Price £4.99
ISBN 0 340 85084 1
Published by Hodder Bite 2002
www.bookswithbite.co.uk
Purchase on Amazon.co.uk

The year they turn sixteen twins Josh and Rachel have the best summer holiday ever! Camping, swimming, diving off rocks and meeting new friends their own age. Everything is perfect! But then Josh falls for a girl called Charlie and what should have been a holiday romance turns into something heavy. Josh has always been attracted to danger, and Charlie seems just the same. But after the holiday has ended Josh is faced with his biggest challenge yet: Charlie is pregnant with his baby. Rachel is keen to support her brother – they’ve always been there for each other…But Josh doesn’t want to know. He ignores Charlie and their unborn child and launches himself into sport – the faster and more dangerous the better! Perhaps if he runs fast enough the problem will go away…

‘All boys should read this book – and anyone who is, was, knows or is ever thinking about being a teenage parent!’ Ashley Herron, National Literacy Trust Website

‘A very well written novel in a sharp contemporary style.’ School Librarian Journal

‘I loved this book…It’s like a hormonal roller coaster with all the loops, corkscrews, climbs and drops!’ Philip Howe, Bishop Rawstorne C of E Language College

‘This book is by far the best book I have ever read in my whole life. It is absolutely excellent.’ Wesley Haggas, St Theodore’s RC High School

‘Absoultely brilliant, I couldn’t put it down!’ Jenny Hepple, Burscough Priory High School

The idea for Reckless began with a chance conversation about boys and how they cope with premature parenthood. I’m the mother of three teenage boys so I was keen to write a book that would both appeal to boys and tap into the way they think. I became aware that there were already a number of very good books about girls coping with teenage pregnancy (such as Dear Nobody by Berlie Doherty) but I couldn’t think of any that focussed on the impact of an unplanned pregnancy on a boy. I was travelling on a train when I started to imagine Joshua. The image came to me of young lads I’d seen jumping off cliffs into rivers in the Yorkshire Dales. I decided Josh would be a character that loved taking risks and was into extreme sports, like BMX and roller blading. (This would enable me to write about the sort of mad things my sons like doing!) If he was someone who lived dangerously and hurled himself into things without weighing the consequences… then it would be logical for him to be impetuous in personal relationships too. I decided to start my story with a holiday in a place called Kettlebeck – which is modelled on a real place (with a fantastic waterfall) where we have had several family holidays. The atmosphere I wanted to create was one of buzzing excitement with a slightly out of control ‘anything might happen’ feel. The sense of an accident waiting to happen…

I thought it would be interesting to give Josh a sympathetic twin sister. (The closeness and empathy twins sometimes have is something I find fascinating.) At first I was going to narrate the whole story from Rachel’s point of view but then it struck me that if I wrote some chapters from Rachel’s viewpoint and some from Josh’s I would be able to view and describe the same incidents from two perspectives. It would make Josh a more sympathetic character if we knew what was going on in his head and (hopefully) it would make the reader feel she/he knew both characters quite personally.

Because Reckless is about fatherhood - what it means to have a father, and to be one – it felt important to give Josh a positive relationship with his own father. Josh’s dad is a bit like my husband Tim – very cheerful and positive and a really good role model.

Reckless is the book that my sons like the best of all the things I’ve written. When my middle son Jonah read it he said it made him want to be a good dad – which gave me enormous satisfaction. I just hope he waits a while yet!

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