YvonneHeddy Partridge was never my friend because I was pretty, popular, clever and blonde and my friends were pretty, popular, clever and generally blonde, too.
Heddy Partridge was none of these things.
Heddy was dark and lumpen, with heavy eyebrows and an unfortunately large mole on her left cheek, right below her eye. Heddy wasn’t popular. In fact I couldn’t tell you who her friends were at school, but I certainly wasn’t one of them, even though she was always there in my life like a misplaced shadow, a stain, a sort of negative of myself, until we were streamed in the third year of senior school and I was put in the top stream and Heddy in the bottom, confirming her as thick and finally shutting her out of my life, to be more or less forgotten, until now.”
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I think that this book is going to touch a lot of ‘hot buttons’ for me, with those first few lines giving a great taster of what I am sure is to follow.
I am not sure that it is going to be a particularly pleasant read, too many memories, but it unfortunately highlights the all too common scenario of peer pressure and downright bullying, both mental and physical, that many people still endure, in this ‘modern’, judgmental and conformist society.
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