The accidental by ali smith5/11/2023 ![]() What is her mother doing? "She is writing and researching about people who died last century again." Astrid is being bullied at school, and the girls have taken her mobile phone, a loss to which she has not confessed: "If her mother and Michael knew this they would literally have kittens." They are there all summer, and there is nothing to do, but luckily Astrid has a video camera, so she has been "taping dawns". (The reader may be wondering how a male critic can be so sure that this 12-year-old girl is accurate - having two sisters, both of whom were once 12, I claim inside information.) We first meet her, stuck in a boring Norfolk holiday home with her mother Eve, stepfather Michael and elder brother Magnus. One of them is Astrid, a 12-year-old girl, whose habits of thought and language are so perfectly pitched and entertaining that she becomes instantly lovable. Ali Smith pulls it off with terrific verve in this novel, which is a skilful exercise in free indirect style: the characters are not first-person narrators, but lovingly distinguished third-person points of view. ![]()
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