BOOK REVIEW: Rich and Mad by William Nicholson

I absolutely adored William Nicholson's Wind Singer trilogy, so when I read that he'd written a teen romance I could hardly wait to read it.  

Rich and Mad is the story of - yes - a boy named Rich and a girl named Maddy (Mad for short). Both Rich and Maddy are desperate to fall in love. They're teenagers so they're familiar with lust, but love seems to them to be something else entirely. Both inevitably look in entirely the wrong places before finding each other (as, of course, the reader hopes and knows they will). 

I really enjoyed Rich and Mad. Both Rich and Maddy are bright and sweet and funny and I really wanted it all to work out for them. I only had a couple of chapters left when I went to see William Nicholson (along with Melvyn Burgess) give a (wonderful) talk about sex in YA fiction. It was clear that Nicholson wanted to write about first love and first sex in an honest and positive way and I do think he does that, but I also found Rich and Mad sweetly old-fashioned. It felt like it could almost have been written in, say, the early eighties. 

There are a couple of other points I'd like to make, but I don't want to post them here because they are spoiler-ish. All I can really say is that I think Nicholson addresses something incredibly important that I haven't seen in teen fiction before. Read it - I doubt very much you'll regret it. And then let me know what you think. 

Comments

[Michelle]

Ooh. You have me intrigued there. I've heard of William Nicholson, but haven't read any of his books yet!

[diane]

Ooh, this sounds really good!