by Allan Ahlberg (1995)
Unhappy with the stories that are shaping their lives, the members of the Brown family go to see the writer responsible.
Elizabeth Cody Kimmel
"The eventually internationally recognized writer Lily Blennerhassett" spends her thirteenth summer missing her best friend and keeping a journal of her boring life at home and exciting newly-discovered relatives.
Linda Lê
Like author Linda Le, the young woman who narrates this novel is from Vietnam and is a writer, a "dirty foreigner writing in French." The narrator has distanced herself not only from Vietnamese society but also from her family. Her story is an exercise in clear-eyed fury revealing three generations of a cursed family. The grandfather was a lunatic the family locked away and declared dead to avoid shame; the father is a failed artist and humiliated cuckold; the mother is a simpering beauty consumed with lust; the uncle is declared insane because of his incestuous love for his sister, who hanged herself. The narrator, on the verge of a profound depression ever since her mother told her she was illegitimate, alternates her story with her uncle's journal. In an acid style burning with compressed lyricism and savage irony, these parallel monologues sketch misfortune's family tree.
Helen Cresswell
Chronicles the further adventures of the eccentric Bagthorpe family as they go on vacation to a reputedly haunted house in Wales.
Dianne Crabtree
Sixteen-year-old Lisa learns that people are not always what they seem when her invalid grandfather comes to live with the family, resulting in a change in routine and attitude for everyone.