The Clearance ¦ The Resettling

I like Joan Lingard. I've never yet used one of her books without success and, she's that rare thing - a writer who really appeals to a wide ability range. These two books form the first half of a quartet of stories about 16-year-old Maggie McKinley, Glasgow dweller through and through. Or so she thinks - until she is dispatched by her family to spend the summer with her grandmother in a remote Scottish glen.

She meets the Fraser family and forms a mutual attachment with their son, James, grows to love the glen and to feel part of it, and finds herself having to take responsibility for her grandmother and for her family's emotional and financial problems.

The books are entertaining, realistic and accessible to almost all third and fourth-ear readers. They would be particularly useful with the notorious 'bottom set' third years, dealing successfully with such issues as family life, teenage love and the burdens and pleasures of elderly relatives.