Rabble Starkey

Published in Dent hardback under the title The Road Ahead, this is a warm, humorous, sympathetic novel about growing up and the ways in which people change. The narrator, Rabble (short for Parable), is a likeable, forthright 12-year-old at the start of the book. Her young widowed mother is a hired help to the Bigelow family, whose daughter is Rabble's close friend. When Mrs Bigelow suffers a mental breakdown, Rabble and her mother become more closely involved with the family, until Rabble begins to think of them as her own relations - but this situation cannot last, and difficult decisions have to be made.