Primrose Hill

Originally published in England, this colorful, often harrowing debut pits teenage Si and his best friend, Danny, against Danny's mother Josie's abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend, turning what the boys have termed a 1990s-style summer of love into a summer of violence and revenge. Suddenly, their school break isn't just about hanging out on London's Primrose Hill. The boys hatch a desperate plan to kill the man who has beaten Josie with a baseball bat, stabbed her with scissors and kept her addicted to and begging for drugs. The one diversion from these grim preoccupations is Eleanor, a 15-year-old whom Si meets on the hill. Both a rich, flirtatious delinquent who eagerly joins in the murder plot and a troubled child with a dark secret, Eleanor is a stubborn, perplexing character who steals every scene she's in and occupies a good deal of space in Si's head besides. The dialogue doesn't sound a single wrong note, but the characters act on a limited stage: Si's mother, Louise, is pregnant with a baby whose benign but lazy father, Andy, has ""done a runner,"" much like Si's own father, who decided he was gay and deserted the family shortly after his only son was born. The most moving aspect of the story is Si's presence at the birth of his baby sister and his quasi-fatherly devotion to her and his mother; less effective is Danny's single-minded protectiveness of his own mother. Though the novel purports to be about the ""thin lines... between doing the right things and doing the wrong thing... between life and death,"" it doesn't quite measure up to those lofty aims--but its verve infuses the bleak events with intelligence and heart. (Mar. 30)