Levitation for Beginners

It's 1972 and ten-year-old Deborah is living a ten-year-old life: butterscotch angel delight and Raleigh chopper bikes Crackajack and Jackanory Layla and the Bee Gees flares and ponchos. But new girl Sarah-Jayne breezes into school pretty as a picture and full of gossip as well as unlikely but thrilling stories about levitation. The other girls are dazzled but Deborah keeps her distance. That same week eighteen-year-old brickie Sonny turns up on her doorstep with a stray tortoise and begins an unlikely friendship with her young widowed mum. That's bad enough Deborah thinks but then Sonny starts work on a site opposite the school and Sarah-Jayne decides he's the latest love of her life. Nothing escapes Sarah-Jayne and Deborah fears what she'll make of her mum. It's good to be different her mum often says; but not Deborah knows too different.