Suzanne Leal

She hasn't yet learnt the niceties of subtlety.

And I think one of the best scenes for me was when she's at school and there's a teacher and the teacher is being surrounded by all the students and one of the students is leaning on her shoulder and

And Olive notices that other students have done it as well.

So she takes her turn to do it as well.

By that stage, the teacher's had enough and throws her off.

And that's a devastating moment for a young girl.

So I like the fact that Olive doesn't quite choose her moments.

There's one question.

So Olive is an only child.

She's in a large extended family and she finds very early in the book that she may have had a sister and a sister who died when she was a baby.

So we know this very early, but she's never been told about this.

It's never been explained to her.

And so she becomes a type of a sleuth, but it's not a thriller.

What it is is a coming of age story about a young girl.

But it is a good device to keep you going through the story.

The other device, I think, is trying to work out the relationships between the adults.

She has two aunts.

One is called Thistle.

I like the names in this book.

And Thistle, for me, was somewhere between a dark Mary Poppins and Blanche Dubois.