Contemporary
This is a very embarrassing book.
It’s a book about awkward moments, impossible situations and desperate circumstances; it’s about red faces, cold sweats and serious cringing; it’s about putting your heart on the line and hoping it isn’t squashed by the first train into the station. In short, it’s a book about being a teenager. But that means it’s also about heroes, adventure, excitement, and how that first kiss can turn your stomach, and your whole world, upside down.
Two briefcases arrive at a humble secondary school, accompanied by two boys from a posh private school. Tasked with showing them how the other half lives are three pupils: Josephine, Winston and Andrew. They have to guide these newbies through the madness, mischief and miscreants of their new school… without incident. Fat chance!
A briefcase goes missing. They have to get it back. Worse is, they know who has it.
Moose, mayhem and Manchester tart – what’s not to like?
Andrew Batty is an Architect by day designing all kinds of schools for all kinds of people. By night he is generally asleep. In the tiny gap between day and night he finds time to write stories that keep him amused, and hopefully others as well. He was born in a small village near Rugby, where he had so much fun, he forgot about schoolwork, failed his eleven plus, and ended up in a secondary school, instead of the grammar school up the road. Every day the school bus went past a posh private school. The posh kids looked so different to the kids around him. That contrast provided the inspiration for The Boy and the Briefcase and the Moose.
Here's what readers have to say about this book....
I read this just after it came out having been recommend to me by a friend and I'm very glad they did - The Boy, The Briefcase and The Moose was a really enjoyable read from start to finish and helped remind me just how fun reading can be. Too often books get so bogged down in overly complex plots, lost in the wilderness of unnecessary descriptive detail or try too hard to put across an ill founded moral teaching that they forget one of the main goals for any writer is to create something that their readers actually enjoy reading. This books was really enjoyable to read. The book skips along at a nice pace getting really fun once the preverbal Briefcase and Moose become involved. It reads like the classic farce and caper stories of P.G. Woodhouse but keeps central to the story the relationships between characters at that age when the answers to ridiculous questions seem like the most important things in the universe. I didn't grow up in the period when this book was set but reading the descriptions of the school, classes and the unique personalities of the teachers makes me wish I had. That's the skill of the author - you really get a sense of what school life was like and how the characters feel about their place in the world around them - all while being enjoyably ridiculous. A mad caper that I think would be enjoyed by all ages - it's the type of book that makes you wish you could sit down with the author and hear more of their stories.
Made me chuckle out loud Secondary school in the 80's was a very similar experience to that experienced by Andy ,albeit ours was an all girls school. Reading about his and his friends exploits made me chuckle out loud. This is a very funny and uplifting read. Good luck with future writing.😁
