Scotty is your standard teenage boy, with friends, family and the usual set of problems. What he didn’t expect to have as a problem, though, was being stuck in school, with no help, no heat, no food, no water for a week in the middle of a snowstorm. This is teenage social structure condensed, told through the eyes of a boy. This is where the novel is interesting. There’s not a lot of decent, truthful, non-sci-fi YA fiction told through the eyes of a teenage boy (that I’ve read in any case).

I got to the end of this book, and although I didn’t particularly like any of the characters, I wished for a happy ending. You might think that this is giving things away, but not really, you’ll have to read it to understand. They were teenagers just trying to do what they thought were right. I think part of my problem with some of it was that it was very American in style and I’d like to think that Australian teenagers wouldn’t be quite that useless. Luckily we don’t have any serious snowstorms so none of the kids around here will be in that situation.