27 Jun 2026
issue 27 June 2026
Comments
Child narrators are tricky little beasts. Misjudge their vocabulary and they lose all credibility or are unreadably twee. Even the brightest young minds can’t penetrate the nuance of adult life, which limits their perspective and reliability. That, though, can be a positive in the right hands. Throw them into an unstable family (show me a stable fictional family?) and they really start pulling their weight.
Enter Frank Dart, Charlotte Edwardes’s first-person protagonist in Trouble Was, her debut novel. He is nine years old, something Edwardes makes us work out for ourselves, which is a neat taster of everything Frank has to figure out for himself. The narrative opens on ‘the edge of Exmoor, the perilous crossing’, the italics being Frank’s way of denoting words specific to the adult world. His mother, Cynthia, is driving the four of them – four-year-old Odette and Patrick, the baby, are asleep in the back – plus Reggie the dog to their aunt’s house in north Devon.
