The Missing Link Book

"Everybody in our town had their own ideas about my step-brother, Danny. Some of them called him disabled, some said he was autistic and some just referred to him as "that poor boy". The truth was that there were only two people who knew what Danny really was. One was his father, who didn't believe it. The other was his mother, who did."Christie and his step-brother Danny embark on a curious quest to track down Danny's scientist mother in the north of Scotland. En route they meet with Tina, a young homeless girl, and her dog Oggy who has the ability to speak. Together with Darling, a talking bird, they travel through the harsh winter Highlands to the Fourth World: a place that holds as many secrets as it does answers.Kate Thompson,author of the intense and magical Switchers trilogy, turns her hand to the tricky subject of genetic engineering in The Missing Link, a novel that subtly captures the spirit of its mismatched characters as they travel across the harshest of landscapes in search of some kind of truth. The beautifully observed relationship between Christie and his "disabled" brother holds the story together, driving it forward until the crucial moment when everything begins to fall into place and the slow realisation that there is something more to Danny's condition than meets the eye pulls the reader deeper into the story until the final and shocking twist.Set somewhere in the not too distant future in a world where fuel is heavily rationed and civil unrest is rife, Thompson touches the tricky subject of genetic engineering with a sense of time, place and emotion that sensitively drives this exceptional novel towards its climax. What remains is a lasting and pertinent impression of a world where nothing is quite as it seems and where human beings, on their eternal quest for improvement, meddle with things that are sometimes best left in peace. Age 10 and over. --Susan HarrisonRead More