Author: Robert Swindells

Publisher: Puffin Books (4th October 2001)

Pages: 187

ISBN: 978-0141-31035-0

Imagine waiting for your GCSE results when you know they are going to spell bad news, you know you haven’t done enough to get a good grade. How do you know all this? You didn’t bother to do the revision earlier in the year. This is the position Dennis found himself in, instead of revising he was sitting on a wall with his mates with a can of larger in a hand and without the knowledge of how to stop.

Then imagine another boy, Mark who didn’t even bother showing up for the exams in the first place and because of his father he feels he can never go home.

Wrecked is really both these stories rolled into one (quite short) book, with each and every action they take taking the boys further away from the ones that they love and causing more and more harm to a point that you start to think can they ever really return home.

Thankfully towards the end these two separate stories do eventually come together in a satisfying climax which wraps the book up but the speed with which it takes to get going and the apparent lack of connection between the stories until near the very end really did let the book down for me.

Perhaps this is down to my taste in books or possibly how long ago it was published, I can’t really say. Although I did finish it and I did (eventually) get into it I just feel the connections between the two stories could have come together a little bit sooner.

For this reason I feel I can’t really recommend it as much as I was grabbed by the blub.