Boot Camp

Garrett Durrell does not like the situation in which we first find him – he’s been flown and driven through the night with his hands cuffed behind his back, slowly going numb, with two escorts. You might think he had been kidnapped, but he knows, and we know because we’ve read the book title, that he’s off to boot camp.

Oh dear, you might think, knowing nothing of this book – a current issue book, through the eyes of a naughty little brat of a first-person narrator. But Garrett is not the usual boot camp inhabitant. He might have been wired before he went there, as on arrival he has a caffeine withdrawal headache, but he recognises this for what it is. This, then, is no hyperactive nasty, but possibly the smartest kid in any American boot camp.

This is certainly not ITV documentary territory.

Garrett is a mature fifteen year old – large in physique and very intelligent. There are two reasons for his ending up in boot camp – one I’ll let you discover as it is a breath of fresh air for teenage fiction, but the principal reason is that he simply fails to meet his competitive parents’ society world, club-going life expectations.

Garrett soon encounters the cruel and unusual punishments meted out to all the children in Lake Harmony, as this camp is called. He also notes the indemnifying contract quoted to let him know he has no rights at all. This raises the question in my mind of how realistic all that follows is, but the teenage reader will be less worried about this, I think, and instead greatly empathise with the inmates, as the emphasis on the parent always being right is drummed into them.