By Phil Earle
Mikey's dad has died, and the worst part is that he can't remember his voice anymore — so his best friend goes looking for it.
Mikey's father died, and Mikey went numb right along with him. He's stopped caring what happens to him, and he's making the careless, self-destructive choices a boy makes once he's stopped caring. Under all of it sits the thing he can't say: he can't remember what his dad sounded like. His father used to do funny voices, and now there's just a blank where the sound should be. His best friend watches this for as long as he can stand, then sets out to track down the sound of Mikey's father's voice and hand it back to him.
Here's the bind this book gets a reader out of. A fourteen-year-old who reads slowly is stuck between two useless shelves: the books they can actually read are about wobbly first teeth, and the books about their own life run four hundred pages of small print. Mind the Gap is a genuine teenage novel — grief, bad choices, a friend who won't give up — built so that child can finish it. Barrington Stoke publishes for exactly this reader and prints two numbers on the cover: the story and the voice are pitched at thirteen and up, but the words sit at a reading age of about eight or nine. That's an hour of reading and a whole real novel behind them.