Easily my favourite book about invisibility, though, is Memoirs Of An Invisible Man by H.F Saint. Published in 1987 it was a huge hit. It was made into a not-very-good film starring Chevy Chase and made H.F Saint a lot of money: so much, in fact, that he did not write another book and retired.

I look down at my legs. They’re not there either, although I can touch them. I can touch my face. I can touch every bit of me, and feel it, but I just cannot see it. It's written in first person and it's incredibly realistic. It switches between being detailed (extensive details of a house) to very little detail ("I take the dog to the dog-sitter Nd then go home"). Nevertheless, I'd have no problem believing Ethel is a real, living, breathing person. I don’t know how long I’m sitting there, just looking again and again at where I should be. It’s several seconds, but probably not as long as a minute. I’m going through things in my mind, like: Has this happened before? Is this in any way normal? Is it my eyes--have I been temporarily blinded by the strong UV light? Except I can see other things--just not me. I'm very impressed with Ross Welford's work and will be adding this to my school library shelves. Some wonderful scenes with bullies, the logical effects of invisibility (and how you would cope), and some second half family dramas that make this a potential TV series.Anyway, the doubts were necessarily momentary as I had a contract to fulfill with HarperCollins and – in hindsight – the problem was not that I couldn’t think of a story to write, but that the initial, enthusiastic reception to Hamster had somewhat intimidated me. And if I felt that with the modest success of Hamster imagine what poor Harper Lee felt when her first ever book won the world’s most-coveted literary prize and was set by exam boards the world over. Set in the Tynemouth and Whitley Bay area of the north-east of England, thirteen year old Ethel Leatherhead desperately tries to find a cure for her acne. An accidental combination of methods causes a startled Ethel to turn invisible. The invisibility proves to be temporary but that doesn’t stop Ethel from trying again, convinced that being invisible will solve all her problems.

Ethel lives with her grandmother, is plagued by terrible acne and has become the unwilling friend of new boy Elliot (Smelliot) from London. When Ethel discovers she has the ability to become invisible via her new skin treatment and the generous application of UV light, her life suddenly becomes a lot more complicated. A well-written new friendship with a fellow misfit and some interesting scientific concepts thrown in make this a smart read. Ethel's story is more than just a 'wish-fulfilment' tale, with several strands weaving together to give this depth and heart. Soldiers have been using camouflage to evade detection for…well, forever, really. (In Macbeth by William Shakespeare, the soldiers of Malcolm’s army attempt to disguise themselves as a small forest by holding branches in front of themselves.)

That would involve copy-pasting it and as I'm typing this on a tablet via the goodreads app, I can't do that right now. What I quite liked was that we finally get a description of the main character, even if it's quite late in the book. What got on my nerves was how I never knew what Al looked like in Time Travelling with a Hamster. Here we get a small description. The description of Ethel's not much (hair colour, eye colour), but it's enough. It's more than we get of Al in his debut book. The first is a leopard, the second is a giraffe, the third is a snow-white bird. Even when you know what to look for they are hard to spot! La narrazione in prima persona presenta una buona dose di rottura della quarta parete, come se Ethel avesse bisogno dell’approvazione del suo lettore e una sorta di conferma che quello che combina sono cose che capitano, è trascinante, ironica e molto fresca. Vedere il mondo attraverso gli occhi di Ethel è, non solo come tornare preadolescenti, ma un approccio diretto alla vita che in un secondo sembra terribile mentre l’altro appare piacevole.

Two out of two hits for Ross Welford. Intelligent, genuinely funny and warm writing for a young audience. H.G. Wells, sometimes called “the father of science fiction”, wrote The Invisible Man in 1897. In honour of Wells, I gave Ethel’s doctor the same name as the doctor in The Invisible Man – Dr Kemp.

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En cuanto al estilo del autor, destacar que utiliza un vocabulario sencillo y adaptado a los más jóvenes. Welford consigue algo increíble, y es que incluye en sus libros contenido de carácter didáctico, por lo que además de leer, se aprende. En general es un libro que tiene una estructura muy fácil de seguir y es perfecto para que los lectores noveles no se agobien ni se cansen de leer. In case you were wondering: Yes, it does have references to Time Travelling with a Hamster. Once again, it's set near Culvercot, and there are even a few trips to Culvercot bay. I caught 3 references (one with a spelling "mistake"(?), as it was a name, one thing that was a small detail in TTWAH (and an even smaller detail in WNTDIYTI), and one that just mentioned the same sliproad from TTWAH. The one at the bay - if you've read it you'll know which one I mean.) These are all very minor details, though, and they're not important in the slightest to the plot. I think, That’s weird. Has the tanning bed affected my mind? Like, am I still half asleep, or dreaming, or having a hallucination or something? But you know what grown-ups say, in that way they have that’s designed to make them seem clever: “Ah, you see--it’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?” I’ll be honest – there were times when I thought, fleetingly, that perhaps I was destined to write only one book. That Time Travelling With A Hamsterwould have its brief moment in the limelight and then gracefully move along the bookshelf to make room for books by other, more prolific and successful authors.