This is no ordinary gathering, you understand. As well as Harry’s estranged mother and father, there are his father’s first wife and her second husband. Then there are his father’s girlfriend and his mother’s boyfriend, not to mention his aunt and a variety of offspring across an age range reaching from early childhood into young adulthood. It’s by showing everything through Harry’s cynical, confused eyes that Macdonald cleverly overcomes readers’ natural disbelief chat such a nightmare gathering could ever occur. Harry sees the gathering as just one more aspect of adolescence that’s inevitably and inexplicably puzzling.

In any case, he’s more concerned with the sometimes visible effects of his own hormonal activity, which particularly manifests itself in a fascination with breasts. He begins to see the point of it all when he meets and falls in love with Angie, a slightly older girl. Angie, who has only recently moved to the town, is oddly reticent about her own family situation, and particularly about her father – for good reason, as it turns out.

Until its startling conclusion, Small Sacrifices gives little sign that it’s going to be anything more than a likeable, if fairly thin, take on modern family life. However, even its very moving dénouement – and its laudable effort to get inside a teenage boy’s head – may not be enough to lure, let alone hold, those school-age readers who find contemporary young adult literature a turn-off. And, because they’re too frequent, mention should be made of editing lapses such as ‘flack’ where ‘flak’ is intended; ‘defenses’ instead of ‘defences’; ‘draw’ instead of ‘drawer’; and ‘her’s’ for ‘hers’.

Smash by David Caddy

FACP, $10.95, 128 pp

Jake, the somewhat younger narrator of Smash (FACP, $10.95, 128 pp), enjoys family circumstances which are far simpler than Harry’s – Jake’s mother is dead and he’s looked after by his father, a gold prospector. Where’s the humour in that, you may be wondering. Well, I have to confess that, even though, like Small Sacrifices, it has the word ‘hilarious’ in its blurb, Smash didn’t in fact move me to a single smile – not even a grudging grin. But then the book is also described as ‘fast-paced’ when it actually reads as if it started out as a much shorter and tighter story and has then had bits of ragged padding tacked on. The dialogue is stilted and there’s a mawkishly happy ending. The book’s faults sadly don’t end there: I might mention punctuation and editing that are not just careless but suggest a lack of appreciation of the niceties of language. To complete an unappealing package, it’s all wrapped up in an unwelcomingly stiff cover.

And the story itself? Well, that’s about Jake’s search for an albino kangaroo which has caused his teacher to roll the school bus – the problem being that Jake is the only one on the bus to have seen the animal. It’s not hard to guess whether he will find the kangaroo; it is hard to swallow the circumstances in which he does.

Cairo Jim Amidst the Petticoats of Artemis by Geoffrey McSkimming

Hodder, $10.95 pb, 232 pp

Oddly, ‘hilarious’ isn’t one of the words used in the cover blurb of the latest Cairo Jim yarn (Cairo Jim Amidst the Petticoats of Artemis, Hodder, $10.95 pb, 232 pp) – odd because the book is far and away the funniest of this trio. Like others in the Cairo Jim series, this instalment of the adventures of Jim (an archaeologist) and his companions Brenda (a telepathic camel) and Doris (a talking macaw) is full of alliteration, zestful word play ana outrageously fortuitous coincidences.

With a chase on the very first page, the plot-driven, filmically structured yarn immediately insists on its readers’ attention. Before long, Jim is again called on to tackle the megalomaniacal and hugely fat Neptune Bone, whose lust for ancient artefacts in this instance entices him into a race to appropriate a garment which purportedly once gave Artemis the power to transform barrenness into fertility.

Many adults might be irritated by McSkimming’s anachronisms – mixing adventures in the spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark with modern trappings like mobile phones, the books seem to be set in a world simultaneously straddling the 1930s and the 1990s. However, though McSkimming doesn’t achieve (and may not even be aiming for) anything like the same depth and texture as that in the British Harry Potter books, his series is calculated to appeal to boys around the same age as those who lap up the Potter escapades. I have no doubt that the adventures of Cairo Jim are similarly capable of creating and sustaining a reading habit – a feat which should by no means be underestimated.