Norma Meek sure knows how to pack a bariffle of pre-teen troubles into 150 pages.
In Watching Out for Mummy, which the author wrote twelve years ago and is still her only novel, we meet 11-year-old Shawn Austin at a moment of transition: he’s about to swap life in Barbados for life in New Jersey in the United States, where his mum lives.
“Everything that happens in the universe has an impact on who I am, how I live, and what I write: thought, word, deed. Everything I think, I write, I speak has an impact on the world; like the...