The Clever One by Helena Close

ISBN: 9780340920206
Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 314

I've always been 'the clever one'. So clever that I got 10 As in my Junior Cert. So clever that everyone knows I'm destined for great things. But my family chooses to ignore how clever I am when I tell them that all this is going to end badly.
'This' being my sister Fiona's announcement that she is having a baby (father: Big; occupation: shady scumbag). At first, I swore I wouldn't help her. After all, if she wants to be a pramface, that's her problem. But I didn't realise how much I'd love baby Harvey, and want to do everything in my power to protect him.
Mam is doing her usual act of pretending everything's fine. My brother Cian is in a world of his own. My shiny happy best friend Mark thinks I should stay out of it.
But I can't. So I try to figure out a way to get Big out of our lives for good. And once my plan is in motion, I can't go back. No matter how much I sometimes want to.

Although, I enjoyed Helena Close’s writing style, to be honest, I found The Clever One to be a bit odd. The mood of the book would sometimes change quickly, and quite a lot of the speech was hard to understand mostly due to how words & phrases were shortened to portray the characters’ accents. At the beginning of The Clever One my favourite character was Maeve, this was probably because the majority of the book was from Maeve’s perspective, however as I got further into The Clever One, I began to like her less and less. I like the cover of The Clever One as it represents Maeve well in the image and the bright, vivid colours give it a more youthful, light-hearted look, but apart from that the cover is quite plain really, and doesn’t noticeably portray anything else within this book.

Available at Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk.