Introduction

I feel such a rat but, honestly, Oliver just wasn’t learning anything. The teachers do their best but they spend most of the time controlling the troublemakers. He’s bright, you know, so he finds it all too easy – he was getting bored and losing interest. We were worried that he’d get turned off school altogether. And remember what happened to his cousin Tom. He fell in with a bad crowd and went right off the rails. My sister blames herself. She feels that she should have picked up the warning signs earlier.