Losing William is a great story; it is filled with messages about pre-adolescent anxieties, marital breakdowns and kidnapping. There are examples of the different problems and hardships that children go through. The book gets very tense in places, and holds the attention of the reader. Keri walker is a 12-year-old girl, and her life is almost perfect. She’s a smart girl who is very popular and has the perfect family.

Then one day her parents tell her they are getting divorced, her best friend moves away to New York and everything just starts to go wrong.

She is selected to be the recipient of a free scholarship to any college of her choice and is the best player in the schools A netball team. Many of the other girls get jealous and begin to dislike her. This is horrible for her because all children ever want to be at school is in the ‘in crowd’.

Many of the girls tease her and make her feel down and left out. The problems at home make things even worse. Her dad has left her mum for a younger woman, her younger brother Nicky has been getting into trouble at school for stealing other children’s belongings, her three year old brother William has always been a hassle and her mum is always depressed and hardly notices keri is alive.

Then one day Keri is left responsible for her little brother, William, in the shopping mall. She turns her back on him for a minute and the next thing she knows he is gone. The police are informed and her mother and father are angry and worried. Her father is made even more furious when Keri accuses Beth, her father’s new girlfriend, of kidnapping William. Keri dislikes Beth because she is the one behind all their problems.

In this time of need she finds out who her real friends are and she realizes how selfish and rude she has been to her parents, especially her father and his new girlfriend.

Losing William is an excellent book. I recommend it for young teens. It’s the first in a series of stories about Keri and her friends. I give it five out of five, as it is full of twists and turns, pain and depression and shows how much life can change with only a few small circumstances.