Keri sometimes speaks before she thinks and in this book Keri is ostracized when she wins an award at school.

She is already feeling miserable after her best friend, Jessie, emigrates to America with her family. The unpleasantness at school rapidly escalates and Keri is so caught up with her misery that is comes as a total shock when her parents sit her down and announce that they are splitting up.

Keri feels things couldn’t possibly get worse but they do when she loses her three year old brother at the shopping mall. While enduring this nightmare Keri discovers who her real friends are and with their help she sets out to discover what happened to her brother.

This is Jenni Francis’s first book and she intends it to be the first in a series. This is a story about adolescence, marital break ups and kidnap. Marriage breakups seem to be on the increase in New Zealand society today so a story about this issue is both tiopical and relevant.

But over 76 per cent of children in New Zealand live with two parents. It seems a long time since I read a book about children living in a regular family.

Francis writes about the pain and trauma that comes with a family break up in a sensitive manner. The voice of the character, Keri, is very credible. Keri is at intermediate school so I feel Losing William will appeal to girl readers aged 11 to 14 years.