16 October 2004 CANDY by Kevin Brooks, Scholastic/The Chicken House, March 2005, ISBN: 0-439-68327-0

"I was innocent then.

Just a boy.

On a train.

With a lump.

And a hat.

That was all the world I needed to know."

Joe Beck's got a family life that is nothing to write home about. His father goes off to "date" his mother. She moved out at some point in the past, choosing not to deal with the home and children thing. Joe hasn't seen Mom since she left. Joe's older sister Gina the nurse lives at home, but Dad can't stand Mike, the black boyfriend Gina met at the hospital. Joe feels his dad treats him like a child while expecting him to act like an adult.

Joe Beck tells us absolutely nothing of his days in high school. His father the gynecologist is concerned that Joe's ignoring school and wasting his life away. It seems to Dad that Joe is interested only in his band, the Katies.

"I got up and turned on the TV, setting the volume just loud enough to drown out the music, then I fetched my guitar from the corner of the room and started to pick out some chords. As far as I was aware, I wasn't playing anything in particular, I was just strumming...just seeing what happened...mindlessly repeating the same magical chords - G to C, G to C - over and over again...nice and slow, deep and heavy, open and raw, letting the harmonies find themselves."

Joe Beck first meets Candy after arriving in London one afternoon, on the way to an appointment to have a ganglion cyst aspirated. His dad's physician friend successfully draws the fluid out of the lump on his wrist. In their initial, brief encounter Candy does a similar job on Joe's heart.

"Deep down inside me, buried beneath all the chaos, I could sense a feeling I'd never felt before. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was a good feeling or a bad feeling or something in between...I wasn't even sure it was a feeling at all. It was just something - an unknown shade, a barely perceptible signal, like a flickering candle on a distant hill. I knew it was there, but most of the time it was too faint to see, and even when I could see it, I couldn't tell if I was seeing it or hearing it or smelling it or feeling it...

"It was too many things all at once: a light in the darkness, a crying voice, the scent of fresh-washed skin, some wonderful oblivion..."

Joe goes home and writes a song about the girl he's met. His band adopts and refines it, and an industry talent scout takes notice of the band during a London gig because of it.

But that's irrelevant now, along with everything else. School. Dad. Band. Doesn't matter. Nothing matters except for Candy.

But the problem is that Joe's dream girl is really a heroin-addicted prostitute with a way-scary and deadly-violent pimp named Iggy. And Candy inhabits a different world, "a world of violence and pain and darkness."

CANDY is the story of Joe Beck's loss of innocence and what results from his decision to invade Candy's world.

"As I unwound the sellotape and cautiously positioned his arms behind his back, I felt like a vet in a safari park, tending to an anaesthetised beast - ready to jump and run at the slightest sign of life. As quickly as I could, I wound half the roll of sellotape around his wrists, then I shuffled down and wound the other half around his ankles. It was a lot of tape, and I wound it as tightly as I could, but I didn't think it would hold him for long when he finally woke up."

Kevin Brooks has written both a heart-stopping thriller of a tale and a gut-wrenching portrait of heroin addiction. It is truly a challenge to avoid tossing out a stream of explicatives in trying to adequately express how exhilarating and heartbreaking a story CANDY is.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com