Young Adam's bicycle journey … begins ordinarily enough [in I am the Cheese], and his recollections of the events leading up to the accident seem at first coherent and believable, but when the narrative begins to be interspersed with transcripts of recorded interrogations of the boy by a patient but cold and remorseless interviewer, the picture gradually takes on a nightmare quality. The nightmare becomes wilder and wilder, the suspense tauter and tauter, and the climax, when Adam's true situation is revealed, is searing and horrifying. It affords the reader naught for his comfort when it is realised that, for his own sake, Adam must not let his interrogator make him remember the past completely. 1984 looms alarmingly close. Sixteen is young enough, I feel, for the harrowing experience of encountering this remarkably powerful book. Very strongly recommended, for any age beyond that. (p. 281)
Robert Bell, in The School Librarian, September, 1978.
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