WAITING FOR GONZO

Oz, aka Marcus Osbourne, faces unexpected challenges when his family relocates from London to a farmhouse in a northern village.

He starts his first day of Year Nine in a school where classmates with thick accents give him a new nickname, “Kecks,” for the girls’ underwear that spills out of the family’s laundry bag he grabbed by mistake. It’s downhill from there as Oz finds himself on the wrong side of tough-girl Isobel, known as “Psycho Skinner,” and befriended by a fantasy geek named Ryan, who participates in re-enactments of movies and books, down to the “hobbit socks” he made himself. When Oz finds out that his 17-year-old sister, Meg, is pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s baby, he starts to write down everything that’s happening to share with the child he calls Gonzo in the unlikely event that Meg will decide against termination. In a three-part message to the baby starting with “The Beginning / G minus 245,” narrator Oz frames a series of humorous events and near disasters with chapter headings like “The Life-Sucking Brick of Nonsense” as he navigates new emotional territory.

Cousins follows up his debut (15 Days Without a Head, 2013) with another tightly woven, heartwarming story of the ups and downs in the life of a teenager and his family.