"Miranda wasn't paying much attention to Mr Nancarrow reading aloud to the class. Her own thoughts, tinged with habitual anxieties of one kind or another, were still more interesting than hearing about Captain Cook sailing up the coast of Australia and complaining because he didn't fancy the look of the place. Probably he'd been a gentlemanly wimp, too scared to land in case natives jumped out at him from behind a rock, she thought. Usually she liked history, but Mr Nancarrow, reading aloud, could make anyone in a book sound wimpy. His vowels were as plump as chocolates in a box and he had a habit of looking up and catching someone's eye, then smiling cosily to draw them into the story."

Miranda Palgrave, the eleven-year-old girl introduced in this excerpt from Robin Klein's novel Seeing Things has a lot in common with many of the characters in...