The Freak

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Jade has been given a gift; unfortunately, it is the kind of gift she
would rather do without. After a nearly fatal bout of meningitis, Jade
has become psychic; she can now read other people’s minds and
occasionally see glimpses of the future. Her new powers turn her school
days into a minefield of embarrassing situations as she learns and
inadvertently reveals some of her friends’ most personal secrets.

Jade soon finds herself ostracized by everyone she knows except Jon,
her new boyfriend. And then life becomes even more complicated when a
gang of skinheads begin targeting Jade and Jon because she is a Jew and
he is East Indian. Jade does not need her psychic powers to know that
something very unpleasant and possibly even deadly is about to happen.

Carol Matas is a prolific writer of children’s books with several
awards already to her credit. This book, which contains a little bit of
psychiatry, spiritualism, comparative religions, Nazi-hunting, and some
good old-fashioned teenaged romance, is up to her previous standards of
fast-paced prose and challenging content. And further, her main
characters are believable and interesting. The skinheads, for example,
are not just two-dimensional cartoon bogeymen but sad and sometimes
complicated people who are all the more frightening for being
recognizable as human beings. Recommended.