The Seeing by Diana Hendry: review Hendry's descriptions of Natalie, the menacing ringleader, are concise, cutting and lyrical. She's wild. Wild as a cat . . . as wild as the sea in winter. She plays mind games. Newly arrived to Norton, she is desperate to take revenge on a torpid place and a time when "quiet and peaceful means pretending everything's all right when it isn't." She reveals in her diary her powers of manipulation. She knows people stick with you, "if you keep them scared." Lizzie is the daughter of a safe middle-class Jewish mother (ostracised by her family after 'marrying out', she is focussed on other daughter Lal's impending wedding and oblivious to her teenager's dilemmas). Lizzie is awkwardly trying to work out who she is. It gave me a shiver to think there were two of me. A kind of home and away me, like they say at football matches," she says. She wonders, rightly of course, 'how can evil just stop?' when Natalie demands she joins in the Nazi hunt. She is vulnerable to her power, attracted to her danger. And there is Philip. Forget the misleading Harry Potter-type picture on the cover - this boy is a spooky, interesting child. He has second sight (a cruel twist, given that he wears glasses that are useless) and can see "swastikas on their hearts" in visions about people that come via his dead father. His deadbeat prostitute mum calls him a "mistake and a freak." Watching all this, without realising what treacherous ground he is on, is Hugo. It's a neat device to have Hugo's viewpoint in the long letters he writes to his sister. Hugo discerns uneasily that the boy "is a bit psychic" and he guesses that the mum is on the game. But he has his own problems. He's recovering from a nervous breakdown and full of remorse and guilt over the death of family members at the hands of the Gestapo. Hugo seems a kindly man. Yet an aside in one letter, that he sent the boy home "with a pat on the behind," leaps out. A harmless 1950s gesture or something to ring alarms bells for a 2012 reader? Nothing more is said. Decide for yourself. And see the problem with suspicion. It's easy is to sow doubt about fellow human beings. Lizzie comes to believe that a friendly garage worker called Sam Dingle is a Nazi 'sleeper' and comments: "His face, I now saw, was sharp as a fox's." Natalie is also at the age of being sexualised - an aspect drawn in subtle, revealing touches, via the seedy client who says her mother is "past it" and slurs "you're next in line" as he stumbles down the stairs; or shown in the way Natalie slyly agrees to be drawn by Hugo and turns up wearing scarlet lipstick. She keeps uncrossing and recrossing her legs. What Hugo sees instead is the rage in the girl's heart, and after she is painted like an "absurd bird of prey," she attacks the paintings with a knife. The class system of postwar Britain is shown in deft ways by Hendry - who has worked as a typist, a journalist, a teacher and was writer-in-residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary - including when Natalie scornfully writes of Lizzie that "anyone would think she thought coming to a council estate and eating baked beans on toast was an adventure." There are also touches of humour. When Dottie, a preachy little girl inspired by evangelist Billy Graham, criticises Lizzie's home, the scene ends with the line: "Then she sat down in front of the television and hogged the biscuits." Hendry, who lives in Edinburgh, has written more than 40 books for children and has three grown-up kids of her own. She has an assured hand writing about children. One of the most hurtful things that Natalie says to Lizzie is that she has "a small imagination." The book builds to a dark, destructive ending (which I won't give away) but what you remember are the memorable, finely drawn and vivid characters - and the fractured time in which they are growing up. As Hugo says about the children in a letter: "Although they are too young to know the war, they have somehow been blighted by it. It's almost as if they were born with the knowledge of war in their genes like a terrible inheritance.