There is indeed "lesbian love, swearing and drinking" in the first few pages, and that's no bad thing.
Lynn Reid Banks recently wrote a letter to the Guardian criticising the choice of David Almond's A Song for Ella Grey as winner of the Guardian children's fiction prize 2015 because of all the "lesbian love, swearing, drinking"in it.
Here's an extract of the letter: In the first five pages there is lesbian love, swearing, drinking, and enough other indications that, once again, this is not a book for children.
Many of us may love, swear to uphold, and even pledge to die to support the Constitution, but are simply unwilling to invest the time to read about a difficult subject.
My mother knew that she had acquired powerful psychic abilities, "like Superman," she said excitedly, and because she had a fourth grader's English vocabulary and loved swear words, she often described her ability to see what was coming as "Batman's spidey sense or some shit".
After a new experiment in love, he swears an oath to a new poetic: Upon that book I swear To abide by what it teaches: Gospels of ugliness and waste, Of towering voids, of soiled gusts, Of a shrieking to be faced Full into, eyes astream with cold — With cold?
The climb was a vertiginous boot camp of sarcasm, tough love and swearing.
Those who love them swear they're the most practical bags they've ever owned.
So it must have been, Kempton went on to reflect, for Tristan, of the Round Table, who "I suppose would have been like that when he met young men in the fit of first love and swearing that they would live no other way".
For Madonna isn't the first person to decide that you can't get through life with just one accent, and just like many posh English people, her laddish husband-to-be included, she enjoys subverting that big house in Chelsea and the Burberry coat with snippets of cockney rhyming slang and the occasional swearword (and the English love to swear).
