Böcker av Margaret Pearce

What protection do females have from the social culture moulding the humans they develop into? The fourteen sharply perceptive tales in A Feminine Perspective celebrate the quiet courage within each woman's heart.

In 1941, Darwin is bombed, and the war against the Germans and the Japanese gets alarmingly close. While those in the area are raising money for the war effort with backyard concerts, the kids on Bolton Road have their own ideas about how to help out. Notices around the town warn that loose talk kills. Are spies passing information to the enemies right under their noses? Mable convinces Nancy, Janet, Fred and Lennie that catching spies is the best way to do their part. But will their efforts catch the traitors...or make the kids targets?

What do you do when you desperately want a pet of your own but your parents put their foot down, insisting pets cost too much to feed and they're messy? Jeremy solves his dilemma by getting a secret pet, hatched from a very odd, large egg. His pet isn't messy and doesn't cost anything to feed. His is also a most unusually nice and helpful pet. Jeremy's very happy to have his new companion, although he's still not ready to tell his parents about it...

Twins Gert and Phil realise there's sure to be trouble when the Morris family moves in next door. After the twins rescue kittens that the Morris kids have tried to drown and then vandalise their backyard, the war is on! In retaliation, the Morris kids rub their dog down with shoe polish and then steal the canine. Only learning the truth of their background allows the twins to forge a truce...and offer to help out instead of counterattack.

Jane Smith is the unhappy, resentful, eleven-year-old daughter of a single parent. Her escape from the unpleasantness she considers her life is through another world. There, she's one of the four powerful Patrollers sworn to the service of the Princess in the Far Tower. Their quest: To choose the bravest warriors in all space and time to fight the Red Wizard.Jane's ordinary life improves as she makes friends. She's picked for the school play and the prestigious trampoline team. But her otherworldly life with its epic adventures continues to be more important to her than the one she lives in...until the warriors' battle causes a merging of Jane's ordinary world and her otherworldly one.

Jenny has an older brother and a younger sister--and a father in the hospital. Feeling like she's always in the way or even invisible to those around her, she's sure nobody cares about her at all. Even as she seeks attention in all the wrong ways, can Jenny's family prove to her she's not only a vital part of them but unconditionally loved as well?

Belinda is thrilled that her unusual grandmother along with her equally unusual Siamese cat, Senna, are looking after her while her parents are away. Unusual things always happen when grandmother comes to visit...This visit is no exception. First, a missing last will and testament is all that will save old Miss Higgins, then the petrified gryphon on Miss Higgins' roof accidentally gets woken to life. Belinda and her friends learn they must find the gryphon's missing ankh in order to learn the location of the will and only then will this hungry, angry gryphon go back to sleep.

It's not all beer, skittles and Dr Spock, this motherhood caper. Somewhere between the experts who theorise and the amateurs who practise is a wide deep gap. Experts have written a lot on how to raise children. In a free society, you pay your money and take your pick. Starting from the Good Book (the original spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child advocate) to the very latest volumes out on toddler taming, child psychology and emotional problems (the child's, not yours). One of the interesting side effects completely ignored by experts is how raising children lowers mothers - right down. They are reduced to tears, tea and aspirin, hysterics, sherry, cigarettes, blunt instruments, bullying and blackmail. Some of the more fortunate are driven to sympathetic psychiatrists and rest homes. All this keeps the rest home industry healthy, ups the sales of something to fortify and simultaneously drown your problems in at supermarkets and liquor stores, and gives the experts on outer suburban neuroses plenty of material. Life with children is composed of confrontations, truces, compromises and intermittent battles. Suitable textbooks on survival of child raising might well include guerrilla warfare, unarmed combat and, of course, communications - handy for negotiating terms for truces, compromises, moratoriums, rescues of badly wounded psyches, egos and compensation payments when in the wrong (which is always). In the no-man's-land of the outer suburban battlefields, this motherhood caper keeps going on (when will they ever learn?) and so do the battles. And unfortunately we don't win 'em all.