Deeply moving and utterly gripping . . . Stewart Foster carries off an astonishing feat of storytelling in this exceptional book' Julia Eccleshare, lovereading.co.uk

Alex’s relationship with his parents was quite unique too and was amazing to see. Having a child with OCD mustn’t be easy and to see how the mother and father both react to Alex’s disease was fascinating to me. They contrast in their responses but I think this added to the authenticity and highlights the complexities of OCD. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with the portrayal of Alex. In fact, Stewart Foster has depicted Alex’s struggles skillfully. By writing in the first person, the reader is invited into Alex’s confused mind. We see his internal struggle laid bare, realizing how debilitating his condition can be. It is a highly accomplished piece of characterisation. At the end of the story, I could not help but scream "aww." Dan and Alex were the two people that you would never expect to ever become friends, but Dan finally learned the right from the wrong and befriended Alex. The idea of their friendship blossoming from the raft Shooting Star was such a good symbol of the novel. In the end, Alex, Dan, and Ben ventures on Shooting Star, which to me represents that their friendship took time, hard work, effort, and understanding, but at the end, it turned out to be a great adventure of friendship. Alex has contamination OCD which is so debilitating that he is often unable to leave the house. Immediately, I warmed to him and resonated with him completely. The writer does a fantastic portrayal of what it’s like to live with such a crippling mental illness by highlighting the awful thoughts that go through Alex’s head on the daily. I found this incredible. What’s more is that despite his illness, Alex is completely his own person with hopes and dreams and hobbies and a life which I thought was remarkable. A lot of writers often make the mistake of allowing their characters to become their illness. Alex has OCD, he is not OCD. I really loved how this book ended. I'm not going to say too much here, other than I was satisfied.Alex is being bullied and he doesn’t know what to do. He struggles anyway because of his serious OCD condition, and has sworn to the bullies that he won’t tell anyone what they’re doing to him. If he does, they say they’ll kill him.

With chapters alternating between narrators Dan and Alex, we are given an intimate, inside view into the hearts and souls of these two boys. This is not so much a tween book about bullying as it is a novel about how very much we are alike. When given the chance to really see each other, our differences become just a small part of who we really are. This rewarding, heart-warming novel is one everyone should read. We get to see Dan's side of the story, though, and we do end up feeling for Dan too. Dan has issues and he has reasons - or so he thinks - for bullying.With a simple twist of fate and the two boys are thrust together to work on a project, it seems inevitably doomed. The victim and the bully? Disastrous. Or is it? The two boys’ mums are old friends and unaware of the issues at school between Alex and Dan. Much to the dislike of both boys, the mums arrange for the pair to spend time together at the weekends building a raft. As time goes by with the boys working together on the raft, a new empathy begins to develop and their relationship begins to grow, albeit shaped by a mixture of tension, confusion and developing compassion. The actual plot line of Alex helping Dan with the raft took about one third of the book to get to, however, I really felt like that first third really helped to build the characters up and their relationships with each other, and show the extent of the bullying before diving in to Alex helping with the raft. It was definitely not boring in any way and I think it was rather important it was done this way. It also shows how hard it is to step in and stop someone else being bullied. I won't go into too much depth here, but there were several occasions where Alex could have stepped in to help someone else from the bullying, but because you were inside Alex's head, you really got the sense of how it isn't that easy. It just feels like there was so many different factors to this bullying and they were all so well rounded up, like everything slotted together so well. But Dan is angry, and misses his brother. He soon realises that Alex isn’t all that bad. He can impersonate Yoda, C-3PO and R2-D2. However weird he is, he’s actually pretty cool.