What a horrible little child Harriet is. I love her. She feels like an actual child too - noisy and energetic and distracted at the drop of a hat, interested in her friends and yet entirely selfish. So often kids in literature seem sanitised, and if they have flaws they're sort of minor and easily fixed, whereas Harriet, in every sense of the word, is juvenile. There's nothing saccharine about her, or her friends (I think Janie was my particular favourite, awful in a completely different way). The kids are all done really well. There's not one of them feels like a cut-out, even the antagonists seem like solid little things.

I like too that the story is so sly and subversive. I mean, I read the blurb on the back and thought I had it: Harriet spies on people, writes down her too-truthful and absolutely unedited observations in a notebook, loses notebook, friends read notebook, oh what will she do to make it up to them? I won't spoil it, but I laughed my arse off. Because it's so very obvious, and so very tailored to the horrible child that she is. Anyway, it was deeply entertaining.