title: Mouthing the Words
author:  Camilla Gibb 
description: A crystal-voiced young narrator and the saving grace of humor distinguish Gibb's stunningly assured debut novel (already winner of the Toronto Book Award) from similarly conceived stories about dysfunctional families. Thelma is but five years old when her story begins in the small English village of Little Slaughter. Her mother, a model who resented her pregnancy with Thelma, has a lover who she says is just pretend. Her father holds Thelma over a bridge by her armpits and has her play secretary to his boss, a game that involves French kissing and, later on, worse. It's little wonder, then, that Thelma invents three imaginary friends Ginniger, Janawee and Heroin each with her own function for helping Thelma to cope. When the family moves to Canada, things worsen, and Thelma commences poignantly asking other adults to be her parents. In spite of her horrific childhood, Thelma attends law school and wins a scholarship to Oxford. But psychological fallout from her past including bouts of anorexia and self-mutilation stand in the way of her progress until at last she reclaims the life she should have had all along, finding her own voice. Gibb intimately understands the child's need to reinvent the personal world as normal, however topsy-turvy the reality. The novel has already been compared to Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, but it more closely resembles the film Shine. Thelma is a compelling heroine, her tale too well-told and too wide-ranging, both in content and affect, to be pigeonholed as "just another coming-of-age story." Foreign rights sold in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway.
zlib_text: **FAST FRIENDS**
  
   **JILL MANSELL**
  
   ****
  
  Prologue
  
  Camilla stared at the girl sitting cross-legged on the bed opposite her. ‘But
  what is subversive behaviour?’ she asked, curiosity mingling with excitement.
  With those dark eyes, heavy, slanting eyebrows and incredible cheekbones, Roz
  Vallender exuded an aura of exotic mystery which transcended her sixteen
  years. Camilla’s mother, no doubt, would have taken one look and pronounced
  her ‘dangerous to know’. Camilla, however, was instantly enthralled. ‘And why
  did they expel you?’ she continued breathlessly. ‘What exactly did you _do?’_
  
  Roz, having in turn studied the plump, eager blonde with whom she would be
  sharing this large but slightly shabby room, decided that Camilla Avery-Jones
  would be a push-over. All she had to do in order to maintain the position of
  superiority she had held at her last school was to start as she meant to go
  on.
  
  ‘Gambling, smoking, drinking,’ she began, ticking them off on her fingers with
  studied casualne