The Underground Conspiracy

by catherine-storr

When Jass first hears that her cousin Colly is coming to stay for Easter she's fed up. She can't imagine how he'll fit in with her plans, especially her secret way of spending her free time - travelling for hours on end on the underground. The two of them become involved in a mystery.

Genres: Fiction

152 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Louise Culmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jass is fourteen and lives with her mother Jean in Kentish Town. Jean works as a cleaner so she and Jass don’t have a lot of spare money. In the school holidays, while Jean is at work, Jass likes to go riding on the underground. She buys a ticket for one stop, and then rides all day, avoiding changing anywhere she has to go through a barrier. She is an expert on the network. She can only dream about the places she stops at on the tube but never gets to see: “she knew there was a forest at Epping, but she’d never seen it, Was it a real forest? Trees, birds, bluebells in the spring? Or would it turn out to be like Chalk Farm, just reads and houses and tall blocks of flats? Sometimes Jass thought it might be just as well that she never saw the places with names she liked. Royal Oak sounded like something out of Shakespeare, but probably it was nothing but a pub. Ravenscourt Park she had seen, briefly, as the train ran past it on the overhead rails, but it looked tame and Ordinary compared to the possibility of the huge black birds suggested by its name.” One day however something alarming happens, and Jass’s game begins to look like something more serious, even frightening.
This is an enjoyable story with some interesting characters, though I couldn’t help thinking Jass was a bit naive, even for fourteen. But perhaps I am being unfair. Would I have realised what was going on at fourteen? Probably not.

[Vanlilith · Rating 4 out of 5]

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