A rollicking fun read!
 When I told Buster and Themba – my two best friends – that I’d be spending three months with my grandfather – Pops – and a bunch of nearly dead people in the Nelson Mandela Gardens Retirement Village in Port Elizabeth, they said that there was no way I’d survive. Themba said that he couldn’t think of anything worse – apart from being sentenced to life in a monastery (with no access to what he calls ‘educational material’). And Buster said that even James Bond (he’s a big fan of the Bond Movies) would never have survived this kind of torture, not in a million years – and we all know what happened to his goolies at the end of Casino Royale. Instead, they suggested I:
1) Drink so much Coke that I had a seizure and had to spend three months recuperating in hospital
2) Commit some heinous crime – like digging up the school cricket pitch – so that I would spend the time in jail (or detention) instead
3) Run away
4) Get a hot-shot American lawyer to sue my parents for cruelty, change my identity and buy myself a new life in Cuba
But, to be honest, this was all about as useful to me as a third nostril. And, anyway, Themba and Buster couldn’t have been more wrong. For a start they didn’t know Pops – who is really not boring at all. And they also didn’t know about Regina Versagel – the girl I was destined to meet at the Internet cafe – and her depressingly handsome ‘cousin’ Peter Ranger. In fact, looking back, there wasn’t a lot they did get right, except for the fact that surviving three months at the Nelson Mandela Gardens was going to be a whole lot harder than I thought.
 THE AUTHOR
Edyth Bulbring is the author of two children’s novels: The Summer of Toffie and Grummer (Oxford University Press 2008) and Cornelia Button and the Globe of Gamagion (Jacana 2008). She has also published a young adult novel entitled The Club (Jonathan Ball 2008). Edyth is a former journalist and lives in Johannesburg.
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