Sal (13) and Peppa (10) have fled the home of their alcoholic mother and her abusive partner and made camp in the remote Scottish Highlands where Sal keeps them safe and fed and warm with her carefully collected supplies and all the survival knowledge she has gleaned from books and TV.

The writing is effective, convincingly creating the voice of a smart, self-proficient girl without losing Sal's essential youth. Kitson injects her narrative with slang and uses informal grammar to capture her personality and reflect her background very successfully but would have been strengthened further if her inner monologue was more similar to her direct speech. Peppa brings liveliness to balance Sal's more thoughtful, considered and suspicious outlook bringing humour and warmth through their closeness.

The weaker parts of the novel hinge largely on the ability to really believe that such young girls could survive so successfully, alone in a hostile environment with only second-hand knowledge amassed from sources aimed at adults. Sal is a wonderful protagonist but after a while her resourcefulness and proficiency starts to take its toll on the reader's ability to really believe the story. There is a very big difference between learning how to do things in theory and putting them into practice, a few more failures and a little more difficulty on Sal's part might have addressed this . Although, this is, of course aimed at a young audience, Kitson is also drawing on a tradition of survival stories such as Kidnapped, so I may be being overly critical. The appearance of Ingrid makes this worse, her backstory is just so elaborate, so fortuitous and so unlikely that it really impinged on my enjoyment.

I am in charge of the senior library and work with a group of Reading Ambassadors from 16-18 to ensure that our boarding school library is modernised and meets the need of both our senior students and staff. It has been great to have the chance to talk about these books with our seniors and discuss what they want and need on their shelves. I was drawn to his book because I thought it would be something different from the usual school library fare and draw the students in with a tempting storyline and lots to discuss.
This book was a really enjoyable read with strong characters and a real sense of time and place. I enjoyed the ways that it maintained a cracking pace that kept me turning its pages and ensured that I had much to discuss with them after finishing. It was not only a lively and enjoyable novel but had lots of contemporary themes for our book group to pick up and spend hours discussing too.
I think it's important to choose books that interest as well as challenge our students and I can see this book being very popular with students and staff alike; this will be an excellent purchase as it has everything that we look for in a great read - a tempting premise, fantastic characters and a plot that keeps you gripped until you close its final page.

Oh my goodness I totally fell in love with this book from day one. It’s such a gem of a find I felt privileged to read it. And was actually quite sad when it was over.

I totally adored Sal & Pepper especially Peppers honesty at the most inappropriate times haha! It’s about two girls running away from an awful home where abuse from both their mum and step dad is is just the beginning. It’s about survival and courage and I loved reading about their adventures and survival in the woods along with their past and what lead to this point in their lives.

It’s a sad book in parts but it’s also very uplifting showing the strength we have without even knowing it. Is about total
Love for your siblings and the lengths you will go to keeping them safe.

I loved this book immensely and I really didn’t want it to end, I read it in around 3hrs well into the night as I couldn’t stop reading and had to know how it ended for them both.

A beautiful read and a book you’ll remember for a very long time. A must read it’s stunning!

If Sal doesn't become a modern day classic and a Book of the Year for 2019 then it'll be a travesty. It's a story of survival against sexual abuse, a dysfunctional family and the horrors perpetrated on them by an abuser. It's a story of a sister going to a mental place where she thinks the unthinkable, prepares and executes a plan to save her family and takes her and the reader into morally grey areas where you're in a moral no-man's land. Normal categories of right and wrong cross boundaries and raise ethical questions that haunt and blur the psychological lines. What would otherwise seem an act of brutal savagery becomes a heroic act but you're not sure whether you should admit this or not.

It's the story of thirteen year old Sal and her ten year old sister Peppa escaping their alcoholic mother's abusive partner and surviving in a Scottish forest. Sal's remarkable survival skills are learned from YouTube, the SAS Survival Handbook and her trusty Bear Grylls knife! I learned more about the forest and survival in this book than I've learned in a hundred television wildlife documentaries! I read a book recently themed around a forest but sometimes felt suffocated under the literary foliage. I didn't feel that with Sal as the writing is precise and descriptive without being suffocating or claustrophobic.

The story is told from Sal's perspective and it took me probably too long to realise that I was reading/listening to the mind of someone with special needs who is both deeply disturbed from her experiences and deeply loving and loyal and has had to grow up far too fast taking on the role of mother to her little sister and even to her own mother. Sal is the adult in the family out of necessity rather than choice in a scenario sadly all too familiar in real life. I could be wrong but I sensed that both Sal and Peppa may be on the Autism/ADHD spectrum but that's more my own guess. At times I had to remind myself that this is fiction because it felt a bit like reading an extraordinary autobiography.

There is a tension like an electric current between Peppa's innocently carefree and careless attitude which at times risks revealing their plight, and Sal's sometimes tense vigilance through her more developed awareness of their predicament. She is the one with most to lose after all. The interaction between Sal and Peppa is one of the driving forces of the book and there are some genuinely funny moments and dialogue revealing both their sisterly bond and at times deep yet innocent immaturity.

It's an amazing book but it's not perfect. By the time we meet Ingrid I was too invested in Sal and Peppa's story and found myself reading Ingrid's life story sections just to get back to Sal and Peppa. While Ingrid is a compelling character in her own right I felt her back story took attention away from Sal and Peppa. I can see why it's included, presumably to explain why she is in the forest in the first place and it is fascinating in its own right yet I felt I was being diverted away from the main story. Also while Adam is presumably there to represent a danger to their 'hidden' status (and they all fancy him!) I felt his character was the weakest in the book and wasn't sure if he really needed to be there. The one bit that didn't work at all for me was the way Sal and co meet their mother again after going on the run. I felt it was very unrealistic and stretched credibility. It's difficult to say more without going into spoiler territory but I simply felt it was unrealistic.

The book got right back on track when they return to the camp after the rehab adventure and from then on until the end it is once more captivating. The final two chapters are amongst the best I have read in any literature for a long time. I don't honestly think I've thought more about any other book after finishing it. It is filled with both darkness and light, fear and hope, foreboding and freedom.

I'm not sure if I'd read it again (but I might!) but when it's published I will buy a copy as it is one of those books you just want in your collection. If it had been published before Christmas I'd have bought a copy for Christmas. If I'm honest I'm quite hard to please as a reader and don't give five star reviews often. I was considering giving this four stars, knocking off a star for the bits I didn't quite 'get' as outlined above. But a book doesn't have to be perfect in every way to be outstanding and essential reading so even though I questioned parts of it I still want to give it the full five stars. I could write another thousand words about Sal (and when I pass a forest I'll always wonder who is in there!) but best you just read it and decide for yourself. Highly recommended and essential reading.

Thanks to author Mick Kitson for writing this and I couldn't help hoping that there might be a sequel relating what happens next. One can only hope!

Thanks to NetGalley and Canongate Books for ARC. I'll post summarised version of this to Amazon and Goodreads when published and then my own blog.

* I definitely preferred the first half... when Sal lays out the how and why of where they are.
Her survival skills learnt from you tube videos and reading.
But other survival skills learnt from living with an alcoholic mother and abusive partner.
Sal was confident,and pretty thorough in planning for escape.
With the introduction of Ingrid and Adam,it lost something for me.
Maybe I just wanted to see how the two sisters fared alone.
A neat ending,and a decent read.

How utterly marvellous that Mick Kitson has created two young, strong, highly capable female characters? For a non-Scot, he writes very well in the vernacular. Both Sal and Peppa are vibrant and wonderful. The novel tells a story of survival, the lengths we will go to in the face of adversity and the enduring power of love. That it’s set in Scotland was the icing on the cake for me. A fantastic debut!