'Desiree u Zven'

Author: Rita Grech

Publisher: Dom Communications Ltd / 2016

Pages: 147

Rita Grech from Cospicua, was born in 1975 and has been writing for these past 10 years.

She has written so far 24 books aimed at an adolescent audience. She writes about everyday life, featuring young lives and what they get up to, what happens to them, the problems they face and how they tackle them.

Her aim is to get her readers to understand that the problems they would be facing had been more or less the same problems faced by other people and thus even they can solve them just as others have done.

One other aim that inspires Rita, as she turns out book after book, is to encourage people to read and to enjoy reading in Maltese.

She also mentions that she enjoys writing while listening to music, as it helps spark her creativity. Every book is inspired by a particular song.

Her most popular book has been Samantha u l-imhabba sigrieta.

Other popular books include Famuzi, Markuz, Angli, Sajf specjali ghal Charlene and Abbie u l-guvni tal-beritta.

This book, which is being reviewed today, as its title implies, is about Desiree. Life has not been easy on her. She has been brought up by her grandparents because her mother was a drug addict.

Then her grandparents died and the girl was sent to live with Anton. After some years her mother told her that Anton was her father. This news shook her to the core.

Meanwhile Desiree has begun to attend a new school. Despite everything she is a model student and works hard at her studies.

But two boys at her school begin to harass her both inside the school and outside, on her way home.

Zven is a boy who goes to the same school. He too has problems in his personal life for his father makes his life and that of his mother a living hell.

Although he has all these problems Zven cannot stomach the harassment the two subject Desiree to.

This brings the two closer to each other but then Zven, through his ingenuity, is enticed to get involved in something that could seriously endanger not just the relationship between them but his whole future as well.