13 MINUTES by Sarah Pinborough – a review
13 MINUTES by Sarah Pinborough – a review by Gary Fry Call me naïve. I haven’t read much Young Adult fiction. I think I expected material a lot more sanitised than similar stuff for adults. You know what I mean: swearwords replaced by “damn” and “bloody”; violence supplanted by mere shoves and pushes; and as for “scenes of a sexual nature” – well, forget about that. Then I read 13 Minutes by Sarah Pinborough. By the end of only the first few chapters, I’d readjusted my expectations. Pinborough depicts modern school life, with teenage girls at its heart, with social realism-like accuracy. There are cattish calls in corridors, their unmasked subplots on social media, experimentation with drugs, high-tailed parties, and genuinely erotic encounters in the backseats of that nostalgia-baiting “first car”. All this soap opera detail is a vital context for the story which rapidly emerges. A girl has died after falling in a river and was resuscitated after 13 minutes. What were the causes of he