Hector is a real disgust. And that already at the age of ten. He beats up other children, steals candy or money from them. In the school cafeteria, he trips others up when they come by with a full tray. He has no respect for adults. Why should he? He doesn’t have to do more than detention as punishment. For the headmaster of the school it is considered a nuisance, hops and malt are lost. His parents, who travel a lot for work, always expect problems. The older sister likes to tease him, only his four-year-old brother adores him.
The British author Onjali Q. Rauf has really not chosen a popular protagonist for her second children’s novel “The Night Bus Heroes”. Rather, she has put two nasty children at his side, Will and Katie, who motivate Hector to new crimes. And so it so happens that one day he chooses a homeless person as a victim, deprives him of his meager belongings.
Hector acts less out of malice than out of boredom
Anyone who reads the first pages of “Night Bus Heroes” can feel somewhat disgusted by Hector. Rauf doesn’t treat her hero squeamishly, she doesn’t explain why the ten-year-old is acting like that. She leaves him with her by telling from a first-person perspective. Then a very clever, quick-witted guy emerges who has obviously lost his moral compass. At the moment, Hector is acting less out of malice than out of boredom, always exploring boundaries. It soon becomes clear that hops and malt are not lost. Hector just has to learn more intensively than others that there are not only the categories funny and boring, but also right and wrong.
So it is a development that the author traces here, and which she uses at the same time for an exciting story. In parallel to Hector’s misdeeds, his hometown London is struck by a series of art thefts in public places. Homeless people are suspected. Since Hector has harmed a homeless man and he tries – not entirely voluntarily – to make amends, the adventure of solving the series of robberies begins for him. Without the police, but with the fabulously courageous classmate Mei-Li.
Rauf wrote down an adventure, a detective hunt through London
For the socially committed bestselling author Rauf, it is important to tell about those, about those who live on the streets. Hector, the spoiled bully from the upper class, meets people who are homeless for various reasons. Unlike him, however, they have a heart for others. And it is precisely in this point that those who actually do not have much can give him a lot.
The idea of telling about two different outsiders, the bully and the homeless, may sound very ambitious for a children’s book, maybe even exhausting. In fact, Rauf has written an adventure, a detective hunt through London – among other things with the night bus from which it is named. Your real concern is not imposing. And this is how the wonderful combination arises of using narrative tension to bring people into the field of vision who are too often overlooked. (from 8 years) Yvonne Poppek
Onjali Q. Rauf: The night bus heroes. Translated from the English by Katharina Diestelmeier. Atrium Verlag, 288 pages, 15 euros.