Having a good family friend as your headmaster might sound ideal, but Luke Brownlow soon finds that it just makes life even more complicated.
In with 'the wrong crowd', Luke's schoolwork is suffering and his parents take drastic action: banning him from seeing his friends and making him change schools. Luke falls out with his family completely and escapes by forming an acquaintance with his neighbour, Ned Kelly.
Luke plans to get expelled from his new school, but has to reassess the situation when he discovers that his new headmaster is the neighbour he has been getting to know over the summer. An antagonistic fellow student and the arrival of a runaway teenage girl make it harder to avoid confrontations with Ned than Luke had hoped. By the end of the school year he is in imminent danger of expulsion and is sure that he has lost the respect of the man he most admires.
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Amanda
(A. J. Braithwaite)