⇒ Download Free Once Upon a Set of Wheels Part One Baby Driver L M Steel 9781909192751 Books

Once Upon a Set of Wheels Part One Baby Driver L M Steel 9781909192751 Books

Download As PDF : Once Upon a Set of Wheels Part One Baby Driver L M Steel 9781909192751 Books

Once Upon a Set of Wheels Part One Baby Driver L M Steel 9781909192751 Books

Baby Driver, what an odd title for a book, I thought when I first picked it up. What could this possibly be about? I was in for a surprise. Now that I am finished with this book, I have that feeling of still wanting to be reading it, still caring about the characters, and wanting to know what happens to them.

Baby driver is the name I use to refer to the main character, since she never really had a proper name. She was left abandoned by her mother in an abandoned car. Then she went from one heartbreaking situation of abuse and neglect to the next, and a heartless system of social services and the state with it's absolute stupidity that caused her to turn to a life of crime, more out of necessity than her own evil. She wasn't allowed to even form a personality before she had to act for her own survival, turning criminal in order to survive. This reader never blamed her, but she blamed herself. She had a sense of morality that came from who knows where, since none of her role models could have ever instilled it in her. You wanted to reach into the book and grab her and bring her to safety although by the time you got to her she wouldn't be a safe person to have in your life.

What I loved most about the book was how it really made you think in a never ending loop about how she really couldn't be blamed for her actions, which involved several murders, and yet you couldn't just leave her to society as she had become. And yet the society that had done this to her barely deserved our sympathy either.

This is a fast read, a great story, full of twists and turns. The writing is so good you never notice it, you just follow the story. This author must continue writing as she is clearly quite gifted and talented.

I will read the sequel to this book, and am looking forward to it, and highly recommend this modern day Oliver Twist.


Tags : Once Upon a Set of Wheels Part One: Baby Driver [L. M. Steel] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. On May 17th 1982, an infant girl is found in a stolen car abandoned on a bridge. The police call her 'Lotus' after the car she is discovered in,L. M. Steel,Once Upon a Set of Wheels Part One: Baby Driver,Beaten Track Publishing,1909192759,Coming of Age,Crime,FICTION Thrillers Crime,Fiction - Espionage Thriller,Fiction : Coming of Age,Fiction : Crime,Thrillers - Crime

Once Upon a Set of Wheels Part One Baby Driver L M Steel 9781909192751 Books Reviews

I find myself in something of a quandary over `Baby Driver'. Some aspects of it are undeniably good, but there aspects too which badly need revisiting.

The harrowing story of an abused girl, there are times when the book makes very uncomfortable reading. At times I felt real anger on Becky's behalf, and almost abject despair of the social care system which allows children to fall prey to such terrible mistreatment. But the girl's heroic resilience and determination prevent her from being just a downtrodden victim. This girl has guts. As a character she is engaging and I found her story very compelling. I wanted to know what happened to her. There is no doubt that LM Steel has created a very appealing character in her protagonist.

On the other hand, I did find that at times my credibility was stretched too far. For a six-, let alone a three-year-old to display such self-discipline and cold-blooded resourcefulness didn't seem realistic to me even given Becky's extraordinary background. Could a nine year old really drive so expertly and without being noticed in broad daylight on motorways? Also, I had terrible difficulties with the setting. This was West Yorkshire in the twentieth century, not Mexico City, or even Dickensian London. It seemed to me highly improbable that a girl as young as six could wander the same streets of a relatively small town every day for a fortnight, getting into a pattern of pilfering, bin-raiding and sleeping rough without someone cottoning on to her circumstances and alerting the authorities. And while I don't know West Yorkshire well enough to comment on the accuracy of the geography described, I do know that it just isn't possible for anyone - let alone a child - to wander from Windermere to the motorway and back again in the course of a couple of hours. It was such a shame that these details repeatedly jarred me out of my engagement with the narrative, but when a writer sets a novel in actual locations in the real world,she must describe it accurately.

I liked the way the book was constructed. As chapters progressed so did fully rounded incidents or complete periods of Becky's life. There was a pleasing episodic feel to the book, which also has a sound-track as different popular songs not only place the narrative in time but reflect Becky's various states of mind and emotions. I had a problem with the framing device, though. The book opens and closes at a period clearly some years after the events narrated but the conclusion of the book is really only a hiatus between books one and two. The central mystery of Becky's life - the circumstances of her birth and abandonment - are nowhere near being explained and only eleven years of Becky's life have been described to us. I do think that even when a book is part of a series, each individual book ought to be complete in itself. Frankly, at the `end' I felt a bit cheated.

The story is written in the first person, and as a reader we really do get inside the head of young Becky. Her agonised dealings with anger, shame, guilt and hatred are believably rendered in a consistent voice. The style is colloquial, discursive and sometimes inept, as though dictated and taken down verbatim. I forgave it at first; it is after all, supposed to be the journal of a child. But when the same style was used for passages from a mature character's point of view, or for newspaper reports, I started to suspect that this is in fact LM Steel's style, and not Becky's. That being the case the text began to feel shoddy and rushed. What I could overlook in Becky I could not excuse in a published novel. A raft of grammatical and punctuation errors - the constant misuse of the apostrophe, for example - strongly suggested that once the story was down on the page it had never been revisited by any kind of objective, editorial eye or the self-critical re-drafting process which hones a good story into a great book. In the end, sadly, it felt like a draft.

LM Steel is a gifted story-teller and creator of character. She understands the psychology of abuse. (I think she must also be something of a car fanatic!) Her narrative voice is consistent; not an easy feat when using the first person. Baby Driver is shaping up to be a gritty bildungsroman of our time.
Once you get into this book you're not going to want to put it down. If you've started and stopped due to the distressing nature of the first part, keep on going. What happens to Lotus will make you angry and you'll want to take vengeance on her part with everyone who has hurt her. You'll find yourself coaching her "No, no, don't do it. Don't mess this up." But she does, because she is just a little girl. A precocious brilliant little girl with a past no one should have to experience.
I do agree with the reviewer who questioned how Lotus could have been so cognizant of her surroundings,so sophisticated in her observations. But I could accept that as part of her story. And the author very cleverly pointed out how people could have missed a six year old roaming the streets by observing how so many of us see only what we want to see. And though I'd like to say the caretakers were overdrawn in their abuse or neglect, sadly far too many people do take that attitude with difficult children. Lotus never had the opportunity to understand what makes up a good life.
You'll be angry and horrified and drawn in and compelled to keep turning those pages. And maybe it will cause you to look twice at the children in the house on the next block. Is that a bruise you see? Are those larger children bullying the smaller one? It's all too easy for us to look away, when we should look twice.
When I was thirty I was waiting tables and grooming dogs, not writing disturbing stories about neglect and abuse. I predict a bright future for L.M. Steel
Baby Driver, what an odd title for a book, I thought when I first picked it up. What could this possibly be about? I was in for a surprise. Now that I am finished with this book, I have that feeling of still wanting to be reading it, still caring about the characters, and wanting to know what happens to them.

Baby driver is the name I use to refer to the main character, since she never really had a proper name. She was left abandoned by her mother in an abandoned car. Then she went from one heartbreaking situation of abuse and neglect to the next, and a heartless system of social services and the state with it's absolute stupidity that caused her to turn to a life of crime, more out of necessity than her own evil. She wasn't allowed to even form a personality before she had to act for her own survival, turning criminal in order to survive. This reader never blamed her, but she blamed herself. She had a sense of morality that came from who knows where, since none of her role models could have ever instilled it in her. You wanted to reach into the book and grab her and bring her to safety although by the time you got to her she wouldn't be a safe person to have in your life.

What I loved most about the book was how it really made you think in a never ending loop about how she really couldn't be blamed for her actions, which involved several murders, and yet you couldn't just leave her to society as she had become. And yet the society that had done this to her barely deserved our sympathy either.

This is a fast read, a great story, full of twists and turns. The writing is so good you never notice it, you just follow the story. This author must continue writing as she is clearly quite gifted and talented.

I will read the sequel to this book, and am looking forward to it, and highly recommend this modern day Oliver Twist.