My Especially Weird Week with Tess

And fortunately there’s still a heart-warming Woltz adventure in this book: during the May holiday on the Dutch island of Texel, ten-year-old Samuel meets eleven-year-old Tess, a boisterous and rather bossy islander. He quickly becomes involved in a bizarre plan that Tess has concocted so that she can get to know her father, who has no idea that she exists. Tess has found his name in one of her mum’s old scrapbooks, tracked him down on the internet and invited him to stay for free in their holiday home – without telling him that she’s his daughter and most definitely without letting her mum in on the plan. She intends to test him for a week to see if she really wants to have him as a dad, but of course all kinds of things go wrong.

While Tess longs for a relationship with her father, Samuel is doing his best to become less attached to his family. He practises being alone, a little more every day, so that he can get used to loneliness, just in case his family dies. But then an old man confides in him about how much he misses his dead wife: “When my Maria died, I cried because I hadn’t seen her more often. I would have liked more Maria. Not less.”

Woltz delights her readers with such beautiful insights, skilfully weaving together all of the threads of the plot to craft a very moving conclusion.