Believability
All fiction is a kind of conspiracy between author and reader. The author pretends that what they are writing is true and the reader pretends to believe them. I know there's a lot more to it than that—the author probably has something they want to say through shaping the events and characters in their story and the reader may be searching for some kind of truth, or a new way of looking at things, and what is truth anyway? But for the whole thing to work the reader has to be able to convince themselves while they are reading that what they are reading is true. So when I started reading Meg Rosoff's Carnegie Winner Just in Case and discovered that the central character is named Justin Case, that contract between the writer and this particular reader was immediately undermined. I mean, Justin's parents seem quite ineffectual, but I couldn't believe that any parents would deliberately do that to their child. Justin lives in a weird world. It's a world where toddler