Wake Up Singing

"Mevrou, isn't it unpatriotic not to do cadets? I mean, we show we are willing to defend our country by learning to march and shoot, hey Mevrou?" " Kom nou, Celia," began Mevrou Piek, but Melanie was standing, her feet neatly together. She said, too loudly: "I think he's a disgrace to the school. Why does he have to be different to us?" Nicholas Mackenzie, sixteen, white and male, is drifting through his adolescence in Johannesburg in 1985. A new friendship with a girl called Em brings him to the edges of another world, South Africa outside cocoon of white society. He meets Zach and Mpho, black kids his own age. Through them he finds himself drawn irrevocably into new understanding of his life in South Africa - and into direct conflict with his father, his cadet master and his schoolmates.