The Real Plato Jones

by Nina Bawden

Thirteen-year-old Plato Jones comes to terms with his mixed heritage when he visits Greece and finds out about his Welsh grandfather, a World War II hero, and his Greek grandfather, who is rumored to have been a traitor.

Genres: Greece, Fiction

176 pages, Hardcover

First published October 18, 1993

About the author

Nina Bawden was a popular British novelist and children's writer. Her mother was a teacher and her father a marine.

When World War II broke out she spent the school holidays at a farm in Shropshire along with her mother and her brothers, but lived in Aberdare, Wales, during term time.
Bawden attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

Her novels include Carrie's War, Peppermint Pig, and The Witch's Daughter.

A number of her works have been dramatised by BBC Children's television, and many have been translated into various languages. In 2002 she was badly injured in the Potters Bar rail crash, and her husband Austen Kark was killed.

Bawden passed away at her home in London on 22 August 2012.

Reviews

[Lucy Portsmouth]

Not nearly so good as Carrie's War, and obviously aimed at a YA audience, but it's a vivid description of the awkwardness, search for identity and belonging of boy growing into himself, making sense of his family history and his own sense of self as the people he loves change around him.

[Sarah Thornton]

Companion piece to Rebel on a Rock and The Outside Child.

A story about feeling comfortable in your own skin and the various histories of ancestors that are the genetic makeup of a person, Plato never quite feels like he belongs anywhere until he realises that he, like oatmeal, is a good mixture of many positive things.

[LeAnne]

With a Welsh father and a Greek mother, Plato Jones feels “all mixed up... When I’m there, I want to be here, and when I’m here I want to be there! It’s as if I were split in two. And I don’t know which half is me.” (p.93) It takes helping his Greek grandfather’s village in a major emergency to make Plato feel at home with the two sides of his heritage.