Better Late Than Never

by J.M. Newsome

Award-winning original fiction for learners of English. At seven levels, from Starter to Advanced, this impressive selection of carefully graded readers offers exciting reading for every student's capabilities. Alexandria, Egypt. Anika and Zaphira are sitting at a seafront cafe. Suddenly, there is a huge explosion which knocks them over and changes their lives for ever. Both teenage girls learn a lot about each other as they struggle to survive, and to understand what has happened and why. And their combined strength is a surprise to the men they come up against. Paperback-only version. Also available with Audio CDs with complete text recordings from the book.

96 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2013

Reviews

[Bryan Fox]

I read this because a school I'm working for assigned it as a required text for a class I'm teaching this semester. I have no problem assigning adult texts to adult learners, but I struggle to understand how Cambridge felt that including this book in its collection of readers was appropriate.

The book begins with a terrorist attack, contains multiple scenes of graphic violence (often perpetrated against the book's two 16-year old female protagonists), and has repeated direct references to threats of rape as a punishment Who is the target audience for this type of text?

And if the inappropriacy wasn't bad enough, don't worry - the story itself sure is. It makes so little sense I was worried about my own level of English. Somehow the entire story, which involves the aforementioned terrorist attack, the girls' escape from it, their sequestration as stowaways on a yacht belonging to a man connected to the attack, their escape and meetup with agents of Interpol, and a sting to catch the man whose yacht they end up on, unfolds across two continents but takes place over the course of the same day

Christ on a bike, this book is wrong in just about every way possible.

[Palmaria M]

A very confusing 96 pages. While the story did follow the traditional rules of storytelling the characters felt as if they had been developed in a previous book and the missing links were left for this story. More often than not, when a book starts in the middle of the action it can be well received but this seemed a bit too abrupt. With children as the protagonists the story was too violent and their characters too unchildlike. I can’t help but wonder that if they were of a different race maybe the approach would’ve been different. The main source of my discomfort comes from the writer using Egypt as a setting and blatantly employing negative stereotypes especially in a book meant for ESL learners. Furthermore, the multiple subplots were too distracting .