Very very entertaining  read!

Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews  ………   Each of four children responds in terms of his own frame of reference to the odd presence and still odder sudden absence of the bruised and lonely little boy in the park who has no name but Squib. Gently fixing (not fixating -- and she's on top of the difference) on his ineffable yet palpable sadness, Mrs. Bawden makes him the pivot of an unaffected, unencumbered story that settles in nicely and sits comfortably. Prue and Sammy, eight and five and variously given to intermixing fact and fantasy, know Squib as a sometime playmate and worry about his being imprisoned in a laundry basket by a witch. Twelve-year-old Kate Pollack's concern betokens just the overdeveloped motherly instinct of an only child until she allows herself to hope that Squib is her brother resurrected: Rupert would be about the same age if he hadn't drowned and he had those same eyes (one blue, one brown) and in fact his body never was found. . . . Robin, something of a mediator and the voice -- he likes to think -- of reason, interprets Sammy's comments with the practiced discrimination of an older sibling, but he wonders now and then about Kate's sanity while working up his personal theory that Squib is the victim of a kidnapping. They're all wrong -- there's no witch, no resurrection, no kidnapping -- and yet they're all right in struggling with the possibilities in their respective ways; the finale illumines quite a bit more than just Squib's identity as the characters sharpen into personalities through a roundly natural give and take.

`SQUIB' IS DARK, BEWILDERING ……  The 12-year-old main character finds boy who she believes is her brother, who drowned years before.

Not sure what I think ..  The book Squib, by Nina Bawden, is the story of Kate Pollack, a girl who believes that a mysterious little boy she meets in the park might be her drowned brother, Rupert.

Kate feels responsible for Rupert's drowning. The two children were swimming in the ocean when the current became strong. Seeing the children in trouble, her father swam out and saved Kate first because Rupert appeared safe in an inner tube.

By the time he went back for Rupert, the boy had drifted far from shore. Rupert and his father were unable to fight the strong currents. The body of Kate's father was recovered, but Rupert's never was. This gives Kate hope that possibly someone came along and saved Rupert and then kept and cared for him.

When Kate meets Squib, her hope that Rupert is still alive is strengthened. Everything about Squib seems to support Kate's idea. First, Kate notices that Squib is the same age Rupert would have been. Second, she notices the eyes. Squib has "one eye more blue than brown (and) one more brown than blue." Kate notices in a painting her mother did of Rupert that his eyes are the same. And no one can totally convince Kate that Squib is not Rupert.

Squib is not a fairy tale, but a story about real life. The book ends happily, but it's a rough road to the end. The story touches on many depressing subjects, so it's not suggested for the person who is having a nice day. It includes such topics as child abuse, gangs, the death of loved ones and how people cope with it, and the absence of parents.

This book left me bewildered. I did not have an overwhelming feeling of praise or dislike for it when I finished. I didn't know what to feel because I had never read such a dark children's book.

It’s more suited to older children as it does introduce the realities of life to the reader from a child's-eye view.

TEACHERS VIEW .... How is the story told?