Sheep on the Fourth Floor
by Leonie Thorpe
When is it right to do something wrong? Anna is the well behaved and obedient child of professional parents. Her mother Penelope is a leading research scientist and her father a doctor - and she's been raised in a politically correct nonsmoking vegetarian home, with a solid foundation of firmly held beliefs she has inherited from her parents.However, Anna is shaken to the core when she organizes a school trip to her mother's work and discovers that she experiments on live animals. A sheep is being held on the fourth floor away from all the things that make life good for a sheep - and he will be killed and dissected when the experiment is finished. Horrified with what she now knows, she is further rocked to discover that her father is a secret smoker - despite lecturing his patients on the evils of smoking. What follows is her way of dealing with her own moral dilemma - exciting, funny, poignant and probably illegal. A contempory novel for 9-12 year olds.