At one stage, Annabel – in her mother’s body – fires the family housekeeper for using racist language and in another scene fears that her own physical form may actually have abducted, raped and murdered. Which would be fine, if the book was intended as nothing more than light whimsy but it clearly has pretentions to making a serious point about the responsibilities of adults towards children, and it occasionally veers into unexpectedly dark territory. But elsewhere, it’s the humour that actually stymies the story. It’s the 1970s New York equivalent of the “Decond Class Redurn Do Dottingham”.

Because Ben, we learn, has been inexplicably allowed to leave the house with a “beautiful chick” stranger who calls at the apartment, charming teenage babysitter Boris into letting the trusting infant wander the streets of New York in her company.īoris, an adenoidal 14-year-old adored by Annabel – although, predictably, he himself is in love with the senior Mrs Andrews – does actually provide effective comic relief: I certainly laughed at the revelation, after an entire book’s worth of sleight-of-hand, that his name is actually Morris, but a cavalcade of sinus-troubling allergies render him unable to pronounce it correctly.

Things predictably go awry: overwhelmed by the obligations of the adult world, Annabel – a typically scatty and wayward teenager – finds herself baffled by her mother’s vague diary appointments out of her depth in a school meeting about her own underachievements and – ultimately – not only concerned about the disappearance of her own physical form, but also that of her younger brother. 13-year-old Annabel Andrews wakes up to discover that she now inhabits her own mother’s body and has therefore inherited a full gamut of family responsibilities: her busy executive father, her six-year-old brother Ben (or “Ape Face” as Annabel has nicknamed him), and – indeed – her own absent physical form, which she assumes to be now inhabited by her mother’s personality, although this supposition remains tantalisingly vague until the book’s final chapter. Four ( four!) feature-length screen adaptations to date, all produced by Disney, have given Mary Rodgers’ tale a genuine pan-generational appeal, but the book is very firmly rooted amid the middle-classes mores of Nixon-era New York, and is centered around a family whose reactions to a perspective-altering case of otherworldiness seem disappointingly glib.ĭisappointing, because it’s a genuinely brilliant premise. More of a Wet Wednesday than a Freaky Friday, this familiar tale of a mother/daughter body-swap feels, appropriately, like an engaging, powerful story being forced to masquerade in the form of an ungainly knockabout comedy.

Freaky friday book mary rodgers