achukareviews

My thoughts drift. I think about the world beneath us, down,down, down. Water washing stone, grinding it slowly into sand. There are stretches of sea-bed between the islands which used to be valleys with village settlements, thousands of years ago. The sea level has slowly risen, covering it all up. Deep down, a whole flooded life is metamorphosing into something else.

In protagonist, Freya, Julia Green combines the contradiction of binding a palpable zeal for life together with the grief of losing her brother, Joe. The result is that an affinity between the reader and Freya is instantly wrought and it is upon this special relationship that its subtlety and, at times, jagged, raw, emotional truths depend.

Visiting her grandparents on the island where they live and where Joe's tragic accident at sea occurred forces a confrontation with a past that Freya remains deeply affected by. The death of Joe is downplayed meaning that it is Freya's grappling with what this means and how the events came about that take centre stage within the novel.

In spare prose, a sense of community is built up around the island and gradually, through immersion into the ebb and flow of her emotions, Freya is able to reach a level of understanding as to the continuing breadth of feeling she has for her brother, the expectation she retains that he will still be there for her and the yearning that is bestowed upon her because of this.

Julia Green makes a welcome return with this tender, affecting tale.

I snatched the gun from him. It felt cool and smooth to the touch, and the weight and shape of it in my hands was completely alien and therefore completely fascinating.

Mia shares a highly unusual relationship with her brother Jamie, one that is dominated by obsessive fascination. The reasonsfor this appear to be apparent from the outset, their mother suffers depressives phases, the severity of which has increased since the death of her father.

The childhood that Mia and Jamie share in this gritty, urban novel is one that is foregrounded constantly by the state of their mother's mental health. A crisis point is reached when Jamie's tolerance finally wears thin and he resolves to push his mother 'to the edge', forcing her to 'sit up and take notice'.

Having set the familial thrust for the novel, the novel turns into a relentless thriller set amidst a suitably chilling evacuated school building within whose realms lies a gunman. Conscious of her brother's resolve to force his mother's hand, Mia believes her brother to be the gunman. She sets off determined to find him and dissuade him from continuing his scheme.

This is a fast-paced, race of a read with twists and turns that keep you guessing and gulping throughout. It represents a departure from Dhami's writing style and is a highly contemporaneous story exploring bereavement and familial uncertainty. The shock ending certainly comes as a surprise and draws question to the weight of significance our individual backgrounds exert upon our present. It leaves readers with a lasting sense of the desperation and desolation Mia has faced. An accomplished novel.

It is the subtext of Sally Nicholls second novel that makes it so powerful. There is a sense of pain and of grief that permeates through the novel and nowhere is this more poignantly felt than in the absence of Molly and Hannah's cripplingly bereaved father, a gap that gains a weight of significance every bit as heavy as the sudden, unexpected death of their mother.

Solace and resolve is found for the bookish Molly - whose favourite reads include the ouevre of Enid Blyton and Jacqueline Wilson - when the myth of the Green Man manifests itself in fully realised formbefore her. Choice of this analogy feels apt in as much as there is a cyclical quality to where death and life are found with each counter-balancing the other.

There is a quiet, subtleness about the message of regrowth and of what it is to be alive that permeates the novel building to a head of steam that invigorates and inspires readers. Unlike in Nicholls' first novel, 'Ways to Live Forever', where the writing is pinioned constantly by the emotional response that is wrought solely by its subject, here the style is lighter and more balanced and it benefits from this.

Myth, nature and magic combine to create an enlivening story of individual and ultimately environmental growth in this moving work.

This is a jaw-droppingly impressive debut novel. It brought to mind two other extraordinarilly good novels - The Collector by John Fowles and Z for Zacchariah by Robert O'Brien - as it will for other readers familiar with those books, and it says much for Lucy Christopher's promise as an author that her first novel can stand proudly side by side with those two titles.

The bare narrative outline: a teenage girl is 'stolen', in other words abducted, from a foreign airport while on holiday with her family, by a young man who, it transpires, has been stalking her for years. He imprisons her in a very remote region of the Australian desert. The girl makes some efforts to run away until it becomes apparent that all attempt at escape is futile.

To begin with the girl despises her captor. In time she comes to have feelings both of admiration and affection for him and it is to Lucy Christopher's credit as an author that she manages to take her readers on this same journey so that by the end of the book we also feel sympathetic towards the abductor despite his crime.

Subtitled 'A letter to my captor', Stolen is an intense first-person voice narrative, which never falters. It has the page-turning propulsion of a thriller and many a time I needed to put the book down to get on with something else, but had to read four or five more pages before it was possible to do so.

If the right lead actors could be found it would make a superb movie. The narrative features a feral camel and there are several 'action' scenes that would make great cinema. Although the author now lives in Wales, it is no surprise to discover that she spent much of her childhood in Australia. The sense of place, of remote desert wilderness, is really well evoked.

I don't have anything else to say about this book, other than, "Buy it, read it, tell someone else about it."

Excellent start to a new sequence of titles from Peterson-Haddix. Difficult to review without spoilers, because it's important that readers take the start of the book at (relative) face value.

A mystery plane arrives at an airport. The only passengers are thirty-six babies.

Thirteen years later, two adopted friends receive threatening anonymous messages and, with the help of one boy's sister, set out to investigate.

It's absolutely gripping and written in an easy unobtrusive style that ends each short chapter on a cliffhanger.

Eventually, as the complicated explanation of the thirty-six babies on the plane and where they came from is revealed, readers will have the philosophical lobes of their brain exercised as well as experiencing the adrenalin rush of the exciting narrative.

How stupid to slap 11+ on the back jacket, as if there aren't plenty of 9/10 year olds capable of enjoying it.

"My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded."
Many a novel has opened brilliantly and promisingly only to disappoint - it would, I suggest, be difficult to gainsay the brilliance and the promise of this particular opening sentence - but not one single moment of disappointment, not one wavering of tone, not one narrative misjudgment awaits the reader in this impressively assured debut novel.
After the grandmother has duly exploded (not spontaneous combustion, as one reviewer misleadingly referred to it, but the result of dousing herself with hairspray and then imperiously insisting on striking the Advent candle match) Pia, the narrator, is ostracised at school. Only one person is prepared to sit next to her, Stefan (Pia's name for him is StinkStefan), a loner who sees this as an opportunity to secure a friendship with someone rejected by the rest.

The novel is set in Bad Munstereifel, a real place, a small spa town in the west of Germany. When a girl goes missing soon after the death by combustion of the grandmother, Pia feels herself the centre of a whispering campaign suggesting that she carries a curse with her.

Pia is not a native German. Her mother is from England. The relationship between Pia's parents becomes increasingly fraught as the novel develops, with the mother continuously making caustic remarks about the small mindedness of the town, and clearly wanting to return to England.

In this climate, Pia and Stefan become close and increasingly daring in their desire to solve the case of the missing children. The tone set by the exploding grandmother - a tone of sardonic relish - is maintained for two thirds of the novel, with Grant's choice of phrasing and use of dialogue exqusitely entertaining, and allowing the reader to take a somewhat detached view of events, as if watching a film. And then, hold on tight, turn those pages with increasing speed, feel yourself there, right there with Pia and Stephan in what proves to be a perilous predicament.

This is truly a book that leaves you gasping with admiration and nervous exhaustion at the end. It is, quite simply, a triumph and Grant is clearly a writer of abundant talent and promise. I feel frustrated that, as of yet, there is nothing else by her to read. But in due course there will be, and I am certain it will be every bit as good as this.

Early on in this superb novel, the main character comes across a half-killed rabbit, with bulging eyes and a crushed spine. She shows her strength of character by doing the humane thing. And the author shows us how good she is at choosing her words and modulating them so that exactly the right tone and atmosphere is achieved.

I hesitated, because it was adorable, but half-shut my eyes and hit it twice on the neck, then once more for luck. I opened my eyes, feeling a complete heel, and saw its hind leg jerk skywards, then sink gracefully back to the ground. When I poked it with the stick its head lolled loose on its fragile neck. There was blood trickling from its ear that was a simply beautiful colour: jewel-red, sparkling so vividly against the tarmac you'd think the rabbit's life had drained out of its eyes onto the road. I touched its unblinking eyeball with the tip of a finger, then snatched it away; it was dead now, all right...

Make no mistake, this is not an easy scene to write well. So easy to overdo. So easy to underdo. So tempting to be either sensationally vivid or evasively poetic.
After reading this passage (page 30 in a 240 page long novel), I knew I could sit back and enjoy a story being told by a writer of the very highest calibre.

Bad Faith is a murder mystery with a dystopian backdrop. The trouble with most dystopian fiction is that it is laid on too thick. The horrors of the envisaged future swamp the drama being played out in its midst. But that is very much not the case here. The personal drama - the predicament of a young couple forced to dispose of a corpse - is always the driving force of the novel. Small details - cars driving past blaring religious trance music - are cleverly dropped in to suggest the daily living atmosphere in a society governed by the One Church and the gangs that intimidate unbelievers.

Cass's own father is a vicar of the One Church who, though sickened by its values, plays the game for the sake of his family's safety. The darker secrets that lurk in the family's past are gradually revealed by Philip with consummate skill.

Thematically and atmospherically Bad Faith recalls the early work of Kevin Brooks, a name I mention with due care, since I am eager to convey how very good I think this novel is; those who know my reviewing will know how highly I rate Brooks' work.

After I had finished it, I looked on Amazon to see if there were any reader reviews. There are (as of March '09) eight reviews, every single one of them 5-star reviews. So I am not alone by any means in thinking this a first-rate, five-achukachick read. I urge you to hunt it down.

I am now looking forward with much excitement to reading Crossing The Line, to be published by Bloomsbury in April (2009).

"I can't cope with this," Tanya's mother declares at the start of this exceptional debut novel (winner of this year's Waterstone's Children's Book Award), and promptly dispatches her daughter off to stay with the grandmother, in a suitably expansive and derelict mansion.
It is Tanya's fixation with fairies that has driven her mother to the end of her tether.
And thus is set up a quintessentially English children's book adventure; child staying with grandmother in slightly spooky house has escapades involving little people.
Now, whilst I am happy to read the classics in this genre, I have to say that a contemporary title of this ilk normally finds me a somewhat resistant reader. But I quickly found myself a thoroughly willing participant in the tale concocted by Harrison - one of fairy glamour and entrapment going back two generations.
The house itself and its principal occupants - Tanya's grandmother, the groundsman Warwick and his son Fabian (nicely chosen names, these) - evoke just the correct atmosphere. And when the fairy intrusion occurs it happens with such unexpected malevolence as to be completely unnerving and, in the book's best sequences, as exciting as an episode of 24.
There are occasional lapses of pace (usually when Harrison is attempting to convey narrative information via dialogue) and, quite importantly really, the book's title is never given proper significance or weighting. Having said that, the sheer power of invention and fluency of story narration carry the reader along in a fashion that makes its winning of the Waterstone's Award entirely understandable.
Here we have a writer who you just know will go from strength to strength. There are superbly well-realised sequences - in the catacombs of the house, in the surrounding woods - which, in my own reader's mind I imagined as a TV dramatised adaptation, so visually vivid was the description.
The book has a Prologue and an Epilogue. Its chapters are of just the right length for children to read one (or more) in bed at night. Harrison herself decorates the initial letter of each new chapter, in a style suggesting she might also have contributed excellent narrative illustrations had the publisher been so inclined.