In a clever twist at the end, dragon fire burns a big hole in the final page and right through the back cover of the book. The fly-leaf carries the message DO NOT BLOCK FIRE EXIT.
I like the way the jacket designers have continued to play the game and aid suspension of disbelief by making this "fire exit" obscure a big chunk of the back page blurb. One thing is for sure, young children will want to share this book Again and Again even if it's just to poke their fingers through that hole.
Her third novel is, like the first, set in the small town of Bad Munstereifel, and begins reasonably lightheartedly as a kind of Five Children and It in reverse. Instead of child characters, the friends in this book are all in their late teens, and act and behave accordingly. Instead of their wishes (made on scraps of paper and left in a deserted house) going comically wrong, they are granted precisely as asked. Each time it is Steffi (the book's narrator) whose wish is granted. For obvious reasons this unsettles her, particularly when people begin dying.
Steffi, who works in the family bakery and cafe, is a vivid presence and her voice is the driving force of the novel, as it has to be. The experiences she undergoes become increasingly horrific. The ratcheting up of the tension is not, however, as well handled here as in the first two novels. There are signs that it was not so tightly edited, both at individual paragraph level, and in terms of its narrative trajectory and structure. Grant is a fluent writer, but at times her fluency produces more words where fewer would serve more strongly. The novel would be better for being fifty pages shorter.
An Amazon reviewer feels that the brief return of Steffi's sister was 'pointless'. I agree with that. The father's illness is sufficient in itself to add roundness to Steffi's character (as well as ensuring Steffi is alone in the bakery at a crucial time in the plot's development) and allows Grant to ensure the reader remains sympathetic towards her main character.
It's still a good read and like the first two books would make superb TV drama.
The start of the novel is told exclusively in an exchange of letters between the recently widowed Gaia (whose husband had been one of the leading architects of his time) and Selene. Initially, Gaia suspects she is writing to a young mistress of her dead husband, and the gradual disabusing of this notion is humorously and very beguilingly handled. Indeed, Selene is a delightfully witty and life-affirming creation.
It is something of a shame that the novel could not have been conceived as a wholly epistolary construction, because when the action moves away from the exchange of letters and the compelling relationship between Gaia and Selene, the novel loses its hold on the reader to the extent that the resulting four-way competition to design the perfect home for Gaia to move into and reconstruct her life in never achieves any traction. Whilst the letters are perfectly pitched, Joso is less assured when it comes to character dialogue. The American architect in particular is an embarrassing pastiche.
Nevertheless, I'm glad it caught my eye.
The book's title refers both to to the theologian St Augustine and the eponymous establishment that Tristan (one of the book's two main characters) attends. I had laughably selected the book to read on the train thinking the title referred to the month August and that the jacket strapline - "A thriller that will turn you upside down" - promised a lightweight 200pp diversion. How wrong could I have been? And how shamefully ignorant of the tenor of the previous novel which had been selected for the Guardian Children's Book Prize two years ago.
Part of the book's unpleasantness stems from the situation which opens the novel, persists throughout, and the scatology of which the author seems to take perverse delight in describing.
A car has just crashed and is lodged upturned half-way down a ravine. Tristan, the driver, and Grace, the passenger, are trapped inside.
It soon becomes apparent that this circumstance is not going to be the prelude to a conventional 'thriller' - in fact it is hard to see how the book can be so described, when the novel is in fact a fairly demanding philosophical exploration of free will and determinism. The only real thrills in the novel are intellectual ones stemming from Tristan's attempts to outwit the manipulative rector at St Augustine's and prove that his actions are freely chosen and not predetermined.
It is a tribute to Beckett's ability as a writer that he manages to make this aspect of the novel - its crux - completely engrossing.
The stories of Grace's and Tristan's lives leading up to the car-crash are told in recollection. Neither really existed for me as a believable character, even and especially in the last quarter of the novel when the independent and codependent lives of each are given more space. But being moved about character is not what this book is about.
Because the book is told in the first person, it also reads as a memoir recounted in retrospect so that all the episodes, particularly as Clem grows older and falls in love, have a veneer akin to The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.
The rural and period evocation created by Peet's impeccable writing is hugely impressive. It is a pageturner of a novel, not by virtue of its narrative pace - it is told slowly - but because the reader is made to feel a sense of place and character so very vividly.
I had a problem with it, however, which it would be wrong to let my admiration for Peet in general and this book in particular gloss over.
The bildungsroman, coming-of-age tone of the book changes abruptly and unexpectedly at the end of Part One. Part Two is titled, appropriately 'Blowing Things Apart'. The beautifully evoked memoir is suddenly suborninated to pages and pages of potted history about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I personally found this part of the book heavy-handed to the point of doing something I had not done in the book thus far, and can't remember doing with one of Peet's books before - skip-reading. These days if I start skip-reading a novel I tend to give up on it altogether. Let me make it clear, I came nowhere near feeling that about this book.
The same political crisis underpins one of David Almond's recent novels. There the action is adumbrated but not swamped by the political perspective. But Almond and Peet are very different writers, and for most reviewers of this book the space given over to political history has not been an issue. I wonder what young readers, coming to the Cuban Missile Crisis for the first time, will make of it. My worry would be that they, like me, will be tempted to just skimread those reported conversations between generals and politicians at the risk of diluting what is likely to have been a complete immersion in the book to that point.
The book also suffers somewhat to my mind by using material which is, by Peet's own admission, autobiographical and, in order to maintain the fiction, having to put it all in the voice of an imagined character. Whilst I get a very vivid picture of Clem as a young boy and then as a teenager in love (I feel as if I am definitely seeing Peet as he was himself when young) I do not get any real sense of Clem the freelancing, middle-aged, living-in-America illustrator in whose words the novel purports to be told.
Ruta Sepetys discusses her upcoming novel, Between Shades of Gray from Penguin Young Readers Group on Vimeo.
As the author herself says in the book trailer above, the war crimes of Hitler are well known and well documented both in histories and in fiction. The war crimes of Stalin and the sufferings inflicted on the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are not so widely known, especially amongst the young.
Sometimes it is the awkwardness of the prose. I was once at a launch party and was discussing with the husband of a fellow reviewer why he did not read children's books. He picked up a copy of the launch title, opened it at the first page, and seemingly at random pointed at a sentence in the middle of a paragraph. He didn't need to add any further explanation. It was a horribly worded sentence. Children love a good story and will happily pass over stylistic hiccups if the narrative is sufficiently gripping. This, it seems to me, is taken too much for granted by contemporary children's authors and their editors. There are too many books that are awkward to read aloud, that have a sentence to stumble over on every page.
Sometimes, I find myself thinking 'Who on earth is the target readership for this title?' Largely because of the 17yr old character's life amid "fast cars and flash women" you are probably talking Y7+ or age 12+ here. But by 14+, if not earlier, surely any adolescent boy (this is male-oriented writing) wanting to read a good thriller will be turning to a fully-blown adult thriller, something a little more savage than Eddie Savage. So the target audience is very narrow indeed, and one notoriously difficult to reach.
It's a shame because Cocks writes well enough and the book grabs the attention at the start. But it falls hopelessly in between the appetite for true juvenile thriller-writing, as so well served by the likes of Horowitz, and the adult genre. Cocks and his publisher clearly think there is some middle ground waiting to be served. I think they're wrong. It takes a quirky one-off like Kevin Brooks to really reach the teenage audience with thriller-style material.
After the girl has entered the bears' house, and they duly return, the tale follows its traditional course but Browne has created a version that will get children thinking and talking and reacting to the clever artistry.
Five achukachicks, of course!