ACHUKAREVIEWS...

Hmm. Had this one for over three weeks and I’ve just finished. (Sorry Michael) My wife suggested that this initial sentence would suffice, but on we go.

Chapter One. Forces of light and of darkness. Mention of a ‘Nine’ of heroes and heroines. A dark lord, a Black Tower (no, not the Liebfraumilch), a demon battle host. Any of that sound at all familiar?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all anti-fantasy. I read and re-read The Lord of the Rings many times as a child. I consider Garth Nix to be ‘the business’: Ursula LeGuin even better. There is some tremendous stuff out there in this genre, but (to misquote Groucho Marx) Setting of a Cruel Sun just isn’t it.

Funnily enough, despite some of those early clichés, lack of imagination isn’t the root of the problem in this book. There are a complex host of different peoples and even species imagined against a backdrop scented with our own Middle East. Roughly speaking they are grouped into the Hotec-Ra, the tyrants who have ruled the land with an iron hand (not a wooden foot or a piece of string…. Cf The Goon Show circa ‘59?), the Helati rebel slaves, who wish for a new era of equality and justice, and the fearsome Darkwing, a once-human, now life-hating demon lord. So, all the heroes have to do is defeat the overlords in a great battle and thwart the Darkwing’s scheme to destroy the life-giving sun and everyone can settle down to a bit of serious sunbathing with maybe a cocktail or three. Piece of cake, and (although the usual good-versus evil-for-the-fate-of-mankind fare) an okay fantasy plot.

The problem comes first that this is a sequel that really feels like one for at least fifty pages, if not more. The story opens at the end of another great battle, with the Nine just recovering from a previous victory, and feels like a strange mixture of a formal history being unfurled and glimpses of a large number of individuals with too many pasts and characteristics to possibly cram into the text. Result: a real hard slog for several chapters.

But even when I had worked out who everyone was and what their aims were, I still struggled. I think this is partly due to that uncomfortable mix mentioned above (great history versus personal events) a mix that Tolkien manages well in a much longer work that grew over decades of imagining and re-imagining but just feels rushed, messy and formulaic here. Add to this a correspondingly strange narrative style that sometimes has characters directly analysing their own motives and actions against the wider backdrop in a most unconvincing way - “What do I feel?” asks one particular traitorous villain, “Yes, I am jealous… There is comradeship among the enemy, whereas we Children of Ra cheat and deceive... I am without friends or confidants. In my loneliness, I envy my foe.” – and quite often brutally spells things out rather than letting us draw our own conclusions or allowing tension to mount: “The decision would have grave consequences. Before nightfall the next day, it would bring the swords of the Sol-ket down on his village.”

I kept asking myself during my reading if I was being too harsh, but the reality is that I failed to engage emotionally with any of the characters, I was rarely surprised by the plot and, by the end, I felt as if I was simply filling in the numbers in a hellishly large but low-level Sudoku puzzle.

As ever, just one person’s opinion. You might love it.

The cover of this one put me off: textured like the skin of a dinosaur, a huge yellow eye looking out of the beast’s face. Oh gawd, I thought, not horror, not Jurassic Park, not monsters, please.

Just goes to show how wrong you can be.

The book is not about monsters or dinosaurs. There is a creature in there, but he’s not the ‘beast’. The ‘beast’ is 17-year-old Stephen, reaching the end of a three-year stint at yet another foster home and facing the grim prospect of going on to St. Mark’s hostel next, home to addicts and losers. Stephen speaks to us in conversational first-person, present-tense narration: a lot of that about at the moment. The first thing he gives us is a list of the ten worst things he’s done in his life. Clearly he’s learnt to have a certain perception of himself, and as we meet his foster family, his social worker and other influences in his life, we can see why. For all their wish to do good, even the best of them have marked him down as an outsider, an unreliable entity, a probable ‘no-good’ troublemaker. Yet the person that gradually emerges for the reader is very different. He is responsible, according to his own rules, he has integrity, he is a fighter. Enough of a fighter to break through the self-doubt and the doubts of those around? Enough of a fighter to deal with the mysterious creature and to avoid St. Marks? To get the girl? Read it and find out. But don’t be surprised to find yourself gradually liking this boy more and more as the story unfolds, whatever judgment you made on page one about those ‘ten worst things’. See, you’re as bad as the rest of them.

A great book from a new Bristol writer. And, in retrospect, a great cover too.

In many ways, this title is pure, traditional ghost story. It sets out to chill and it does.

When twelve-year-old asthmatic Jack comes to live in an old country cottage with his mum, he can feel at once that there has been death in the house. With his own father recently dead of a heart attack, Jack has developed a keen sense for traces of those who have passed on. Just by passing his fingers over objects he can sense the passage of the once-living, a skill that his mother doesn’t appreciate. His entrance is watched with excitement by four ghost children. They have been here for so long, perhaps this new boy will bring them excitement, hope, laughter, something. However, their enthusiasm is tempered by fear: even as they watch, they are aware that the ghost mother, their worst nightmare, is awake once again!

Jack’s room was that belonging to the old lady who last had the house. He can sense her past presence and it comforts him. Yet when he awakes and finds a ghostly woman draped over his bed one night, it is not the old woman at all, but a very different presence: thin, hollow-eyed, seemingly affectionate. For the first time he can see and even talk to a spirit! Day by day his power to touch the dead is growing. The woman herself is delighted. She wants to take care of him, to play at being a second mother. Her own little girl, Isabelle, died of consumption in this very house more than a century ago and she longs guiltily for other children to dote upon. What could be wrong with that?

Well, everything.

Thanks to a warning from the ghost children, Jack is alerted to something not so sweet in the ghost mother. But as his asthma grows – mirroring the breathing difficulties of Isabella – and as the ghost mother grows stronger, feeding gruesomely on the souls of the other ghosts, and determined to replace Jack’s real mother, so a time of horror begins. And only Jack’s ability to touch the dead and their different worlds can end the horror… if his asthma doesn’t triumph first.

The writing here is more than competent. McNish spins a suspenseful page-turner within his ghost story. I was also impressed by the degree to which he has developed explanations for how the ghosts move about, what rules they must follow and (despite a western Christian spin) what choices they might face after death.

A spine-tingler suitable for age ten and up. For those of brave disposition.

‘Look at me, Elizabeth. Do you think I’m wicked? Do you think I’m a devil? In my time everyone was a Catholic, because there was only one Church, but even then I was different from the others because of the shadow land. Don’t let your mind be clouded by what other people have told you. Judge me with your heart.’

So speaks the strange green child that twelve-year-old Elizabeth finds in the forest as she secretly tends a ruined Catholic shrine. The year is 1586 and Protestant England is an unforgiving place for Catholics. But mindless blame, fear and persecution are nothing new, as the green child, Isabella, can testify. She herself was born more than three hundred years ago, the child of a wise woman and midwife. Her mother was executed as a witch, a scapegoat when a rich family’s baby was born with a faulty heart, and since then Isabella has hidden mostly in the land of faeries, leaving her bones hidden in a hollow tree awaiting her return.

Yes, this all sounds a little strange, but Sarah Singleton has a gift for blending the seen and the unseen, the matter-of-fact and the magical, into a convincing whole. After all, what is the magical other than something we are not used to or don’t understand? And that is what this book deals with; the problem of how the different (in this case the spiritually different) can be demonised by the unthinking mob. Set against the hounding of Ruth Leland (Isabella’s mother) and the sixteenth century persecution of Catholics is the simple and powerful friendship that develops between the two girls. For Isabella her tragedy is done, and yet she berates herself for not having stayed at her mother’s side until the bitter end. For Elizabeth the fear has just begun: the Queen has sent the brutal Christopher Merrivale to hunt for the priest that her family is sheltering. Perhaps here there is a chance for the two girls to help each other: for Isabella to gain ‘closure’ and a second chance with a loving family, whilst Elizabeth gains safety and escape.

A powerful tale against a strong historical backdrop, this book introduces many themes but works most of all because of the focus on the girls’ fears and hopes and needs. In comparison, the sinister Merrivale, the dogmatic and ecstatic priest, even the cold-hearted faeries, seem unimportant, no matter what their schemes and desires. The writing, too, is mostly first rate, with a great feel for visual detail:

‘As the men whispered one to another, light and shadows slid over their faces, alternately revealing and hiding eyes, noses, mouths moist with wine and words. They looked like demons, leering and grimacing.’

A highly appealing, multi-dimensional historical adventure. Check it out.

The sequel to The City of Ember, which I haven’t read, this book does a fair job of standing by itself as a single story.

We’re in post-apocalypse mode here. Sometime in the distant future four hundred inhabitants of an underground city have managed to find their way to a surface that they didn’t even know existed. Their city, Ember, is ‘dying’ thanks to lack of power for the lights and shortages of various essentials, but here in the great outdoors they are as infants without knowledge of stars or seasons or weather. Luckily for them they happen upon one of the very few post-disaster villages, Sparks, a place where years of hardship and toil have finally resulted in quite a thriving and self-sufficient little community. Needless to say, the people of Sparks are a little nonplussed to have a population greater than their own suddenly descend upon them. Nevertheless they agree that aid must be given, and as a short-term measure they house the newcomers in the decrepit old Pioneer Hotel, offering to feed them and teach them survival skills in exchange for hard work: strictly a six-month arrangement.

Yet in time the strain of having these two groups living side by side, draining the resources of a single village, begins to cause friction: friction which is exploited and egged on by individuals on either side in whom the alienating concept of ‘us’ and ‘them’ runs deepest. Thus Sparks teeters towards its own mini apocalypse, a war that may destroy this village just as completely as the larger version did with the great cities of the past.

Who, we wonder, in this atmosphere of distrust and anger, can lead the way to a different more loving path?

Jeanne DuPrau writes very naturally and without visible effort. She depicts a highly believable, warts-and-all series of characters thrown together by circumstances and it is to her credit that the reader is not drawn to favour either ‘side’. She keeps her post-apocalyptic vision simple and convincing (the story might almost have been set in the pioneering days of the American west) and although such scenarios have been explored many times, we do care about this world she’s made, and the characters that must struggle through it.

Despite a little heavy-handedness in some of the moral content, the anti-war message of The People of Sparks is more valid now than ever before. All you leaders out there intent on demonising fellow human beings for your own paranoid reasons, do please have a read.

A teenage boy wakes up in a strange field and remembers nothing other than his name. Not where he came from, nor his parents’ faces: not even the words home or parents. In a little while a man comes to collect him and takes him by boat across a wide river to a grey settlement called Locus. Here he is allocated a uniform and a bed in a dormitory: one of hundreds of dormitories full of teenage boys and girls, all of whom have woken up in the field and come to make their lives in Locus. The days are spent picking rocks off the ground where new dormitories are to be built, the nights are for playing the 'memory game', when inmates share any little tiny snatches that return to them from the lives they lived before. Such nuggets are priceless, spiritual food to the inmates.

Imagine something with a sixties feel: Holes done in the style of The Prisoner. Imagine it written with an appealing Magnus Mills sort of simplicity, the strong emotions delivered with a muted touch. This is how Jacob’s Ladder begins, and like Jacob himself we cannot avoid the conclusion that there is something afoot, a conspiracy perhaps, to explain why all these teenagers are being kept in this soulless place, fed never-changing tasteless food, robbed of memory and purpose and the will to rebel. Like Jacob we are determined that we would not be such pushover victims to the routine of Locus. Without any guards openly in attendance, why stay? Why do the daily work?

Yet as Jacob desperately fans his own small spark of rebellion – and finds one or two others in whom it still lives – he starts to discover that the bonds of Locus are much deeper and more permanent than he could have realised. And when he does eventually break free with two friends, they embark on a spiritual journey, a series of weird meetings and endless walking that has something of The Little Prince or Richard Bach about it.

What Jacob finds out, and whether his bid for freedom and a return to 'before' is successful should not be revealed here. I read this one in a day, however, and if you’re looking for a book to make huge questions and unknowns accessible to 10-14-year-olds in a compelling story, then this is for you.

My only slight doubt was to do with the importance given in the book to holding on… to the past, to people, to situations. Much of the damage done in our world comes from too much ‘holding on’. Letting go is something that our children could learn more of from us.

It is easy to pinpoint the minute when my friend Branwell began his silence. It was Wednesday, November 25, 2.43 pm, Eastern Standard Time. It was there – or, I guess you could say not there – on the tape of the 911 call.

You couldn’t wish for a better start – a better ‘hook’ - to get you into this mystery cum exploration of the nature of friendship. Concise, accessible and dramatic, Silent to the Bone gives us first that terrifying 911 call verbatim. A baby has been harmed, possibly dropped, and must be rushed to hospital. The baby is Branwell’s half sister. Branwell is blamed by the babysitter, and his total silence seems to confirm his guilt. From here on, from Branwell sitting like stone in his cell in the detention centre, just as baby Nikki lies silent in her coma, we are taken backwards and forwards in time by narrator Connor as he alone sticks by his friend and tries to piece together what happened on that fateful afternoon and (more importantly) why it happened. In this, Connor is helped, appropriately, by his own half sister, grown up Margaret, who is smart enough to help him interpret his clues and sensitive enough to nurse him through the corresponding emotional journey. In a smooth arc up towards light and understanding, the puzzle unfolds, Branwell edges towards speech and Nikki struggles to regain health and life.

This is a moving book, carefully written by a craftswoman of the game and there is little to fault. My first impulse was to give it a straight five chicks. Yet on reflection I was a little unsure. The issues of rejection and belonging in modern multi-strand families, of the way that sex can become a world-changing issue for a young, confused teen (does it ever stop?!) and the healing power of forgiveness, love and openness are all beautifully handled. Margaret in particular is a lovely character: anyone would want such a sister. But still, would the circumstances depicted really lead to Branwell’s helpless silence? And how realistic is Connor’s endless introspective attention to detail and his self-analysis? (Her voice trailed off as if she had ended that sentence with a comma and not a period)

No matter. Four chicks or five, this is an excellent book, well worth checking out.

The hero of this fantasy for older children/early teens is water-fearing, bullied loner Owen. Living in the shadow of his father’s apparent suicide, Owen keeps himself to himself, skives off school, and spends much free time in his den. As our story starts, on a bitter chill day, he is, as usual, out and about doing his own thing, visiting his own private places, when he encounters a tired, uniformed stranger. Moments later a strange phenomenon occurs: a dark flash in the sky, a moment of blackness across the land, and a feeling of change. The uniformed man seems to be the only other witness. It has begun, he tells the boy, grimly.

The ‘it’, we learn gradually, is a recurring battle between The Harsh, ghostly white creatures who wish to turn back time to total nothingness and the Resisters, a group of people who remain in suspended animation deep in the hillside until The Harsh make one of their attacks, and must then thwart them to save humanity. Already Owen’s familiar landscape, his house and neighbours, have disappeared, as time is sucked backwards. All that remains is the old building known as The Workhouse, which turns out to be the Resisters’ HQ, and, across the river, the mini-empire belonging to Johnston, the scrap merchant, the chief ally of The Harsh it transpires. Yet evidently Owen himself has not disappeared. Is this because he happened to be in one of the ‘islands in time’ when the Harsh started their time-sucking machine, or is it because he has some sort of role to play here, something connected with his dead father? As the first trenches are dug between the ancient enemies, the boy seems lost and helpless, just as he is in his own reality: but by the time (200 pages in) that the race to the icy north takes place, in order to turn off the offending machine (the ‘Puissance’ – that’s ‘power’ to you and me), Owen has discovered inner resources and an intuitive understanding of what must be done that are quite inevitable.

Can you tell? I struggled with this one. The basic concept’s okay and there’s no doubt that there are some fine chunks of imagination here - although these tend to be reserved for the various gadgets that Owen encounters in this new world of Resisters and Harsh rather than for the often quite stock characters - yet the overall effect is much too patchy. One has the feeling that a good sneeze would blow the fabric of this imagined world quite away, that there isn’t enough cohesion and weight in what the author would have us believe. Many of the gadgets and setpieces seem glued together without rhyme nor reason. Why the bits of French that crop up from time to time? Why are the bad guys, Johnston’s men, portrayed as Italian-type gangsters that seemed to belong to Inkheart rather than to the icy Harsh? Why is the Puissance in the north and where exactly is that north supposed to be? (Half the characters get there by boat, half by land in a car with huge bicycle-type wheels). I was never quite sure if this was meant to be a serious fantasy à la Garth Nix et al (to mix my languages) or more of a tongue-in-cheek romp.

It could be that this is a good book waiting to happen but released much too early, before the details and writing were properly worked out. Or it may be that it’s destined to be an absolute smash with a follow-up film and that I just can’t see it. It wouldn’t be the first time. Perhaps it will be right up there with Shadowmancer.

[Yet again I must follow the ministerial code and declare an interest. K.M. Peyton very kindly helped me with my writing and with general advice when I was just getting started. I’ve always been in awe of her writing ability.]

Another from the David Fickling YA collection, this book is the sequel to Small Gains, and continues the story of the Garland family, Norfolk farming folk in the early nineteenth century, beset by a fair selection of woes and challenges. The Enclosure movement, agricultural mechanisation, rural unemployment and depopulation, disease and the harsh social and penal systems of the time all rear their heads as historical backdrop to the two books. Even as this story begins, in first person narration by youngest daughter Ellen, we get a fair taste of the uncertain nature of existence…

My name is Ellen Garland. I am the youngest of four. The eldest, Margaret, died of the wasting disease when she was sixteen. My brother Jack, a year younger, had to flee from home to escape hanging after he fired Mr. Grover's hayricks, and my other sister Clara, now fifteen, is pregnant and still at home at Small Gains. I don't know who by, but I can guess. To give the baby a decent name she married the vicar's son, Nicholas Bywater, just before he too died of the wasting disease. To give Clara her due, she loved Nicholas dearly, as did we all. But the baby isn't Nicholas's. You can see this is a strange kettle of fish for a very ordinary farming family to be in, and our father is very depressed.

… and Ellen herself is, within a few pages, to be involved in a prank that leads to her imprisonment and subsequent transportation to Australia.

The heroine, however, and the dynamo driving force of the family, is Clara, and for her parts of the story we move into the third person. Clara is not pretty, she is the practical one, the hands-on daughter, tough and passionate. She is her father’s anchor, not least because, like him, she is born to the land and (more than anything) to understand horses, disdaining the conventions of the time to train her champion trotter Rattler for his gruelling twenty-mile races. Serious money can be made for the family from racing and from Rattler’s stud services.

In both the previous book and this volume, Clara receives her fair selection of knocks, and often fate seems to be against her. Her baby and her unwanted marriage are both the result of blackmail, in order to benefit or protect her family: yet although her heart screams at the shackles that hold her, her courage and willingness to meet circumstances head on without losing anything of herself allows her to thrive. And yes, there’s some romantic interest here, for Clara is in love with the son of another farmer, Prosper Mayes, currently in India.

I can imagine some readers finding these books too muddled – the switches in narration, the uneven jumble of events, frequent repetition of characters’ thoughts and utterances and self-searching – whilst others might not like the almost melodramatic quality of Clara’s romantic rollercoaster. For me, however, Peyton tells it like it is. Practical realities to be met with grit and compassion, dreams that one should not let go of, conflicts and confusions (Clara has to acknowledge her sexual attraction to her arrogant, blackmailing husband but recognises that this is not the love she feels for Prosper)… and yes, a Philip Glass kind of repetition in what we say and think and question as we vary our human theme toward greater self-knowledge.

This is not quite Kathleen Peyton’s best work, but it is still streets ahead of most of the field, and very moving, as ever. The writing style is relaxed, direct and appealing, the historical detail full of life and passion, and the emotional questions blisteringly relevant. She is, in the words of The Times, a ‘born storyteller’.

I did say to Michael that, for obvious reasons, I wouldn’t review fellow Simon and Schuster authors (with the exception of my test review using the excellent Sea of Trolls), but having just finished Century I feel compelled to break the rule.

Except for the single page of (unnecessary) prologue there is a beautiful lack of scene-setting or explanation in this book. We have a bitter, frozen winter’s night in a dusty and decaying mansion. We have an odd shadowy family living out the night as if it was their day. We have ghosts and shades of other lives woven into the twilight world. We have a seamless passage of time, a well-practised routine – boiled egg for evening ‘breakfast’, studies with the governess Galatea, moonlit walks out across the frosted lawns, pre-dawn bedtime stories in the nursery parlour – that makes the succession of nights hard to tell apart. And at the centre we have Mercy and her sister Charity, creeping through this existence like ancient mechanical toys.

Yet Mercy has seen a different ghost for once, something new in this world of the totally familiar and unchanging. A woman caught under the ice in the distillery pond.

Like the slightest feathery kiss on Sleeping Beauty’s lips, the ghost’s appearance (and then a snowdrop hidden under her pillow when nothing grows outside) nudges Mercy just enough for her to yawn and stretch and wonder at the curiousness of her existence. Where are her memories? Where is the sunlight? Where is her mother?

The quality of the writing is such that the reader has been drawn easily into the drowsy, whispering nights, fascinated and a little spooked perhaps. But don’t assume that this is a simple ghost story. Mercy’s slight rebellion, which grows and grows in momentum, sucking all her family into a new course, reveals an explanation that is complex and challenging enough to belong to Douglas Adams or Red Dwarf, with a pinch of Doctor Faustus or Mrs. Coulter thrown in. It is a further tribute to the author that even this explanation comes to us utterly believably and with almost some sort of inevitability.

A deserving prize-winner, there is little to fault in this debut novel. I did look for a final twist at the end, but perhaps I was simply being greedy.

The story is one of waiting. Long years of waiting for Odysseus, who left to fight the war against Troy, to find his way back home, via Cyclops, sirens and the rest. (I hadn’t read Troy, the first of these two volumes, and it’s many years since any scanty contact with The Odyssey, but that didn’t prove significant). Penelope, Odysseus’ wife and queen of Ithaka, is struggling to remain true to her husband, to believe in his survival, and to keep all ready - herself most of all - for his eventual return. To a greater or lesser extent, the royal servants and the whole of the island do likewise. Clearly the memory of Odysseus, the tales of his heroism and the need for a king have left a long shadow over the island, even affecting those who were no more than babies when their lord left. The goddess Pallas Athene adds to Penelope’s straitjacket of duty and faith by telling her that 'as long as you are here, unchanged and unchanging, he will come to no harm'. To this end, the queen spends endless hours at her loom, weaving the images of her husband’s adventures and of his ship always heading for home. Meanwhile the hero’s ancient dog, Argos, pads around the place and dreams also of his master returning, whilst Telemachus, Odysseus’ son returns again and again to the armoury to take down his father’s massive hunting bow and marvel at it.

Yet the nature of life is change, and as time goes on, the strain of the waiting becomes a curse to the islanders. Soon, many are arguing that Penelope should declare her husband dead and marry again. The queen herself is emotionally and physically unfulfilled and restless, and the palace starts to fill up with a rabble of violent and unsavoury suitors, bringing chaos and disorder. As with a Shakespearean comedy, the idyll of Ithaka becomes tainted and corrupted by misunderstanding, deception, doubt: the reader can only wonder whether order is ever to be restored.

Much of the tale is told through the eyes and the growing pains of Klymene, the queen’s maidservant, and this is its strength, for the loves and losses of the younger characters around the palace are often the most touching and immediate. As a whole, however, there is a distance, a lack of either an emotional hook or a compelling, urgent story, that mars the narrative. Add that to the air of gloom that prevails – 'How much wickedness there was in the world. It was a wonder people found even a small amount of happiness in the midst of all the anguish' - and we are firmly in the realm of Greek tragedy, where the gods have their sport of poor mortals. For those who desire such a read, you couldn’t do better.

This may all sound Tolkienesque rather than historical: indeed, Amanda Craig compares The Sea of Trolls to The Hobbit, although the description of the Life Force and the way it is used (and the opening of the book, where fog is spun to confound the attackers) seem also to touch the world of Ursula LeGuin’s excellent Earthsea books. Nevertheless, the tale is told in a much more down-to-earth manner than either Tolkien or LeGuin, and what especially delights is how the author gets under the skin of these people. Whether dealing with the once-conquering Saxons, now on the wane, or the rank, muscular, ruthless, lovable Vikings, Farmer’s book goes beyond meticulous research and shows real empathy with how life’s realities and the world of the unseen meshed together to make a life theatre for these people.

The Sea of Trolls is action-filled, funny, sad, touching and vibrant. It sizzles with the advice Jack receives from the Queen Troll: ‘To ignore joy while it lasts, in favour of lamenting one’s fate, is a great crime.’