| Helen Grant |
| Penguin |
| 978-0-141-32576-7 |
| May 2010 |
 |
|
At times I had to keep reminding myself that Lin and Michel are both in their late teens (indeed, Michel drives them both around in his car) because their manner is not the teenage manner as more usually portrayed in contemporary young adult literature, and also because the adventure that unfolds is, for all its menace and melodrama, very much in the mould of younger children going out and attempting to solve a mystery without adult intervention. This all works to the book's advantage and results in a novel that is at one and the same time an older children's mystery and a chilling, Hawthornesque tale of murder and malevolence for adults. Lin's father, an academic driven by an idee fixe, uproots his family to Germany, determined to discover the long lost Allerheiligen stained glass. Even before entering their rented property they stumble upon the first body - an old man apparently fallen dead while picking apples, small shards of shattered glass noticed only by Lin at the time. Not long afterwards the family is all but completely unravelled when Lin's younger brother comes close to being impaled by a spear while sleeping in his cot. The local police so closely follow protocol and procedure that the family themselves feel under suspicion. Just as she did in her first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, Grant cranks up the drama and excitement with impeccable pace and timing. The story would make a fabulous two-part BBC thriller, expecially because each of the characters is so well-realised, from the ineffectual young stepmother, to the darkly dashing priest. And there would be wonderful bit parts for the stonewalling police. Can't wait for novel number three!
|
Recently in Teen/YA Category
| PJ Reece |
| Tradewind Books |
| 9781896580012 |
| January 2010 |
 |
|
There are some things not quite right about this novel: the ending is so overwrought I had to read it twice to make sure I understood what was going on; the main first-person character's pregnancy (revealed very near the beginning of the book, so this is not a spoiler) is never convincingly portrayed, even to a male reader, and I imagine will ring even less true to a female reader; the 'romance' that develops between Roxy and a Greek local also scores low on believability. Despite these weaknesses the book can be recommended as a riveting read, about a 17-year-old who travels to Greece to discover the truth about her ancestry from her eccentric Scottish grandfather. The author's background is in the film world -mainly as a cinematographer, but he has written screenplays as well. And this is one of those books that reads very cinematically, which is why the thinness of the characterisation, including Roxy herself, would be perfectly OK if the plot were ever filmed - and I can see it being made into a very diverting 100 minute foreign location cine drama, with several cameo roles for older actors, and opportunities for exotic flashbacks.
Reece writes excellently. His sentences roll smoothly, and it was only at the very end that I had to stop and re-read, as described above.
|
| c. j. skuse |
| Chicken House |
| 9781906427252 |
| March 2010 |
| |
|
The proof copy of this first novel carried a recommendation by Kevin Brooks, which was enough to push it ahead of other reads. Make no mistake, this is a fabulous debut and if I fail to give it five stars it is only because of a couple of caveats. Skuse, female, writes with a lot of balls. The two main characters, Paisley and Beau, are brother-and-sister twins. At the start of the novel Paisley is receiving counselling at the Immaculate Conception Academy for Girls. The book is narrated by each character in their own voice (alternating a chapter at a time), and it has to be said that Paisley's chapters are by far the strongest. Paisley is the life and soul of this novel. She has the drive, the imagination, the guts, the energy, and the mouth. My word, does she have a mouth. Skuse makes that mouth utter lines of colourful confrontational dialogue that are an absolute joy.
As a first novel Pretty Bad Things has no doubt received a good deal of editing. Like Lucy Christopher (another exciting debut author), Skuse is a graduate of Bath's creative writing MA, and the novel is the result of long gestation. The shame for me is that its narrative momentum dips slightly at that very crucial midway point in a novel. I would have to read it a second time to put my finger on precisely where the flagging occurs and where some ratcheting up or streamlining could have been beneficially applied. It's just a shame that after a scintillating opening, followed by a movie-worthy confrontation with a fortune-hungry grandmother, the pace starts to drift once brother and sister arrive in Las Vegas on their mission to be reunited with a father they haven't seen for more than a decade.
When at last they devise a plan to get themselves noticed by staging a series of mall robberies, the momentum, and more importantly the character chemistry are re-established. Paisley is re-energised and the contrast between her and the more nervous, cautious Beau is well-handled.
The novel's backstory (death of the mother when the children were three years old, father in prison etc.) is never wholly believable, but that does not materially matter.
What matters is that Skuse has arrived on the scene with a voice that I for one will be longing to hook up with again.
|
| Margo Lanagan |
| David Fickling Books |
| 9780385613231 |
| July 2009 |
| |
|
At the start of this book (the first I have read by Lanagan) I was totally under its spell, immediately gripped by the bawdy and earthy lyricism used to describe the abuse suffered by Liga at the hands of her father, an appalling and horribly believable character.
But at the halfway point (it is a book of roughly 500 pages) I realised my interest in Liga and her daughters had been fatally undermined both by the way the plot takes sudden trips into an alternative reality and the way Lanagan's wordiness begins to grate.
So I closed the book, unfinished, recognising that this was largely the result of personal taste (I have seen Lanagan compared with Angela Carter, another writer I have never been able to settle into) rather than any reflection on the quality of the book and its likely appeal to readers who relish lushness of style and structure rather than spareness.
|
| Marcus Sedgwick |
| Orion |
| 978-1-84255-186-8 |
| July 2009 |
|
|
|
This book has done something important for me. And it has done it in a way so utterly and compellingly convincing that I shall henceforth consider Marcus Sedgwick a writer of the very highest order. I know others have long held him in that regard. I have admired some books of his, but none has registered that complete sense of satisfaction that you get when you read a book by a master of their trade. Let's be honest, few books do this completely. Two of my lodestars that I use when I have finished a book I have enjoyed are Robert Cormier and Sonya Hartnett. Yes, I think to myself, this book was good, but was it that good? Well, I have to tell you that Revolver IS that good. And for the life of me I cannot imagine the conversation that must have gone on around the table between the judges of the Guardian Prize (to be announced on Thursday 8th October) that led to Sedgwick's book failing to make the crossing from longlist to shortlist. It is a shocking omission. This book should be on the shortlist of each and every fiction prize of the coming year, and that includes adult lists, because the story it tells is entirely unpatronising. If any book deserves to have 'crossover' success, it is this one. Fans of Cormac McCarthy, viewers of Deadwood alike will find familiar themes confronted with a moving, moral grandeur. Marcus Sedgwick, you are the real deal. Revolver is a very fine achievement. A book that will stand the test of time as surely as one of the late stories of Tolstoy.
|
| Kevin Brooks |
| Penguin |
| 978-0141319124 |
| June 2009 |
| |
|
|
| Becca Fitzpatrick |
| Gollancz |
| 9781847386946 |
| November 2009 |
| |
|
There's much to admire in this debut novel, due for publication in November 2009, and not the least is its lack of pretension. Hush, Hush is a novel written to entertain and not to impress. There was a brief moment midway through the book when I thought I was going to regret the fact that the fallen-angel theme was being taken literally rather than metaphorically, fearing that I would find the rest of the narrative somewhat preposterous. But Fitzpatrick is already a sufficiently skillful storyteller to be able to carry the reader along and create the necessary suspension of disbelief. This is all done in the atmosphere of a Sunday afternoon feature film. I can't say I was ever seriously moved or unsettled by the predicaments the main character, Nora, finds herself in, but I was always fully engaged.
The relationship between 17-year-old Nora, her best friend Vee, and Patch, the sinister but dangerously alluring boy who comes between them, is very adroitly handled in the first half of the novel, in short well-orchestrated dialogue-driven scenes that one can imagine transferring well to the movie screen. And cinema certainly seems to be an influence on some of the setpieces towards the end of the book (I think particularly of Nora's encounter with Dabria).
As is inevitable with a book of this type, there is much in the way that the different characters' motives are explained towards the end of the novel that is farfetched, but I didn't mind that, since it was so clearly signalled that this was the type of book i was reading.
I would much rather have done without the short Prologue, set in the Loire Valley, 1565. For me, that came across as very 'Pseud's Corner'ish, and was the one false note in an otherwise highly accomplished first novel.
|
| Carrie Ryan |
| Gollancz |
| 9780575090842 |
| July 2009 |
| |
|
I feel very ambivalent about this debut novel. And I think that is largely because it is ambivalent about itself. It is essentially, and in its denouement has the honesty to admit it at last, a zombie novel. A village is making its last stand against the infection that surrounds them. A deliberately knowing but misjudged withholding of narrative information concerning the infected 'Unconsecrated' keeps the reader in the dark for far too long. The suggestions that the book is some sort of religious allegory are laid on very heavily.
Consequently, as a reader the novel only hooked me in short bursts. When it did so it hooked me good (especially towards the end when the storyline has become a more straightforward fight for survival against the zombie hordes), but that only made the dull and pretentious patches the more disappointing. As a reviewer I found myself frustrated by the narrator's plaintive tone of voice. The book is written in contemporary fiction's perniciously pervasive first-person continuous present and it is the worse for that.
On the plus side, there is some very effective writing here, both in terms of describing action and describing the main character's emotions.
I'd certainly read another book by Ryan. I'm not sure it will be The Dead-Tossed Waves, coming in 2010, and a return to the world of the Unconsecrated.
|
|
| Julia Green |
| Bloomsbury |
| 0747595461 |
| May 2009 |
| |
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.
|
|
| Narinder Dhami |
| Corgi |
| 055256043X |
| May 2009 |
| |
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.
|
