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| Tabitha Suzuma |
| The Bodley Head |
| 0370329066 |
| May 2007 |
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Tabitha Suzuma has the rare skill to breathe such life and motivation into her characters that they burn bright and indelibly upon the brain. In “From Where I Stand”, Raven is suffering severe trauma that drives a wedge between himself and others. His resultant vulnerability leads to his being taunted at school.
Raven’s grief, despair and guilt moves through stages as the novel progresses. He denies the reality of what has happened, weaving around himself a protective film of lies and half-truths. Though the stigma of mental health problems are encountered through the levels of misunderstanding and of miscomprehension that surround Raven, the mind is depicted here as resilient, strong and in a process of renewal and of resolution. Suzuma’s willingness to draw from a reservoir of biographical experience to colour her characters with credibility makes this a courageous novel and, in an age when one in four people experience mental health problems throughout their lives, a highly worthwhile and contemporaneous one also.
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Teen/YA: November 2007 Archives
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| Catherine Johnson |
| Oxford University Press |
| 019275498X |
| Apr 2007 |
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Cultural expectations and prejudices are brought to the fore in Catherine Johnson’s pithy new novel “The Dying Game”. Shehana makes a promise to a dying prostitute that she will contact the girls brother, a decision that exposes her to a sinister underbelly of drugs, lies and the abusage of trust.
Against this backdrop, Shehana herself, a Londoner with Bangladeshi family ties, rallies against the fast-approaching marriage that her family feel is so timely but that represent a very real blockade to the future she herself aspires towards and her desire to enter higher education. Race assumptions are constantly subverted and just what it means to belong to a particular group and to identify ourselves within a specific set of cultural and social ideologies is probed incisively with by Johnson. This is a gripping thriller, with rich writing that envelops and engages from start to finish and that reveals the dehumanising influences of viewing the body as object, distinct from mind and personality. In parts dark, in parts disturbing, this is a smart and sassy novel with a strongly defined sense of pace and of purpose. A relevant and resonant novel that is well worthy of promotion.
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| James Jauncey |
| Young Picador |
| 0330447130 |
| Aug 2007 |
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Set in a none-too-distant future, the one-hundred-acre act has revolutionised land-ownership in Scotland inspiring riot and revolt. It is against this politicised backdrop that the novel opens with a tumultuous sense of drama and of pace. John witnesses carnage and inhumane destruction as he bids to make escape from one of presumed countless rural rebellions. Conscious of the danger that what he has seen has placed him in, he encounters Ninian a defenceless and seemingly traumatised child.
So begins a desperate plight to escape pursuers, to find sanctuary to seek assistance where available, but to be aware of the position and danger such a trust necessarily places himself and Ninian within. Jauncey’s ending to the novel leaves the swathes of problems over the nature of land-ownership and possession open and poses the chilling question as to whether we are in fact now fighting for the political and philosophical space of childhood itself…
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| Joanna Nadin |
| Oxford University Press |
| 0192755269 |
| Jun 2007 |
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Joanna Nadin has written a novel that forms a reaction against and indeed is the antithesis to the ‘teenage issue novel’. Astute and witty, comments about suburban, middle-class values ethics and world views abound in this uproariously funny page-turner.
Following the life and thoughts of Rachel Riley through a series of diary entries, the novel is similar in form and in feel to the Georgia Nicholson series by Louise Rennison. A distinction exists, however, in that a more coherent thread of storylines and plots courses beneath the self-conscious, though rarely self-aware, diary entries of the protagonist. Resolved that the current year truly will be her most dramatically tragic yet, Rachel is so focused upon this aim, she is unaware of the more irregular and surreal aspects of her life. Ascorbic and probing, writing so sharp and so pointed should carry a safety warning!
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| Michael Morpurgo |
| Doubleday |
| 0385610432 |
| Oct 2007 |
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As much as Kyle’s physical journey is curtailed within “The Stuff of Nightmares”, he nonetheless follows a definite path, one that leads from inexperience through various manifestations of uncertainty to an eventual awareness and understanding that culminates with him unencumbered and able to lead his life again. Complex and convincing character development of this type constitutes one of Malorie Blackman’s major strengths as an author.
Following the separation of his mother and father, Kyle has become socially withdrawn. Embarking upon a class trip, the train that Kyle and his peers are on is de-railed and hangs precariously between safety and danger, life and death, for all those on board. One of the few individuals conscious on the train, Kyle finds that he is able to experience at first hand the dreams – and thereby the fears, guilt and neuroses – that his fellow passengers are subject to… Large questions regarding, faith, belief, reality, truth, preordination and psych-kinesis are stimulated and are constantly brought to the fore as the narrative pace races through a total of thirteen nightmares told in a frame-setting. Blackman depicts horror at its most chilling and efficacious through drawing the shades of darkness from sources identifiable to the everyman. The personal base to several of the dream described makes this a brave work, its considered nature and seriousness of intent ensuring it is, at once, in equal parts worthwhile.
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