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Lisa Drakeford |
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Chicken House |
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9781910002230 |
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July 2015 |
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hardback |
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The Baby by Lisa Drakeford is one of the best books about the impact of teenage pregnancy I’ve read. The opening is a tour de force, a superbly realistic and well-realised seventeenth birthday party at which things take the normal mildly debauched downhill trajectory culminating, not so normally, in a girl giving birth in the bathroom.
The party is Olivia’s. The girl with the baby is her best friend Nicola. I don’t normally enjoy books with multiple narrative viewpoints, but this book is masterfully constructed, so that we experience events from one person’s point of view and then move on to another’s. The author doesn’t fall into the trap of switching back and forth, but continues the momentum of the narrative forward in time as she switches from character to character. Olivia narrates the first section, February. Nicola takes over in March. Then it’s Alice, Olivia’s younger sister’s turn in April. These three sections, forming just over half the length of the novel, are superb. By the time the two male narrators, Jonty and Ben, take over in May and June, the novel becomes a little less engaging. I think this is partly because they have already been seen through the other narrators’ eyes, partly because the author is less assured in writing in the masculine voice, but mainly because the introduction of an additional ‘issue’ (Ben’s ‘secret’) is an unnecessary loading of concern into a novel which already has Nicola’s teenage pregnancy, Alice’s autism, Jonty’s anger issues and Olivia’s sense of betrayal to contend with. This is, nevertheless, a book that can be very heartily recommended, and the author’s next novel eagerly awaited.
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The Rest Of Us Just Live Here
 
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Patrick Ness |
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Walker Books |
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9781406331165 |
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August 2015 |
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hardback |
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In its own way this novel is a far more sardonic satire and commentary on the fantasy genre than Mal Peet’s The Murdstone Trilogy, because it is more knowing of contemporary fantasy fashions. The 18th century style italicised chapter prefaces are absolutely hilarious and cumulatively withering in the way they so accurately pastiche the style and narrative content of so much recent fantasy writing.
The main narrative of the novel is also a commentary in itself, being centred on the everyday life and relationships of a group of high school students in the year before graduation. We meet them on the first page “all sprawled together in the field, talking about love and stomachs”. Narrated by Mikey, a character with high anxiety and periodic bouts of extreme OCD, the story concerns a perfectly ordinary bunch of adolescents very content to be ordinary, and keen to keep their distance from the “indie kids” (dangerous people infected with the sense that extraneous powers, dark and light, are at work in their lives). “Our town is just like your town,” Mikey is keen for us to know close to the start of the book. “Me, all I want to do is graduate. And have a last summer with my friends. And go away to college. And (more than) kiss Henna (more than) once. And then get on with finding out about the rest of my life.” Ness uses a quote from Bjork, to set the tone for the novel. “I thought I could organise freedom. How Scandinavian of me.” And so Mikey and his family friends pursue their down-to-earth American high school life while dark and foreboding things involving the indie kids go on around them. This is an excellent and, in the sense that its ideal audience should be those aged about the same as its protagonists, an authentic YA novel. I don’t think the American setting will be off-putting to English readers in the slightest. The dialogue is way too sharp and the relationships between the protagonists far too involving for that to be an issue.
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Fire Colour One
 
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Jenny Valentine |
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HarperCollins |
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9780007512362 |
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July 2015 |
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paperback |
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This is SO good! Absolutely up my street. An economically written YA novel with wryly observed characters and an original storyline that is emotionally engaging to a degree that more overblown, in-your-face writing can never reach. I want Wes Anderson to discover it and make a movie of it. Sixteen-year-old Iris has long been estranged from her father, until she is taken from America by her mother and step-father (the shallowness of these two is both mercilessly and totally believably depicted) to visit him on his deathbed. But not before she has met the most amazing boy called Thurston around whom life becomes magical and positive. Iris is not a happy teenager. She has taken to lighting fires of various magnitudes. The tone and story arc of the book cannot be faulted. Valentine is an expert at writing dialogue, and needs to be in the long heart-wrenching scenes between the dying art-expert father and his estranged daughter. This is what YA fiction used to be like before the days of rampant fantasy and vampire romance. It has immediately become, like M. T. Anderson’s Feed, one of my favourite young adult novels of all time. You know, sometimes those straplines speak the truth: “A bold and brilliant novel about love, lies and redemption,” says the back cover. Believe it, buy it, read it. 
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All My Secrets
 
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Sophie McKenzie |
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Simon & Schuster |
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9781471122217 |
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July 2015 |
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paperback |
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The author recently described her approach to plotting in a Guardian feature. “With every scene I write I ask myself: Is what has happened unexpected, yet credible and convincing? Is the plot unfolding clearly: neither so slow that it’s boring nor so fast that it’s confusing? Is the main character(s) at the heart of the scene, moving the action on?” This technique is very much at play in Sophie McKenzie’s 24th novel, about a 16 year old girl who suddenly learns that she has been left a large inheritance by her mother, a ballerina allegedly killed many years ago in a motor accident. The news and revelation about the circumstances of her birth are so shocking to Evie that she is sent away to Lightsea, a Scottish island specialising in the rehabilitation of teenagers who have gone off the rails in various ways. The formulaic storytelling technique is initially effective but somewhat grating over time, especially when the narrative becomes increasingly overwrought. When every single chapter ends with a carefully stage-managed ‘cliffhanger’ the effect on a mature, experienced reader is underwhelming. But this book is presumably aimed at an audience younger than the main character (who has just finished her GCSEs) – readers of 10+ with a liking for BBC thriller dramas. Certainly the romantic maturity of Evie is more in tune with Y6 girls than with older teenagers. I’d be happy to suggest it as pageturning holiday reading for 10-13 yr olds, but would want to steer older readers towards alternatives. There is a freshness at the start of the book that becomes unrecognisable by the end. It is as if all the characters have become mangled by the mechanics of the story structure.
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Pike
 
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Anthony McGowan |
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Barrington Stoke |
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9781781124666 |
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May 2015 |
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hardback |
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There was a very revealing and self-aware exchange during a brief Q&A feature that the author of this splendid little book completed for the publisher’s website recently, in which he responded to a question about which type of books he preferred writing as follows: “If I have a preference it’s for surreal, gross-out tragi-comedies, like Hellbent, Henry Tumour and Hello Darkness. That way of writing comes very easily to me. I’ve had to make myself write in a more simple, grittily realistic way, for The Knife that Killed Me, Brock and Pike. Strangely, I think this has forced me to produce my best work. Sometimes you find that going against your own grain makes you a better writer.” Pike is another story about Nicky and Kenny, two characters reminiscent of Stenbeck’s George and Lennie from Of Mice And Men. McGowan first wrote about them in the earlier, highly-popular Brock, and this second tale about them indeed shows Nicky and Kenny bringing the best out of McGowan. The action takes place mainly around Bacon Pond, a small lake next to a derelict food-processing plant. The atmosphere created is superbly tense and claustrophobic – very different, it has to be said, from the rurally idyllic illustrations that somewhat incongruously decorate the page footers. But that’s beside the point, because it’s the words that make this little story sing and soar, used as they are to create memorable characters and incidents in a manner suggestive that McGowan’s work as a YA writer will become more widely regarded, successful and appreciated in direct proportion to the degree of ‘going against the grain’ future full-length novels share with their little siblings, Brock and Pike.
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My Name’s Not Friday
 
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Jon Walter |
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David Fickling Books |
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9781910200438 |
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Jul 2015 |
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hardback |
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One of the best children’s novels of 2014 was Close To The Wind by Jon Walter. The fact that it was overlooked by all the major children’s book awards (including the Branford Boase Award for a first novel, where it was not included in even the longlist, let alone the shortlist) left me open-jawed and, ever so temporarily, nervously questioning my own judgement.
Was Close To The Wind as good a book as I thought it was? Did it contain some flaw that made it ineligible for praise in the eyes of award judge panels? I looked at the book again and was reminded how unique, how special was the slow, unhurried but totally gripping narrative tone. I remained convinced. This was, it is, a very special book indeed. And now we have the author’s second novel to stand alongside that exceptional debut. My nervousness as a reader and reviewer returned. Would the new book excite me as much? Or would it help explain why none of those award panels had shared my enthusiasm for the earlier book. That nervousness didn’t last beyond the first page of My Name’s Not Friday. In the short opening chapter we appear to be starting a story that is going to be told in the same unspecific, emblematic style of Close To The Wind. A boy is bound up and has a bag over his head. We experience things only through the boy’s sense of hearing. He calls himself Samuel, and starts off believing his captor to be God, since he feels he must have died and gone to heaven. The tone and narrative style quickly shifts in the very next chapter. The boy is being taken to market to be sold as a slave. The book tells the story of how this has come to pass and what happens to Samuel once he is working as a slave. Set near the end of the American Civil War, My Name’s Not Friday is more soundly set in a specific time, place and period than Close To The Wind. But Walter is still more keen on establishing convincing, emotion-engaging verisimilitude than on creating a precise historical exactitude. There is an illuminating Author’s Note to read at the end of the novel in which Walter writes: “I had to use detail to portray a narrative that was believable and then make choices about how best to illuminate the truths contained within the story.” As an illustration he refers to his use of the word “nigger”.
At a little over 350 pages Walter has written a classic children’s adventure story in which the reader sides with the main character throughout, but is helped to see how the rights and wrongs of any particular situation are always shaded. To those classic stories such as Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian and The Kingdom By The Sea by Robert Westall can now be added My Name’s Not Friday. It really is a fantastic novel. The characters all live as vividly as if they were in a Dickens novel. Reading the book I became aware of echoes with Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones and, of course, the movie 12 Years A Slave. If Jon Walter is once again ignored by award panels after writing a book as good as this – with its enormously satisfying narrative arc and a main character whose belief in an interventionist God remains undimmed throughout – I shall be aghast. The book is published in hardback by David Fickling next month (July 2015). Order a copy today. And if you haven’t yet read Close To The Wind, the paperback is available straight away.
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Bone Jack
 
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Sara Crowe |
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Andersen Press |
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9781983440054 |
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Apr 2014 |
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paperback |
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This is one of those dark, atmospheric children’s novels of a type more numerous and popular in the previous century than today, in which tradition and landscape are as significant in the narrative as are the various human characters. The incidents in the book take place during preparations for the annual Stag Chase, something that the main character, Ash, is busy training for, having been chosen to play the role of the stag boy, the lead runner pursued by a human pack. Usually, of course, this tradition is pure theatre. But the author cleverly plays her plot (and its themes of suicide and post-traumatic stress) to create a psychological thriller of considerable force. At sentence level the writing is taut and effective, and the relationship between Ash and his parents extremely well-handled. But a tendency to over-extend scenes makes the book at least 50 pages longer than it need have been. The book has a really pleasing cover design by Kate Grove and Phil Huntingdon.
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A Small Madness
 
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Dianne Touchell |
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Allen & Unwin |
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9781760110789 |
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May 2015 |
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paperback |
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I don’t think I’ve read a book with such intense and compelling emotional momentum since Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade (and that’s going back a bit). If you want to read an authentically Young Adult book about an unwanted and wilfully denied pregnancy, with a vividly harrowing outcome, then this is that book. Except in the rawness of its engagement with the reader, it is very different from the novel I compared it with above. Touchell writes as an unfashionable ominiscient all-observing narrator. Her writing is flawless and often verbally exciting in the best poetic sense. But the language is always being used for dramatic purpose, not for decoration. It conveys mood, atmosphere and character. I could ‘see’ every character in this book extremely vividly. There are three main characters: The lovers, Rose and Michael, and Rose’s very different friend Liv, who is in some ways the most sympathetic character in the book. But the supporting roles are just as important. Michael’s brother, Tim, and the authoritarian, church-going father. Rose’s mother. Liv’s mother. It is difficult to write much about the story without giving spoilers – suffice to say that everything that happens is horribly real and believable. It’s a five-star recommendation for sure.
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Panther
 
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David Owen |
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Corsair |
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9781472116420 |
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May 2015 |
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paperback |
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This is an extraordinarily powerful and emotionally raw debut novel. Very highly recommended. It’s a story about how the main character, Derrick, feels his own mental stability unhinging under the cumulative impact of his sister’s suicidal depression. Even at the start of the book all is not well. He is dangerously overweight (18 stone) and scavenging in bins to feed his hunger for comfort food. As the book develops, things get progressively worse. Owen is brilliant at conveying Derrick’s sense of betrayal when his best friend makes out with the girl (a longtime family acquaintance) he had always hoped would be his alone. The panther of the title refers to a large black cat, stalked by Derrick in the allotments near to his house. This hunting ground becomes the arena for confrontations as powerfully charged as scenes in the work of Robert Cormier, Kevin Brooks and David Almond. (I don’t make such comparisons lightly.) The sister, Charlotte, is central to the work but never centre stage. The novel is intense, but not overbearingly claustrophobic. Derrick’s perverse sense of humour provides a certain levity even in the darkest moments. And make no mistake, the book _is_ very dark. The only thing preventing me from giving it 5 stars is its opening paragraph, which very nearly made me put the book aside (such is the number of books that bid for my attention). “The cookie broke apart in his mouth like smashed concrete.” Not only does this not work as a stand-alone simile, but it becomes irrational in the following sentence. “It was so stale that his saliva turned it into glue and his teeth stuck together.” What kind of saliva does the boy have, for goodness sake, that it is capable of turning concrete into glue? There are occasional instances where words jammed against my ear (the repetition of the word ‘cut’ three times in six lines across the bottom of p132 and the top of p133) but otherwise this is a very well-written, well-structured novel, and I hope it gets the reception and recognition it deserves.
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The Many Lives Of Ruby Iyer
 
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LAxmi Hariharan |
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Jacaranda Press |
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9788192144818 |
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Nov 2014 |
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paperback |
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Despite being poorly copy-edited and overlong – at just under 300 pages it is not a very long novel but could usefully have lost at least 50 of those pages and been all the better for it – I did enjoy this book, especially its first half, during which the emphasis is on Ruby and her apparently gay flatmate Pankaj. The repartee between these two is very well done. Later, when Ruby does her female Robocop turn of saving Bombay from a gang of teenage terrorists (with echoes of the 26/11 Mumbai massacres), the novel runs into action overdrive and the focus shifts to Ruby’s relationship with two older testosterone rich men. Early on in the book Ruby is molested on a railway station by a Hand, and pushed off the platform onto the live wire in the path of an approaching train. She is dramatically saved but carries the physical and emotional scars of this experience throughout the novel. Emblematic of the strength she draws from having survived such an experience is the tree-branch-like scar on her back, tattooed into her by the electrical charge from the live rail, which stirs into life whenever she is in danger and gives her computer-game-like powers. Hariharan writes vividly and evokes the metro-city life of modern Bombay extremely well. Although I read the book in print form, the author (who has had a career in marketing) has been active in promoting its Kindle ebook format, which is currently available for just 99p. The print edition is £6.95. It’s a YA rather than adult action novel but not at all ‘teeny’. A sequel is in preparation.
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