Kevin Brooks |
Penguin |
9780141326122 |
March 2013 |
250pp |
Whole book read |
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I never want to read this book again. I don’t need to. It will stay with me forever. When I closed the last page of The Bunker Diary I sat motionless in my chair for a long long time. I haven’t read a young adult novel as powerfully compelling and as certain to have longevity since Marcus Sedgwick’s Revolver. The day before I finished this book I looked for it in a local branch of Waterstones. I couldn’t find it. Let’s suppose it was on a display table somewhere and I missed it. More staggering was the absence of any other title from Brooks’ impressive backlist on the Young Adult shelves. I would hope that this is a temporary aberration. To begin with Linus is alone in the six-bedroomed bunker. We quickly learn how he came to be there. Fooled into giving assistance to an apparently blind man, he was bundled into a van, drugged, and deposited in the bunker. One by one five others, similarly hijacked and kidnapped, are brought down into the bunker. Linus himself is the dropout, street-living, busking teenage son of a rich dad. It is his diary which tells the story, and his voice and mindset through which Brooks delivers a book that is – to use a word much-loved by Melville – provokingly ontological. In a dictionary definition, ontology is the ‘philosophical study of the nature of being, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations’. This is what all great writing does, in a sense. But in The Bunker Diary we have it done very specifically, very intensely, very frighteningly, at times almost unbearably. Linus’s first companion is a young girl, Jenny. At every point in this admirable novel Brooks takes risks head-on then executes things, via Linus, in a way that avoids obvious novelistic dangers. The four other occupants of the bunker are all adults. The inclusion of a young girl in their midst is an important counterbalance. The relationship between Linus and Jenny is a touching one. The serial arrival of the other characters, and the daily coming and going of the lift, delivering provisions or other messages from above, cannot help but carry reminders of TV’s Big Brother, but the seriousness of the victims’ predicament is never in doubt, or at least becomes quickly apparent, so that any notions that games are being played or that this is some form of prefabricated entertainment are quashed early on in the book. The Bunker Diary is already receiving 5-star reviews on Amazon. One reviewer says this: “For me, there were a couple of parts in particular that I really couldn’t handle. I was reading this while on a train home and I had to shut it numerous times. If I had been at home, I would have put it in the freezer for a bit because some parts were just that scary for me.”>> ![]()
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Roof Toppers
Katherine Rundell |
Faber and Faber |
9780571280599 |
March 2013 |
278pp |
Whole book read |
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Katherine Rundell’s extraordinarily well-received debut novel, The Girl Savage, passed me by but my expectations of this, her second novel, could not help but be raised by all the enthusiastic comments about that first book filling the back page of the publicity sheet. The writing is lucid and the chapters are short. Structurally I found the narrative a bit loose; somewhat languid. I wanted to hurry it along. I didn’t feel enough was happening. Sophie, as a young girl, survives the sinking of a passenger ship. She is, apparently, the only female survivor – found, as a baby, floating in a cello case in the middle of the English Channel. The man who lifts her into the rescue boat – a fellow traveller and scholar – becomes her guardian. The early part of the book concerns the difficulty Charles has in persuading the authorities that he is the right person to fulfil that role. Sophie becomes convinced that her mother was a musician on the ship that sank; convinced also, against all the evidence, that she survived. Once the action moves to Paris – by which time Sophie is considerably older – I expected the mother-searching to begin in earnest. Instead, the middle part of the novel is taken up with the relationship between Sophie and Matteo, a ‘rooftopper’. Charles believes in freedom, so effectively gives Sophie his blessing to wander the rooftops of Paris all through the night with an unknown friend. Hmmm. Well, it is set in a different period of time, not the present, so I guess we can suspend disbelief. But I did find myself becoming restless in this section of the book. Rundell seems to fall into the trap of becoming beguiled by her new character and the whole notion of roof-dwelling and too set on evoking the thrill of this lifestyle without actually moving the narrative along. Matteo is eventually the agent who leads to a satisfactory conclusion to the quest, but it does not come about in any emotionally involving way. (There is a brief sequence of gang rivalry, with knives flashing, and the heroine kicking someone in the crotch, but this sequence is so out of character with the rest of the story that it appears merely gratuitous.) The finale is picturesque and seen from a distance, through Charles’s eyes. It is over too quickly, and left me feeling frustrated. I could imagine the much better, more engrossing novel it could have been. It would have taken some reworking, some rewriting. But it would have been worth it. I’m giving it four chicks, even though my review reads as if it deserves fewer, because it could so nearly have become a very fine five-chick read.>>
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Bartoleme, The Infanta’s Pet
Rachel Van Kooij |
Little Island |
9781908195265 |
September 2012 |
200pp |
Whole book read |
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Little Island Press is an Irish publisher of quality fiction by Irish and international authors for older children and teenagers. Rachel Van Kooij, as her name suggests, is Dutch-born, but lives in Austria and writes in German. The book being reviewed was first published in 2003 and has only recently become available in an English translation (by Siobhan Parkinson). This is a wonderfully well-paced and realised story about a young deformed dwarf who, at the start of the book, is growing up in the Spanish countryside with a father absent for long periods working in the royal court in Madrid. All changes when the father announces that the family is to up sticks and move to the city to be with him. But he does not want to take Bartoleme with them, fearing the boy will only be ridiculed and be nothing but a source of embarrassment for the family. Eventually he agrees that Bartoleme can come, but only if he remains hidden from view at all times. The first half of the book concerns this hidden life, and Bartlome’s determination to better himself and prove himself to others by learning to read and write. However, when an accident exposes him on the streets he is spotted by the young princess – the Infanta – who mistakes him at first for a dog, and insists on it becoming her pet plaything. The back of the eye-catching book jacket shows a scene from Valasquez’ painting Las Meninas, the significance of which becomes cleverly apparent towards the end of a novel which is thought-provoking, moving, entertaining, life-enhancing and powered by a dignified narrative momentum. This is a book that takes the reader beyond their present-day experience and presents them with the issues faced by those who have a handicap or are otherwise physically very different from most other people. The father is insensitive and unfeeling and has a thuggish streak – there is one upsetting scene of domestic violence – but is never depicted as a pure brute.>> ![]()
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Snapper
Brian Kimberling |
Tinder Press |
9780755396207 |
May 2013 |
213pp |
Whole book read |
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There’s a bittersweet feeling that comes when you turn the last page of a really good novel. Often it comes from the emotional power of the story, or an attachment that you have felt as an involved reader with one or more of the characters. Less frequently it comes from the knowledge that the voice of the writer has come to the end of their tale. The story is over. The voice has spoken.
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Blink & Caution
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Tim Wynne-Jones |
Walker |
978-1-4063-3741-9 |
January 2012 |
349pp |
Whole book read |
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A really great read! I wasn’t a bit surprised to discover, on finishing it and checking the author’s website, that Tim Wynne-Jones was this year’s winner of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best juvenile/YA crime book. The award results were announced earlier in the summer and I would previously have been alerted to them by our Canadian correspondent Andrea Deakin, who is now retired. Blink & Caution by Tim Wynne-Jones – trailer from achuka on Vimeo.
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My Pop-Up World Atlas
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Anita Ganeri and Stephen Waterhouse |
Templar |
978-1-84877-398-1 |
July 2012 |
16 pp |
Whole book read |
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Young Olympic watching children wanting to know more about competing countries and where they exist geographically will find this new pop-up atlas packed with information. Anita Ganeri is very experienced in creating information books for children and Stephen Waterhouse has illustrated in a lively and colourful picture atlas style. They make a good team.
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The Weight Of Water
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Sarah Crossan |
Bloomsbury |
978-1408823002 |
January 2012 |
240 pp |
Whole book read |
Read On? n/a |
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I come to a verse novel with a hope that it will live up to some of the best writing that has been done in this genre. One of the most powerful Young Adult novels ever written, and an enduring favourite of mine, is Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff. Love That Dog and Heartbeat both by Sharon Creech are two other verse novels that I would recommend without reservation.
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The Flute
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Rachna Gilmore ill,. Pulak Biswas |
Tradewind |
9781896580579 |
June 2011 |
32 pp |
Whole book read |
Read On? n/a |
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Movingly told, simply but effectively illustrated by one of India’s best-known illustrators, this is a lovely short story by Governor General Award-winning author, Rachna Gilmore.
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Again!
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Emily Gravett |
Macmillan |
9780230745360 |
October 2011 |
24 pp |
Whole book read |
Read On? n/a |
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Emily Gravett is already a two-times winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal. Her new picture book is another class act. The book-within-a-book tells the tale – in splendidly executed, easy to read aloud rhyme – of Cedric the Dragon, whose end of day refrain is “Tomorrow I’ll do it all over again.” The young dragon who is being read to by parent dragon also shouts “Again” on every alternate double spread. But in his case it is the storybook he wants to hear again.
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Wish Me Dead
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Helen Grant |
Penguin |
9780141337708 |
June 2011 |
441 pp |
Whole book read |
Yes |
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Let me begin with a reminder of how much I admired Helen Grant’s first two novels, each of which received ACHUKA’s top rating of five gold chicks.
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