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Mal Peet |
David Fickling Books |
9781910200155 |
October 2014 |
hardback |
Finished |
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| I was looking forward to The Murdstone Trilogy, A Novel by Mal Peet as soon as I got wind of it. I read it last week, in a couple of sittings. What a superbly entertaining satire it is. Not only is it not a trilogy but, at just a little over 300 generously line-spaced pages, it is also economical in its one-volume-ness. The main character, a single man and writer called Philip Murdstone, is completely believable. His career is going down the proverbial pan. Sales are derisory. Cue for his agent, the magnificently conceived Minerva Cinch, to persuade Murdstone to try his hand at writing a fantasy, since that is all the rage. I was laughing out loud (chuckling out loud to be more accurate, since most of my reading was done on a train, and I’m someone who rarely laughs aloud while reading anyway) from the word go. And it wasn’t always the satirical digs at the ways and wiles of the publishing world that struck me as amusing (though it has to be said those who are most intimately familiar with that world are the most likely to get most pleasure from reading the book) – no, it is often just the pure observational genius of Peet’s writing that raises a smile, as in “Like most solitary men, he has a wide repertoire of groans.” Peet has mischievous fun with the two librarians in the book, Francine and Merilee, known as the Weird Sisters. It’s always a pleasure when they enter the stage. Murdstone agrees, under great pressure from Minerva, to attempt a fantasy – initially to no avail. Eventually, with a bit of help from a guest ale called Dark Entropy, some time alone amid a stone circle on Dartmoor, and a certain dwarfish creature called Pocket Wellfair, the fantasy gets written. Lovers of the genre will need to possess their own sense of humour to appreciate Peet’s clever passages of pastiche as he shows us examples of the quest Murdstone is working on. It’s probably fair to say that the book’s most appreciative audience will be those who share Peet’s own obvious bemusement at the popularity of High Fantasy of a certain ilk.
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Black Ice
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Becca Ftzpatrick |
Black Ice |
9781471118142 |
September 2014 |
hardback |
Finished |
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| I read, and was pretty impressed by, this author’s debut novel back in 2009 – [Read my review of hush, hush] – the first in a sequence of four love fantasies. Although I hadn’t been inclined to read the other novels in that sequence this realistic, edge-of-your-seat thriller felt much more like the kind of reading I enjoy when it arrived from Simon & Schuster – especially so after I’d read the first few pages and the opening chapter. I was hooked, as they say.I said of her first book: “Fitzpatrick is already a sufficiently skilful 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.” That comment about the Sunday matinee feature film wasn’t meant as a criticism, but rather as a signal to readers of the review about what kind of read to expect. I then added, “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.” In this book it is imperative that we do become moved and unsettled by Britt’s predicament. I was. Britt and her best friend drive up into the mountains to go hiking. The weather closes in and they have to abandon their Wrangler. Britt’s companion, Korbie, is the sister of her first love, Calvin, a young man Britt is now estranged from. Whilst they are trapped on the mountains they become the captives of two strange and sinister men. Except that one is not entirely a stranger to Britt. For much of the book the reader is kept wondering which of these two captors is the most evil. And things become yet more complicated when Calvin arrives as rescuer. Fitzgerald’s writing is rarely flashy, and all the more effective for that. There are a handful of moments when she becomes unnecessarily wordy, but these are mercifully few. The book is melodramatic, to be sure, and its fortunately/unfortunately twists and turns are paced a little predictably, but then in this kind of read its the momentum that keeps those pages a-turning.
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Eren
Simon P. Clark |
Corsair |
9781472110978 |
September 2014 |
hardback |
Finished |
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| Look – as politicians are all too regularly inclined to preface an equivocal and evasive answer – I really could not decide as I began reading this book whether it was a somewhat pretentious and presumptuous (for a debut author) enterprise, a heavy-handed homage to an admired author (the Skellig ambience is hardly disguised) or a remarkably deft and poised first novel. Those who read my reviews regularly will know that I am not a great lover of Prologues and Prefaces in works of fiction. I am fairly sure that some of my resistance to this book could have been avoided with the omission of the opening announcement “This is a story about storytelling.” We really do not need to be told that. Nor do we need to be reminded that “Stories have always existed.” I challenge anyone to read the paragraph that begins with that sentence, in the middle of page 1 of this book, without feeling a sense of concern for the story that follows. I hope that it doesn’t cause too many to put the book down in a bookshop and move on to something else. The small-format hardback has been beautifully and enticingly made (cover design by Jessie Price, cover and inside illustrations by Ellie Denwood) and comes with the following strapline by David Almond: “Distinctive, strange, poetic… a truly interesting new voice.” [On reflection, I read accuracy there – the book is all of those things – but also a hint of reservation implicit in the word ‘interesting’.] Oli has had to move out of London to stay with aunt and uncle in the countryside. It is there that he encounters and has a series of conversations with Eren, a sort of monster in the attic. Clark’s writing is exquisite. Economical and poetic. Em and other local characters are very well drawn. The mounting mystery of why Oli’s father cannot join them from London is skillfully ratcheted up with information about it only being given in the later stages of the book. Eren is suitably foreboding and mesmerising and Oli convincingly under the creature’s spell. I finished the book still wishing the Preface had been omitted, still wishing the book had been a little less dreamlike and amorphous, more rooted in a fully-awake reality that the author is clearly skillful enough to evoke. But let’s be done with reservations – Simon P. Clark has a distinctive new voice and a lithe economy of expression that is to be welcomed and celebrated, just as Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, is to be congratulated for publishing such a leftfield book. The British-born author now lives in America. The book will have its US publication in 2015, at the same time as the paperback is released in the UK.
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Replica
Jack Heath |
Oxford |
9780192737663 |
August 2014 |
paperback |
Finished |
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| You only have to look at the self-shot promotional video for Replica (which I did _after_ finishing the novel) to see that Jack Heath is a young author overflowing with self-confidence. And well he might be. Because Replica is a 200 page long tour-de-force. The author has several sci-fi type thrillers to his name, and already quite a reputation in Australia. He really knows how to write action scenes and paces the book like a pro. Anthony Horowitz fans will love it. The novel’s opening is brilliantly conceived. Chloe (whose voice narrates the novel) is essentially a robot with artificial intelligence. She has, we understand, been cloned by the real Chloe, working secretly in the house basement. She has been programmed with the real Chloe’s memories and, because of the sophistication of the software, is able to experience a simulation of human feelings. It takes a leap of faith for the reader to run with this idea and had Heath’s skill as a storyteller been in any way suspect the whole thing would have fallen on its face immediately. But the artificial Chloe is made entirely believable. I have to say I enjoyed the first half of the book (which concentrates on Chloe’s struggles to fool the parents and the real Chloe’s college friends that she is who she is claiming to be) rather more than the second (in which the thriller narrative takes over) but then I’m not the target audience.
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Trouble
Non Pratt |
Walker |
9781406347692 |
March 2014 |
paperback |
Finished |
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| What the author does really well in this novel about teenage pregnancy is make the reader care for a very ordinary and (at the start of the book at least) not particularly likeable 15-year-old girl and the predicament she finds herself in. Certainly I had no difficulty in believing in Hannah as a character – in some ways she was all too real. My sympathies for her increased as the book progressed, as well they should. The leading male role – this is an alternating dual voice narrative – was more difficult to work out and harder to believe in. In a book that could have benefitted from being 25% shorter, reader engagement might have kicked in more quickly had the revelations about Aaron’s past (which explain his previous behaviour) come sooner rather than later. I am not the biggest fan of dual voice narratives. One voice always tends to be stronger than the other and Pratt, like many authors who use this technique, at times falls into the trap of slipping out of her characters’ vocal registers in order to ‘narrate’ in a more authorial tone. Having said all that, the last third of this impressively assured debut is entirely riveting. A particularly admirable aspect of the novel is the way in which supporting characters (family members, fellow students) come fully alive via the alternating narrative. It is also a sobering study of the way in which teenage life, especially in the social network age, is dominated by rumour, gossip and false claim. The fact that Hannah is self-aware enough to know that she is as much a player in these games as the next person makes the book refreshingly (actually a better word might be rancidly) realistic.
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Infinite Sky
C. J. Flood |
Simon & Schuster |
9780857078032 |
February 2013 |
hardback |
Finished |
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| For various reasons my reading of contemporary YA fiction was not as comprehensive during 2013 as it should have been and I found myself attending the presentation of this year’s Branford Boase Awards (for a first children’s novel) having only read two of the shortlisted books.The winning book, Infinite Sky by C. J. Flood, was not one of them. When I interviewed Jon Walter recently (on publication of his debut novel Close To The Wind, which I can confidently predict will be shortlisted for the Branford Boase next year) he made a telling comparison between his own writing style and that of C. J. Flood’s, using the metaphor of photography. “Her writing is like she is looking through a 50mm lens the whole time and she doesn’t vary it. I think of distance a lot when I write, so I zoom in and zoom out. With her you feel she has this beautifully composed view that she moves around at the same focal length.” And in case this could be construed as an implied limitation, he added, “You have to be really skilled to do that well.” Having now read (and enjoyed and admired in equal measure) C. J. Flood’s book, I can see exactly what Jon Walter meant. The novel has an emotional intensity that reminded me at times of the mood in some of Anthony Masters’ books, whose short YA fiction was popular throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Interestingly, the eviction of gypsies from a campsite was often the subject of one of Masters’ improvised Book Explosion events. Here the gypsy encampment is small and is mainly a botheration to Iris’s father, who jumps to conclusions when his toolshed is broken into. The father’s fierce protectiveness towards both Iris and her older bother Sam are understood by the reader in relation to the fact that his wife, their mother, has recently abandoned home to go on a trip of self-discovery. Flood’s handling of the romantic bond between the 13 year old female narrator, and the slightly older gypsy lad Trick, captures the magic of first love in writing that manages to be both lyrical and firmly realistic. Flood’s viewpoint may be, according to Walter’s observation, through a 50mm lens the whole time, but (to take the photographic analogy further) she knows just when to open up the aperture throwing the surround into soft-bokeh relief. The small rendezvous that they kit out with cushions for their trysts is only visited on a few occasions, the last time by Iris on her own, but the reader is left feeling they know this place as well as the characters in the story. (The hardback had a wholly suitable illustrated cover design, which I wish had been retained for the first paperback edition – the latest paperback cover shown above is much much better.) I did not anticipate the dark and violent turn of events, but was swept along by them. Notwithstanding the book’s Prologue (which personally and in retrospect I consider to be an ill-judged inclusion), you start reading Infinite Sky lulled by the mood of summer, by the title, and the fact that young first love is in the air, into thinking that all will stay rather lovely and soft-focus, with the occasional conflict between siblings, and between parents and children, not knowing that tragedy and inescapable retribution are just around the corner. A superb novel, a well-deserving winner of the Branford Boase Award, and a book that cries out to be filmed.
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The Year Of The Rat
Clare Furniss |
Simon & Schuster |
9781471120275 |
April 2014 |
hardback |
Finished |
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| What a wonderful, warm-hearted tearjerker of a novel this is! Flowing effortlessly from scene to scene, largely dialogue-driven, it is told, as are so many young adult novels these days, in the first person continuous present, in the voice of Pearl, self-obsessed and self-pitying, following the sudden death of her mother in the late stages of pregnancy. For all Pearl’s understandable emphasis on her own feelings and view of her situation, the other characters in the book have a strong presence as well. This is the case both for main characters such as Pearl’s father (who is not her birth father, a fact which of course has resonance throughout the novel) and her Scottish grandmother, and also for more minor characters such as members of staff at Pearl’s school, her best friend who feels shut out by Pearl’s grief and, towards the end of the novel, a lively, precocious seven-year-old, who provides levity at just that point when the book might otherwise have become maudlin. The ‘Rat’ of the title is Pearl’s baby sister, successfully delivered prematurely while the mother was dying. Pearl resents the fact that the baby has survived while her mother has not, and she blames her father for wanting her mother to become pregnant. At the first posthumous appearance of the mother in one of what turns out to be a sequence of mother-daughter conversations, I confess to having thought this book might not be for me. Is this going to be a little too Truly, Madly, Deeply I wondered? As it turns out, Furniss is such a skilled writer (hard to believe this is a debut novel) and the mother’s character sufficiently multi-layered that once the first appearance had happened I willingly suspended disbelief on each subsequent encounter. To be honest I loved every moment of it, including the muted flirtation between Pearl and the young man who sometimes visits an elderly neighbour. The back of the proof copy I was reading suggested the book would suit fans of Meg Rosoff and John Green. That’s as may be, but I would want to add that fans of Sharon Creech, Joan Bauer and Hilary McKay will love it too. The book’s mood reminded me at times of a Richard Curtis film. I heartily recommend it.
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Why We Took The Car
Wolfgang Herrndorf |
Andersen |
9781783440313 |
February 2014 |
paperback |
Finished |
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| I am sitting here exhaling air in the way you do after reading a book that has blown you away, leaving a bereft ache in your heart. In the case of Why We Took The Car, a German YA novel originally published in 2010 under the title of Tschick (the name of the co-leading character), and now available from Andersen Press in a superb English translation by Tim Mohr, the sense of heartache is all the more awful for having discovered just now, via a quick search on the interent, that the book’s author, Wolfgang Herrndorf, shot himself last summer, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour a few years previously. This is the only Young Adult book he wrote (his other work is for adults), but it should find a lasting place as one of the very best books in its genre. Mike Klinkenberg, the narrator of the book, would like to be less boring. He’d like to have more friends. He’d like to be invited to parties. And he’d like Tatiana to take notice of him. His mother’s an alcoholic and after writing an all-too-honest essay about her, which his class find hilariously weird, he’s dubbed ‘Psycho’. Things change when new Tschick joins the class. He’s Russian and an oddball – often turns up blind drunk, but doesn’t let anyone, including the teacher, push him around. For Tatiana’s birthday (another party to which he is not invited) Mike creates an oversized drawing of Beyonce but seems unlikely ever to have the confidence to present it to her. But when Tschick picks him up in a ‘borrowed’ Lada car, one of the first things they do is drive over to Tatiana’s house, where the party is in full swing, to present the drawing. No sooner have they handed it over than they’re doing a 180 degree turn in the middle of the street and speeding away on a week long road adventure that will be the happiest time of their lives. Everything that happens on the road has that raw authentic feel that you get from the best of European films (indeed, it is easy to visualise this book as a movie). I’m not going to attempt to describe the experiences the two of them have, or the characters they meet along the way. Read the book for yourselves. Before going into English translation it already had more than one million sales in foreign editions. If any book is deserving of multi-million readership it is this.
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Seeing Red
Kathryn Erskine |
Usborne |
9781409570509 |
February 2014 |
paperback |
Finished |
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These are the songs that Kathryn Erskine listened to while writing this marvellous novel. They form the Seeing Red ‘playlist’ and several of them are mentioned in the story:
Erskine was born in the Netherlands and spent her childhood in Israel, South Africa and Scotland. But she has lived in the US state of Virginia, where this novel is set, for most of her adult life.
Yes, this book is unashamedly didactic. It sets out not just to move the reader, but to inform and educate. I normally dislike the inclusion of extra baggage at the end of a novel, but here the Author’s Note and suggested list of Discussion Questions will be welcomed by teachers who decide to use the book in guided reading sessions – it is particularly recommended for Years 5 to 8 (10-13 year olds).
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Red
Libby Gleeson |
Hodder |
9781444917307 |
February 2014 |
paperback |
Finished |
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| A taut and gripping thriller from the award-winning Australian author, Libby Gleeson. [The book was first published in Australia in 2012, where it won the 2013 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Children’s Fiction.] It opens in the aftermath of a cyclonic storm that has wreaked havoc on Sydney. A young girl comes back to consciousness smothered in mud.
She can remember little from her past. A boy called Peri befriends her and piece by piece helps her regain some recollection of her past. Things start to become clearer when she sees a photo in the ruins of her old primary school.
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