Melvin Burgess

Andersen Press

1842701800

Jun 2006

‘When Bernardette first met Jonathan Heat, she thought of him as a kind of wounded saint, a man with the power to transform the lives of others, but tragically, never his own. Yet by the end, she’d come to believe that he’d led Sara into his own doom, deep into a mental illness, in the disguise of treatment; and finally to an extreme form of self harm, in which she was willing to sacrifice herself to feed his vanity.’

The ability of the media to mythologise the famous, renouncing notions of talent, value and of worth in favour of gratification that is instantaneous and immediately apparent lies at the heart of ‘Sara’s Face’. A caricaturised society is depicted where idiots are idolised and idols are made idiotic.
In Jonathan Heat, Melvin Burgess has penned the fatally flawed hero of a Gothic Romance, brilliantly transposing him upon the popular iconography of modernity. The story that surrounds Heat is one that is suffused with mystery and uncertainty. In a move that parallels the lives and levels of appropriation made common in the biographical detail of many an iconic star of our age, Burgess reveals in true tabloid-sensationalist-exclusive style the degrees to which the scourge of disposability and consumerist tendencies have infiltrated popular consciousness and indeed conscience. This is not so much one of Burgess’s alleged assaults on morals, but rather an assault on the types of assault morals have been assaulted by!
Within the context of comments on childhood arising through ‘children’s literature’ the novel challenges the manner in which the transition from childhood to adulthood is eroded and pushed back further and further by consumerist tendencies as market-forces have come to realise the weight and value of kid-coinage’ Sara’s currency is her youth itself and subtle reference to the sexualised relationship she shares with Heat make for a deeply disturbing read in which her trust is continually abused.
One of the most relevant and resonant novels for teenagers published this year, underpinning ‘Sara’s Face’ are explorations of identity, and of the mechanics via which self and society act individually, interact symbiotically and react against one another. This is a fascinating and intricate novel that holds up to repeated re-reading, revealing the complexity of its inner-workings through careful obfuscation and revelation, here is a book not to be taken at face value’

Jaclyn Moriarty

Macmillan Children’s Books

0330438840

May 2006

‘So, basically, we read your whole life story, Bindy, and PLEASE DON’T BE MAD. We felt guilty, but you say in the introduction that it’s a FAD assignment, so we are actually FAD. We ARE your life raft, Bindy, so we thought the LIFE raft should read the LIFE story. In case it would help with all those issues you were telling us about tonight.’

Think of the laughs with Louise Rennison’ think of the angst in Jacqueline Wilson, then’ think again! Jaclyn Moriarty is endowed with an all-too-rare ability not only to write convincingly using the voices of teenagers with their curious mix of laconic wit and personal anguish, but also to weave around this devilish plots that keeps readers caught dually between delight and deduction’
Alarmingly intelligent and precocious in the extreme, Bindy Mackenzie is seen as something of a fearsome individual by her peers. Readers of Jaclyn’s first two novels for teenagers ‘Feeling Sorry for Celia’ and ‘Finding Cassie Crazy’ will be familiar with the setting, Ashbury High and will find herein a number of old friends from these novels.
Bindy’s story is told in the form of memos on personal stationery that Bindy herself has created, e-mails to her mother and father and numerous other epistolary forms. Looking at the type of response Bindy receives from her parents makes one realise the crushing importance of communication between parents and child and the lack of meaningful interaction that modern ICT methods provide as a substitute for one-on-one attention.
Under the instruction of one Try Montaine, a seemingly liberal, left-wing teacher, Ashbury High has developed a new strand of study skill session called ‘Friendship and Development’ (FAD for short). Initially sceptical of the lessons, Bindy writes several acerbic letters to the director of the Office of the board of studies, complaining that FAD distracts her from her studies.
FAD, however, is not all that it seems and is a clever subterfuge behind which a fiendish attempt on Bindy’s life is being made. In spite of this, the classes develop in Bindy and her classmates a real sense of union, care and understanding as each member of the group communicates themselves more fully and openly.
‘Becoming Bindy Mackenzie’ is life-affirming and touching without falling into the swampish grounds of sentimentality and didacticism. Jaclyn Moriarty has a wonderfully light, butterfly-touch that enables the consideration of deep and profound issues alongside points where the narrative flair is so witty that the book becomes almost too heavy to hold whilst laughing so loudly. This is a rollicking rollercoaster ride for the emotions, revel in it!

Joseph Delaney, ills. David Wyatt

The Bodley Head

0370328280

Jul 2006

“It’s going to be a long, hard, cruel winter, son. All the signs are there… It’s going to be harsh and I don’t think any of us will come through it unchanged.”

Located firmly amidst the legend and lore of Lancashire, Joseph Delaney’s ‘The Wardstone Chronicles’ are curios amidst the trend for series fiction. Whilst each of the stories is inter-connected, sharing at heart a base of the same characters, a ‘local-to-Lancashire’ setting and the premise that the dark is growing in power, each story also very much stands on its own.
‘The Spook’s Secret’, the third book in the series sees Tom Ward learn more about his tutor, John Gregory and the types of personal experience with regards to love, life and trust that have served to influence his world-view. This is encapsulated in an epic struggle between the twin forces of good and evil as attempts are made to raise Golgoth, a pagan god of destruction.
It is the over-arching themes of the series that really cohere these books. The depiction of women and the types of cruelty that befall witches, the parallel constructs of child-development that explore issues of nurture versus nature focused on Tom Ward the seventh son of a seventh son who is apprenticed to be good and to banish malign influences from the county and upon Alice, a witch-child who forms an alliance with Tom and the types of person they will grow up to be as well as the flawed nature of the Spook himself and his prejudice gradually unfold throughout the series. It is interesting to track these through the books and to wonder how they will develop in future’

Malcolm Rose

Simon and Schuster

0689875096

Jun 2006

”all these amazing twists of fate couldn’t happen purely by chance. They were firm evidence of a God who was orchestrating everything. And that would convince them that the were carrying out His will. Karl believed more in bad luck than in God.’
The advancement of the sciences and of technology form the backdrop to Malcolm Rose’s novels. ‘The Death Gene’, his latest, looks at the frighteningly real possibility of synthesising life, the profound impacts this might cause and the types of usage and abusage for which such knowledge might be appropriated.
The work of biologist Eve Perry provides a grim insight into the way scientific development is able to be used to wield power by extremists’ whether political, military, religious or environmental in intent. The novel is split into two parts, the first sees Karl Stephenson and Finn Pallister entrusted with knowledge about bacterial synthesis, sees an outbreak of a new super-bug illness and the quest for its cure through utilising the bacteria’s ‘death gene’ a specially developed ‘self-destruct’ unit. The concluding part of the is novel an-against-the-clock race as an extremist scientist endeavours to destroy the ‘death gene’ thereby unleashing a deadly virus against humanity, a new, unseen weaponry.
“The Death Gene” is admirably wide in scope, it makes accessible the Nietzschean idea that ‘God is dead’, exploring the implications thereof to modern religion, to morality and the study of science and the need for an intrinsic set of ethics as part of that. The novel packs an uncompromising, and for many of its characters, an unforgiving emotional punch and is a potent reminder that scientific intelligence can only be utilised responsively by those with emotional intelligence…