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All These Beautiful Strangers by Elizabeth Klehfoth

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Waterstones

Elizabeth Klehfoth

Penguin

9780241329498

July 2018

paperback

This is an exceptionally good pageturner of a novel.

It opens with an immaculately written Prologue, a single page of beautifully cadenced scene-setting prose which immediately sets up high expectations.

The opening chapters are set in a college called Knollwood Prep and I was briefly concerned that the book was going to be a conventional teen drama about a secret student club.

But it opens up in the fourth chapter to bring in a compelling back story involving the main character’s family.

Charlotte Calloway’s father, Alistair, had attended Knollwood a generation earlier and been a member of the the same society that Charlie herself joins.

From this point on the novel is variously told from the points of view of Alistair, Charlie’s mother Grace, and of Charlie herself.

As the thriller builds momentum, and the mystery surrounding both Grace’s disappearance several years previously and the true explanation behind the apparent suicide of a student who was at Knollwood with Charlie’s father, the reader is increasingly drawn into a web of intrigue and betrayal involving the older generation.

Klehfoth doesn’t pull any punches when writing these scenes, which is what makes the book so admirable. This is very much a Young Adult novel, rather than a work of teen fiction.

Some of the contemporary escapades involving Charlie and her fellow students can have a bit of a Riverdale vibe about them, even occasionally of boarding school antics as seen in The House of Anubis. Klehfoth’s writing never falters, always hitting the appropriate note.

She is particularly good at describing the foibles of the rich and privileged set who make up the membership of the secret society and from which Charlie herself comes. So good I wondered if the author herself comes from a similar background.

I had the opportunity to ask her this question during a lightning interview at an event in London recently. Apparently not. Her Indiana upbringing was far more humble, though when she attended college in Orange County, she was surrounded by students from a smart set whose parents would, quite literally, be able to buy them houses.

I also learnt that All These Beautiful Strangers is her first attempt at full-length fiction, which makes the way she manages to structure and interweave her mixed point of view narrative so extraordinary.

The book is already optioned and I can imagine it making a really good Netflix drama. But it’s as a thoroughly good read that I am recommending it here and giving it the full five out of five, because this is as good a YA thriller as you are likely to come by this year.

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Black Ice

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Becca Ftzpatrick

Black Ice

9781471118142

September 2014

hardback

Finished

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.

Half Bad

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Sally Green

Penguin

9780141350868

March 2014

hardback

Finished

The YA book you will want to have an opinion about this spring.

For reasons nothing to do with the readability of this novel I put it aside just before Christmas when half way through, then picked it up again once all the family visitors had left. This break in reading emphasised the fact that it is a book of two halves – the tone of the first half of the book (while Nathan is held captive) very different from the faster moving second half (when he is on the run).
Nathan is the son of a white witch mother and a black witch father. The novel is set in a realistic contemporary world in which white witches are quite commonplace. As Nathan is of mixed parentage he has to be presented (by his grandmother) to undergo various assessments aimed at determining what type of witch he is growing into. It is this opening section of the novel that reminded me much more of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, than of the blockbusters Penguin compared the novel with at its media launch event.
I often see it as a healthy sign when novelists struggle to summarise in just a few words what their own novels are about. At a recent Penguin presentation, Sally Green risked giving quite the wrong impression of the book when she talked about the “blacks” and the “whites” and the “blacks having been driven out”. To a casual listener with no prior knowledge of the book all this might suggest more than a hint of racial allegory, which would be unfortunate to say the least.
In fact the book is about classic young adult themes – rites of passage, identity, moral compass, freedom, family, romance – and it is these themes that Green so adroitly encompasses in the various narrative components of her novel. In a sense, the fact that it is about witches, good witches and bad witches, good witch genes and bad witch genes, is merely a device for addressing these themes.
The essential ingredient of the American TV series Homeland is that the viewer is left uncertain, as the episodes develop, of Nicholas Brody’s true allegiances. In the same way, in Half Bad, as the title itself implies, it is not clear how ‘white’ or how ‘black’ Nathan is behaving at any given time. I imagine this ambivalence will become even more marked a feature of the narrative in the next book in the trilogy.
Penguin is highly excited by Half Bad and I can see why. Green writes extraordinarily well, and the story makes for gripping reading. The fact that I liked the book so much might not be the greatest of omens for Green or for Penguin, as I tend not to be quite so enthusiastic about books that eventually become wildly popular, and books that I AM enthusiastic about usually have merely modest success. In all seriousness, I do wonder whether Green’s style might just be a little too lean and mean for the readership that has made lusher novels (Penguin are hoping for another Twilight or Hunger Games) such big hits. If they end up with a highly-praised novel that wins many awards (it is, I would suggest, Carnegie-Costa-etc.-shortlist-worthy) and an appreciative readership, but not a mega-successful media franchise, I hope neither publisher nor author will be disappointed.
I give the book 4 rather than 5 stars/ACHUKAchicks only because it is so clearly the first installment in a sequence.
What I particularly liked about the book is the fact that (for a book about witches) it is so well grounded in reality. The sequence set in Geneva towards the end of the novel is especially effective.
Had I read from cover to cover without interruption I would be in a better position to comment on the structure. The first half of the novel is necessarily claustrophobic. I remember thinking just before having to put it to one side, “is the narrative meandering just a little – isn’t it time something started happening?” But then when I picked it up again it all took off in earnest. It will be interesting to see what other readers think. It is important that the restraint under which Nathan is held for so long, and the physical duress he suffers, is properly established, and Green does this during that first part of the novel terrifically well, not pulling her punches.
It is probably best that I do not say too much about Marcus, Nathan’s father, except that his existence becomes an increasingly important feature of the novel, as does, to a lesser but nevertheless promising extent, the love-interest character, Annalise.

I haven’t mentioned yet that Half Bad is a debut novel. How about that?