Flesh and Blood by Chris Priestley

Flesh and Blood by Chris Priestley
Buy Flesh and Blood by Chris Priestley at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Dyslexia Friendly
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: A really good WW2-set chiller for the primary school age, of whatever reading persuasion, from a master of the craft.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 88	Date: April 2017
Publisher: Barrington Stoke
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781781126882
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Families change in wartime – in size, if not any other way. Bill and Jane have already had to get used to their father being away to fight, and they've tried the evacuee experience, but are back in London – just in time for the Battle of Britain, which is a circumstance Bill hates Jane for, as he quickly grew to love the countryside, while Jane resisted the idea of them settling there, so they were returned to an allegedly safe capital. One night after a bombing raid they settle outside the neighbourhood's token empty, boarded up and deserted home – only for Bill to convince himself he hears someone inside. The unidentifiable and severely burnt child that gets rescued becomes a kind of new family member – but does this have anything to do with Bill's resent-filled wish for a brother to replace Jane?

This is a deliciously spooky read, perfectly matching the ghoulish cover of the one child's eye glaring at us from within a welter of bandages. We have a sensible, normal family, and we have a bandaged child, one nobody can tell anything about, and who never even tries to speak. How those meet, and what happens after that, is the core of a drama that really will engage – at the crux of it all I found myself only half a page ahead of the narrator in piecing it all together.

I was aware before then of almost rationing the book – but I found myself only setting it to one side for seconds at a time. I feared at one or two points the ending not being as good as I hoped – oh me of little faith. This really is what you'd expect from Chris 'Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror' Priestley. And the book is as good as I've come to expect from the publishers, Barrington Stoke. They, if you don't know yet, provide perfectly readable books that engage people with dyslexia and copious other specialist reading requirements, with thicker paper, that comes with a lemony tinge that hides the other side, meaning nothing is allowed to get in the way of the eye grabbing on immediately to the crystal-clear text. They deem this book to have a reading age of 8+, and an interest age of 9 and up, so by that I take it they aren't providing anything a regular publisher wouldn't present – there isn't such a specialist demand, as would be the case if the book was a teen read for people several years askew in their literary progress.

But they also deem the book 'super readable' – and while those are their words I have to admit they're mine too. So don't always see the Barrington Stoke name and assume this is only for some minority audience. They just don't let people suffer by being left out of the worlds books provide. But they are perfectly happy here to let Jane, Bill and their anonymous mother suffer, and that's what's the most delicious thing about this novel. PG horror is surely a hard genre to get perfectly right, but that's what's been achieved here.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

This author and this publisher have also combined to give us The Wickford Doom.

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