Book Reviews From The Bookbag
The Bookbag
Hello from The Bookbag, a book review site, featuring books from all the many walks of literary life - fiction, biography, crime, cookery and anything else that takes our fancy. At Bookbag Towers the bookbag sits at the side of the desk. It's the bag we take to the library and the bookshop. Sometimes it holds the latest releases, but at other times there'll be old favourites, books for the children, books for the home. They're sometimes our own books or books from the local library. They're often books sent to us by publishers and we promise to tell you exactly what we think about them. You might not want to read through a full review, so we'll give you a quick review which summarises what we felt about the book and tells you whether or not we think you should buy or borrow it. There are also lots of author interviews, and all sorts of top tens - all of which you can find on our features page. If you're stuck for something to read, check out the recommendations page.
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Where's the Elephant? by Barroux
We've all had great fun with books such as Where's Wally, haven't we? They appeal to children and adults and everyone who has seen Where's the Elephant? has jumped in with great enthusiasm, keen to show just how observant they are. We start off with a forest - actually it's the Amazon Rainforest - full of glorious colours and our three friends, who are hiding in there. Elephant is probably the easiest to spot, but Snake and Parrot are in there too and with a little concentration you'll find them. When you turn the page you'll scan the trees again and discover their hiding places. You even wonder if it might get a little boring if it goes on like this. Full review...
The Blind Man of Hoy: A True Story by Red Szell
Redmond Széll was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) at age 19. It's now 26 years since he got the life-changing news. Although not completely sightless – he sees shadows and shapes – he is registered blind and walks with the stereotypical white stick. This hasn't stopped him from pursuing his hobby of rock-climbing, though, both indoors on climbing walls and on Britain's cliffs. The culmination of his climbing obsession came in 2013, when he became the first blind person to climb the Old Man of Hoy, the 449-foot cliff off the Orkney Islands of Scotland. Full review...
A Few Words For The Dead by Guy Adams
Warning: spoilers for both The Clown Service and The Rain-Soaked Bride so best read them first. Remember the near-demonic Fratfield? Well, the honeymooning Toby and Tamara find themselves – and Fratfield – in the South American jungle. However, things aren’t running smoothly. Not only does Fratfield still control the forces of nature, now he has some help. Meanwhile back home a hit man prepares to continue his profession. The target? August Shining, Toby's boss, friend and wanted as an interview subject by MI6, should he live that long. Full review...
One Thousand Things by Anna Kovecses
When you are just short of two years old there’s a whole lifetime of learning ahead. Where to begin? Well, you could do a lot worse than get Mum or Dad to buy a copy of Anna Kovecses’ One Thousand Things. Don’t believe the mouse on the front cover holding a balloon saying learn your first words. To bill this book as a ‘vocabulary builder’ is to woefully underplay its hand. Study hard and this book will see you safely through nursery and in to reception as an assured four year old who can hold their own in the cut and thrust of classroom debate. Full review...
The Detective's Secret by Lesley Thomson
Two 'hurricanes' link this story. There was the one in October 1987 which wasn't going to happen, but did and as it happened a man lay dying, locked inside an old water tower in west London. He had no identification, no one of his description was registered as missing and the body was never claimed. When the body was discovered there was a single, black glove on his back. In October 2103 there was the St Jude's storm. Late one night on the Piccadilly line a man seemed to jump beneath an oncoming train. Jack Harmon saw what happened and was sure that it was suicide, but the man's brother was convinced that it was murder. Full review...
Thieves Fall Out by Gore Vidal
If you look at history it is very easy to think that human nature never changes and that we are forever cursed to live through the same mistakes. Unstable regions remain unstable; atrocities are still being carried out. 1950s Egypt was as tricky a place to live as the modern equivalent is; a sense of revolution in the air. However, rest assured that in Gore Vidal’s ‘lost’ pulp novel you will be reading more about gun fights and scantily clad women, than politics. Full review...
A Buzz in the Meadow by Dave Goulson
Back in 2003, biologist Dave Goulson bought a run-down farmhouse and 33 acres of meadow in the idyllic French countryside. His aim was to create a sanctuary for all sorts of wildlife, where creatures could go about their business without fear of disturbance. Soon, the meadows were abuzz with activity, with insect species thriving. Birds, mammals and amphibians also colonised this tranquil patch of countryside, including the mysterious 'snake and owl-eating beast' and the elusive 'wack-wack' bird...but if you want to find out more about them, you will have to read the book for yourself. Full review...
That Girl from Nowhere by Dorothy Koomson
Smitty Smittson (Clemency to be formal!) designs and modifies pre-loved jewellery. Smitty was adopted at birth by the straight and very correct Heather and her dearest, late Don. Although Smitty has always been curious about her birth parents she's never searched. However when her 12 year relationship with Seth crumbles, she decides to move to Brighton, the area from which three decades earlier, as a little black baby she was given away to a white family. There any idea of searching becomes redundant as the world turns and she's the one that's found. Full review...
Flesh and Blood: True Fiction by Marcus Dalrymple
Brit John Colson is in Mexico teaching, having been invited out there by his godfather and local school owner Carlos Manuel Fermin. John soon settles in, soon forming a love of the country. But then it all changes… Visiting a public toilet at the wrong moment means that John hears a murder being committed beyond his cubicle door. He goes to the police as he would in the UK but this is Mexico; from that moment on John Colson is a marked man. Meanwhile elsewhere in Mexico tourists are being attracted by more than hot sunshine and tacos. Full review...
Elspeth Hart and the School for Show-offs by Sarah Forbes
Imagine, dear reader, a poor girl who is never allowed to play outside like the other children. Instead, she has to spend her day performing horrid chores, like sweeping up mouse-droppings in the creepy, dark cellar and shooing away the cockroaches in the kitchen. So begins a long list of woes for shy Elspeth Hart, who toils tirelessly during the day and spends her nights sleeping in a dusty, cramped wardrobe. Full review...
Scarlet and Ivy The Lost Twin by Sophie Cleverly
Ivy's twin sister Scarlet had been the strong willed, fearless one whilst Ivy, on the other hand, was timid and shy. Following Scarlet's sudden death Ivy is forced to take her twin's place at the sinister Rockwood Boarding School for girls and once there she finds herself thrust into a mystery she struggles to solve. Her only hope is to behave as Scarlet would have done, so with the help of her new friend, Ariadne, Ivy attempts to conquer her fears and stand up to the wicked Miss Fox and discover what really happened to her sister. Full review...
Creature Teacher by Sam Watkins
Jake’s nervous about starting his new school. His class teacher, Mr Hyde, is new too but, unlike Jake, he has a reason to be worried. Although class 5b quickly decide that Mr Hyde is the best teacher they’ve ever had, they also discover a problem – whenever he experiences a strong emotion Mr Hyde starts to glow and transforms into a naughty, farting, biscuit-loving creature. Suddenly their teacher is wrecking the classroom and they need to work together to find a way to turn the creature back into their teacher before their evil headmistress finds out. Full review...
The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Emily Boyce (translator) and Jane Aitken (translator)
Meet Laure. She's a widow in her 40s, who is entering her Parisian apartment building one night when she's mugged, and her handbag stolen. Meet Laurent, a middle-aged bookseller, who happens upon the handbag the following morning in the street, just before the binmen take it away, never to be seen again. More or less snubbed when trying to hand it to the police as lost property, he decides to take it upon himself to reunite the bag with its rightful owner. He has no idea their names are so intimately linked, and despite a lot of things being in the bag (including the titular notebook) there is no cash, no phone and no ID documentation at all. What's more – and what looks like making the idea even more fruitless – he has no idea that Laure has fallen into a coma as a result of the mugging… Full review...
Haunt: Dead Wrong by Curtis Jobling
Will and Dougie have been friends for ages. They each understand how the other thinks (well, most of the time) and they stick together through thick and thin. Literally, in fact: Will's dead but somehow he's not only unable to move on to whatever comes next, he actually can't stray more than a few feet away from his best friend. The possibilities for embarrassment are endless. Full review...
Young Houdini: The Magician's Fire by Simon Nicholson
As it happens, several facts about the childhood of the man who became world famous for his daring stunts and death-defying shows have been recorded. But fiction is the world of what-if, where anything can be imagined, anything can happen. So what if all those 'facts' were actually a cover, made up to conceal Houdini's earliest exploits? What if, as a boy, he ended up far away from his family and his native Hungary and all alone in New York, having to earn a few meagre pennies each day by shining shoes? And what if his fascination with theatre life led him into dangers even greater than anything he was able to create in his later stage act? Full review...
Train by Judi Abbot
Kids nowadays have far too many toys to play with; whilst I had to make do with a piece of string tied around a rock, today’s youth have rooms filled with more plastic contraptions than an aging Hollywood Starlet’s cheeks. Even with all this stuff at hand most parents will tell you that their child will still gravitate more to a few of their favourite things, ignoring a lot of the other offerings available. Perhaps they have a toy train that they are obsessed by? Train! Full review...
Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy
A book about a woman from a war-shredded country, who discovers she has breast cancer…Not a bundle of laughs, one would assume. One would be wrong. Chernobyl Strawberries is, amongst other things, very funny. Full review...
Professor Stewart’s Incredible Numbers by Ian Stewart
Incredible Numbers starts off easily enough, with a really interesting look at numbers as seen by the earliest people, before moving on to a brief explanation of natural numbers, rational numbers, negative numbers and complex and prime numbers. Subsequent chapters revisit old friends such as Pythagoras’s theorem, the Fibonacci cube, negative numbers, pi and quadratic equations, and other lesser known concepts such as kissing numbers, imaginary numbers and the winsomely-named Sausage Conjecture. Full review...
Waterloo: The Aftermath by Paul O'Keeffe
There have been several accounts of the battle of Waterloo and of the events that led up to it. But it is always interesting to discover a book which finds a different way of telling the tale, or in this case focusing more on what happened directly afterwards. Full review...
The Darkest Hour by Barbara Erskine
In the summer of 1940, at the start of the Battle Britain, Evie Lucas has two things on her mind. She paints pictures of the war and she has fallen in love with Tony, a young pilot.
Seventy years later, Lucy, an art historian, begins a study into Evie’s life. Lucy is recently widowed and hopes to find solace in the engrossing project. Instead, she finds secrets that people have been working hard to protect for over half a century – and her discoveries have a profound impact on her own life. Full review...
Flirting With French by William Alexander
I am not a bad linguist. I don’t tend to struggle with languages too much, especially when the goal is communicative fluency rather than precise grammatical accuracy, and I’ve taught English as a foreign language in a handful of countries too, so I have some ideas of what does and doesn’t work with language acquisition in adults. William Alexander is, perhaps, not so lucky. An American with a longing to be a Frenchman, he is devoting himself to learning the lingo and much more, and chronicles his efforts in this book. Full review...
Falling in Love by Donna Leon
Flavia Petrelli, who will be remembered by regular readers of the Commissario Guido Brunetti series as one of the suspects in the first case, Death at La Fenice, has returned to Venice to sing the lead in Tosca. But this time it's Petrelli who feels that she is a victim and for the strangest of reasons: she's being inundated with gifts. It began in other cities - the yellow roses thrown, in abundance, on to the stage, but this time there are even more roses. Her dressing room is filled with them and there's even a massive bouquet inside the locked apartment building where she's staying. It was Brunetti who proved her innocence the last time and it's to him that she turns with this latest problem. Full review...
Gagged and Bound: A book of puns, one-liners and dad jokes by Nick Jones
Ok. I am not a funny person. I come up deplorably short on the old wit and repartee. My puns are never new. I feel this lack of comic talent quite keenly and I think that's why I love other people's jokes so much. So Gagged and Bound was always going to be right up my alley - it's a collection of very short gags on any subject you can imagine. A stream of punny/funny consciousness, if you will.
The problem is this: how does an unfunny person like me review a funny book? I have no idea. Full review...
Bitter Sixteen by Stefan Mohamed
Stanly Bird is about to turn sixteen - a solitary teen in a small Welsh town, he has few friends. Unless you count his talking dog, Daryl...
A splitting headache on the eve of his birthday soon develops into incredible powers, and Stanly swiftly finds himself defending his neighbourhood, falling in love, and gaining his first real friends. When jealous rivals, a mysterious figure and a horrific evil come into play though, Stanly finds himself cast away from home, and struggling to save everything he has come to hold dear. Full review...
The Listeners by Edward Parnell
May 1940. William Abrehart has not spoken since the mysterious death of his father, choosing instead to spend his days in the woods that surround his home. A promise he made to his dying father means that he is responsible for the wellbeing of his two sisters, and their withdrawn mother. Over the course of a weekend, ghosts of the past cause buried secrets, lies and promises to come spilling out - culminating in a series of shocking events. Full review...
The Good Girl by Fiona Neill
Romy is a sixth former who is unremarkable. A good student from a professional family, her aspiration is to become a doctor, and it’s an achievable, rather than lofty goal. Or it was. Because a video has surfaced and it shows Romy doing something that is hardly going to help her medical school application. Or her future career. Or her future life, full stop. For Ailsa, the head teacher, she has the double whammy of trying to keep the school out of the headlines and protect her child who is now at the centre of the controversy. And it’s clearly all the neighbours’ fault. Full review...
You Belong To Me by Samantha Hayes
Isabel is a Brit abroad who is running away from something, or someone. There are a lot of these about, in my experience, but few who have such an intriguing, and worrying, history. She left the UK to escape a controlling ex but now has to return suddenly, for family reasons, even though she swore she would never go home again. Full review...
On the Train by Carron Brown and Bee Johnson
There’s nothing me and the little ‘un like more than a good transport themed book. Tractors remain top of my toddler’s pops but trains run a close second. One glimpse of the cover of On the Train and his little feet did the happy dance. He hunkered down and the journey began. Full review...
The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature by Daniel Hahn
When I was a child, some sixty and more years ago, there were not many books for children or, indeed, much money to buy what was available. Forty years ago, when my daughter was a child there were more and the libraries were relatively well stocked. But in the last thirty years children's books have flourished. I'm no great fan of Harry Potter but even the most hardened cynic would have to admit that the wizard has brought a lot of children to reading - and to enjoying it too. In the same period we've seen books tackling difficult subjects become mainstream and the rise of young adult fiction. From near-famine we've moved to feast, but what we need now is guidance. Full review...
Pathlands by Peter Owen Jones
I have lots of walking books. All of them have been bought with a half-baked intention of actually doing the walks described within them… which of course, I've only partially succeeded in. I do have some books which I have fully ticked-off, but most of them, especially most of the later ones have (at best) been inspiration enough to get the boots on, but rarely more than once or twice. So many unfinished plans. Full review...
