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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The Resistance Man: A Bruno Courreges Investigation by Martin Walker
When Old Murcoing passed on the priest called on Bruno Courreges, the chief of police in St Denis, as Murcoing had died clutching a bank note from the legendary Neuvic train robbery which happened in 1944. Murcoing had battled to find out what really happened to the money from the robbery - the reserves of the Banque de France - as the Resistance had certainly seen only a small part of it. That's not what's immediately concerning Bruno though. As a member of the Resistance Murcoing would have his funeral paid for by the state and it would be up to Bruno to organise this. He's also concerned with a series of burglaries on his patch - and it seems that one of them has led to a brutal murder. Full review...
One Night, Far From Here by Julia Wauters
I didn't think they made books like this any more. It's very rare to see a book with transparent pages nowadays. I have literally searched for years, snapping up the odd one from used book sellers. These may have gone out of style now in favour of books with batteries, buttons and bells, but these engage a child in a way no battery operated contraption possibly could. Children are fascinated by the pages, not just my own children, but every child I have seen with these. This book is wonderful for story time, but it is also the type of book that children seek out, quietly turning the pages, lost in their own imagination. Experts are beginning to recognise playing with books as a crucial step in emergent literacy. This is a book children will turn to again and again, experiencing a different adventure each time they lose themselves in the pages, and learning that books offer excitement and adventure. Full review...
Chasing the Dark by Sam Hepburn
Sam Hepburn's book begins, intriguingly, by echoing several well-known tales. There is the orphan foisted on an unwilling aunt and uncle, for example, and then the boy who is forced by a frightening, filthy old convict into bringing him food — not to mention a whole slew of stories about young people who find themselves in dangerous situations because they trespass in private property while attempting to retrieve their less-than-obedient pets. But the plot soon gathers a momentum all its own and all the themes hinted at in the opening pages suddenly merge into a new story which is both exciting and scary. Full review...
Babies, Babies, Babies! by Catherine Anholt and Laurence Anholt
This book is one of those lovely books that covers an awful lot in just a few pages. Full of sweet pictures and gentle rhyming text it takes you on a journey through the sort of things that babies' lives revolve around - food, animals, family, clothes and playing. You can read the text as it's written or you may find that your little ones are happy to just look through the book, talking to you about what they can see, what it reminds them of, and what they'd like to do that day. Full review...
The Story of My Purity by Francesco Pacifico
In Francesco Pacifico's translated Italian novel 'The Story of My Purity', Piero Rosini is a 30 year old, ultraconservative Catholic working for a radical Catholic publishing house. His marriage is devoid of physical contact, and he yearns for his virginal sister-in-law. Largely to escape these longings, he heads for Paris, never the first choice of one seeking to preserve their purity, where he is further tempted by a slightly unlikely group of girls, and one in particular, which is further complicated for him by the fact that she is Jewish. Almost living a separate life in his head, he cannot escape either the intellectual or physical constraints of his old life in Rome. Full review...
Monster Odyssey: The Eye Of Neptune by Jon Mayhew
Dakkar, son of an Indian rajah, is sent to study with Count Oginski after being expelled from several different schools. Initially unhappy, he starts to enjoy learning from the mysterious count, and when Oginski is kindnapped by masked men, he sets out tor rescue his mentor. Can he take on the kidnappers, giant sea monsters, and an evil maniac to save the day? Full review...
Zoe and Beans: Hello Oscar by Chloe Inkpen and Mick Inkpen
Zoe and her dog, Beans, are in the garden when Beans sniffs out a guinea pig. Fortunately Beans is a very unaggressive-looking dog who seems unlikely to finish off any small rodent in one excited bite. His curiosity allows the story to accumulate an ever-more exciting set of roaming pets for Zoe to discover, including, surprisingly, a chameleon. By the time Zoe gets to shouting out her name to a parrot, who insists on calling her Oscar, Beans has disappeared through a hole in the fence. That’s when Oscar, the owner of all these wonderful animals, crawls backwards through the fence and how the friends meet, so I’m guessing this is the first of a series of stories featuring Zoe and Oscar. Full review...
Finding Fortune by Pippa Goodhart
After Ida's mother's death, Grandmama makes plans to separate her from her father and send her to boarding school. When Fa decides to travel to the Klondike to seek gold, though, Ida can't bear to be away from him and steals away to join him. How will the pair survive, and can they find their fortune together? Full review...
Superior by Mark Millar and Leinil Yu
Former basketball star Simon Pooni is now in a wheelchair and blind in one eye - at the age of 12. Mutliple sclerosis has left him in this state, praying for a cure. Then a talking monkey named Orman appears to him and offers him the chance to become a real life version of movie superhero Superior - for a week. But what will happen when the week ends? Full review...
Boy Nobody by Allen Zadoff
Zach Abram has a choice - death or death. He can either choose the death of others or his own death. At the age of 12, his parents were killed and he was abducted by a shadowy American government agency, trained as an assassin and give a simple a choice kill and keep killing or die. He is told that he is a patriot, that those he kills are enemies of the state, and as such deserve to die. But this is very state which will kill him if he makes one mistake. Zach is 16 now, but he isn't Zach anymore, he is whoever the agency wants him to be, and for 2 years he has gone from one target to another. He has used his youth as cover, befriending the children of his future victims and killed without remorse or emotion. But something is different this time, he has started to experience feelings and question his assignment. This will be his most dangerous mission yet, and if he fails he will have more to fear from his own side than his enemies. But if he succeeds what will the cost be to himself? Full review...
The Watcher in the Shadows by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Good and bad luck combined have forced Irene and her family – mother Simone and insular younger brother Dorian – to live in the Normandy village of Blue Bay. It's a way to relieve the poverty her deceased father left them in, as Simone is now housekeeper to Lazarus Jann, a mysterious elderly businessman who lives in a mansion peopled by countless automata, and the isolated shell of what used to be his healthy wife. Irene herself has met the maid's brother, which the village network has immediately inflated into a long-term romance. Dorian is happy enough to be errand-boy for Jann's peculiar correspondence. So far, so interesting. But is there a dark secret to be had with the clockwork toys keeping Jann company? Is the tale of a ghost on the lighthouse islet true? And what else could be implied in the book's very title? In such a small village, for anyone to hold a secret it has to be very big, and very powerful… Full review...
The Society of Timid Souls: Or, How to be Brave by Polly Morland
'I see no reason why the shy and timid in any community couldn’t get together and help each other.'
The above words were uttered in 1943 by a gentleman called Bernard Gabriel. Mr Gabriel was a piano player who founded a unique club, The Society of Timid Souls that encouraged timid performers and fear-wracked musicians to come in out of the cold 'to play, to criticise and be criticised in order to conquer that old bogey of stage fright.' The method evidently worked, as many a timid soul claimed to be cured by these unorthodox methods and club membership grew considerably in the years that followed. Full review...
Diary of a Crush: French Kiss by Sarra Manning
When Edie moves up to Manchester and starts college she’s a little scared – scared to be in a new town with new people, and none of her old friends. But then she meets a trouser-shape by the name of Dylan and everything changes. She develops a huge crush on the handsome but complicated boy, and chronicles her feelings for him in her diary. Well that explains the title, then. Full review...
Noble Conflict by Malorie Blackman
Kaspar believes in the Alliance with a whole heart. Who wouldn't? In the face of terrorist attacks from the Crusader Insurgency, the Alliance's response is non-fatal. Its security forces are equipped with stun guns and captured insurgents are not killed. They're incapacitated, given medical treatment and imprisoned. Guardians like Kaspar are trained to defend themselves against these unprovoked attacks in the least violent way possible. And considering the Crusaders destroyed their own country before attacking Kaspar's, you can see how measured and ethical the Alliance's response seems. Full review...
Zoe and Beans: Look at me! by Chloe Inkpen and Mick Inkpen
This is the first board book in a Zoe and Beans series in development, so it will be played with and handled by very young children. Babies and toddlers will like the cheery pics, friendly faces and Beans, the faithful playmate-dog. I loved Beans. He conveyed all the resignation of a household mutt dominated by an ever-demanding toddler. Full review...
Monster, Be Good! by Natalie Marshall
No-one need be frightened of these beasties, and it’s not a story about conquering fears. Instead, these are miscreant monsters who are put in their places with some very firm guidance. Children will recognise the orders instantly, for parents come out with them in varying tones of tiredness, resignation or irritation on a daily basis. In fact, I have the sneaky feeling that the author is on the side of the adults. Full review...
Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam by Tracey Corderoy and Steven Lenton
Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam are two dogs with half baked idea for what thy think will be the perfect crime - despite their previous failures. The dogs prepare a wonderful feast to lure their intended victims out, making cupcakes, pies, buns and every sort of baked treat you can imagine. They have a wonderful time baking, but all the while they are planning to rob all of their guests when the party is in full swing. The feast is a huge success, but the robbery is another disaster. A small act of kindness and a heart felt apology results in forgiveness, and a wonderful idea for a new career. Full review...
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons
If you or I wanted to write a story about an imaginary figure who began as a novelist and poet, then became acclaimed as a singer-songwriter in the swinging sixties, made and lost a fortune, became a monk, and returned to a musical career at an age when most mortals are well into retirement, and found himself not only more popular than ever but also playing to the largest audiences in his entire life, it would be dismissed as total fantasy. Nobody could make it up – and nobody needs to, because in a nutshell that is the life (so far) of Leonard Cohen, the subject of this biography and surely one of the music business’s most unique figures. Full review...
The Deception Artist by Fayette Fox
This story is all about the characters. Plot-wise, it is set in 1980s suburban America. There are no explosions or even fairy tale adventures in this book. It’s just the simple adventure of life when you’re a child and learning new things every day. Ivy accounts her day-to-day life with an extreme attention to the strangest details, just like a child. As well as explaining what she has learnt in school, she describes her daydreams, her friends and her family. When her dad loses his job, her parents start arguing and she is worried they might have to get a divorce like sad Sara in her class. And not only that, they might have to return their new TV. Full review...
The Dead Girls Detective Agency by Suzy Cox
The Dead Girls Detective Agency takes us with Charlotte Feldman, an average school girl who is pushed under a train and wakes up to find that the afterlife for murdered teenagers is a downtown hotel from where they must solve their cases and get the killer to confess in order to move on. I’d call it a fresh and original take on the whodunit if I hadn't seen variants of it before. However, it does have individuality. The sole condition for moving on is solving the murder – there’s no pansying around finding absolution or atoning for transgressions. Full review...
Jelly Cooper: Alien by Lynne Thomas
Jelly Cooper is just turning fourteen. But excitement about her birthday is taking second place to sheer exhaustion. For weeks, Jelly has been having recurring nightmares that leave her shaken and afraid. And it's all taking a toll on her - her friends Humphrey and Agatha are beginning to get worried. Add the night terrors to the figurative nightmare of school, a crush on a boy so cool and gorgeous that Jelly sees no world in which he'd fancy her back, and a cheerleader out to humiliate her at every turn, and you can see that Jelly's life could be better. Full review...
The Queen's Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle
The recently widowed Lady Katherine Latymer falls in love with aristocratic Thomas Seymour, a man more a stranger to fidelity than to a lady's bed. It's not a good idea, especially when Henry VIII announces he'd like to make use of her renowned nursing skills by marrying her. As Katherine navigates the seas of palace survival there's a lot that can sink her: Katherine's wish for Henry to return to the original protestant faith as he perceived it, her desire to bring the King's children together under one roof and the plotting of those who would like to see her head disconnected at the neck to name but three. Meanwhile the shadow of Snape Castle hangs over Katherine's step-daughter Meg, haunting her hopes, her dreams and her everyday life to a degree that only the maid Dot understands. Full review...
The Elimination by Rithy Panh
Three years ago I went to Cambodia. I went to S21, because you cannot go to Phnom Penh and not go to the former high school Tuol Sleng (Tuol Slav Prey as it had been) and see what it became. I went to Choeung Ek, because you cannot NOT know about the killing fields, and you cannot really know about them until you have stood there. Full review...
Silver by Chris Wooding
'Silver' has a large ant with silver circuits on the cover, and while there are no actual ants in this book, the illustration is very well suited. This books puts a unique twist on the ever popular zombie genre. Instead of living corpses, we have nanobots which can turn humans into machines. They possess a swarm intelligence similar to ants. This sounds far fetched but a great deal of progress has been made in research currently being conducted with just this in mind - to create nanobots with swarm intelligence - a phenomenon well known in the natural sciences in which a less intelligent organism is capable of highly intelligent behaviour through a hive mind. It would be impossible for scientists to control hundreds or thousands of nanobots independently - so the idea is to control a few and have these control the rest. Of course there would always be safeguards on this type of technology and there were safeguards in the book as well - they just didn't work. Full review...
The Chocolate Box Girls: Coco Caramel by Cathy Cassidy
Coco is the youngest of the Tanberry sisters but very much her own person. For her, life is about animals and she loves going to the stables for riding lessons even if she does overestimate her own abilities. She was hoping that she could pick up a job there a couple of evenings a week so that she could have extra lessons, but it went instead to form-mate Lawrie Marshall and they're not each other's biggest fans. Well, they're not until the pony which Coco has set her heart on is sold to someone who doesn't seem to have the animal's best interest at the front of his mind. Coco and Lawrie unite to save Caramel and another pony which is just about to foal - but how will they cope? Full review...
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison
Ben hasn't worked for a while and so, deciding on a career change, trains to become a caregiver. His first client is Trev, a 20 year old Duchene Muscular Dystrophy sufferer who hasn't the sunniest of dispositions. In fact Trev is angry, self-centred and goes through caregivers like a knife through milk. However, Ben, needing a job, holds on tight and tries to encourage Trev to live a little. Eventually Trev complies and dictates a way forward: a road trip. A road trip with a housebound, ill, angry person is not what Ben had in mind at all. Meanwhile it gradually becomes clear to us that Trev isn't the only one who has to learn to live a little differently. Full review...
The Boy with Two Heads by Andy Mulligan
Richard is a nice kid. Dutiful, hardworking, rule-abiding, he makes both parents and teachers proud. But one day, everything changes. Richard wakes up with a painful lump on his neck. Rushed to hospital, his parents get some devastating news from the specialists. Richard is growing a second head. Yowzer. When the head - Rikki - emerges, Richard, his parents, his teachers and his friends, all do their best to cope. But Rikki isn't like Richard. He's spiteful. He's angry. He's rude. He says the most unsayable things and he causes a great deal of trouble. Full review...
Goodnight Buffy: Loving a Lakeland Terrier by Thomasina Price
Most dog owners will confess that even after a lifetime of ownership there is one dog who holds their heart. Often the close bond has been forged because of the dog’s ill health, although it never seems to be completely one-sided: an interdependence develops and dog and human seem to exist as one. The dog who stole my heart was a Rhodesian Ridgeback - for Thomasina Price it was Buffy the Lakeland Terrier. She had a traumatic start to life, found hiding in a shop doorway in Blackpool she was taken in by a young woman, but she, in turn contracted ovarian cancer and at the age of two Buffy came to what was at least her third home when she was fostered by Thomasina Price’s sister. Full review...