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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The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher
In space, no one can hear you scream and for the skeleton crew of the U-Star Coast City this is redundant anyway as no one cares if they do. Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland is about to start early retirement, but he is given one last job overseeing the dismantling of this space station that orbits a forbidding star that gives off an eerie radiation. With only a couple of hundred people left on the massive station, it is pretty quiet. This makes it easier to hear the things going bump in the night – a night that continues 24 hours. Full review...
The Bluffer's Guide to Golf (Bluffer's Guides) by Adam Ruck
The fly leaf suggests that this Bluffer's Guide is the way to instantly acquire all the knowledge which you need to pass as an expert in the arcane and labyrinthine world of golf. There's quite a bit there that I'd agree on - the rules (and to an unfortunate extent the attitudes) are arcane and they seem to take a lifetime to master, but there's a surprising amount of information tucked away inside this little book. What I might quibble with is whether or not you would pass as an expert (which suggests that you're something of a con man): there's enough detail here to give you a solid grounding without needing to bluff. Full review...
Convertible Spaceship by Claire Philip and Belinda Gallagher
When is a book, not a book? When it is also a playmat and also a spaceship. With ‘Convertible Spaceship’ you get all three; a book that folds out into a playmat or into a spaceship. Can I hear the excitement from here? Full review...
The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson
1727: The Marshalsea prison is hell on Earth and a Damoclesian sword over the heads of prospective debtors. Tom Hawkins, gambler and bon viveur, has always stayed one step ahead of it until, ironically, the day of his big win. He's mugged, his winnings are stolen and Tom's hurled into the depths of Sheol itself. Is it as bad as he thought? Worse! Not only does he have to survive the cruel and brutal deprivations but a murderer walks the prison's corridors. Full review...
The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day (Science of Discworld 4) by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
The wizards of the Unseen University are custodians of Roundworld. It may be different from their own turtle-carried Discworld (it's round for a start!) but they're still rather fond of it. However, there's a problem: the Church of the Latter Day Omnians have taken a shine to it too and would like to claim it. A court case will decide the winner, a court case that will have a guest spectator. For Marjorie Daw (yes, like the nursery rhyme) has arrived from Roundworld just in time. What on Earth will happen next? Full review...
Land Where I Flee by Prajwal Parajuly
Chitralekha Guraamaa is preparing for her 84th birthday celebrations - her Chaurasi - and her grandchildren (or rather grandadults as they are now) arrive from around the world. They went away in search of a better life but better comes at a cost. Baghwati married beneath her caste, Manasa is resentful of an apparently helpless disabled father-in-law and Agastaya hides a man-sized secret. All have one thing in common: the dread of facing their manipulative, powerful grandmother and their inability to get on with each other. Worlds may collide but let the festivities commence! Full review...
Kindred by Octavia E Butler
Life is a nightmare for black women (and indeed men) back in the southern USA in 1815. For Dana that's just history as she lives over a century away with her husband in their new LA apartment. However one day everything changes: Dana starts to feel faint, the edges of her modern life blur and she's back in the era that can take more than her liberty. She knows her time travel is somehow linked to plantation owner's son Rufus but that doesn't help. In fact its knowledge that could make matters worse. Full review...
Everland by Rebecca Hunt
There have been two expeditions to the Antarctic island of Everland a century apart. The ill-fated 1913 trip of Dinners, Napps and Millet-Bass is primitive by today's standards. The 2012 expedition is better equipped, better prepared and arrives at a better time of year so all bodes well for Decker, Brix and Jess. But despite the differences both expeditions have things in common. Both groups carry secrets, some become obvious but others remain behind waiting to become discovered. Full review...
Love Monster and the Last Chocolate by Rachel Bright
Love Monster has been away on holiday, and he's just come home with that 'holiday's over' feeling, only to find that someone has left a large box of chocolates on his front doorstep! Who left them there? And why? And would it be okay to eat them by himself or, actually, should he really be sharing them with his friends? Full review...
Never ask a Dinosaur to Dinner by Gareth Edwards and Guy Parker-Rees
I don't expect you've ever thought about asking a dinosaur to dinner. In case it ever crosses your mind to do so, this helpful book informs you of the probable consequences of such a rash action. It will also prove helpful should you be thinking about using a tiger as a towel or, heaven forbid, if you wondered if it would be okay to share your toothbrush with a shark! Full review...
Far From You by Tess Sharpe
I have no idea where to begin on this one. I'm not even sure I should attempt a plot summary. Ultra-condensed review is basically along the lines of buy this right now - top five of the last decade for me, maybe top three. Full review...
Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li's Kinder Than Solitude opens with a death but the story goes back much further than that. When orphaned Ruyu arrives in Beijing to stay with a distant relation to go to school, she finds herself sharing a bedroom with the rebellious Shaoai and going to school with the serious Moran and her friend Boyang. Ruyu is not an easy character and her arrival seems to disrupt everyone's lives even though Moran and Boyang look after her. However an 'accident' changes everything. All four of them live with the consequences of what happened either physically or mentally. Moran and Ruyu both leave China and settle in the US, while Boyang and Shaoai stay in China. The book switches between the events of the past and the present. Full review...
Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom by William Sutcliffe
Here is the warning for reviewers who have received a copy of Circus of Thieves:
'If you are chronologically vulnerable, easily confused, or allergic to hiccups in the space-time continuum, do not attempt to read unless you are wearing thick sunglasses or a snorkel with mask - flippers optional.'
Ahem. I'm guilty on all counts. I don't own thick sunglasses or a snorkel with a mask. I read it anyway. So sue me! Full review...
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
Ava Lavender is the youngest in a long line of strange women. Her mother is strange. Her grandmother is strange. Her aunts were strange. But Ava, perhaps, is the strangest of all. Because she was born with wings. In The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, this winged girl narrates the story of her family and how they came to live in the magical Seattle neighbourhood where her grandmother runs a bakery.
It's a tale of magic but it's also a tale of tragedy and disaster and death and lost love. Girls turn into canaries. Ghosts follow living siblings. Pastries cause shared emotions. And as she tells the story, Ava tries to make sense of herself. She isn't normal. Is normal better? Or do her wings come with a special destiny? Full review...
To Bed On Thursdays by Jenny Selby-Green
The advert asked for a young man, but seventeen year old Jenny Selby-Green applied anyway. She met all the other attributes, and the alternative would be having to take whatever job she was offered via the Labour Exchange, seeing as she’d already rejected the maximum of two offers under the 1950s Direction of Labour. And so, she became a journalist, or journalist of sorts anyway. Full review...
Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley
Many eleven year olds would be excited at the thought of a five-hundred-year-old tomb being opened to (hopefully) reveal the bones of the local saint, but Flavia de Luce had what might almost be called a professional interest. Before the opening of the tomb she'd been associated with four dead bodies (to say that she was instrumental in solving the murders sounds just a little too much like bragging doesn't it?) but this time she really wasn't expecting to find Mr Collicut, the church organist who had been missing for six weeks. Still, there he was, dead - and wearing a gas mask. Full review...
The Autistic Brain by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek
Temple Grandin is a lady of many labels: professor of animal science, bestselling author, consultant, activist, engineer, public speaker and subject of an award-winning biopic. She also happens to be autistic, a label she earned at a very early age back in the days before the majority of people knew what autism was. She describes the timing of her diagnosis as fortuitous; only a few years later and the accepted ‘treatment’ for autistic children was removal from their parents and life in an institution. Full review...
Where Do Camels Belong?: The story and science of invasive species by Ken Thompson
Much of what passes for invasion biology is poorly supported hype. So says our author, and you can easily fall into agreeing with him after reading his book. In much the same way the Daily Mail et al have their own attitudes to immigrants of the human kind, so it would appear do many people have similar notions about immigrant species. And the end results might be much more damaging. Full review...
The Collected Works of A J Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
A J Fikry is not having a good time. He's lost his wife to a car crash, and he's not making that much money. The book store he runs, stuck out on a limb on a quiet island community, is too remote to turn a profit year-round, and he has just dismissed the latest publisher's rep to turn up at his door, partly because her previous counterpart, an inconsequential part of A J's life when all is said and done, had died and he didn't know about it. But his bad time is about to get a lot worse, as the one thing he owns worth the most – a rare book, more valuable than his house, his business, anything – is about to vanish. Which bizarrely will cause several major changes to his one-person household… Full review...
The Last Boat Home by Dea Brovig
Then: On the farm above a remote Norwegian hamlet, in 1976, schoolgirl Else is waiting for her mother to return through the wind and the snow. She is also clutching at the kitchen table as the contractions worsen.
Now: fast forward to 2009. Else now lives in the town the hamlet has grown into, on the back of oil money. Her daughter has a daughter of her own, but still spends many a night not coming home. She must have met someone the eleven-year-old granddaughter says matter-of-factly. Else has made a life for herself, running a spa, looking after her daughter and her granddaughter. A quiet life, but not such a bad one. Full review...
Skeletons by Jane Fallon
Jen doesn’t have the happiest of families, so she’s immediately drawn to her husband Jason’s. Luckily they welcome her with open arms and she’s soon like a fourth child to Charles and Amelia. So when she discovers a secret that could tear lives apart, it’s as devastating to her as if it were her own parents. She has a choice to make: share the burden and ruin relationships in the process, or keep it to herself and shoulder it all alone. Full review...
Steaming to Victory: How Britain's Railways Won the War by Michael Williams
Soon after the end of the First World War, the British railways entered what is generally regarded as their golden age, with the heyday of the ‘Big Four’ companies, the LNER (London and North Eastern), LMS (London, Midlands and Scottish), GWR (Great Western) and Southern Railways. By 1939 they were beginning to lose their virtual monopoly of land-based transport to lorries, buses and coaches. Nevertheless, as war became increasingly inevitable, they played a vital part in the preparation to keep the country moving, keeping industry and the war effort supplied, helping in the evacuation of Dunkirk, or as their press office put it in a pamphlet of 1943, 'tackling the biggest job in transport history'. Full review...
Sesame Seade Mysteries 1: Sleuth on Skates by Clementine Beauvais and Sarah Horne
Eleven-year-old Sesame Seade has been waiting all her life to be a super sleuth, so when a student journalist disappears and no-one seems all that bothered, she decides to solve the case herself. Can she track down the vanished girl before her parents work out what's going on? Full review...
Never Ending by Martyn Bedford
Sent to a clinic which specialises in using unconventional methods to help people get over grief, Shiv is forced to confront the death of her beloved younger brother Declan. Like everyone else in the clinic, she’s convinced that she caused the death herself. Will she finally find the peace that her parents are seeking for her, even if she doesn't think she deserves it herself? Full review...
The Bluffer's Guide to Etiquette (Bluffer's Guides) by William Hanson
If you ask people what they fear most in any social situation most will tell you that it's not knowing how to behave. They'll be fine about the basics, but it's those little niceties - how to introduce yourself, what to ask for as an aperitif, how to address someone, for instance which can suddenly reveal you as a parvenu. William Hanson gives us a quick trip through the essentials in a book which is very readable and - in places - hilariously funny. Full review...
A Little Piece of England: A tale of self-sufficiency by John Jackson
Here at Bookbag we're great fans of John Jackson. We loved his Tales for Great Grandchildren and Brahma Dreaming: Legends from Hindu Mythology so it was something of a treat to meet the author on his own ground, so to speak. Originally published as A Bucket of Nuts and a Herring Net: The Birth of a Spare-Time Farm this is actually Jackson's first book and thirty-five years later we're delighted that it's been republished in hardback complete with the original black-and-white illustrations by Val Biro. Full review...