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{{newreview
|author= Aldous Huxley
|title= The Genius and the Goddess
|rating= 4
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= So, three books in, I've now got to grips with the idea that Huxley doesn't so much want to tell a story as expound his ideas. Once you know that, it makes it easier to choose whether to read him or not. On balance, I have come down on the side of not – I won't be dashing out to work my way through the rest of his output the way I want to with, say, Nevil Shute, or George Orwell.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784870366</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Geoff Rodkey
|summary=War books and anti-war books, in my mind, have a lot in common and only a couple of easy things need be changed to turn one to the other. This is dressed as an anti-war book, but here is the lead character surviving against all odds – the platoon whittled down several times while he and his few friends go strong; here he is overcoming all kinds of difficulty and adversity and still coming out the other end; here he is doing proper heroic deeds – or his colleagues saving the day at the last minute – and the war carries onwards towards its inevitable end. The difference perhaps is in the minutiae of what those difficulties and deeds need be, with the anti-war book having a simple honesty about them and their overall worth that the gung-ho, militaristic piece would patently lack. And when you face the guts and gore of the kind of warfare on these pages, you don't really expect jingoism and 'hoo-rah!' attitudes. No, even if the DNA is pretty much the same, the result here is definitely, grimly and firmly anti-war.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0297609769</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Meres
|title=The World of Norm: 9: May Still Be Charged
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=If you ever wondered what Harry Enfield's Kevin going ''UUH, that's SO unFAIR!!'' but stretched to the length of a book sounds like then wonder no longer. Norm is only twelve but he already knows life is completely unfair. He has a horrid girl next door who annoyingly wants to spend time talking with him, he has two awful younger brothers, he has school, and he has a world of parents and adults around him all wittering on in the most weird, antique phrasing. They don't help him understand the world at all, just lay all the world's problems on his shoulders and move on. This morning in concern, for instance, Norm has hardly moved at all – he's still in bed when he's been grounded. His parents have looked up his phone bill online, and it's rather long. As long as Norm's entire list of woes, perhaps – and therefore is just one more thing that's a burden. And as life is so unfair, the only way out is to wait for his parents to decide between him paying them back or grounding him for a month – until something even worse, more unwelcome and more unfair gets mentioned…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408334119</amazonuk>
}}

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