Difference between revisions of "Book Reviews From The Bookbag"

Christopher Bowden's latest novel is a patient untangling of a seemingly ordinary woman's life, carried out by her nephew after she has died. The aunt who always provided a safe harbour and a little bit of indulgence to a young nephew had had a much more interesting life than that nephew Stephen had ever realised and it seems to him an obligation to find it all out. Full Review

Review of

22 Ideas About The Future by Benjamin Greenaway and Stephen Oram (Editors)

Science Fiction

Our future will be more complex than we expected. Instead of flying cars, we got night-vision killer drones and automated elderly care with geolocation surveillance bracelets to track grandma.

I've got a couple of confessions to make. I'm not keen on short stories as I find it easy to read a few stories and then forget to return to the book. There's got to be a very compelling hook to keep me engaged. Then there's science fiction: far too often it's the technology which takes centre stage along with the world-building. It's human beings who fascinate me: the technology and the world scape are purely incidental. So, what did I think of a book of twenty-two science fiction short stories? Well, I loved it. Full Review

Review of

The Girls Who Disappeared by Claire Douglas

Back in November 1998, Olivia Rutherford was driving her three friends home after a night out. As she passed through the darkly-wooded Devil's Corridor, a figure appeared in the road. Olivia swerved to avoid him and the car smashed into a tree, leaving her trapped. When she regained consciousness her three friends had disappeared. Ralph Middleton, who lived in the woods helped her before the police and ambulance arrived. But what had happened to Sally Thorne, Tamsin Cole and Hetty Riding? Their disappearance would be yet another mysterious happening in the Stafferbury area of Wiltshire. It was thought of as Avebury's poor relation. Full Review

Review of

Noema by Dael Akkerman

This is a story about some things that happened to me about twelve thousand years ago.

Maya is a young girl living in a hunter-gatherer village during the Mesolithic era. Climate change is occurring, the Sea of Grass encroaches further and further into Maya's forest home, and food is becoming more and more scarce. What to do? Can the law givers in the federation of villages muster peaceful ways to cope? Can the Traveller, a spiritual figure who interprets the wisdom of All Life, provide solutions? Full Review

Review of

Azabu Getaway (Detective Hiroshi) by Michael Pronko

You can't put 'good at golf' on your tombstone, can you?

When we meet Patrick Walsh he's outside his family's home in the Azabu district of Tokyo, hoping that his key will still work but prepared to break in if it doesn't. He's there to remove his daughters, Jenna and Kiri, and take them back to Honolulu. It's a quick day trip, with just one purpose in mind. Patrick's employed by Nine Dragons Wealth Management and for the past year, he's been working in Wyoming because the privacy laws there are conducive to the business he's in. His wife, Miyuki, hasn't been in Wyoming with him and is in the process of divorcing him after photographs sent to her anonymously suggested that Patrick had not been faithful to her. Patrick's plan didn't work out and he finds himself on the run in Tokyo with the two girls. Full Review

Review of

The Night Watch (D S Max Craigie) by Neil Lancaster

Fergus Grigor went out for a run. The lawyer was on his honeymoon but his body was found dashed to pieces below the cliffs at Dunnett Head. Was it suicide, or did he - for some reason - climb over the stone wall and fall to his death? Or was he pushed? On balance, it looked like an accident but then his 'accident' was linked to the deaths of others associated with him. Scott Paterson was released after a 'not-proven' verdict meant that Scotland's most notorious criminal wasn't facing life imprisonment. Paterson was Grigor's last client. Full Review

Review of

Papa on the Moon by Marco North

Literary Fiction

Some frogs had gotten into the well.

Walter stood waist-deep in the fragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of their eggs wove around him, sticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down at the strange noise of the buckets as he filled them.

How is that for an opening? The style of this novel in the form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to wistful and musing, turning on a sixpence. And author Marco North, who has the most wonderful turn of phrase, starts as he means to go on. Full Review

Review of

A Practical Present for Philippa Pheasant by Briony May Smith

For Sharing

Philippa Pheasant was tired of nearly getting squished as she tried to cross the Old Oak Road. She wrote to the mayor about the problem but didn't even get a reply. Philippa wasn't a bird to sit back on her tail feathers when there was a problem which needed solving: she saw the benefits of the lollipop lady at the school crossing and decided that she would set up something similar herself. Her uniform and lollipop stick were both a little amateur to start with but the benefits were obvious. All the animals used the crossing and Hedgehog was even trained up to provide a safe path overnight. Full Review

Review of

The Last Girl to Die by Helen Fields

Seventeen-year-old Adriana Clarke's family moved to Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull, in search of a new life. It was a bit of a change from Las Vegas, but the family seemed determined and Adriana had shown signs of developing a social life - until she disappeared. The local police demonstrated little interest in the case (could it have been because Adriana's mother is obviously Latino?) and Rob and Isabella Clarke called in Sadie Levesque from Banff, who had successfully tracked down missing teenagers. Brandon, Adriana's twin, was upset and surly. Four-year-old Luna just knew that she missed her big sister. It took four days, but Sadie found Adriana in Mackinnon's Cave. She'd been murdered and it looked like a ritual killing. Full Review

Review of

The Rising Tide (D I Vera Stanhope) by Ann Cleeves

It's fifty years since a group of teenagers went on a weekend retreat to Holy Island. Some of them found the Only Connect course transformative and they've been coming back for a reunion every five years since then. There was a tragedy at the first reunion when Isobel Hall drove off the island too close to high tide and her car was swept away, but her younger sister, Louisa, has returned with the group each year as her husband, Ken, was one of the original teenagers. Ken now has Alzheimer's and he's a shadow of the man he used to be. Philip Robson now a priest, always gets there early as he likes to have some quiet time alone in the chapel. Annie Laidler lives locally and she provides much of the food: her deli is famous in the area. Full Review

Review of

The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly

The Golden Bones is going to follow me around for the rest of my life. How can I trust anyone? It all leads back to you!

Nell didn't want to go to the reunion to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Golden Bones. She'd had no benefit from it - in fact, it had made her life precarious and unbelievably challenging. I'd better explain. The Golden Bones was a treasure quest book painted and written by Frank and Cora Churcher. The story revolved around murdered Elinore whose golden and bejewelled bones were hidden around the country. The clues - some of them quite tortuous - were disguised in the words and pictures of the book - and all the parts were discovered except for the pelvis. As with such quests, some people were obsessive and the theories became more and more outlandish. Full Review

Review of

The Story of Greenriver by Holly Webb

Silken and Sedge, for all their differences, have a lot in common. Silken is a girl whose father is the Master Builder of what might be the finest beaver lodge on the Greenriver. Unfortunately she is also a kind of runt figure, and as a result is patronised, and given the most tokenistic tasks when it comes to fetching wood and shoring the dam up. She also stands out for the unique artistic ability to sing. Otters like Sedge sing, but he too, as the son of the lady of the holt, has pressure on him to be a bit less feckless and more attentive to class. He, after all, will eventually inherit the job of keeping the otters safe from the wolf that both animal species fear the most, and from dreaded events like a Dark Spring. Full Review

Review of

Into Goblyn Wood by Anna Kemp and David Wyatt

Meet Hazel. For the last nine of her eleven years, she has been stuck as a foundling in a horrid, Victorian institution, generally peeling vegetables or acting as a servant. She'd arrived at the place at the same time as Pete, and they're inseparably good friends now, until a chance for them both to escape, and enter the outside world, does not go to plan. There had always been the idea of a life idyllic in the nearby forests, Goblyn Wood, and a tribe of Wild Children, but none of that comes to pass, as Hazel finds herself in the care of a professor at the Natural History Museum. But life with him is not anything like what she might have expected it to be – and Hazel is determined to return to the Woods, restore her friendship with Pete – and to work out just what is going on in the forest, both the light and the shade, and the deathly dark... Full Review

Review of

Hope to Die (D I Fawley) by Cara Hunter

It began rather oddly. There was a 999 call suggesting that a shot had been fired in an isolated house but the call hadn't come from the householder. A couple of PCs went to make certain that everything was alright and it took quite a while for the elderly householder to answer the door. He somewhat reluctantly told them that they'd better come in. In the kitchen there was a body on the floor: the head had been blown off with a shotgun and the corpse was holding a knife in its right hand. Richard Swann told the police that he'd heard sounds of an intruder and had come downstairs to investigate. The ignorant young lout had called him Grandad and come at him with a knife. Swann had shot him in self-defence. Full Review

Review of

Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal

Autobiography

As Philip Larkin so eloquently put it, “They f*** you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do” Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal focuses on this idea of parenthood and the bonds that bind family. This book is a memoir focussing on the author’s formative years as a teenager living in a lower class area of Birmingham. Her father is from St. Kitts in the Caribbean and her mother is an Irish woman ostracized by her family for becoming pregnant by and marrying a black man. This intersectionality plays a large role in the autobiography. Kit De Waal faces multiple hurdles due to her race, her class and her gender. Her parents loom large and are written with care, love, and the kind of anger only a child can express to their parents. Full Review

Review of

Dark Music by David Lagercrantz

How far from the original can a book allegedly inspired by Sherlock Holmes get before the allusion breaks? This does have a wonder-mind at the heart of what little investigating is going on, but there is not a lot that Conan Doyle fans could really pin down as on their exact wavelength. For one, the main focus of the narrative, Micaela, is no John Watson MD. She's a Chilean in the Stockholm police, put on a murder squad as she knows the prime suspect of old, in a case where a referee of a junior football match was found stoned to death shortly after the match, and just outside the stadium. Beppe, the suspect, was drunkenly antagonistic to the ref during the closing minutes, but refuses to admit anything, through days and weeks of interrogation. When some disreputable coppers (the kind who dismiss anything their superior comes up with, the kind who think they can judge Micaela from her fringe and how she might dress – that kind) are told to go and see what brainbox Professor Rekke thinks of it all, she can only smirk when he says Beppe is innocent and the investigation is a shambles. But taken off the case, she can no longer help solve the crime, and with Rekke the most erratic, irregular kind of guy, she can't get his full verdict on it all. Until, that may be, she manages to stop him in the middle of an apparent suicide attempt... Full Review

Review of

The Calculations of Rational Men by Daniel Godfrey

It's the 10th of December 1962 when we first meet Dr Joseph Marr. Just to put what happens in context, the Cuban missile crisis is still very fresh in people's minds. The world has barely had a chance to breathe out. But for Joe Marr, it's not the missile crisis that's at the front of his mind. He's been convicted of murder. With the current state of medical knowledge, it's hard to think otherwise than that the prosecution would never have been brought but Joe Marr has spent his first few days in HMP Queen's Bench, a relatively new prison. He's just getting used to his roommate, Mervyn, and learning to be wary of the McArthur brothers. Full Review

Review of

The Bone Road by N E Solomons

Heather Bishop, the former Olympic cyclist, flew to Bosnia to surprise her boyfriend, cycling journalist Ryan Mackinnon. She even took their bikes so they could have a few days' break in the region. It was a little worrying that he didn't seem exactly pleased to see her: she even wondered if he had a woman in the hotel room. Heather had to give up competitive cycling after a traumatic brain injury four years before: she was still fit but her reactions and her memory were not up to the standard she would need to race again. Sometimes she couldn't be certain about what she had or hadn't done and she simply couldn't cope in difficult situations. She didn't entirely trust herself. Full Review

Review of

The Accidental Stowaway by Judith Eagle

Patch is a little girl who has been passed from one relation to another, until it seems that there is nobody left for her to go to. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother ran away. The family lawyer, after consultation with ‘someone’, arranges for her to go to a school in Liverpool, but on her arrival there, she gets caught up in an adventure with a little boy called Turo who works on a steamship. During a chase with him (when she is both trying to get her rollerskate back and running away from the police!) she winds up on the steamship hiding in a lifeboat, and before she knows it, the ship has left the docks and she is an accidental stowaway! Full Review

Review of

Super Easy Knitting for Beginners by Carri Hammett

Crafts

I learned to knit in the nineteen-fifties: it wasn't a choice, it was a requirement. Girls learned to knit and to embroider and boys did wood and metal work. My knitting wa accompanied by a lot of criticism and quite a few tears: it was a long time before I realised that there was pleasure to be had in the skill. Nearly seventy years later it's the only thing that keeps my hands at all supple. The turning point was a booklet published by Patons which gave all the basics and some patterns. I've been looking for something simple to recommend to people who'd like to master the skill. So, how did Super Easy Knitting For Beginners work out? Full Review

Review of

Alice Eclair, Spy Extraordinaire! A Recipe for Trouble by Sarah Todd Taylor

Meet Alice Eclair. A perfect eye and very careful hands have made her one of Paris's best young cake makers and decorators, making sure her mother's establishment is a classy affair. Not bad for a thirteen year old. Oh, and a perfect eye and a very careful handler and remote trainer have also made sure she is a very competent young spy. Her first real mission will be to chase a traitor across the country – working behind the scenes on a posh sleeper train to the south of France, and hoping against hope that she can prevent documents allowing foreign agents to creep into the country from getting into nefarious hands. But while nobody would have her down as a spy, can she possibly leave behind her rookie status and find the baddy? Full Review

Review of

Super Easy Quilting for Beginners by Editors of Quarry Books

Crafts

I learned patchworking from necessity: old or outgrown clothes needed to be turned into something new and usable when I was in my twenties. It would be a while before it became a pleasure rather than a chore but I've never felt completely at home with quilting. I needed something a little more stylish than my usual buttons or knots. Super Easy Quilting for Beginners seemed like a good place to start. So, how did it stack up? Full Review

Review of

Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism by Alexander Adams

Politics and Society

Can art ever be apolitical? All art is political because art is not made in a vacuum. It is made by people. Antonio Gramsci stated that ‘’Every man… contributes to modifying the social environment in which he develops’’. Therefore, all art must be political, even implicitly. Alexander Adams in his new book ‘Artivism: The Battle for Museum in the Era of Postmodernism’ is adamant that art is freer when it is art for art’s sake. The recent trend of so-called artivism has caused artists to become more overtly political (read: left wing). Their seemingly grass roots movements have been astroturfed by large “left-wing” donors and media elites hoping to create a more globalist and progressive regime. Or at least that’s what Alexander Adams believes. Full Review

Review of

The Cliff House by Chris Brookmyre

Many of them didn't know each other, one of them didn't know anybody, including Jen, one of them quite possibly hated her, and two of them definitely hated each other. What could possibly go wrong?

That's the round-up for Jen's hen party which is to take place on Clachan Geal an island just south of Barra. They're all staying in The Cliff House, hosted by Lauren, and it's the utmost in luxury living but then Jen can afford it. She's just sold her muffin business for millions but is staying on to run it. She's got her doubts about the long weekend: fiance Zaki Hussain has been acting a little strangely of late and wouldn't explain to her what the email he was hurriedly deleting was about. Added to that, he's just about forced her to bring his sister, Samira, whom Jen's never met, on the trip, on the grounds that she's been stuck at home with newborn twins for the last six months and desperately needs the break. Full Review

Review of

Charles, The Alternative Prince: An Unauthorised Biography by Edzard Ernst

Biography

For over forty years, Prince Charles has been an ardent supporter of alternative medicine and complementary therapies. Charles, The Alternative Prince critically assesses the Prince's opinions, beliefs and aims against the background of the scientific evidence. There are few instances of his beliefs being vindicated and his relentless promotion of treatments which have no scientific support has done considerable damage to the reputation of a man who is proud of his refusal to apply evidence-based, logical reasoning to his ambitions. Full Review

Review of

The Daves Next Door by Will Carver

Five strangers come together in one moment as a suicide bomber prepares to detonate his vest on a London tube line. As their fates overlap, the story is told in backwards order, leading up to the fateful moment. Full Review

Review of

The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell

In July 2019, Jason Mott was mud larking on the banks of the River Thames when he came across a bag of what appeared to be human bones. Detective Inspector Samuel Owusu and Saffron Brown from forensics were there to investigate. The bones were indeed human: a young woman had been killed by a blow to the head many years ago - probably as long as twenty-five - but the bones had not been in the river longer than a year. There was no identification but the bag contained vegetation, some of which was quite unusual. Full Review

Review of

Partitions of Unity by Jennifer Mason