Difference between revisions of "Book Reviews From The Bookbag"

India is fourteen and, like many teenagers, doesn't see much outside her own narrow sphere of interest. She's spiky and defensive and reacts to any setbacks with anger and aggression, usually turned against her family. But inside, like many teenagers, she's rather lonely and lost. Finn is twelve and not as good at basketball as he'd like. He's not as popular as he'd like either. But he is honest and loyal, and he longs for a chance to prove it. Mouse is six and a bit of an oddity. She has an imaginary friend and a brain the size of a planet. This doesn't always make her easy to get along with. Full review...

Queen Victoria's Knickers by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley

For Sharing

A message from the palace has arrived! It's from Queen Victoria, and as mum reads it she cries out 'The Queen wants my knickers!' Queen Victoria, ruler of the British Empire, has riches galore, but she has no knickers, so the dressmaker's family set about making her some. Full review...

Letters From Home by Kristina McMorris

Liz Stephens accompanies a couple of friends to a GI social occasion. She's content and already 'spoken for' so she wouldn't normally be here where essentially most people are foot-loose and fancy-free. But she's promised her good friend Betty to come along. As the evening progresses with lots of singing and dancing, things become both interesting and just a little dangerous. But for whom? Who are we talking about here? Liz bumps into one of the many GIs present. His name's Morgan. An instant spark is there - or so someone believes. But they both end the evening on a less-than-satisfactory note. Liz returns to her life with her soon-to-be-fiance and Morgan goes off to war. Full review...

Mixed Blood by Roger Smith

Crime

I reviewed Smith's Wake Up Dead and after reading the blurb on the back cover, this book would appear to be in a similar style. We meet Jack, his heavily-pregnant wife Susan and their young son as they relax in their smart suburban home. Smith paints a lovely picture: the setting sun, drinks on the balcony and views to die for (no pun intended here) over Table Mountain. What's not to like? But this idyll is about to take a nasty and unexpected turn for the worse as a couple of no-users, high on drugs, take their chance and break in to the Burns' home. And all this action is seen by a security guard nearby. Full review...

To My Best Friends by Sam Baker

Women's Fiction

Nicci Morrison had always been the first of the four friends to do everything: fall in love, marry, have children (and twins at that) and develop a successful business. Then, at thirty six, she was the first to die – of cancer. Nicci was an organiser and she couldn't let the opportunity pass to dress her friends for her funeral and to bequeath into their care her most treasured possessions. You're probably thinking in terms of jewellery, or something similar, but Nicci left her friends her garden, her three-year-old daughters and her husband. I mean – just how much more difficult than that can you get? Full review...

Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Crime

The Prologue intends to grab the reader's attention right from the first word. I liked that. A girl, or perhaps a woman (we don't know yet) is imprisoned somewhere, barely kept alive in some sort of dark, airless and smelly makeshift prison - but why? And by whom exactly? The story opens in 2007 and we learn that Copenhagen detective Carl is recovering from a near-death experience in the line of police duty. His colleagues were not so lucky. So we see a broken and rather vulnerable man trying to claw his way back to a normal life. Guilt, revenge, anger are perhaps some of the emotions coursing through his veins. His senior colleagues are at a loss as to what to do with him - he's a good copper, after all. The solution is that a fancy new title is invented along with a fancy new department, all for Carl. But will he cope? Full review...

Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling

Biography

Peal Buck, the 5th of 7 children, was born in 1892 to American missionary parents working in China, where she was then brought up. She learned Chinese before she learned English, and only realised that she was considered a foreigner when anti foreigner riots known to as the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 forced the family out of her childhood home. Later she became famous for her novels and short stories set in China, especially The Good Earth. She won America's most famous literary prize, the Pulitzer, in 1932, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Yet her work is mostly forgotten in the US and Europe, and in the country she loved, her books were banned by Mao's regime after they came to power in 1949. Full review...

How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely

With an uncompromising title like 'How I Became a Famous Novelist', this clearly isn't intended to be a subtle book. So I can hardly complain when a cynical look at the writing industry swings raw punches in every direction. It just isn't my sort of humour, but equally, if you rave about 'The Office' you will likely enjoy this book far more than I have done. Full review...

The Free World by David Bezmozgis

It's the late 1970's and a family of Latvian Jews, the Krasnanskys, are emigrating from the Soviet Union. They're made to stay in Rome whilst they apply to live in the States and they find themselves trapped in a strange migratory limbo, belonging nowhere and tied to no-one but each other. Full review...

The Dysfunctional Family by Paul Bress

Societies are constantly changing and sociology students are presented with theories to help them to comprehend what's happening. Here we have a different approach: a family has been paid a small amount of money to write diaries which they would keep secret from other members of the family and which would be available for publication. This book is the result and we follow Phil and Sue Brown and their two sons, Jack and Theo though a traumatic period which lasts for just over two months. The entries in the diaries are made daily and we read what has happened to each member of the 'dysfunctional family'. Full review...

Night on Terror Island by Philip Caveney

Kip is a real film buff, and because his dad runs the local independent cinema he gets to see all the latest films as a reward for making the popcorn and generally helping out each evening. But this happy state cannot continue for much longer: the big multiplexes on the edge of town are taking all their clients, and the Paramount Picture Palace may soon have to close for good. Things start to look up when the eccentric Mr Lazarus arrives, but Kip is suspicious: the new projectionist may have a gift for raising the quality of the films he shows to enviable standards, but he knows far more than he should about everyone who works at the cinema. And he talks about stars, films and cinemas of the past as if he had actually been there. Full review...

Piccadilly Love Stories: Don't Ask by Hilary Freeman

Teens

Lily thinks of herself as being about a 6 out of 10 on the scale of 'hideous gargoyle to Brad Pitt' and she knows her boyfriend Jack is an 8. So why would he want to be with her? Despite him seeming to be the perfect boy she's convinced there's something in his past and only gets more suspicious when he keeps clamming up about it. So when she finds his ex-girlfriend on a social networking site it seems like a great idea to create a fake profile and make friends with her. Is it worth telling this many lies just to find the truth? Full review...

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Apparently there's a saying that 'time's a goon' - no, I'd never heard of it and to be fair, neither had the first character to whom it is said in Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad', but together with a pair of epigraphs from Proust, it's clear that time is very definitely what is being explored here. Egan's subject area is all loosely based around the music world. Her central character, if one can be said to exist, is Bennie Salazar, a music mogul who we encounter both directly and tangentially at various stages of his up and down career. Goon Squad is also the title of an Elvis Costello track, continuing the music theme as Egan uses the music industry as a lens to examine time. Full review...

Toby's Little Eden by John E Flannery

Short Stories

John E Flannery's debut collection contains four short stories (although one is more of a novella) and a series of amusing sketches about the ground staff at a new Golf Course in north Manchester. They're more varied than they might appear at first glance and demonstrate Flannery's ability to get straight to the heart of the story without wasting words and to develop character as economically as possible, whilst still holding the reader's imagination. I knew as soon as I began The Ghostwriter that I wasn't going to be disappointed as a man who has written successful thrillers is possessed by the spirit of Charles Dickens. It's a neat riff on John Braine's idea that novelist wait for an idea to descend on them and Graham Greene's belief that novelists are like mediums. Full review...

Summer at Willow Lake by Susan Wiggs

Women's Fiction

Olivia Bellamy does not seem to have a lot of luck with men. When we meet her she's just about to put her third broken engagement under her belt and head of into the wilderness of the Catskills with Freddy. Don't get excited – he really is just a friend. They're going to revamp the family's old summer camp in readiness for her grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary celebrations and right now it seems like the best way to forget about her love life. Things turn from bad to worse though when she finds herself not only stuck up a flagpole but having to be rescued by the man who was her first boyfriend some nine years before. Full review...

Notes From the Teenage Underground by Simmone Howell

Teens

Gem, only child of arty mother Bev and an absent haiku-obsessed father always found fitting in difficult until the mysterious Lo turned up at school. The trio of her, Lo and Mira have been inseparable for a while now but as they plan their summer project – an Andy Warhol inspired underground film – she starts to feel pushed out by the other two. Can she deal with exams, romance co-worker Dodgy, save her friendship with Mira and Lo and cope with her father’s reappearance? Full review...

Every Last One by Anna Quindlen

Mary Beth Latham is contemplating her average, ordinary life where every day is more of less the same. Would things be better if life were more exciting, varied, newsworthy? Is that a legitimate thing to hope for? They say to be careful what you wish for, and Mary Beth never comes right out and says this is what she wants, but there are hints to this effect. Full review...

Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family by Jeremy Lewis

Biography

Graham Greene's father actually had six children, and his brother six of his own. (Well, there were nine in their generation for a start...) The surprising and joyous thing about this book is that it can show that Graham Greene's remarkable life is by no means the only standout in that whole generation of family history. It can continuously throw up surprises - we know Hugh Greene was high up in the BBC, but it wasn't him who helped found Canadian public service broadcasting. We are familiar with Graham himself traipsing around the world, reporting back in fact and fiction from unusual circumstances and exotic climes with dubious systems of government, but it wasn't he who was noted for being an ardently public supporter of pro-Communist China. Full review...

The West Rand Jive Cats Boxing Club by Lauren Liebenberg

Best friends Tommy and Chris are 12 years old. It is 1958 and they are growing up in a small mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa. They are learning to box and to dance to rock and roll music. Full review...

A Lily of the Field by John Lawton

The book opens in the early 1930s in Vienna where we meet one of the main characters; ten year old Meret. She's gifted musically and in particular in playing the cello. Even at this tender age, people are talking about her starry future on the world stage. She is the apple of her father's eye and soon she's being given extra musical tuition by a kind but much older man. He's old enough to be her grandfather but nevertheless they strike up a rather unusual friendship with music being the common denominator. But some of their conversations are serious and quite grown-up for a young girl, not yet into puberty. The tutor, Viktor Rosen is Jewish and has already suffered at the hands of the Germans. Meret progresses at such a pace that before you know it, she's performing in public. Her life appears to be wonderful and full of future promise. Full review...

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

Popular Science

In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare wrote,'Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, wherin he puts alms for oblivion'. This fully accords with the discoveries of modern brain science. Proust in his famous novel, 'In Search of Lost Time' anticipates such discoveries by neuroscientists, such as Rachel Hertz, that smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus. Thus the taste of a petit madeleine evokes a rediscovery by Proust of Combray and a flow of associations - it is the part of the brain in which long term memory is centred. Lehrer in ' Proust was a Neuroscientist' weaves an intriguing argument about the relationship between recent neuroscientific discoveries and the novels of George Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. A scientist, who has researched with Nobel Prize-winning, Eric Kandel, has a taste for philosophy; Lehrer intends to heal the rift between what C.P.Snow termed the 'Two Cultures'. He wishes to accord respect to the truths and the intuitive discoveries, especially of modernist writers and painters. Full review...

For the Record by Ellie Irving

Luke is obsessed with records. He's so busy planning on breaking world records when he grows up, and playing world records DVD games, that he doesn't take much of an interest in what's going on around him. But that's about to change, because when the village of Port Bren is chosen to host a waste-incinerator plant his house will be demolished and the graveyard where his dad's buried will be destroyed – unless the village is too historically important for this to happen. How can they put themselves on the map in one week? Luke comes up with the idea to break 50 world records… but why won't his mum let him take part? Full review...

While We Sleep... the Dream Snatchers Cometh! by Wolfren Riverstick

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Jackson family was unimaginative. Jack Jackson, the head of the household was generally known as Pa, even before he had any children to call him by that name. His wife, Jacqueline, was known as Ma. You could put all this down to accident but naming their first child Jackie (after a comic which Ma had enjoyed in her youth) and their second child Jacques might confirm your fears. It was a few years before they acquired a pet, but the cat was to be called Jackson and the Dutch Hamster Sjaak. Guess what their house was called? Yup – it was Jacksonville. Full review...

Anno Dracula by Kim Newman

Horror

The story begins in London. It is 1888 and Queen Victoria is on the throne. She has recently remarried, taking as her husband the infamous vampire Count Dracula. Dracula's influence is all around London as more and more of its citizens turn willingly to vampirism, whilst others resist its temptations. A distinct sense of social and political unrest is in the air as factions speak out against the race of vampires, somehow spurred on by the serial killer at large. Known at first as the Silver Knife, but later as Jack the Ripper, this killer targets young vampire women in Whitechapel, prostitutes who have recently turned to vampirism, known as new-borns. Full review...

There's No Home by Alexander Baron

It's the year 1943 and Sicily has been invaded (along with other parts of Europe). The menfolk have gone (will they return?) and the women, children and old people left behind are a sorry sight. Impoverished, ragged and with barely enough food to eat. A British company of soldiers rolls into town ... and everything changes. The men are foot-sore, exhausted and dirty. They are also glassy-eyed with the horrors of war. And as if that were not enough, the Sicilian sun beats down on them mercilessly. But there's some good news - they're here to rest and recuperate for a while. Full review...

The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey

The Rabbis say that all the signs are there from the birth of Ben Zion Avrohom that he is the Messiah. That's a lot of anyone to cope with and, like Jesus, there's much of Ben's early life that is untold here. When he is involved in an horrific accident on a building site that he miraculously survives, albeit with terrible scaring, the prophecies appear to be true. He develops a form of epilepsy during which he appears to speak to God. He is fluent in ancient languages despite never learning them, knows all the Holy books by heart and yet distains all forms of religion, instead spreading his message of love to all who meet him in modern day New York. Full review...

My Ballet Dream by Adele Geras and Shelagh McNicholas

For Sharing

Tutu Tilly really loves ballet. She's been learning for about a year now, and her ballet school is about to put on its end of year show. She is both excited and nervous. But, of course, disaster strikes...the wrong costumes are sent and the tutus and shoes aren't pink...they're blue! Full review...

Sharaf by Raj Kumar

With its subtitle "Forbidden love in the kingdom of faith and honour", I expected something entirely different from Sharaf to what it delivered. For the second time in as many weeks I had misjudged a book by, if not its cover exactly, certainly by its setting and its blurb. Full review...

Bride Price by Ian Mathie

Autobiography

'Bride Price' has proved an even more absorbing book than I anticipated from its Amazon write-up. I read it in a single sitting; the issues it raised overwhelming my thoughts for the next couple of days. In terms of its overall flavour, quality and impact value, I'd bracket it with the classic 'Walkabout' by James Vance Marshall. Full review...

Little Grey Donkey by Nicole Snitselaar and Coralie Saudo

For Sharing

Little Grey Donkey lives on a small island in the middle of the big blue sea. As he is the only inhabitant on the island things could possibly get quite lonely for him. They do not, however, because he has a friend called Serafina, a small girl who rows across the ocean every day in order to play with him. One day though, the little girl does not come and visit and little Grey Donkey is sad. He waits all that day, and many more days to come, but she does not appear. Eventually he is so worried about his friend that he decides to go and find her even if that means going on a tricky journey. The path is narrow and terribly steep; he is scared of going in a boat and he is worried that the rusty brown lift might fall or get stuck. However, each time that he feels afraid, he thinks of Serafina and that spurs him on until eventually he finds her and realises that she has been ill. She is so pleased to see him and that makes everything that he has been through worth while. Full review...

Escape from the Nazis: The Incredible and Inspiring Saga of Two Young Jews on the Run in World War II Poland by Benjamin Mandelkern

Biography

Do we all have it in us? Would you as a Pole in 1940s Poland, who like as not had been 'educated' in the horrendous evil of Jews by your church - would you ignore Nazi death threats and countless opportunities for the wrong thing to be said, for the truth to be let out, for betrayal - would you help a Jewish life survive? Full review...

Eleven by Mark Watson