Difference between revisions of "Book Reviews From The Bookbag"
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| + | |title=The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery | ||
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| + | |summary=Like many an enthralling novel, this book starts with a death from natural causes yet in odd circumstances which initially leaves several questions unanswered. In fact, in spite of the subtitle, and also knowing nothing about the family whose story it tells in part, I had to look through the book thoroughly before reading, to satisfy myself that it actually was non-fiction. | ||
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|author=Iain M Banks | |author=Iain M Banks | ||
Revision as of 17:10, 14 October 2012
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 Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery by Catherine Bailey
Like many an enthralling novel, this book starts with a death from natural causes yet in odd circumstances which initially leaves several questions unanswered. In fact, in spite of the subtitle, and also knowing nothing about the family whose story it tells in part, I had to look through the book thoroughly before reading, to satisfy myself that it actually was non-fiction. Full review...
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks
It's 25 years since Iain M Banks introduced us to the utopian Culture series of sci fi adventure books and The Hydrogen Sonata is the 13th in the series. One thing Banks does particularly well is to make his books completely accessible as stand alones, explaining the concept afresh each time without going over old ground for long time fans, of which there are many. In many ways, this is a good introduction for those who have yet to discover the joys of this excellent series because it's far more linear than some. He sometimes leaves even hardened Culture addicts struggling to work out what's going on with alternative realities before bringing them together, but there's little of that here. Full review...
Drawn Together by Robert R Crumb and Aline Crumb
This book is, as it says several times, the collected works of the world's only comic-strip creating husband-and-wife partnership. While this is to ignore the work Joyce does to co-write some of Harvey Pekar's titles, there certainly is not a couple such as this. Over several decades of work, we see just how joined at the hip they are. Most of the panels are drawn by him - R - with Aline drawing herself on top of his inked backgrounds. Later on, their self-created titles are split, with him doing half the pages, and her own opus on the other half - by this time she had had works out under her own name. But so close are the couple in each other's intimate works, they are never very far from the edge of the frame. Full review...
A Grain of Truth by Zygmunt Miloszewski and Antonia Lloyd-Jones (translator)
State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki is attempting to recover from a broken marriage and has left Warsaw. He is prone to cheerless thoughts especially if deprived of his soothing iced tea. It is the very start of spring in the legendary and magical Polish town of Sandomierz on the banks of the Vistula. Szacki, who does not like to be bored, is soon preoccupied in solving a ghastly murder that has been staged in the style of a Jewish ritual and this particular city is notorious for ancient, tense and deep rooted relations between Catholics and Jews. To solve this crime Szacki will need to delve into the murky history of occupation; Nazis, Communists and patriots. He will also need to face his own self-doubts. He must search for 'A Grain of Truth' under the critical gaze of local citizens enflamed by press paranoia. Full review...
On The Map by Simon Garfield
You might think that there's not a lot which could be said about maps - but you'd be completely wrong. This is staggeringly good - one of the very best non-fiction books I've read all year. Garfield takes us from the Great Library of Alexandria to a map of the brain, via maps in films, treasure maps and JM Barrie's hatred of folding maps. Alternating between full chapters which tell the stories of cartographers and their maps in roughly chronological order, and shorter entries bearing the title 'Pocket Map' which pick out particularly interesting trivia, there's not a dull entry in the book. Full review...
Dream a Little Dream by Sue Moorcroft
Liza Reece works as reflexologist at The Stables, a therapy centre attached to a hotel. It should be doing quite well. It could be doing quite well, but the manager and leaseholder is Nicholas, who's a waste of rather a lot of space. Liza reckons that she could take over the lease, reorganise the finances and make a success of it, but she has to raise the money to buy the lease. Dominic Christy has a plan too. He used to be an Air Traffic Controller, but he developed a rare sleep disorder and falling asleep on that job is not a good idea. He's just split up with his girlfriend and has money from the sale of their house. He has plans for The Stables - and he wouldn't need a reflexologist. Full review...
Diary of a Christmas Wombat by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley
There is one thing which makes Christmas special for Mothball the Wombat. Presents? No. Fun and games? No. It's carrots. Yes - carrots. Mothball eats, sleeps, scratches, occasionally nibbles a tasty stem of grass, scratches and sleeps some more. The highlight of her day is when she discovers that people leave carrots out for reindeer (for some, obscure reason...) and provided that she is willing to do battle with said reindeer she can munch away to her heart's content. It's when she discovers that a sleigh is a wonderful place for postprandial nap that she is taken on a very exciting journey. Full review...
Winterling by Sarah Prineas
Thirteen-year old Fer doesn't feel like she belongs with everyone else. She keeps getting into fights at school, she's teased for her unruly appearance, and her grandmother won't let her go anywhere except school. Then she rescues a mysterious boy called Rook from some wolves, and is taken to a wondrous, but cruel, world where it's always winter and a dangerous queen rules the land. Can Fer save the day? Full review...
Stray Souls by Kate Griffin
Sharon Li has a normal job in a London coffee shop but doesn't feel normal. She's beginning to realise she's a shaman, especially when she is so at one with the city, she vanishes. In order to meet others who'll understand, she starts Magicals Anonymous, a self-help group for the mystically confused coming to terms with their gifts. The meetings come with various beverages, biscuits, a Facebook page and a very good turnout. However all is not herbal tea and crunchy-creams as someone or something seems to be stealing the spirits that make London's soul and another something walks the streets tearing people limb from limb. The city is dying and gradually Sharon realises that Magicals Anonymous are more than just a social group. As odd as it sounds to look at them, the Midnight Mayor wants them to save the capital. Full review...
What's Left Of Me by Kat Zhang
Addie and Eva are 15 year olds living somewhere in America. They have a mother, a father and a younger brother. But Addie and Eva are not sisters, or twins, in the usual sense. They are two minds who share one body, and they are in trouble. Full review...
Desolation Island by Adolfo Garcia Ortega
In Madeira, in the first months of the new millennium, a man named Oliver Griffin collars a total stranger to explain his lifetime’s obsession with a South American island called Desolation. Griffin is a narrator as gabby as Melville’s Ishmael but twice as rambling, and what he recounts is less a coherent story than a neverending cabinet of curiosities. This magical realist take on the history of a place involves forbidden love, sixteenth-century automatons, mysterious Balkan castles, war crimes, death at sea, Jewish folklore, the personal lives of French authors and the sexual conduct of famous Spanish explorers, each bizarre strand twisted together by the novel’s own weird internal logic into one astonishing and delightful pattern. Full review...
The Exhibitionists by Russell James
On one particular London night in 1834 three children start a journey that will mould their futures. Newly born Maddy is abandoned in Mrs Cuthbertson's establishment (a thinly veiled baby farm) causing Maddy to spend years looking for the reasons that led her there. Baby Sam is fished out of the Thames and grows with a burning desire to uncover the truth, shaping his career as a journalist. Meanwhile Hannah is conceived that night by two people fated to live lives that don't coincide, until… Full review...
Will We Ever Speak Dolphin? by Mick O'Hare
The annual New Scientist book is becoming a bit of a ritual for me, and I hope it is for you too. Each year, they collate the best questions and answers from their Last Word column, and each year I heartily recommend that you pick it up, or give it to someone as a Christmas present. This year is no exception, as we find out whether we'll ever speak dolphin, all the ins and outs of James Bond's vodka martini, and - most importantly - detailed information from a dishwasher expert about how to deal with tinned spinach. Full review...
Ratburger by David Walliams
There are lots of similarities between the style and plot of this book and those of Roald Dahl. First of all you have a child who is living in a situation so outrageously terrible that it becomes funny, and for whatever reason, all the other adults around don't seem capable of helping. The villain, while being fairly two-dimensional, has enough disgusting and frightening qualities to make readers shiver in delicious anticipation whenever they appear. And the miseries just keep piling up until it doesn't seem there's any way out. Full review...
The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling
It's hard to know how to describe my experience reading JK Rowling's new book, and her first departure from the world of Hogwarts. 'Liked it' doesn't seem appropriate, because I didn't really. I found it very bleak, depressing and disturbing to be honest. I have a friend who is reading it at the moment and she says she's really enjoying it, which just makes me shake my head because, really, this isn't the sort of book you enjoy. Full review...
Monsieur by Emma Becker
She is a twenty-year old student, with an average cleavage and a big bum. He is 45, a married cosmetic surgeon, and a friend of the family, having worked with her uncle for years. They might be an unlikely couple – at least outside the realms of erotic fiction they are – but as she puts it, she wants him to show me what a man was like, a real man, a man who could fill my body and my mind. The consequences are in this novel. Full review...
Poacher's Moon by Ann Cliff
Back in the middle of the nineteenth century it was village gossip when Judith Weaver 'took up' with Will Thorpe. Such matters are always talked about in a village but Judith's parents ran a successful bakery, whilst Will had little to recommend him. As time went on Judith left the village and Will suffered the consequences of his actions (it was, he said, only the one pheasant...) and when he returned to Kirkby he met and married someone else. Full review...
40 Uses for a Grandpa by Harriet Ziefert and Amanda Haley
It's amazing what you can do with a Grandpa - some you might well have thought about already, such as cash machine, taxi, dance partner and dictionary, but you might never have thought of using him as a basketball hoop, tailor or butler, but perhaps the most important of all forty in the book is friend. It's a delightful celebration of all that's wonderful about being a grandparent - and a grandchild. Full review...
Witch Hunt by Syd Moore
The history of witchcraft and the complexities of current social politics do not appear to be the easiest ingredients to blend smoothly into a novel. But Moore has achieved this, skilfully weaving the threads of the middle ages with the modern day. This achievement has also been mixed with some fascinating points about feminism, witchcraft and Essex stereotypes, all the while presenting them as the narrative of the protagonist, Sadie. Full review...
The Diaries of Nella Last: Writing in War and Peace by Patricia Malcolmson and Robert Malcolmson (Editors)
This work brings together a selection of some of Nella Last's diary entries from the 1940's and 1950's. She wrote from her home in Barrow-in-Furness as part of the Mass Observation project, writing a huge amount of material, some of which has already been published as Nella Last's War, Nella Last's Peace and Nella Last in the 1950s This volume brings together the three previous collections, with new material too, taking the reader through the war years and on into post-war Britain. Full review...
The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach
'Later they would all remember it…the man was gigantic, and they all mentioned the smell of sweat'.
The man concerned is Fabrizio Collini, a quiet, respectable man, for thirty-four years a diligent worker at Mercedes Benz, an unexceptional person. Then, one day, he walked into a luxury Berlin hotel, up to the Brandenburg Suite and pulled a trigger. At least four times. Full review...
The Merde Factor by Stephen Clarke
Meet, if you haven't already, Paul West. Before now we've had four chances to meet him and see his struggles with all things French – their cuisine, their language, their social life and their bureaucracy – in order to run an English-styled tea-room in the trendier side of Paris. Four books then, and we might have expected him to have settled down into some form of success – were it not for the fact this is a comedy series. But no, he seems to still be in France on borrowed time, on borrowed (or sub-let) land, and things are certainly not turning out tres belle for him. Full review...
Dork Diaries: Dear Dork by Rachel Renee Russell
You can see how easy it would be for a series of children's books to settle into a stale formula, repeating the same idea time over time until the last drop of originality had dried in the sun and the coordinated covers were bleached into off-white. The characters got boring, their interactions meaningless, and the author covered old ground for the hell of it for one last buck. Now look at this series, and in particular this fifth full, proper title in it, and you'll see just how that hasn't happened. Full review...
In Glorious Technicolor: A Century of Film and How it has Shaped Us by Francine Stock
Many of us have been captivated from an early age by the world of movies, whether introduced to them by visits to the cinema, or watching them on TV, video and latterly DVD. Author and presenter Francine Stock’s lifelong love affair with the medium began when she was taken as a child to see ‘My Fair Lady’ on the large screen. A little later, for her the most memorable thing about the summer of 1970 was not the weather, but repeated viewings of ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’. Full review...
Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England by Sarah Wise
Many a family in Victorian England had a problem husband, wife, son or daughter whom they felt ought to be ‘locked away’. Only occasionally if ever was it for totally unselfish reasons connected with their mental health and well-being. More often than not it was to settle old scores, or so the family could get their hands on the victim’s fortune or business, or sometimes because, as the title of this book suggests, they were merely ‘inconvenient’. Full review...
A History of Football in 100 Objects by Gavin Mortimer
Given how long it's been played and how many books have been written about it, any new history of football needs to have some kind of hook to make it stand out. Gavin Mortimer may have found that, by presenting his history as A History of Football in 100 Objects. This prompts the question as to whether the whole of football could be reduced down to a mere century of objects. But then, if From 0 to Infinity in 26 Centuries by Chris Waring can make a history of maths worth reading, I guess anything is possible. Full review...
Rage Within (Dark Inside) by Jeyn Roberts
We left Aries, Michael, Clementine and Mason in a world they can barely recognise. After a series of devastating earthquakes many people changed. They became murderous monsters that the normal survivors called Baggers. There are few normal people left and they must hide in ruined cities, avoiding death at the hands of the Baggers. And in Rage Within, the battle for survival is about to get even tougher. The Baggers are organising themselves, clearing the streets of bodies and setting up worker camps for captured survivors. Full review...
God's Gift by John E Flannery
An ex-soap actor, Tommy Armstrong now hosts a successful Saturday night chat show. It covers entertainment and current affairs. Recently divorced, single Tommy enjoys bedding his researchers and then firing them. It's something to do, after all, no? And particularly enjoyable if they're willing to take it up the bum. Tommy likes bums. Irritatingly, the Dirty Bitch, aka Susan, Tommy's ex-wife, has forgotten all about bums and become a born-again Christian. Her new partner is a 21st century Mary Whitehouse, leading a campaign to clean up the media. Full review...
Bitter Seeds (The Milkweed Triptych) by Ian Tregillis
It's 1939 and Lt Commander Raybould 'Pip' Marsh of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service travels to Portugal to smuggle out Krasnopolsky, a fascist with a secret. However things don't go to plan. Krasnopolsky nerves are justified as, in the time it takes to order drinks, he spontaneously combusts. Marsh is too late to extinguish him but manages to retrieve Krasnopolsky's case to take back home. He finds the surprises keep on coming: it contains film footage of people becoming 'insubstantial' whilst walking through walls, others absorbing bullets and some bursting into flames with no apparent side-effects (unlike poor Mr Krasnopolsky). Marsh realises the Nazis' unconventional weapons need an unconventional response and so calls on Lord William Beauclerk who happens to be a warlock. Operation Milkweed is on so let other-worldly battle commence. Full review...
Ripley's Believe It or Not 2013 by Robert Leroy Ripley
You know it's getting near Christmas when you spot the annual Ripley's Believe It or Not, the celebration of all that's macabre, shocking, gruesome and frequently downright revolting - and that's just the people. Just wait until you get to the non-human items. We don't usually cover annuals at Bookbag because they've frequently gone out of fashion before too many months have passed, but these books can be read year after year and they're still going to make the average adult feel rather unwell. Yes - you're right. Kids are going to love it. Full review...
It Happened In Venice by Molly Hopkins
Evie is a tour guide who leads groups around Europe, but when we first meet her in Barbados she’s there for pleasure, not work. She’s back with Rob, her boyfriend who also works on the tour circuit. She’s just about forgiven him for cheating on her and this holiday and their subsequent moving in together with be a fresh start. Full review...
How to be Gorgeous: Smart Ways to Look and Feel Fabulous by Fiona Foden
The first point that author Fiona Foden stresses is that this is a book about how to be gorgeous, but she goes on to explain that this isn't just about having glossy hair, great skin and a wonderful dress (although she does admit that these help). It's about looking amazing, but still being you. It's about having confidence in who you are and having a positive energy about you. It's about having great friends - and being a great friend, in fact being the sort of person that everyone wants to know. She promises that most of what she suggests is not going to break the Bank - somethings are virtually, if not totally, free and it's all easy. So how does it live up to the promises? Full review...
The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally
Expectations ahead of Thomas Keneally's 'The Daughters of Mars' are understandably high. He regularly features on the Booker shortlist and has won the prize in the past with Shindler's Ark. While his subject matter, World War I, is hardly the most original, his slant on the story is, and this is a book that deserves to sit with the very best of the many books on that subject, including All Quiet on the Western Front and Birdsong. It's that good and that powerful. Full review...
Where Have You Been? by Joseph O'Connor
Irish novelist Joseph O'Connor has had quite a 2012. Earlier in the year he joined the ranks of such authors as Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle and Seamus Heaney when he became a recipient of the PEN award for his outstanding contribution to Irish literature. What could possibly top that for a sense of achievement? Well this, his first book of short stories in 20 years, must come pretty close to at least equalling it, amply illustrating the reasons for the panel's decision. Full review...
