Book Reviews From The Bookbag
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. We can even direct you to help for custom book reviews!
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When the War is Over by Barbara Fox
Gwenda and Douglas Brady were a brother and sister from Newcastle who were evacuated to the Lake District during the Second World War. When the War is Over tells Gwenda's story of evacuee life in the idyllic village of Bampton, where they spent several years living with a kindly schoolmaster and his wife. As they settled into village life, Gwenda and Douglas found it harder and harder to come to terms with the idea that they would have to return home to their parents at some point. Full review...
The World-Famous Book of Magical Numbers by Sarah Goodreau
If you are very lucky, the act of reading feels just like magic. You pick up a book and your imagination takes you on adventures you could never have in the real world. You should try and start this magic as early as possible and one way is to use interactive books, babies love to grab tabs or lift flaps. You may even stumble across a book all about numbers that provides this magical feeling for your child. Full review...
D is for Duck by David Melling
Duck, the magician, is giving a demonstration of his magical skills, conjuring up a wide variety of items from his top hat. Things begin normally enough with a bunny, but with lizards and lions and dragons following on soon after duck finds that perhaps his magic is getting a little out of hand! Full review...
James Dean: Rebel Life by John Howlett
James Dean was in a sense to the 1950s what Sid Vicious was to the 1970s – the ultimate 'live fast, die young' character, although as the star of three classic movies of the era he achieved rather more in his short life than the hapless punk icon ever did in his. Full review...
Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell
Odd is a young Viking boy. His father died in a raid not so long back. While trying to emulate his woodcutter father - Vikings weren't full-time Vikings, you know: they all had other jobs - in the woods, Odd got too enthusiastic with an axe and a falling tree crushed his leg. With a dead husband and a crippled son, Odd's mother had little choice but to remarry. And what with his strange habit of smiling at the wrong time and his crippled leg, Odd isn't well-liked, either by his stepfather or the rest of the village. Full review...
Eat Your People by Lou Kuenzler and David Wojtowycz
Monty the monster is having his dinner. He is eating all of his vegetables without any problems at all, but when it comes to eating up his people he really isn't happy, declaring them to be chewy and crunchy and full of bones! In a funny twist on the picky eater story, this is a lighthearted way of broaching the tricky 'eat your vegetables' issue! Full review...
Arrowood by Laura McHugh
Arrowood lies amongst the ornate historical houses that line the Mississippi River in Southern Iowa - a house rich with money, history, and mystery. It has been nearly twenty years since Arden Arrowood's infant twin sisters vanished under her watch, never to be seen again. The disappearance of the twins broke Arden's family – her parents divorced and they moved from the house that has been in her family for generations. But the mystery was never solved and now Arden has inherited Arrowood, allowing her to finally return to her childhood home. Still clinging to the hope that her sisters might still be alive, Arden is anxious yet determined to finally uncover the truth about what happened that fateful summer day. Full review...
The Bertie Project: A 44 Scotland Street Novel by Alexander McCall Smith
Catching up with old friends is a pleasure, and it's good to be back on Scotland Street, finding out what everyone is getting up to. Irene is back, of course, from her travels to the middle-east. Bruce has fallen in love, Matthew and Elspeth have triplet troubles, and somebody has an extremely unfortunate accident… Full review...
Miraculous Miranda by Siobhan Parkinson
It's Old Bear's birthday, and so all the other toys are planning something. In fact lots of somethings: gifts, a cake, a proper celebration. It's wonderful. Elsie the elephant has even made him a present, the talented little thing. But then, as we soon find out, Elsie is good at many things: wrapping presents, baking cakes, blowing up balloons, singing. It's a lovely sunny day, so the toys gather outside but just as they finish setting things up, and just as Old Bear arrives, disaster strikes! Can the toys have a happy ending and find time to finish Old Bear's party?Miranda is a small girl with a big - no, a huge - imagination. She writes stories, tells jokes using wordplay and her favourite part of school is the Word of the Day competition, which she almost always wins. Unless best friend Caroline O'Rourke aka COR or annoying boy-in-the-class Darren Hoey pinches one of Miranda's words and pips her at the post that way, that is. Miranda is also quite soppy and emotional, unlike COR, who is sporty and blunt. Full review...
Happy Birthday Old Bear by Jane Hissey
It's Old Bear's birthday, and so all the other toys are planning something. In fact lots of somethings: gifts, a cake, a proper celebration. It's wonderful. Elsie the elephant has even made him a present, the talented little thing. But then, as we soon find out, Elsie is good at many things: wrapping presents, baking cakes, blowing up balloons, singing. It's a lovely sunny day, so the toys gather outside but just as they finish setting things up, and just as Old Bear arrives, disaster strikes! Can the toys have a happy ending and find time to finish Old Bear's party? Full review...
One Cheetah, One Cherry: A Book of Beautiful Numbers by Jackie Morris
Once you've seen anything illustrated by Jackie Morris you know that you'll get a book full of pictures, all of which you'd be delighted and proud to hang on your walls. One, Cheetah, One Cherry: A Book of Beautiful Numbers is no exception. We begin with just the one cherry, so red and shiny you are tempted to see if it's real, but you're put off by the next picture. The one cherry is joined by one cheetah and he's got a proprietorial paw resting across the shoulder of the cherry. You're not going to argue with him. Full review...
The Other Alice by Michelle Harrison
Alice hasn't met her traveller father very often, but there's one rule he always impresses upon her: never, ever leave a story unfinished. And for a gifted writer like Alice, that's easy – until she tackles a full-length novel and realises her imagination has dried up. She's a long way into the story before she discovers she has no idea how to finish it. And then she starts seeing shadows out of the corner of her eye, shapes that flit away into the dark as soon as she turns to look at them. Full review...
Dog Medicine: How My Dog Saved Me From Myself by Julie Barton
It was 1996 and Julie Barton was twenty-two years old and one year into her job in publishing in New York when she collapsed on the kitchen floor of her apartment in Manhattan. She was severely depressed, an illness provoked, on the face of it, but the end of a destructive romantic relationship - or was it the end? Will kept coming back, in the early hours of the morning, sleeping with her, then leaving again. When Julie collapsed all she could think to do was to ring her mother who drove from Ohio to New York and took her home. Despite the best intentions of her parents and therapists, Julie seemed unable to break out of the depression, until she finally made just one positive decision - to adopt a Golden Retriever puppy whom she called Bunker Hill. Full review...
The Countenance Divine by Michael Hughes
In 1999, a programmer is trying to fix the millennium bug, but can't shake the sense he's been chosen for something.
In 1888, five women are brutally murdered in the East End by a troubled young man in thrall to a mysterious master.
In 1777, an apprentice engraver called William Blake has a defining spiritual experience; thirteen years later this vision returns.
And in 1666, poet and revolutionary John Milton completes the epic for which he will be remembered centuries later.
But where does the feeling come from that the world is about to end? Full review...
Why Did You Lie? by Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Victoria Cribb (translator)
There's a bunch of rock stacks – four of them, even if their name implies only three – off the coast of Iceland. The largest is a tall and thin lump of rock, hazardous to anyone on it, and home to a crumbling and inoperable helipad and a small, squat lighthouse – not the lighthouse of your imagination, but a perky concrete cabin, not needing any more than the one room to house the gear and the lantern on top. Replacing some of that gear and surveying the site is a group of four people – specialist workers, and a photographer to capture it all. So why and how do we know their story ends in tragedy – two of them cast to the waters below, and a third seemingly stabbed before the prologue is over? And why is their narrative interspersed with that of a woman, struggling with work in the police and seemingly with a haunted garage, the scene of her husband's failed suicide, and also that of a family returning home from a house-swap trip to Florida to find something they really didn't want to have waiting? Full review...
Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
This is the debut novel from Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, but you would never know it. It is an accomplished, unusual, poetically written story about a young Japanese girl, Yuki Oyama, who has lived most of her life in New York. As such, she feels an outsider: the American girls at school ignore her and she finds the rituals of her parents' home suffocating. Her father has hopes of her studying medicine, but the only thing Yuki enjoys is art. Full review...
A Whisper of Horses by Zillah Bethell
A Whisper of Horses is set in a dystopian future, where most living things have been long since eradicated by 'the Gases.' The few remaining survivors try to eke out a living in the ruined city of Lahn Dan, split into three distinct class groups: Lead (Pb), Copper (Cu) and Gold (Au). Serendipity, a young Pb girl has always been fascinated by the statues and artworks in the city, which depict riders on majestic horses. Of course, she has never seen a real horse; no-one has. When Serendipity finds a map that hints that there may still be horses living in 'Grey Britan', she makes the brave decision to try and escape the walled city to go in search of her dream. Full review...
Prince Arthur: The Tudor King Who Never Was by Sean Cunningham
Prince Arthur was the eldest son of Henry VII. Had he lived longer, there might have been no Henry VIII, thus paving the way for a very large counterfactual 'what if' in British history. The name Arthur, that of the mythical King several centuries earlier, had great expectations attached, never to be fulfilled. Full review...
Constellation by Adrien Bosc
October 28, 1949. 02:51, following reports of good weather and visibility on, the pilot makes contact; the flight has reach 3,000 feet, he has the airport in sight, he is preparing to land. The estimated time of arrival came and went, the landing had not happened. A search is initiated, which eventually establishes that the carrier had crashed into a mountainside in the Azores, killing all 37 of its passengers and all 11 of its crew. Full review...
Spectacles by Sue Perkins
A dash of drama, a sprinkling of gossip and a smattering of laugh-out-loud funny make for the best sort of memoir. Full review...
The Strays by Emily Bitto
Lily comes from an ordinary suburban family, but on her first day at a new school she meets Eva: the super-confident middle daughter of artist Evan Trentham. The girls fast become firm friends, to the exclusion of all those ar ound them and it isn't long before Lily is spending more time at the Trentham's than she does at home. Why wouldn't she? Their life is everything her family's isn't. Full review...
Boy X by Dan Smith
When Ash McCarthy wakes up in some sort of medical facility he immediately knows something is wrong. But he doesn't suspect just how much until he steps outside and finds himself on a remote tropical island. Then he smells the blood and begins to find the bodies. A deadly virus has been released and, to make matters worse, it's being taken off the island to be sold as a weapon that could wipe out humanity. The antidote is being taken with it and, unless Ash can stop them within 24 hours, everyone on the island who has been infected (including Ash's mum) will die. Full review...
Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
I wasn't sure what to expect when I asked for this book to review. It claims on the front cover to be not exactly a memoir, and it isn't. Yet, also, it kind of is. In fact, I would struggle to describe or decipher exactly what it is. It is so unlike any book I've ever read before. Full review...
Through the Mirror Door by Sarah Baker
Angela doesn't like her Aunt or cousins but living them with has to better than the series of children's homes she's had to put up with. She's, therefore, determined to bite her tongue and behave like an angel when she's invited to join their family holiday in France. Her cousins don't make this easy but Angela soon has bigger concerns to occupy her mind – namely the mysterious boy on the other side of the Mirror Door and the fact that he appears to be dying, alone and uncared for in 1898. Full review...
The Witch's Kiss by Katharine Corr and Elizabeth Corr
Merry is an average teenager. She's also a witch. She's trying not to be, but she is. Then Jack comes into her life and she can't help falling under his spell. One problem – he's part of an evil, centuries-old curse that Merry now has to break. If Merry has lost her heart, will she lose her life too? Or can true love's kiss save the day? Being a witch is dangerous – but being in love is even worse… Full review...
Warrior Bronze (Gods and Warriors Book 5) by Michelle Paver
Hooray and boohoo! The final instalment of Michelle Paver's Gods and Warriors series has arrived. This series is set in the Bronze Age amid the Greek civilisations of the mainland (Mycenaean) and Crete (Minoan). Our two central characters represent both: Hylas, the boy searching for his sister, is Mycenaean, and Pirra, the daughter of a high priestess, is Minoan. Together, they are trying to defeat the evil Crows who are ravaging lands far and wide. But to do that, they need to retrieve the dagger of Kronos from deep inside Crow territory. If they fail, the evil gods known as the Angry Ones will rule all the land and all the people. Full review...
The Chicken Nugget Ambush by Mark Lowery
Roman Garstang and his class are embarking on their school residential trip to Farm View Outdoor Survival Centre. Events leading up to departure day mean than Roman is not all that excited about the visit - mostly due to the jam doughnut incident which in turn leads to a solely chicken nugget diet prescribed by his doctor. Well, not exactly prescribed by his doctor, but this was the message his mum chose to hear. A typical school residential setting provides the backdrop for exploring children's relationship when they are away from home. Some of his class mates are fully prepared for the trip, others shudder at the thought of a bit of mud in their finger nails and a stereotypical survival 'expert' in Mad Dan leads the children on their adventure. Full review...
