Book Reviews From 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.
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The Grunts All At Sea by Philip Ardagh and Axel Scheffler
Mr and Mrs Grunt are a rather despicable couple. They are dirty and violent and always throwing things at each other. They eat things like dead badger scraped off the roadside, and like using very rude words. But as disgusting and depraved as they are, they are not evil. They are more like overgrown, badly behaved toddlers who haven't seen a bath in years. They fight and throw things, but honestly seem to care about each other as well on some level. They live with their adopted, or more accurately kidnapped son, who doesn't seem to notice that wearing dresses is unusual for a boy, and Mrs Grump has taken the trouble to dye them blue. Rather than a house they live in a caravan that looks like a cross between a camping caravan and an outhouse, and is pulled by a large elephant, with two donkeys riding in their own trailer behind. Full review...
The Double Cross System by J C Masterman
This Vintage re-issue of Masterman's account of the work of the Twenty Committee is subtitled the 'classic account of World War Two Spy-Masters'. That's a somewhat misleading tease. The book isn't really about the spy-masters, very little information is given about those recruiting, turning, running and protecting the spies. More information - but again relatively little - is given about the spies themselves. Full review...
The Bad Mother by Isabelle Grey
When we first meet Tessa Parker she has a major problem on her hands. Her seventeen-year-old son has been missing since the previous day. The police are involved and Tessa is beside herself with worry. She's told the police quite a bit - however you can't help but feel that there's a lot more going on that she's not telling. To find out the full story we go back four months... Full review...
In The Dutch Mountains by Cees Nooteboom
Often, when asked if what I’m reading is a good book I hesitate before answering, trying to decide what the asker really means. Do they mean is it exciting? Funny? Full of interesting characters? Recently, someone asked me that and when I hesitated they gave me this as a clarifier: “Are you better off for having read it?”. In this instance, yes. I think I am. However, despite coming away from this book with a strong positive feeling about it, it’s also left me a little befuddled. Full review...
The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism by Naoki Higashida and David Mitchell
Imagine if you will, a world where the normal laws of physics have been slightly changed. You swirl around almost weightlessly, with no control over your limbs. Sounds seem either deafeningly loud or hopelessly muffled. Sensory input floods your system, overwhelming you with bright colours, patterns and odours that attack you from every side, without warning. Communication is almost impossible. You open your mouth and the wrong words come out. People talk down to you as if you were a child.
Welcome to Naoki’s world. Full review...
The Year of Big Dreams by Karen McCombie
Flo Brown's mum is in the final of a huge TV talent show! Millions of viewers want to see her give a life-changing performance - but they aren't expecting what they see. What will happen to Flo, her mum, and her gran Olive after the show is complete? Full review...
Brooklyn Girls by Gemma Burgess
22-year-old Pia Keller has screwed up again. She should be living the dream, sharing a Brooklyn townhouse with her four best friends - but one too many drunken escapades leads to her getting sacked from her new job. After hearing this, her parents are ready to summon her to live with them abroad. They clearly don't think she's mature enough to look after herself - can she prove them wrong? Full review...
Two for Joy by Helen Chandler
Two for Joy is Helen Chandler’s first novel and is immensely enjoyable from the very first pages where the reader meets Julia and her best friend Toby who is telling her about how he intends to go down on one knee and propose to his girlfriend, Ruby. Although outwardly delighted, internally Julia experiences some uncomfortable feelings that she doesn’t really recognise and does not want to acknowledge. Come the big night, she is desperately miserable at the thought of Toby’s and Ruby’s romantic evening and can’t bring herself to do anything other than mope around in her pyjamas. Full review...
The Sex Diaries by Arianne Cohen
As far as ‘doing what it says on the tin’ goes, this book is a good one. It’s the diaries, plural, from people, plural, talking about their sex lives. But it’s not just the doing of the deed and the sowing of the seed, it’s also all the stuff that goes with being in a relationship or not being in one. The daydreams. The texts. The efforts made to secure a hook-up, if there’s not one waiting for you at home. Full review...
High Rollers by Jack Bowman
Tom Patrick is a far from popular air crash investigator, who is nonetheless the best there is. He has more than ruffled a few feathers and is suspended from working on cases. Despite this the largest case of his career is forced upon him when not one but two Boeing 737 jets encounter catastrophic failures resulting in many fatalities. Tom recognises a possible link between the two and potentially many more airplanes, a link that could uncover a far reaching and very dangerous conspiracy. Full review...
Sam's Spitfire Summer by Ian MacDonald and Charlie Clough
'Sam's Spitfire Summer' is billed as a thrilling WW2 adventure. In my opinion it is not. This is not a high octane adventure. Instead it is the story of a rather ordinary boy, homesick, terribly frightened and unsure of himself after being evacuated from London. This book describes the life of a child during WW2 with such realism that I honestly wonder if it might have some basis in fact. It describes Sam's loneliness, and fear, being separated from his parents as his father goes away to fight the Germans, and his Mother remains in London, with the risk of bombing. This book really gives a good glimpse at how Sam feels being evacuated. He misses his home desperately and is frightened by the large animals in the country - such as cows. Full review...
Anton and Piranha by Milena Baisch and Chantal Wright
Anton just can't understand his grandparents. He was looking forward to a camping holiday, but only because he expected a pool. The campground his grandparents chose has a lake instead of a pool and Anton is terrified of the dark water and creeping aquatic vegetation. What's worse his grandparents want him to swim in it. There are fish in the water, and snails and all sorts of slimy things. So Anton watches the other children have fun and gets nasty because he is left out. He isn't happy with his grandparents other ideas either. They want him to play board games instead of watch the telly at night, and they even want him to make friends. Not the internet sort, he has plenty of those. They want him to make friends with real children. How positively uncivilised of them. But when Grandpa takes him fishing, he does make a friend, a very close friend, even if it is a fish. Full review...
Cemetery Gates: Saints and Survivors of the Heavy Metal Scene by Mick O'Shea
The way to hell is paved with dead heavy metal stars, or so you might be forgiven for thinking after reading this book. On the other hand, some have made it back from the brink. In this book, Mick O’Shea has summarised in twenty chapters the lives and often troubled times of ten 'saints' who ended up inside the cemetery gates, and ten survivors. Full review...
This Close by Jessica Francis Kane
'This Close' is a sensitively written collection of short stories exploring the fragile nature of the bonds connecting friends, neighbours and family. As the title suggests, most of the stories contain pivotal moments where a missed opportunity, fleeting as it may be, can propel a person along a path culminating in regret or loss. Each story is poignantly written and perceptively observed. As a reader, I was drawn in and became so emotionally involved with the characters that it was often impossible to close the book until I knew how each story ended. Full review...
Carnaby by Cate Sampson
Sarah's mother was murdered and Sarah found the body. Agonisingly, she didn't even realise she'd found the body at first - Sarah thought her mother was asleep on the sofa. But she wasn't. Borys - Sarah's sister Jude's boyfriend - has been accused of the murder and the trial is coming up, with Sarah as a key witness. A school counsellor, a lawyer and a police officer are all trying to prepare her, but Sarah can't think about that. It's too dangerous. And she has more than a court case on her plate Full review...
The Asylum by John Harwood
A woman wakes up in an unfamiliar room. She doesn’t know where she is, or how she got there, but at least she knows who she is: her name is Georgina Ferrars and she lives with her uncle in Gresham’s Yard, London. Full review...
The Misunderstanding by Irene Nemirovsky and Sandra Smith (translator)
After the Great War Yves Harteloup was a disappointed young man when he returned to the resort where he had spent idyllic childhood summers. It wasn't long before he became infatuated by the beautiful Denise - mother of a young child, wife of an older man who was away on business and bored. In the heat of the summer the relationship is intoxicating and Denise falls passionately in love with Yves. When they return to Paris Denise envisages a little flat which they will furnish to their taste for afternoons of leisure and pleasure but the truth is that Yves must return to his mundane office job and try to make every franc stretch as far as it can. In the drab autumn of Paris Denise is driven mad with desire for Yves and their love disintegrates under the burden of misunderstanding. Full review...
Summer of '76 by Isabel Ashdown
1976 was a blisteringly hot summer. People celebrated when it eventually did rain and at one point it was so hot that Big Ben stopped working. It would be the summer that Luke Wolff turned eighteen and he planned on leaving the Isle of White and going to poly in Brighton. He had a job at the holiday camp, which was hard work but there was a great social life too and even the possibility of romance. His parents were happy to let him have his independence - after all, he was a sensible, well-balanced young man - and they were rather preoccupied with their own problems. Looking in, you'd have thought that the Wolffs were the ideal family: from the inside there were obviously one or two cracks. Full review...
The Smallest Horse in the World by Jeremy Strong and Scoular Anderson
Bella despises the new girl at school, Swan. Swan is always bragging about her rich father, her fancy house, their Ferrari etc... And to make matters worse, she is rude, bossy and much bigger than Bella. Bella has problems at home too. Her parents have split up and she misses her father; her mother is always working and she doesn't seem to have any close friends. Things look pretty dismal after an argument with Bella, but every thing changes when Bella's favourite picture breaks and out steps a real live horse. A very tiny horse, but a horse all the same, and a talking one at that. Bella would love to keep the little horse, Astra, but the horse is desperate to be reunited with her true master, Rufus. Full review...
Ghost Stadium by Tom Palmer
I usually buy Barrington Stoke books for my son to read on his own. He loves the short but exciting stories, and the easy-to-read text. With this book though, the temptation to turn out the lights and read this out loud by torch light was simply too much to resist. It begins as a boy's own adventure. Three boys, Lucas, Irfan and Jack have come up with the perfect plan to start their summer holidays on a high note. Their local football club has been closed for years, but the boys have a scheme to get into the stadium one last time and spend a night camping on the pitch. My son immediately realised the football pitch would be the perfect place to camp out. It is difficult to get into, but once there, it would be like being in a wilderness. The high walls would block out everything, leaving the boys completely alone in the dark. There is only one problem. Places that are very difficult to get into can also be very difficult to get out of... Full review...
Brock by Anthony McGowan
The events of the badger bait are horrifying. Thankfully the author does not feel the need to give us all the gory detail, but in a sense, he has made it more terrifying but what is left unsaid. Everything about this book is extremely realistic. I am an adult, and this book had my stomach in knots. It isn't just what happens to the animals, but the psychological terror directed at the boys as well. This is made more intense by the level of character development in this book. McGowan has created characters with such depth I can't help wondering if he has based any of this on real children. Perhaps not the badger baiting part, but the inner turmoil created by poverty, shattered families, and the responsibility of being a caretaker at an early age as well many other personality traits which are so true to life it is difficult to believe you are reading fiction. The characters in this book are so genuine, I feel as if I know them. My son also commented on how much he liked certain characters, a sure sign that the author has succeeded in making the characters real to the reader. Full review...
Behind the Facade by Dennis Friedman
We have all, at one time or another, wished that we had the ability to read minds. Imagine how interesting it would be to peer beyond the external appearance and to understand the various thought processes lurking beneath the surface. Psychiatrist Dennis Friedman gives the reader the opportunity to do just that with his collection of short stories 'Beyond the Facade' Full review...
Every Promise by Andrea Bajani
Italian writer, Andrea Bajani's Every Promise is narrated by Pietro. His partner, Sara, has left him due to their inability to have a baby, but soon she finds herself pregnant after a one night stand and reliant on Pietro's mother for advice. Meanwhile Pietro meets Olmo, an elderly man who lives in their old family apartment, who reminds Pietro of his own Grandfather, Mario, who, like Olmo, served in Mussolini's ill-fated Russian campaign. Olmo persuades Pietro to go to Russia to visit the scenes of some of the photographs he has to try to come to terms with the past. It's a story about the past, the present and the future and the struggle for one man to make sense of this. It's packed with surpassingly detailed imagery and Bajani is at times breathtakingly unflinching in exposing the vulnerability of his narrator. However, it is very much a slow burn of a book and it's not always an easy book to read. Full review...
An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman
In 1961, noted Soviet man of letters Vasily Grossman went to Armenia, for a couple of months' research and fact-finding, while he was working on transforming an Armenian novel of no small length into Russian. (You can't call it translating, as he didn't speak Armenian beyond two words – he really was paid to rewrite it to some extent in his fashion.) With time spent in the capital, Yerevan, and in other rural areas, he got an intimate flavour of the country and its people, and this book is the resulting piece. It's not really accurate to call it a travelogue, for it covers just a patch here, a topic there, and is in no correct order as such – and the author calls it a literary memoir. What you can call it, however, is a success. Full review...
Robot Rumpus by Sean Taylor and Ross Collins
My sons tore open the parcel with Robot Rumpus and were already reading it themselves before I could even get the tape from the rest of the box, so they had one up on me when we settled down to read it later as a family. We began looking through the robot models on the inside of the front of cover, and as I mentioned which ones I wish we could have, the boys were already laughing with a just wait and see look on their faces. Full review...
Falling by Cat Clarke
Falling is a book that I liked for some reasons, and disliked for others. It is very short and terribly bleak romance. Anna seems to have it all. She is popular, pretty, and has an absolutely perfect and very wealthy boyfriend, Cam. I'm afraid I never warmed to Anna though. She comes across as one of those people who feel the world revolves around them. Self centred as she is, she does truly care for her best friend Tilly, perhaps more than she realises. It all comes together in tragic misunderstanding on the night of Cam's big party, a party he never wanted to have, but that Anna pushed him into. Full review...
Joe and the Lightning Pony by Victoria Eveleigh
Joe has discovered that his pony, Lightning, is brilliant at mounted games - you know that ones we see kids and their ponies playing at the Horse of the Year Show. What we see is the competition for the Prince Phillip Cup and Joe can't wait for him and Lightning to try out for the local Pony Club team. He adores Lightning - the pony we heard so much about in Joe and the Hidden Horseshoe - but he knows that he'll soon be too big for the her. Other children might worry about how they would get another pony to ride but Joe is worried about Lightning. Joe and his family brought her back to health - but would that continue if the pony was sold on? Full review...
The From Hell Companion by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Alan Moore will always be synonymous with two major books – Watchmen and From Hell, his look at the Whitechapel Murders. While the latter may appear to many to be a great, galumphing graphic novel loosely about Jack the Ripper, you ain't seen nothing yet. This volume is his illustrator Eddie Campbell's look at proceedings, and for a book that would appear to have no actual Moore input in it, he provides a welter of words for it. Full review...
