Book Reviews From The Bookbag
The Bookbag
Hello from The Bookbag, a 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! Visit www.everychildareader.org to get free writing tips and www.genecaresearchreports.com will help you get your paper written for free.
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The Night of The Eleventh Sun by Steven Burgauer
The word 'Neanderthal' has become equated with people deemed to have a backward attitude and outlook. But what do we know of the original Neanderthals from over 200,000 years ago? Here American author Steven Burgauer melds the knowledge of anthropologists, archaeologists and historians with the story of Strong Arms, his family and their struggle to survive in a very effective, and informative way. Full review...
Octavio's Journey by Miguel Bonnefoy and Emily Boyce (translator)
Meet Octavio. He's a large lunk, a gentle giant, living alone in a lowly Venezuelan town – a town which once, fleetingly, had fame, fashion and success through a minor miracle, but has none any longer. Octavio, it seems, has some unusual habits – here he is, marching off to the chemist's with a table across his back, for it was all the doctor had at the time to write a prescription on. Now we never learn exactly what the cause of the prescription was, but we soon find out what the cause of the table is – Octavio cannot read, and has learned nothing beyond cutting into his palm to allow the wound to let him escape the need to write. Until, that is, a woman seems to suggest a way for him to learn to read and write, and to love – but that experience also proves to Octavio that there is a whole host of other things he can put his mind to, both for good, and for bad… Full review...
The Pledge by Friedrich Durrenmatt and Joel Agee (translator)
In what sounds like rural Switzerland, a girl has been murdered and left for anyone to see in a forest. The police come, and soon find out who the villagers already think is the sole suspect – a man known for illegal liaisons with young girls. They have, in fact, to put a compelling case against lynch mob rule just to get him back for investigation. He does confess, after a lengthy process – and then hangs himself. But the leader of the investigation, even while walking across the airstrip to the plane waiting to take him to a different job elsewhere, is determined to follow up on the promise he made to the girl's parents, to make the guilty person face justice. It's a promise, however, with far-reaching consequences… Full review...
Morse Code Wrens of Station X by Anne Glyn-Jones
Bletchley Park is probably now the least secret of all the secret ops that went on during World War II. I for one am pleased about that: technology has moved on so far that there can't be anything that happened back then on the communications front that is worth continuing to shroud in mystery. With most of the participants either departed or at least in the departure lounge, the more recollections we can still gather the better. What remained secret far longer however, is the work of the telegraphers that served Station X: those posted to the Y-stations. There are few of them left to tell their tales, so I applaud those who finally saw fit (a) to release them from their life-long bonds of secrecy and (b) encourage them to write it down, tell us what it was really like. Full review...
Reading Allowed: True Stories and Curious Incidents from a Provincial Library by Chris Paling
I once made a comical faux pas in a library when I was younger, but it certainly didn't put me off returning. I once declared in a self-important way that I would start at the beginning of the books for young children and not stop til the end, then do the same for those for the older children – and then do it all over again with them, I said, pointing at the large-print shelves. I hope not, was the response – but little me was only aware of a need for large font for my fellow whippersnappers, and not for any other reason. Since then I've needed libraries, and going to them has been second nature. On the dole I made sure I could use the free Internet they provided to pay me back for my council tax; later I was intent on finding out if a Senior Library Assistant girl was worthy of her title; and of course it saved a fortune on books for study and fun. I'm not alone in sharing the warmth of both their heating system and the very thing they were born to provide – books, but there was still a huge step up between my level of use and knowledge of them to actually working in one. Which is where Chris Paling comes in. Full review...
In Search of Sundance, Nessie...and Paradise by Simon Bennett
Books are personal. There are three things that signal good books to me: how I feel while reading them and in the enforced spaces between reading them, the degree to which I bore everyone around me for ages afterwards by quoting them and talking about them, and whether I remember how, when and where I first read them. That last criterion can only be judged later, but on the first two In Search of Sundance… definitely qualifies. Full review...
Honeymoon Suite by Wendy Holden
This is an excellent read, weaving together many stories. We have Nell who, yes, is left at the alter after a whirlwind romance. It's horrible and horrifying and she is, understandably, distraught. Her last modicum of self-respect vanishes when she rings to cancel her honeymoon, only to find it non-refundable. And so, in a rare show of gumption, she decides to go anyway, taking along her friend Rachel and Rachel's daughter Juno for the ride. At the same time, bestselling novelist Dylan is having romantic woes of his own. An almighty fire has chased him out of town and he needs to disappear, at least for a bit. As luck, and artistic license, would have it, the two end up in the same place. But this is not the first time they have crossed paths, and they are both in for an almighty shock. Full review...
The Things We Learn When We're Dead by Charlie Laidlaw
On the way to a dinner party, Lorna Love steps into the path of an oncoming car. Waking up in what appears to be a hospital, but a hospital in which wine is served for supper, everyone avoids her questions, and her nurse looks suspiciously like Sean Connery, it soon transpires that Lorna is in Heaven, or, at least, on HVN. Because HVN is a lost, dysfunctional spaceship, and God the aging hippy captain. At first Lorna can remember nothing, but as her memories return – some good, some bad, she realises that she has a decision to make, and that maybe, she needs to find a way home… Full review...
Kill the Next One by Federico Axat
After getting started with the opening chapters of Spanish writer, Federico Axat's Kill the Next One, you might be forgiven for thinking you are stuck with one of those machismo riddled tales where a middle-aged man with a mysterious past is forced to shoot or blunder his way through a by-the-numbers thriller. The spectre of Lee Child's successful Jack Reacher series creeping in around the edges of the page. The novel opens with Ted McKay and his Browning pointed to his temple. He has the perfect life, including a beautiful wife and two adoring children, but has discovered that he is also in possession of an untreatable tumour buried deep within his brain which is slowly killing him. However, right before he decides to take the shot and end his life, there is a knock on his door. Standing behind it is a man named Justin Lynch who tells Ted that he represents an all-knowing organisation that turns would-be suicides into opportunities to correct the imbalances of the law. Ted, instead of killing himself, could kill someone who really deserves it. Full review...
This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
Claude is the baby of the family. He's very bright. He has a vocabulary way beyond his years so he can hold his own in the rough and tumble of a house containing four older brothers, an emergency doctor mother and a writer father. Claude also likes to wear dresses. He wants to become a night fairy when he grows up. And one day, Claude becomes Poppy. He becomes she. Poppy's parents, Penn and Rosie, aren't too concerned at first - children all like to try on different identities and why should Claude/Poppy be any different? But it soon becomes clear that Poppy isn't play-acting at being a girl. Poppy is a girl. And things get complicated... Full review...
The Memory Book by Lara Avery
Sam McCoy has her life all planned out. She is going to win the national debating competition, go to college in New York and become a human rights lawyer. She is so sure of this that it almost feels ordained. And she has worked for it too, sacrificing relationships and friendships in the service of ambition. You can imagine, then, that Sammie views a diagnosis of Niemann–Pick type C as little more than a rock in the road. She won't let a pesky health condition stand in her way. Full review...
Out of Bounds by Val McDermid
When a teenage joyrider crashed a stolen car and ended up in a coma a routine check of his DNA revealed a connection to an unsolved murder from years before his birth. On the face of it, it looked as though solving the cold case should be straightforward, but it's not. Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie is an expert at clearing cases which have proved unsolvable but in this case it looks as though the law itself might prove to be an insurmountable barrier. She's drawn to another case too - one which she really has no business investigating - and one which has its roots in a terrorist bombing two decades earlier. Like the case of the teenage joyrider nothing is quite as it seems. Full review...
Evil Games (D I Kim Stone) by Angela Marsons
When Ruth saw the man who had raped her coming out of a local pub she was traumatised. He'd served his time (albeit it was rather short) and now he was free - and she was frightened. The rapist was murdered and DI Kim Stone and her team were called upon to solve the killing - and quickly. There was a little bit of a feeling that the man had got what was coming to him and didn't deserve a lot of sympathy, but professionalism won the day. Then more revenge killings came to light and it was obvious to Stone that there was something sinister behind what was happening. Full review...
The One by John Marrs
Everyone needs someone to love and to love them. But how great would it be if that someone was actually The One, tried, tested, scientifically guaranteed? Full review...
The Trophy Child by Paula Daly
We've all encountered pushy mothers - the ones who seem determined not to let their children have a moment's peace between all the extra-curricular activities which they have arranged for them. Karen Bloom is in a different class though. Her son, Ewan, was something of a disappointment, but she's not going to allow that to happen to her daughter, the talented Bronte. There's not a moment to spare between the music lessons, dance classes and extra school work - sometimes they have to eat on the hoof from one lesson to another. The rest of the family can see the cost to Bronte and to the family as a whole, but Karen will not listen, will not change her ways. Then one day Bronte disappears. Full review...
You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman
A woman known only as A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality dating show. A eats mostly popsicles and oranges, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials — particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert — and models herself on an impossible standard of beauty. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a local celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up a Wally's Supermarket's entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal. Meanwhile, B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who in turn hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C's pornography addiction. Maybe something like what's gotten into her neighbors across the street, the family who's begun ghosting themselves beneath white sheets with holes cut for eyes… Full review...
A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson
With grandparents who were distinguished writers and a father who co-founded a major publishing house, it was inevitable that Juliet Nicolson would follow in the family’s literary tradition. Already known for two works of social history, here she tells her family story through seven generations. Full review...
Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki and Polly Barton (translator)
Murakami, and (long before the film) Endo's Silence. That's my limit as regards contemporary Japanese writing. But now there's Tomoka Shibasaki, and her noted work Spring Garden. Which, make no mistake, is definitely Japanese. For instance, if I told you it starts with a man looking up to watch his female neighbour on her balcony, and concerns obsession, you could well think it was his about her. But no – perhaps only in the west is the gaze so male. The obsession is very much hers here, and it – and the novel – concern a singular house. And the very singular country it lives in, and the changes it is going through… Full review...
His Royal Whiskers by Sam Gayton
What would you do if your only son was accidently transformed into a cat? The Czar is beside himself, as a war chief, the emperor of the land, he needs an heir strong enough to follow his legacy. Instead, he has a fluffy ginger kitten. He is the laughing stock of his enemies, and he really needs to turn these odds back in his favour. So he forces those responsible to change the cat into a giant cat through the same magic they used the first time: alchemy. Full review...
English Animals by Laura Kaye
When Mirka gets a job in a country house in rural England, she has no idea of the struggle she faces to make sense of a very English couple, and a way of life that is entirely alien to her. Richard and Sophie are chaotic, drunken, frequently outrageous but also warm, generous and kind to Mirka, despite their argumentative and turbulent marriage. Mirka is swiftly commandeered by Richard for his latest money-making enterprise, taxidermy, and soon surpasses him in skill. After a traumatic break two years ago with her family in Slovakia, Mirka finds to her surprise that she is happy at Fairmont Hall. But when she tells Sophie that she is gay, everything she values is put in danger and she must learn the hard way what she really believes in. Full review...
Everybunny Dance by Ellie Sandall
Children's book have a long history of the lion lying down with the lamb when most adults understand that the only thing that the lamb would be lying on is the lining of the lion's stomach. However, there is plenty of time to learn about what creature eats what creature and perhaps we should just allow children to imagine that bunnies like to dance the night away and perhaps even get along with a fox. Full review...
Scotland Yardie by Bobby Joseph and Joseph Samuels
Things are grim in London. 'People of colour' can no longer stand at a bus stop or cross the road without white cops shooting them down, and planting drugs and guns on them. Heaven help them if their satnav leads them past certain corrupt coppers. But obviously one of the problems there is that there are no black police, so to encourage their growth Boris has built Jamaica a prison, and borrowed their finest – Scotland Yardie, a dreadlocked and heavily-armed skunkhead rasta. It's purely thought of as a PR exercise, but Yardie knows different. When you add on a mystery regarding a new chain of chicken shops, and the nasty cops, he has his work cut out. Seen? Full review...
Sarah Valentine, No Great Expectations Part 1 by Philip Valentine Coates
Sarah was the first of several children born in dire poverty to Jim and Sarah Valentine, and these pages tell her story from birth in December 1819 to her eighteenth birthday. Everything is vividly conveyed, from the poorly-clothed barefoot children in crowded living quarters in the Whitechapel Road area, without a lock on the door and with no possessions worth stealing except for the occasional shilling, to the noisy public houses with their fist-fights and the dirty, evil-smelling streets with sewage overflowing down the alleys and where epidemics spread all too rapidly. Full review...
Tilt by Mary Hoffman
To make an author, you first show someone books. To make a reader, you first show them the books they want to, and/or can, read. To make a builder, you first show someone buildings. I use those platitudes to introduce Simonetta, or Netta, who lives in Pisa late in the thirteenth century. She is surrounded by fabulous buildings – it's not for nothing the area will become known as the Field of Miracles, for the Cathedral, Baptistry and bell tower look gorgeous. But something is wrong with the latter one – it's definitely leaning, cracks are showing, and over the hundred-plus years it's taken to get this far people have built the floors at odd angles to correct the problem. Netta is intent on being the person who can solve it, alongside her father who's employed to finish it off. But therein lies the problem – it's all well and good showing someone buildings, and making them want to be an architect, but if they're the wrong gender then all hope is lost… or is it? Full review...
Neuromancer by William Gibson
He still dreamed of cyberspace…all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void
Neuromancer follows Case, who used to be a cyber cowboy with exceptional hacking skills, before attempting to steal from his former employer, who as a result severed his connection to cyberspace by injecting him with a mycotoxin. No longer able to enter the Matrix, Case enters a dark depression having suicidal thoughts and developing a drug addiction, which is where the reader first meets our troubled protagonist and antihero. Waiting for someone to help him escape his misery, a mysterious stranger proposes a deal to restore Case's ability to connect to cyberspace in exchange for working for him. Surrounded by secrecy, Case joins the recruits on their mission to uncover artificial intelligence and start life afresh. Full review...
A Collection of Short Stories by Gillian Fletcher-Edwards
Marged Evans allowed a break-up with a lover to affect everything in her life. Osian wanted to invest in the present but Marged loved the past. Since they drifted apart, Marged's life has been careful, ordered, unadventurous. But then Osian sends her a Christmas card and everything changes. Marged Evans is the first and longest in this collection of short stories from Gillian Fletcher-Edwards. It's almost a novella and its initially slow pace sets off quite the masterclass in how one event can throw everything into unexpected - but lovely - chaos. Full review...
Until We Win by Linda Newbery
The best journeys are made with little steps. Lizzy is slowly leaving her boring village behind – by being cheeky yet clever at her lessons, and getting a job in an office in the nearest proper town – and by saving to buy, and teaching herself to ride, a bicycle. All that's under the watchful eye of a mother insistent she learns to knuckle down with the housework on behalf of the men, and an older brother working at the village hunt. At the office, however, further steps are suggested to her – shorthand and typing classes, but she gets diverted. A chance encounter in a tea rooms puts more stepping stones in her way – en route to becoming a fully committed Suffragette, concerned only with making demands for votes for women. Full review...
The One Memory of Flora Banks by Emily Barr
Flora Banks has anterograde amnesia. This means that she hasn't laid down any new memories since she was ten years old and had a brain tumour removed. She's now seventeen and can remember life before the tumour but can't hold on to anything that happened after that for more than an hour or two. She gets by with the help of her very protective parents and her best friend Paige, and from the endless notes she writes to herself that tell her who she is, what's wrong with her, and what's been happening in her life. Flora has a tattoo on her arm. It simply says be brave. Full review...
