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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Blood Pool by J E Ryder
Samantha Shelley was surprised to become the owner of a boatyard when her husband died in a cliff fall. She had worked in the East Devon boatyard - run it in fact - for quite some time but it's the men of the Shelley 'blood pool' who have always inherited the land for the past two hundred years. She was aware of ill-feeling against her in the village, but her priority was to keep the business running as smoothly as possible for herself and for the staff she employed. There was some support in the village - an old friend, known to one and all as 'the Prof' - had always been there for her and willing to listen to her outpourings or just to chatter as she drank coffee. Then he disappeared in violent circumstances. Full review...
Encounters of Sherlock Holmes by George Mann (Editor)
Sherlock Holmes remains an enduring icon of English literature; perhaps as popular today as he was back in the late 1800s, maybe even more so with the advent of TV and film adaptations of his adventures. Indeed, such is the lasting appeal of the character that since the death of Conan Doyle there have been literally hundreds of works published, picking up where the original stories left off. Full review...
Countess Dracula by Guy Adams
1970s Hollywood, and a small group of people on a rough-and-ready coach tour round the stars' homes and scenes of scandal gets diverted to the completely ruined mansion once owned by a true golden couple. Cue a major flashback to the days when cinema idols Frank and Elizabeth were living there, and growing a very singular approach to sex, drugs and each other. Their career – jointly and separately – has been going downhill, hers irreparably as talkies have proven she is not the home-spun American dream, but Hungarian. A freak accident suggests that, like her compatriot and namesake, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the blood of young women will turn back the clock on Elizabeth's years, and make her youthful, the vivacious beauty of old. Cue a descent into the kind of excess that only Hollywood can produce… Full review...
Monstrous Maud: Horror Holiday by A B Saddlewick
And you think you have it tough… Maud is the only human at a school entirely populated by monsters – vampires, zombies, invisible people and so on. So just put yourself in her shoes when it's parents' evening, trying to divert her family from realising the truth about everyone and everything around them. Worse than that, try and put yourself in her shoes when it's revealed that she has to get an impossibly high score on an essay to not be kept back a year and lose contact with all her best friends. Worse than that, empathise with Maud as her folks meet another pupil's family at the parents' evening, and they therefore agree to go on holiday with a family of werewolves… at full moon… Full review...
Jasmine Nights by Julia Gregson
The temptingly titled Jasmine Nights starts promisingly. Saba, a talented singer whose gift to the war is entertaining the troops, comes from an unhappy family background, and one that has little patience for the opportunities for women brought about by war. Dom, a fighter pilot who has sustained injuries, is feeling displaced - the war has changed his world forever. Full review...
Hysteria by Megan Miranda
Shunned by many of her former friends after killing her boyfriend in self-defence, and unable to remember the details of his death, Mallory feels haunted by his presence. When her parents send her to boarding school, will this be a chance for a fresh start, or will her past catch up with her even there? Full review...
More and More Ant and Bee by Angela Banner
Right at the beginning, when you're just starting to read books which have more words than pictures, you need a book that's structured to help you. You need a book which is comfy to hold in small hands and which has a firm cover so that everything keeps straight. You need to share the reading and to know which words you're going to read and you might perhaps appreciate a hint in the form of a picture which will help you to get the word all on your own. Most of all though, you need to have a proper story and a feeling that you've achieved something when you get to the end. You need Ant and Bee. Full review...
Clouds above the Hill: A Historical Novel of the Russo-Japanese War, Volume 2 by Shiba Ryotaro
If Volume 1 built up the characters of Masaoka Shiki and the Akiyama brothers, Volume 2 is a book more about war than about people, at least as individuals. Very early in this volume, Masaoka Shiki passes away at a very young age and so fades from the story. Shortly afterwards, as the war with Russia becomes more inevitable and Japan's preparations for this really kick into gear, the Akiyama brothers blend a little more into the cast of characters working on the war effort and whilst their names appear fairly regularly, we don't follow their stories as closely as before. Full review...
The Queen at War (Chronicles of the Tempus) by K A S Quinn
Katie Berger-Jones-Burg is puzzled. Living with her former pop-star mother in a New York apartment she is having strange visions. It seems she has forgotten all about her previous time travelling adventures (in The Queen Must Die) although someone appears to be trying to send her some clues to prompt her memory. Her friends from Victorian England, Princess Alice and James, are facing difficulties of their own, with a very sick friend and also the threat of war. They need Katie's help, but how can they get her to travel back in time to them? Full review...
Nine Days by Toni Jordan
Christopher 'Kip' Westaway lives in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia with mother Jean, sister Connie and his twin, Francis. Kip's mother considers him a layabout who doesn't deserve the special privileges of his educationally elite brother and so he works at the big house next door for the Hustings, caring for their horses. One day Mr Husting presents Kip with a shilling; their little secret. As its 1939, that's a fair amount of money so Kip hides it away, not realising how special that coin will become as the decades pass. Full review...
How to Fall by Jane Casey
Freya dies after a fall from a cliff. But was it an accident, suicide, or - horror of horrors - murder?
Jess Tennant can't bear a mystery and so she sets out to solve the mystery of the death of the cousin she never met. She meets with nothing but obstruction and hostility, but perhaps it's little wonder. Not only is Jess a stranger in the parochial town of Port Sentinel, she is also the spitting image of Freya. She unsettles everyone for these reasons but, even despite them, Jess is an unsettling girl. She's blunt, direct, and she never takes no for an answer. Full review...
Ten Things I've Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler
Alice returns home to spend time with her dying father. She's been travelling in Mongolia, finding temporary escape from the issues that had haunted her life in London but now, on her return, events bring the pain she thought was behind her into sharp focus. Meanwhile Daniel is an elderly vagrant who calls the streets of London home. He seeks his lost child, leaving a trail of random items across the city in the hope of reunion like someone occupying a verse of Eleanor Rigby. Disparate lives, seeking love and acceptance in a world that seems to exclude it. Full review...
Arthur and the Earthworms by Johanne Mercier
Arthur has got himself a new job. He might be only seven but a boy can never start too soon. He's going to be selling earthworms from a table at the side of the road and the idea came when his pet duck started pulling up the worms. They were his favourite food, you see and on a rainy day you could find a lot of them just near the surface. He and Grandad managed to get quite a few worms together, but trade wasn't very brisk on the first and the woman who was determined to buy his pet duck did rather scare him. But the next day, trade picked up (although some of the customers did look suspiciously family) and then the big order came in... Full review...
Everbound by Brodi Ashton
This is the second in the Everneath trilogy and picks up two months from where the first book finished. Two months ago the Tunnels of the Everneath came to claim Nikki Beckett, to take her back to the Underworld where she would be used as a human battery forever. That night, Nikki's boyfriend, Jack, made the ultimate sacrifice and took Nikki's place in the Everneath. Now, Nikki is haunted by Jack, who appears in her dreams every night, lost, confused and slowly having the life sucked out of him. On the Surface everybody is blaming Nikki for Jack's disappearance; Jack's Mum has hired a Private Detective who's following Nikki around, convinced that she will take him to Jack. Full review...
I Love You by Giles Andreae and Emma Dodd
This is the fourth I love … publication from the prolific Giles Andreae, this time partnered by illustrator Emma Dodd. Judging by the little trike the child rides, this book is aimed at one and two year old children. It would be a good choice for a child not yet up for a simple story, since here, the language is the emotional narrative. Repetitive rhyming couplets explore familiar aspects of a young child’s world. The best books for pre-language children at bedtime secure and settle, and the appeal of this book is in its predictable rhythmn and happy emotion, rather than a challenging vocabulary or exciting story line. Full review...
The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence
While re-entering the UK with some human ashes and a stash of marijuana, Alex Woods is stopped by customs and referred to the police. It all started 6 years before when, as an 11 year old living in England's West Country, his escape from bullies necessitates breaking into a shed; the shed of a man with a gun pointing at Alex. The man is American Vietnam veteran Isaac Peterson and, whatever his school teachers may say to the contrary, this is the moment when Alex's education really begins; this and the moment when he was hit on the head by a passing meteor of course. Full review...
Maximus Musicus Visits the Orchestra by Hallfridur Olafsdottir and Porarinn Mar Baldursson
One day Maxi wanders into a rehearsal of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, where he is entranced to hear Ravel’s Bolero. He encounters most of the orchestral instruments and there’s a lot of whimsical humour as Maxi moves from instrument to instrument. Eventually he falls asleep on the stage, tired out by the excitement of his adventures. He wakes to a loud booming noise as the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is played, and he finds that the orchestra is in concert. He scuttles down into a packed auditorium. At the end of the concert, Maximus joins in the standing ovation which precedes the stirring home-grown encore. Full review...
Publish on Amazon Kindle with Kindle Direct Publishing by Kindle Direct Publishing
If you're thinking of going down the road of self-publishing your book but are unwilling or unable to fund the services offered by some of the leaders in the field then publishing on Kindle is the obvious place to look first. It's a big step though and you want to get it right - not least because what you publish could be out there to haunt you for a very long time. This book comes, as it were, from the horse's mouth and I was expecting explanations, guidance, advice and, well, something which would leave me with the feeling that I could do this successfully. How did it square up? Full review...
Whizz Pop, Granny Stop! by Tracey Corderoy and Joe Berger
Grannies come in for a lot of negative press. Absent-minded geriatric, witch with a black cat, spoiling the kids, always getting it wrong ... you know the stereotypes. Well I’m fighting back. I latched onto this book, of course, as a granny. And in this neatly rhyming story, Granny, as seen through the practical eyes of her small grand-daughter, is all these things as well as being notably peculiar. Tracey Corderoy has pretty much got us metaphorically taped! Full review...
The Gurkha's Daughter by Prajwal Parajuly
Parajuly is the son of an Indian father and Nepalese mother hailing from Gangtok in the Indian Himalayas, but spending most of his time somewhere between New York and Oxford. His insight is therefore something we should probably trust. Full review...
The Revenge of the Ballybogs by Siobhan Rowden
Not much has changed in Barnaby's world since the first book in this series. His grandmother is still smelly, burpy, purple and a pickler on an industrial scale. Barnaby is at last working alongside her as opposed to hating her, but not everything is running completely smoothly, and Barnaby still doesn't know everything there is to know about his heritage – either the pickle factory he is supposed to inherit, or the bogle blood his unusual background has left him with. These short, dirty, hairy, stinking critters live in a world of their own underneath an unusual nearby bog – when they're not invading people's homes and causing mischief. Once again, however much Barnaby is reluctant to, he is forced to enter their world in an effort to solve a major calamity in his family, but this time without the help of his mother – for someone or something has kidnapped her… Full review...
How To Scare The Pants Off Your Pets (Ghost Buddy) by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver
Billy is the only person who can see the ghost of Hoover Porterhouse the Third that he shares a bedroom with. While nobody else knows about the phantom's existence, Billy certainly knows about his character – his arrant braggadocio and the many self-serving rules he demands he lives his afterlife by. The problem is that that same lack of respect and responsibility is what is keeping Hoover in Billy's life and not moving on, and his attitude is so bad he's been grounded by the Higher-Ups in charge of such things. Billy's not one to live with an annoyance like that, though, and decides to prove the Hoove can be responsible – and caring for a pet should be the obvious proof with which to start… Full review...
Lenin's Kisses by Yan Lianke
Yan Lianke's 2004 novel, Lenin's Kisses, newly and beautifully translated by Carlos Rojas, is a rare and fascinating example, not just of Chinese fiction from a writer living and working in China, but also a book that has won literary awards (the prestigious Chinese Lao She Literary Award), now available in English. In many respects, the fact that this book won such a literary prize is somewhat surprising - not I hasten to add because of any lack of quality - but because Lianke, who has previously sailed too close to the political wind for Chinese censors, here presents a not altogether flattering view of Chinese politics. It's a book that is literary with a capital L, and while the core of the plot is relatively simple, what makes this book so interesting is the structure and way the story is told. Full review...
Little Manfred by Michael Morpurgo
In The Imperial War Museum, a little wooden dog stands in a glass display case. He was donated to the museum in 2005 by a family who lived at a farm in Kent. The little dog was made from cast-off apple boxes by a German prisoner of war who worked at the farm. Full review...
Stick Dog by Tom Watson
'I Can’t Draw, Okay?' Tom Watson apologises in the opening chapter of Stick Dog. He then goes on to lay some ground rules with the reader, explaining that:
'....this Stick Dog story (with the bad pictures that my art teacher doesn’t like) will also be told in a way that I like (but my English teacher doesn’t).'
'Good deal?'
'Excellent. Let’s move on.'
'This is going to be fun.' Full review...
Transforming Pandora by Carolyn Mathews
When we first meet Pandora Armstrong in the spring of 2003 she's grieving for her husband, Mike, who had died just a few weeks before. It hadn't been his first heart attack and he had reduced his workload but this attack was fatal. He was only in his fifties and Pandora feels that he'd been snatched away from her as they'd only been married for a few years. When a friend suggests that she goes with her to an Evening of Clairvoyance she runs out of excuses to refuse and although she's not exactly convinced by what she hears there's a lingering doubt. A spirit voice mentioned her children and Pandora was adamant that she didn't have any children - it's actually quite a sore point - but that wasn't true of Mike. Full review...
The Wayward Gentleman: John Theophilus Potter and the Town of Haverfordwest by Patricia Watkins
In 1778 John Theophilus Potter (Theo to his friends) came to Haverfordwest from Dublin with a group of actors to put on two performances of Romeo and Juliet. A careless accident left him unable to return with the other players - and then he met Elizabeth Edwardes, from a family of local gentry. Friendship turned to love and whilst some in the town wondered (in a rather loud voice) that the Edwardes should allow Elizabeth's friendship with an actor, Theo was no strolling player without a penny to his name. He was a 'gentleman player' with a considerable fortune and a very respectable income. He was also a restless man, constantly driven to achieve. Full review...
The Technologists by Matthew Pearl
The year is 1868 and Boston is under threat from an evil genius who seems to have the uncanny ability to manipulate matter itself. The city has already experienced two attacks; the chaos in the harbour when the navigation instruments went awry and the eerie spectacle in the commercial quarter when every item of glass, including windows, eyeglasses, clocks and watches spontaneously melted. But are these attacks a prelude to something greater? Full review...
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker
Sendker is German-born (Hamburg 1960) and worked as American correspondent for Stern (1990 to 95) and then as its Asian correspondent from '95 to '99. He now lives in Berlin. This probably gives him enough global insight to write about a US-born high flyer with an Asian heritage heading off to Burma to find out the truth of her father's disappearance. It probably also gives him the language skills to do it in English without recourse to a translator. Full review...
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
There’s a distressing moment in any long-term relationship where you realise that, in practice, happily ever after looks a lot like an eternity of small, snarling arguments about who forgot to buy food, who should take out the rubbish and who is responsible for that mouldering pile of clothes in the corner of the bedroom. Domestic bliss is often more like very polite guerrilla warfare between two people who love each other so much that they want to spend the rest of their lives fighting about it. You and your partner are absolutely in each other’s pockets – but no matter how close you are, there’s always one last barrier you can’t break down. You aren’t them, and they aren’t you, and so you can never truly know what’s really going on inside that well-known head. Full review...
The Engagement by Chloe Hooper
Chloe Hooper's gothic, psychological thriller concerns an affair between a thirty-something English girl, Liese, working in Australia at her uncle's real estate business and a blandly handsome Australian farmer, Alexander. Set over one weekend as Liese is heading to Alexander's remote family farm for the first time for a weekend of passion, this is a classic 'girl trapped in spooky house and situation' story with a dark, sexual twist. Liese, who trained as an interior architect, met Alexander while showing him around exclusive Melbourne properties and, has somehow managed to get herself into a situation whereby Alexander pays her for her attentions, believing that she is some kind of prostitute. He's even paying her handsomely for her time at the weekend. With debts of her own, Liese willingly encourages this perception with little idea of the problems to which this fantasy will lead. Full review...
School's Out! by Jack Sheffield
The beginning of September 1983 starts a new academic year for the village primary school of Ragley-on-the-Forest. Headmaster Jack Sheffield starts the autumn term with a skip in his step as he and wife Sally enjoy their new baby, John William despite the broken nights. What else will the year bring? The advent of a new teacher and a tragedy that strikes sorrow in the heart of the village reduces Jack's skip a bit but there are always moments to lift the mood; for instance, whatever it was that little Madonna Fazackerly did in her cat's ear. It's all there in the school's daily log; perhaps not the one that the inspectors see, you understand, all is explained in living detail here in Jack's memoir of life as a teacher and villager. Full review...
The Ambassador's Daughter by Pam Jenoff
In 1919 the Great War - the First World War - was over and all that was left was to work out the terms of the peace treaty. Margot Rosenthal accompanied her father, a diplomat, to Paris, where he was part of the German delegation and in the invidious position of being disliked by the French because he was the enemy and mistrusted by fellow members of the delegation because he was Jewish. They'd previously been in England where they'd simply been the enemy. Margot could have gone home to Berlin but that would have taken her back to her fiance, who'd been seriously injured in the war. She'd rather fallen into the engagement, feeling that it was what she ought to do. Passion played no part. Full review...
