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 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...
The Start of Everything by Emily Winslow
After some flooding, the badly decomposed body of a teenage girl was washed up in the fens outside Cambridge. The major problem for DI Chloe Frohmann and DCI Morris Keene isn't how she got there - but who she is. There's no identification on her and despite the fact that she's obviously been dead for some time no one seems to have missed her. No family is in distress. No friends are worried about what has become of her. No employer is concerned about what has happened. Meanwhile, in Cambridge Mathilde Oliver the daughter of a don is trying to trace the Katja. Letters are being delivered to Corpus Christi College addressed to her, but she doesn't seem to exist. Also at the university a student dropped out of her course: Grace Rhys was uncertain about whether or not she wanted to study Maths and took a job as a nanny at Deeping House, the home of three families, another nanny and a young writer. Full review...
Rituals by Cees Nooteboom
Rituals introduces us to Amsterdam, and to Inni, firstly in 1960, then in 1950, and then in the 1970s. When we first meet Inni, it is when he is a middle-aged man in 1960. Far from responsible and hard-working, we see him as someone who is impulsive and reckless, even to the point of cruelty to his wife - who formulates plans to leave him. It is only after this frankly miserable first impression that we meet the younger Inni, and we see how a chance meeting with a man called Arnold Taads had changed the course of his life. Taads is a man obsessed with matriculating his life down to the last second, letting time dictate what he can do, with whom he can do it with, and, most importantly, when. In Part three, in another chance meeting, the now ageing Inni meets Taads' son, Phillip. Phillip, though having never met his father, curiously lives a life that is an echo of his father's; though as Arnold isolated himself in the mountains, Phillip isolates himself in meditation and the methodology of the tea ceremony. Full review...
Stormbringers by Philippa Gregory
Luca Vero, his servant Frieze, and his clerk Brother Peter are investigating signs of the end of the world. Accompanied by Lady Isolde and her servant Ishraq, they arrive in Piccolo just before the mysterious Johann, a young body claiming to be called by God. He's followed by a horde of children who he's leading on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Even though his grandiose claims that the sea will part for them would seem absurd if anyone else said so, he's so charismatic that Luca and Isolde believe him - could he really be chosen by God? Or is he leading the children, and Luca and Isolde, into tragedy? Full review...
The Fury: The Director's Cut by Alexander Gordon Smith
I chose The Fury expecting a zombie novel. It isn't what I was expecting at all. The official press release describes the Fury as a zombie book without zombies. This book has several things in common with the zombie genre; a group of survivors, in this case all children struggling to survive against a world that wants to destroy them. Unlike the typical zombie book, those affected by the fury are not the mindless living dead. They are ordinary people who go about ordinary lives with one exception. When they get near one of these children they are gripped by an uncontrollable urge to rip them apart, and everyone on the planet, other than a very small group is affected. Parents murder their children, other children will kill their best friends and total strangers will give up everything to destroy them. After they have killed them, they will go back to their ordinary lives. The world will continue unchanged - at least for now. What makes these children different? Why does the whole world want them dead? Who is infected - and with what? Full review...
Managing Yourself (The Checklist Series: Step by step guides to getting it right) by The Chartered Management Institute
When you start work, when you become a manager or move up the ladder it's assumed that you will need training in managing. This is always assumed to be managing other people, but it's only very rarely that any consideration is given to managing yourself - and then probably only in specific areas. But - if you haven't sorted yourself out, thought through your own actions and motivations, how can you give leadership to others? Managing Yourself remedies this and covers the cradle to grave of working life. If you have ambitions to move up the career ladder - or even if you just want to have a more rewarding and stress-free working life - this book is essential reading. Full review...
Promise to Obey by Stella Whitelaw
Jessica Harlow let her London flat and undertook a three-month nursing contract at Upton Hall to fill in the time before she took up a permanent post in Sheffield. It didn't start well: she got soaked waiting to be picked up at the deserted railway station and then she discovered that she was to nurse Lady Grace Coleman who was recovering from a hip-replacement operation and look after her two grandchildren. Five-year-old Lily was a delight, but overweight and asthmatic. Eight-year-old Daniel was autistic and on top of this Lady Grace was, er, difficult. What made her stay? Well, despite a humiliating romantic experience with a doctor in London she was rather taken by Lucas Coleman, a talented plastic surgeon - and she was obstinate enough to decide that she was going to make a go of it. Besides, where would she live if she left Upton Hall? Full review...
The Eighties: One Day, One Decade by Dylan Jones
Most of us can count on the fingers of two hands, perhaps only one, a select few special days when it was as if the eyes of the world were focused on one major event. These include 9/11; the day Princess Diana was killed; and for those of us with even longer memories the day Kennedy was shot. Add to that grim litany an event which had far more positive results. Full review...
First Class: A History of Britain in 36 Postage Stamps by Chris West
As a philatelist and lover of history, I approached this book with even more curiosity than usual. The subtitle suggested a very intriguing approach, but would it work? I’m glad to report that it did. Full review...
In Between Days by Andrew Porter
After Chloe Harding is forced to leave her East Coast college, for reasons she refuses to explain to her recently divorced parents or older brother Richard, her family's lives start to unravel. Will the rest of them ever find out what caused her fall from grace, and can they solve their own problems? Full review...
Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda
Red Hook, Brooklyn and it is blisteringly hot. Two fifteen year old girls decide the best and most exciting way to cool off is to take a small inflatable raft on to the river. The next morning one of the girls is found unconscious and washed ashore with no memory of what happened in the river and the other girl is nowhere to be found. This becomes a big local story and the survivor, saviour and community have to deal with the loss in their different ways. Full review...
My Friend the Enemy by Dan Smith
It's 1941. Peter wishes the war away every single day. His father is away fighting. They rarely hear from him. Mr flipping Bennett is always at his house. Making sure he and his mother are managing, apparently. That's not what the other children are saying. They say Peter's mother is Mr Bennett's fancy woman. And they bully Peter about it. Despite farms lying all around, there isn't much food. Everything is rationed. Full review...
Baggy Brown and the Royal Baby by Mick Inkpen
Baggy Brown had the best possible start in life. He was the first bear off the production line at Better Bears Limited and was destined for The Palace. Baggy was to be the bear of Princess Sophinyiniannia - that's Sophie to you and me - but life went disastrously wrong for Baggy before he reached the end of the conveyor belt. A NOT FOR SALE notice was stuck on his nose and a NO 1 tag in his ear, but it was the NOT FOR SALE notice which proved his undoing. He didn't line himself up correctly, and fell straight off the end of the conveyor belt and into the big red teddy bear machine. Full review...
The Wolf Pit by Will Cohu
Up on the north Yorkshire Moors there’s a feature of the landscape known as the Wolf Pit. It’s thought to be a medieval trap into which wolves were driven, but as you get close to it, it’s difficult to locate, marked only by a change in the light, a slope of the ground. Will Cohu doesn’t concentrate on the pit but rather on nearby Bramble Carr, the remote moorland cottage to which his grandparents moved in 1966, almost on a whim and certainly with insufficient thought. George Brook was a manager at ICI in Billingham and Dorothy was an artist and musician. They’d been brought together by a shared love of the arts but once installed at Bramble Carr and with little more than each other for company the marriage deteriorated into dark silence. Full review...
Paris by Edward Rutherfurd
Taking four families, from different social positions, Edward Rutherfurd weaves these family histories into the history of Paris and France. We encounter the noble de Cygnes, the bourgeois Blanchards, the lower class Gascons and the revolutionary Le Sourds. Their lives cross paths through the years in often unexpected ways and while Paris is an historical fiction novel, this is as much an epic story of families as it is about the history. Full review...
The Radically Awesome Adventures of the Animal Princess: Balloon Toons by Pranas T Naujokaitis
I know so many parents who are completely fed up with the stereotyped role of little girls and especially princesses in stories. If you are looking for stories with a totally different type of princess, then this book is for you. The little princess, or Animal Princess as she is known, is most certainly not a damsel in distress. She is an active heroine boldly seeking adventure, and the messier the better. Rather than looking like a beauty pageant winner in a formal gown, the little Animal Princess looks refreshingly child like in the illustrations. I am delighted to see a princess drawn with the proportions of an ordinary child rather than a Barbie doll. She also prefers nice comfortable animal pyjamas to ball gowns. Full review...
My Friend Fred (the Plant) by Daniel Cleary and Kanako Usui
I loved comic books as a child. As an adult. I love them even more as wonderful way to encourage literacy in young children. Unfortunately comic books for children are hard to come by now, and there are very few books in this format for children under age 8. Ballooon Toons seems poised to change this with a delightful new series of children's books printed in comic book style format, but with a sturdy hardback binding. Full review...
Out Of This World by Ali Sparkes
The best thing about being a book reviewer is the sheer variety of reading material you get access to. In the last few weeks alone I’ve been immersed in blasphemous hilarity, paranormal mystery and even the landscapes of deepest darkest Transylvania. This book, however, is the first one I’ve read in ages that dragged me right out the door on an adventure. Full review...
