The Great Unexpected
by Sharon Creech
A wonderful tale of unexpected family ties spanning two continents - with a little bit of a ghost story thrown in too - oh, and a fairy ring!
Naomi and Lizzie are best friends in a small American village called Blackbird Tree. The main thing they have in common is that they are both orphans. Naomi is looked after by Nula and Joe - Nula came to America from her home country Ireland when she was a teenager. Lizzie is with foster parents - her only family is apparently a mad aunt living in Ireland. Thus the seeds of family ties are sown, and grow as the story grows. It is helped along the way by a mysterious young lad, Finn, who falls out of a tree one day in front of Naomi. He has a strange accent, and also a strange ability to appear and disappear at random moments - usually when Naomi is thinking of him. The stories of old Mrs Kavanagh and her friend Pilpenny in Ireland, and Naomi and Lizzie in America, are interwoven beautifully, helped along by all the other strange and eccentric characters in Blackbird Tree, each of them with their own secrets and stories to tell.
I just loved this!
After Iris - The Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby
by Natasha Farrant
What a wonderful book, I loved it. Just right for girls 10years and over. Written part film transcript and part diary, it is about young Bluebell (but she much prefers Blue) whose twin sister Iris died in a car accident 3 years earlier. Blue records her family's life on video - much to the annoyance of her eldest sister Flora. Blue, Flora and their younger brother and sister Twig and Jas live in a beautiful old, but cold, house in London. They are looked after by a Bosnian au pair Zoran, as their father spends most of the time working in Warwick, and their mother constantly travels all over the world with her job. The past few years have been an emotional struggle for them all, especially Blue, and you can sense the family slowly falling apart. Only the silent and solitary Blue, cameragirl extraordinaire, is able to show her feelings in her diaries. She thinks she's finally found someone to talk to when carefree and loveable Joss Bateman pops into her life and she finds she has a huge crush on him. However, the path of young teenage love is an unfairly rocky one, but help and friendship is not too far away...
You will laugh, and you will find a lump in your throat, but mostly you will just love this book.
Downside Up
by Hayley Long
Ronni Runnacles is in a bad place emotionally. Her dad has left, her mum is a wreck, and she just can't concentrate in school - that's if she actually goes. Add to that the very annoying Sadie Slowgrove and the gorgeous you'll-get-me-if-you're-lucky Stuart Bolan, and Ronni finds the easiest way out of all her problems is to create an imaginary world where she is the superfamous popstar Ronni Runaway. But one day, after an accident on the dodgems, Ronni starts to realise that you might not always be happy with what you wish for.
This was really rather funny, and a whole lot of fun with it too. I just loved Ronni's teenage language - 'whoop' is one of her favourite words, so just imagine it said in a teenage 'whatever' way. Ronni's nan is great too, with her too-tight clothes and her 'cheesemobile' yellow car. But I think my favourite character is Ronni's Russian classmate Yuri Maximovich Krolik who starts all his sentences with 'Yes' - he's hilarious.
I must admit I much preferred the first section to the second 'upside down' after-the-accident section. It definitely wasn't as funny (apart from Yuri) and I found myself skim-reading through most of it. But I'm sure once young girls have read this one they'll definitely look to read Hayley Long's other books.
I'd recommend this for girls over 10. There is some light swearing (cr*p, b*tch, bl**dy) but you can hear worse in the Harry Potter films!
"When Did You See Her Last?" (All The Wrong Questions 2)
by Lemony Snicket
There's not much more to say than that this is just as madly and weirdly wonderful as the first book "Who Could That Be At This Hour?" We rejoin Lemony and his 'teacher' S.Theodora Markson, this time trying to hunt down the missing Cleo Knight, a young chemist on the verge of creating invisible ink. Many familiar faces appear again from book 1, with the sinister Hangfire still lurking in the background. A joy of silliness.
Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
by Matthew Quick
Leonard is a troubled soul. His parents are no longer together - his ex-rock star alcoholic father is no longer in the picture, and his fashion designer mother spends most of her time away from home with her French boyfriend. It is his 18th birthday, but nobody remembers. He is bullied at school by Asher Beale, one-time best friend until that dreadful life-changing incident. He is unhappy, and he sees no happiness in the future for himself either, so he makes the decision to take himself out of this world and into another, happier place - and take Asher Beale with him. And that's where his grandfather's P-38 gun that was used to kill a Nazi officer in World War II, comes into the picture. It is up to his 3 friends in the world - Herr Silverman his history and German teacher; Walt his Humphrey Bogart film loving neighbour; Lauren the beautiful Christian - to convince him that life is worth living. But will it be enough?
This is understandably a very sad story. Poor Leonard, even though he is highly intelligent, is seen as a weirdo by his classmates, so when he starts to spiral downwards no-one seems to notice because they think he is strange anyway. The school guidance counsellor remarks on his behaviour but when he laughs it off, so does she. You end up screaming at some of the characters to give him the help he needs, stop the inevitable from happening. Thankfully Herr Silverman is a lot more astute and aware and you hope you can rely on him to pull Leonard out of his suicidal hole.
There were a few annoying things in the story, the first being footnotes. I'm not a big fan of these, they seem to tear you away from the moment and when the story is so emotionally heavy, it takes a while to get back into it. The second is the sudden introduction of letters from the future. You wonder what on earth it is about, until it is explained a little further into the book. The third is the ending - I often seem disappointed by endings, but this one really annoys. See what you think yourselves.
Other than that, a really enjoyable, thoughtful, heartbreaking story about a taboo subject.
Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
by Robin Sloan
I didn't quite know what to make of this. In a way, it was a shame that I read it right after The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, because I loved that book so much it was going be hard to beat. I loved the idea of the story of Mr Penumbra - a bookshop that is open all day and all night, but hardly has any customers. The few customers it has act rather strangely and keep quoting what sounds like a Latin phrase to Clay, the young lad whose job it is to man the bookstore through the night. Using the help of a few of his friends, he discovers that many of the non-mainstream books kept in the shop are written in code. Once this code is broken, the secret to eternal life is revealed. But Clay doesn't want to have to read through all the books to solve the puzzle. One of his friends works at Google and she uses her technological wizardry to solve it the modern way. I think this is where the story lost me slightly. I wanted an oldy-worldy magical story of secrets and books, but instead I get thrown back into the real world of Google search, Kindles and e-books, and Amazon. So good concept, but not quite good enough to hold my excitement.
The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
I was very excited when I saw that Donna Tartt had written a third novel. Her first, The Secret History, was published to critical acclaim in 1992 and I absolutely loved it. She had us waiting 10 years for her second novel - The Little Friend was published in 2002. So another 11 years have passed and she has produced another tome of a book - the 771-paged The Goldfinch. This book is not only of epic proportions size-wise, but also content-wise. The story may itself be simple - 13-year old Theo is visiting a museum with his mother when there is an explosion and his mother is killed. Theo takes a painting which his mother loved, in order to keep it, and the memory of her, alive. But it is this painting, and the struggle to keep it safe and hidden over the next 14 years, which draws him into a world he could not have foreseen for himself.
You will become addicted to this book. Its size will become invisible, until you near the end and you wish it to continue further. Theo becomes your best friend, you want all the characters to like him, and most of them do. You will fall in love with Theo's best friend, Boris, with his heavily-accented speech and his bad-boy but totally adorable personality. You want Hobie, Theo's 'guardian', to be your father and to live in his eccentric sounding house. But above all you want Theo to survive all the bad stuff that gets thrown at him. Donna Tartt details so much that you wonder whether it is research or real life that she is basing it on - the horror of drug use and abuse; the minutiae of the art world. But wherever it's from, the fact it feels real is what makes a great story, and a brilliant read.
For me the only downside of the whole book is the last few pages of philosophising. I'm a 'black and white' type person, so all questions on the 'meaning of life' make me glaze over. Donna Tartt, through her character Theo, makes a couple of comments during the book about the pointlessness of bringing children into a world of misery and unhappiness - mortgages, divorce, hip-replacements and loneliness in care homes are what they face in life. Her own reflection on life perhaps?
