Difference between revisions of "Book Reviews From The Bookbag"
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| + | |author=Richard Denning | ||
| + | |title=Tomorrow's Guardian | ||
| + | |rating=4.5 | ||
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| + | |summary=Eleven year old Tom Oakley thinks he's going mad when he seems to relive short periods of his life, and dreams about other people from different times. The reality is far stranger – he's a Walker, with the power to rescue those he dreamed about. Travelling to the battle of Isandlwana, the Great Fire of London, and a German U-Boat, guided by the mysterious Professor, Tom saves the lives of soldier Edward, servant Mary, and Able Seaman Charlie, who also have powers. There are others, however, with similar powers, who aren't as pleasant as Tom's new friends – and the four of them, allied with the Professor and his roguish helper Septimus, are pitched into a battle to save the worlds. That's intentionally plural – there are two parallel universes at stake here. | ||
| + | |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1445251388</amazonuk> | ||
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|author=Kate Griffin | |author=Kate Griffin | ||
Revision as of 17:31, 15 March 2010
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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Tomorrow's Guardian by Richard Denning
Eleven year old Tom Oakley thinks he's going mad when he seems to relive short periods of his life, and dreams about other people from different times. The reality is far stranger – he's a Walker, with the power to rescue those he dreamed about. Travelling to the battle of Isandlwana, the Great Fire of London, and a German U-Boat, guided by the mysterious Professor, Tom saves the lives of soldier Edward, servant Mary, and Able Seaman Charlie, who also have powers. There are others, however, with similar powers, who aren't as pleasant as Tom's new friends – and the four of them, allied with the Professor and his roguish helper Septimus, are pitched into a battle to save the worlds. That's intentionally plural – there are two parallel universes at stake here. Full review...
The Midnight Mayor: A Matthew Swift Novel by Kate Griffin
'A telephone rang.
I answered.
After that…
…it's complicated.'
Sorcerer Matthew Swift does not especially like danger. In fact, after the events that led to him destroying the Tower and his former teacher, Robert Bakker, he'd prefer it greatly if danger would leave him to mind his own business, thank you very much. Full review...
Dubai: The Story of the World's Fastest City by Jim Krane
In the 1950's, Dubai contained just a few thousand inhabitants scraping a living. By 1985, it had grown, but Sheikh Mohammed was still laughed at when he said that he wanted to make it a popular destination for tourists. With the addition of artificial islands, the world's tallest building, an indoor ski slope, and much more, it's now one of the world's foremost cities - but as headlines showed last year, the stellar growth may have been extremely costly, in terms of finances, environmental problems, and the quality of life for some of its inhabitants. Full review...
The Surprising Life of Constance Spry by Sue Shephard
The very mention of the name Constance Spry conjures up thoughts of flower arranging and books of recipes from a bygone era. Perhaps it was her misfortune that she died just before television could have made a celebrity of her, as it did of the likes of Fanny Cradock and Nigella Lawson, to name but two. Even so, she enjoyed a remarkably successful career, and the woman behind the public face was no ordinary career woman, but quite an unconventional personality. Full review...
Blade: Cutting Loose by Tim Bowler
Cutting Loose is the seventh book about Blade, the fourteen-year-old anti-hero who has unerring skill with a knife and a past that won't let him go. Blade is coming to the edge of his resources and he can't go on for much longer. He has done all he can to expose uber-villain Hawk - rescued Jaz, talked to the police, given up his carefully-hidden evidence, set a gang war in motion in the Beast. It's not enough, but it's the best he could do and now he just wants out. Full review...
Corrag by Susan Fletcher
A small and dirty woman sits in a prison cell. With her bare feet and her matted hair and her damp, filthy clothes, she doesn't wonder at the word witch. She has been called it all her life. Her mother called her witch before she named her. Her given name Corrag – was a corruption: for Cora (her mother) and Hag (which she'd get as used to as Cora had).
She sits through the snow of the winter, knowing that the sound she hears outside is the dragging of the logs for her pyre.
She was told, though, that a man would come. So she waits for him. Full review...
Double Jeopardy by Martin Stratford
Celebrating her release from 18 months under cover busting a drugs gang, Detective Sergeant Julie Cooper meets her cherished Aunt Jo for dinner.
Just across from the restaurant, in a dark alley, a man stands watching.
As the two women leave the restaurant, a motorcycle rounds the corner – not travelling at excess speed or in any other way destined to attract attention – shots ring out. Two bodies hit the ground. Full review...
Ask Alice by D J Taylor
The central character Alice, has had a humble start in life but ' ... the silence of the Kansas flat ... and the distant murmur of the freight trains ' is not for her. She dreams of the bright lights of the big cities and although she is naive and unworldly, fancies herself as an actress. Painful and difficult decisions are made as she reaches for her goal. Her talent and resourcefulness see her through; give her a modest roof above her head in this precarious profession. Full review...
Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead by Christopher Golden (Editor)
Anyone who enjoys a good horror story and likes zombie films will love this book, which is a collection of nineteen short stories by a variety of authors. I have to admit that I have only heard of one of the authors before - Mike Carey, who writes the Felix Castor novels - but I am not an avid reader of the genre and don't doubt that the authors will be known to readers more familiar with it. Despite this unfamiliarity, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the stories, with just one or two seemingly not up to scratch. Full review...
The Amber Treasure by Richard Denning
Cerdic is the younger son of a minor lord living in a quiet Anglo Saxon village in sixth century Northumbria. His people are settled and the Welsh (Romano-Britons) seem contained behind the Pennines. Cedric fully expects to live out his live as a gentleman farmer, hopefully with the beautiful Aidith by his side. But as he listens to the tales told by Lilla the bard, he can't help but dream of following after his uncle, the great warrior Cynric, and finding glory in battle. Full review...
Girl With a One Track Mind: Exposed: Further Revelations of a Sex Blogger by Abby Lee
Abby Lee is back with a brand new book that's sure to bring her readers closer to her than they've ever been before.
For those who missed the media spectacle that surrounded her first book, 'Girl With a One Track Mind' followed twelve months in the life of 'Abby Lee', a film runner who became an internet sensation after starting a blog in 2004 detailing her sexual exploits and thoughts. The book became an immediate success with men and women alike and earned Abby a couple of thousand more hits on her blog ever day. Full review...
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe
Connie is doing postgraduate research on witchcraft. Although she is initially rather wary of being asked to clear out her grandmother’s old house, the project turns out to lead to lots of exciting possibilities, including romance and perhaps original sources for her studies. Full review...
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
I never really got on with maths at school. Or sport. So a book that seems to deal with both baseball and mathematics ought to fly to the bottom of my 'to read' pile. However, this slim little Japanese novel slipped into my hands and into my heart as soon as I saw it. The premise is very simple - a young housekeeper is assigned to a job working for an elderly, brain damaged professor of mathematics. He has only eighty minutes of short-term memory, so he doesn't remember her from one day to the next, but his memory pre-1975 remains intact and somehow he continues to function, living through his obsession with numbers. Each morning he greets her at the door asking for her birth date and her telephone number. He finds puzzles and equations in everything, including shoe sizes and baseball, and the housekeeper becomes fascinated as she and her son also begin to see the beauty and the poetry in numbers. Full review...
The Last Stormlord (Stormlord Trilogy) by Glenda Larke
The Last Stormlord is a unique story which explores a civilization on the brink of disaster. The world survives through the powers of a Stormmlord who brings water to the parched lands of the Quartern from the distant seas. As the story opens the last Stormlord is weak and dying. Choices are being made about who will receive water, who will not and the Quartern hovers on the brink of returning to a time of Random Rain: water that does not fall where or when it is needed. Without a new Stormlord the land will die. Full review...
Life on Another Planet by Will Eisner
There are some people who don't even need their name on their books, for the contents are so obviously and uniquely theirs. Will Eisner is one such person, for the esteem and renown his artwork and pioneering work in the graphic novel form is held under is rightfully his and his alone. I'm quite sure I could recognise a page of his black and white inkwork, and his easily drawn but realistic characters, more easily than any other sequential artist. That trademark signature on the cover, surely the most well-known in 'comic strips' outside Mr Disney's empire, is hardly necessary. Full review...
The Secret Language of Sleep: A Couple's Guide to the Thirty-nine Positions by Evany Thomas
This volume takes the premise that the positions in which couples sleep together are an insight into their private mind. Therefore, with the help of the line drawings of 39 (apparently all of THE 39) positions, one might see where one is going wrong. It’s a chicken and egg situation where you might learn you’re with the wrong bed partner, and change either them or your nocturnal habits, or in order to change yourself alter things having reflected on the contents here – with the help as they suggest of a ceiling-mounted camcorder. Full review...
My Worst Best Friend by Dyan Sheldon
Gracie Mooney and Savanna Zindle are, unlikely as it may seem, best friends. Savanna is popular, beautiful, loud, confident and, well, a little bit stupid. Gracie is short, plain, quiet, and an intelligent lizard-loving environmentalist. Their friendship really shouldn't work, but somehow it does, and they spend hours and hours together, then when they're not together spend hours discussing everything on the phone with each other. You can tell already what's going to happen, can't you? Yes, it's a friendship bust-up just waiting to happen... Full review...
City of Ships (Stravaganza) by Mary Hoffman
Isabel is unhappy. Her twin brother is better at everything and she has to make up an imaginary twin to compensate. But when she trips up on a bag of silver tesserae (mosaic tiles) all of that begins to change - she falls asleep holding the tiles and finds herself in Classe, in a parallel world, a country equivalent to Italy, encountered in previous books by Lucien, Georgia, Sky and Matt. She is a Stravagante, a traveller in time and space, and the bag of tesserae are her talisman. Invited into the Stravagante group, she encounters problems with pirates, politics and 'the usual' teenage troubles. Full review...
Hooey Higgins and the Shark by Steve Voake
A shark has been spotted in Shrimpton-on-Sea's bay. The local chocolate shop has a mahousive egg for sale for £65. Hooey Higgins decides to capture the former so he can charge admission and buy the latter. He's helped out on his adventures by Twig and Will, whilst they all hope they won't fall foul of the big bully Basbo. Full review...
Shine by Kate Maryon
You and me, Mum, you and me.
Twelve-year-old Tiff and her mother are a double act. They're so close that they're almost more like sisters than mother and daughter. They both like shiny, girly, things, and Tiff's mum seemingly has an endless supply of new, ever more glamorous baubles for them to share. There's only one problem: how she comes by them. Because Tiff's mum has rather sticky fingers. She shoplifts. She defrauds credit cards. She's very naughty and sometimes it makes Tiff feel rather uncomfortable. She knows deep down that it can't last. Full review...
Einstein's Underpants - And How They Saved The World by Anthony McGowan
A delightfully silly school cum sci-fi romp for confident readers, with plenty of pants-based humour, but never at the expense of a rollicking good read. Full review...
My Circus by Xavier Deneux
An utterly gorgeous board book that everyone will love to pore over, from the very youngest right on up. Full review...
Bedtime (Slip-and-Slide Books) by Maureen Roffey
Bedtime is a pull-the-tabs book about - unsurprisingly - bedtime. Page by page reveals child after child rubbing their eyes, changing into their pyjamas, kissing mummy goodnight, and cuddling up with teddy. Each pulled tab changes that picture, much like a before and after shot. Full review...
Paper Towns by John Green
17-year-old Quentin Jacobsen has been in love with Margo Roth Spiegelmen ever since he can remember. It's an unrequited love though - neighbours and childhood friends they may be, but their respective places in the High School pecking order are miles apart. Margo is one of the beautiful ones. She's cool, clever and a trendsetter. Q languishes in the middle ranks with his band member mates, Radar, who's an obsessive editor of Omnictionary (read Wikipedia), and Ben, who wants a girlfriend more than anything, but lacks the status to get one. Full review...
Under a Sapphire Sky by Susannah Bates
Marianne Cooper is happy. She has a thriving jewellery business with her best friend Gabby and is six months pregnant with Gabby's brother Jay's baby. Marianne enjoys her passion for stones, her unconventional attitude to life and her pregnancy, and her unique relationship with Jay, but when her ex boyfriend, and reformed man, Paul comes back into her life with his fiancée Sophie and a rare padparascha stone he wants Marianne to turn into an engagement ring, she soon finds herself questioning her decision to reject Paul and indeed her way of life. Full review...
Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt
The blonde bombshell in question in Tom Holt's latest book of that name is Lucy Pavlov. If you are reading this review in 2017 of course you will know who Lucy Pavlov is. She's the beautiful, talented, wealthy, CEO of PaySoft Industries - the revolutionary operating system that is running on every computer in the world. Of course, if that is indeed the case, then we've got a problem. A very big problem. Because what Lucy doesn't know is that she is literally a blonde bombshell - well she knows she's blonde, just not that her body is a shell for a bomb. A very big and a very smart bomb, but nevertheless a bomb. And she's been sent to destroy the planet. It kind of makes Bill Gates seem OK for the time being. Full review...
Jake Highfield: Chaos Unleashed by Alec Sillifant
What's this that Jake is doing - breaking into a building? Vandalising it with graffiti, having ruined someone's privacy and infiltrated something he shouldn't have done? Three years ago he would have been doing this as a yobbish kick, but now he's a teenage agent of a shadowy organisation called the Academy, and people want him to succeed in his mission. But do they all want that? Who are his taskmasters after all? And what does the Void have in store for his future? Full review...
The Suicide Club by Rhys Thomas
Craig Bartlett-Taylor's third attempt at killing himself is nearly successful – except when he announces in class that he's taken a whole bottle of pills, new boy Frederick Spaulding-Carter steps in and saves his life. Freddy attains instant celebrity as a hero, and our narrator Richard Harper is as impressed as anyone else. Full review...
Sacred Sierra: A Year on a Spanish Mountain by Jason Webster
Jason Webster and his partner, Salud searched and bought forty acres of valley and mountainside halfway up the Penyagolosa Ridge in Southern Spain, complete with two derelict sets of farm buildings. These mas, or smallholdings, formed the backbone of Spanish agriculture until young people abandoned rural life for towns in the mid-twentieth century. The agro-economics of the EEC enforced obsolescence of the mas system. As old timers retired or died, their farms were abandoned, leaving most of the land returning to wild. Full review...
The Pull of the Moon by Diane Janes
The main story, the events in Kate's memory, is set in summer 1972. Simon's uncle has gone away for a few months and Simon and his friend Danny are meant to be doing some work on the garden over the holiday. Danny brings his girlfriend Kate along, and Trudie invites herself to join them a couple of weeks later. How did a summer of lounging around and drinking with a little work on the garden end in murder? And what can Kate tell Danny's mother Mrs Ivanisovic? Full review...
The Hidden Landscape by Richard Fortey
The purpose of this book is to explore the connection between the landscape and the geology underlying it, which in one of his many vivid similes Fortey compares the surface personality with the workings of the unconscious mind beneath. He starts by describing a journey he once made from Paddington Station to Haverford West, a market town in Pembrokeshire and with it a passage back into the plutonic depths of geological aeons, indicated by the large 60cm monster trilobites that have been found in the Cambrian rocks near St David's. Fortey describes the magnificence of the Cathedral constructed from the local purple sandstone and mottled with moisture-loving lichens. He contrasts this with the anonymous character of a nearby brightly-coloured service station, anonymous and synthetic, an invader cheaply built and out of context. Full review...
A Day and a Night and a Day by Glen Duncan
Augustus Rose was brought up in New York, but not in a des res, in an altogether grittier part of the city. ' ... his childhood in East Harlem, darkness framing the blistered stoop, the blinding asphalt, the smell of garbage cans and urine.' He's had an unfortunate start in life. Mother, white, father (unknown) black so that makes the young Augustus an in-between, a not-sure, a neither-one-colour-nor-the-other. Today, in the 21st century, no one would raise an eyebrow, bat an eyelid. But this novel is set in the 1960s where racial tensions abound. Yes, even in cosmopolitan cities such as New York. Full review...
Shipwrecked (The Adventures of Titch and Mitch) by Garth Edwards
Titch and Mitch are two little pixies who have run away from home. Through a series of misadventures they find themselves shipwrecked on an island, and the story revolves around them making new friends there. They come to the rescue of a strange coloured seagull, they save a trapped fairy, they play dentist for a little dragon mouse and they aid and abet an intelligent turkey who is trying to escape from the turkey farm. Full review...
Fightback by Steve Voake
Meet Kier. A smart, yet lonely, young teen, he's been farmed off to a private school by his dad since mother died. Among his achievements are several successes on the karate mat, but all this is about to change. When his father is rammed off a motorway and murdered, Kier finds he's even more alone, and duty-bound to fight even more, when he gets clues to just who his father might have been, and how to go about responding to his death. Full review...
Dark Life by Kat Falls
Climate change came. The oceans rose. Half the land mass disappeared uner the water. Some of what was left simply crumbled away. Now, Topsiders live in giant tower blocks in a society under an authoritarian regime with emergency powers. Time outside is limited because the sun is so strong it causes third degree burns. Status brings space, not money. Using space to which you aren't entitled brings severe punishment crashing down upon you. It's no wonder Gemma wants to find her brother, who is living as Dark Life on the ocean floor. Full review...
Kiss Like You Mean It by Louise Harwood
This book is a modern-day love story. It's all about trendy characters with trendy names living rather trendy lives in glossy location sets. The title gives a very clear message as to its contents. Romantic fiction which will appeal generally to women. But there's also a story within a story (and for me the more interesting one) which is the Hollywood movie being filmed in Europe. It takes us back to the first World War and the heroic actions of one young man, in particular. Full review...
Fen Runners by John Gordon
Years ago, a boy fell through the ice under Cottle's Bridge. He said afterwards that something pulled him, a sleek silvery creature dragging him down into the blackness. Now, decades later, two boys go swimming in the very same spot and find one of his ice skates, a so-called fen runner, buried in the mud at the bottom of the channel. But when they take it home, dark secrets begin to resurface around them and they become aware that an ancient evil is stirring out in the fens. Full review...
The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom
Dawn is a single mother who has been avoiding a lot of things for a long time. When her aunt, who raised Dawn as a daughter, dies, Dawn finds the key to a cupboard which she was forbidden to look into as a child. Inside she finds clues to her family history, links to a Traveller Community, unearthing a journey that sees her finding her roots. We also witness her struggle to renew her complicated relationship with her family and her efforts to escape the ever-present memory of her abusive husband. Full review...
Love Affair: The Memoir of a Forbidden Father-daughter Relationship by Leslie Kenton
For some years, I had been aware of Leslie Kenton's books on healthy living, and also of Stan Kenton's work as a jazz bandleader, though I had never made the connection until now. This family memoir reveals all about the famous father and later-to-be-famous daughter, and it is a disturbing tale. Full review...
Swashbuckle School (Scarlet Silver) by Sarah McConnell and Lucy Courtenay
Young Scarlet Silver had always wanted to be a pirate and eventually her wish came true when she and her family took to the high seas in their pirate ship, 55 Ocean Drive. The problem was though that neither Scarlet nor anyone else in the family knew how to be a pirate and they soon discovered that it was quite a tricky business. Scarlet became the self appointed captain and did her best but her parents, brother Cedric, grandfather and his mate One Eyed Jake formed a pretty inept crew. This resulted in them all soon falling foul to hostile pirate ships and narrowly escaping death and disaster! Full review...
Wanting by Richard Flanagan
Read the blurb on the back of Flanagan's Wanting, and you'll think it's the usual post colonial tale of Britain as enemy number one, wanting to impose its rule on everyone else. In a way it is such a tale, but what makes it more interesting is the story of a little girl caught up in the wider historical events. Full review...
Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles
On the outside, Brittany is the flawless high-school girl. She has the perfect hair, the perfect outfit, and the perfect boyfriend. Any girl should be jealous of her, right? Wrong. Underneath the immaculately applied mascara lies a multitude of family problems, her despair at the thought of her severely disabled sister being bundled off to a nursing home never leaving her mind. She has to keep her hurt hidden to save her image, but surely enough this mask starts to crack as more and more of her life refuses to live up to the expectations she has forced upon herself. Full review...
The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge by Patricia Duncker
It's rural France, and 2000 is barely begun, when hunters come across a spread of human corpses in the mountains. Several families, all in the same cult, seem to have killed themselves on their path to wherever. If so, this is a problem, for the last time it happened, in Switzerland a few years previous, nobody could work out why – and who was there to dispose of some of the evidence. This isn't a problem for the policeman involved, as he fell desperately in love with the investigative judge in collaborating on the initial case. Combining again, they see a link with everybody involved in both cases, a famous conductor /composer. Full review...
