Difference between revisions of "Book Reviews From The Bookbag"

Tales of Freedom is a book of two halves, with a short story entitled Comic Destiny taking up the majority of the book. Comic Destiny is made up of a series of short pieces that follow on from each other and are probably best described as being closer to prose poetry than anything else. Full review...

The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic by Sara Wheeler

Travel

The title of this book suggests another travel book about adventure in the frozen north, but Sara Wheeler mixes her tales of her own travels with some history of polar exploration and a serious examination of the impact of visitors and of those who wish to exploit the Arctic’s natural resources on the region and its people. Rather than setting off on another expedition to reach the North Pole, she travels around bits of the Arctic divided between different countries and governments, including Chukotka (Russia), Alaska (USA), Canada, Greenland, Svalbard (Norway) and Lapland (Russia and Scandinavia). There is a huge amount of material in the book but Wheeler organises and presents it in a very readable, accessible style. Full review...

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

Edward Sheffield hadn't exactly been Susan's childhood sweetheart, but after a family tragedy left him homeless he came to live with Susan and her parents for a year so that he could finish school. Susan didn't particularly want him there but accepted that it was the right thing to do. Years later they met at university when Edward was studying law and after a short relationship they married. The marriage wasn't entirely successful; Edward gave up law to become a writer, relying on Susan's teaching income to support them, but whilst he spent a month away in a remote cabin 'to find himself' Susan found Arnold instead. Many years – and three children – later Susan receives a manuscript from Edward. She was, he said, always his best critic and he would like her opinion. Full review...

The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff

Politics and Society

There can be few people who are unaware of the name of Rupert Murdoch. Over four decades he's built News International into a seventy billion dollar corporation from its original Australian base. His position in the UK media is such that he's courted by politicians and has what many believe to be an excessive amount of power for someone who is not elected and is not even a UK citizen. He's now expanding into Southeast Asia and in his eightieth year it's still difficult to imagine when – or where – he will stop. Full review...

Vamoose (Pocket Money Puffins) by Meg Rosoff

There are lots of reasons not to become a teen mum while still at school – there’s your loss of freedom, for a start, plus the fact that babies spend their days crying and pooing, not to mention the fact they’re expensive. But what happens to Jess is something that no one has warned her about: she goes into hospital and gives birth to a bouncing baby moose. Which is, it has to be said, slightly odd. As she and boyfriend Nick struggle through first-time parenthood and learn to deal with the Unique Challenge of having a non-homo-sapien child, there’s a lesson for all of us about biting off more than we can chew and unpredictable consequences. Full review...

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

If you try to read 'The Book of Disquiet' from cover to cover, it is almost oppressively melancholic. Nothing much happens, and what we have is a collection of reveries and thoughts - almost a diary, but not quite - of existential musings about life, loneliness and the human condition. It's so introspective that after a while the monotony of the writer's mundane existence starts to wear on the reader. But I would urge you not to read this book like that. Rather, dip into it at random and you will find a work of undeniable genius. It's quite simply a masterpiece of modernist writing. Full review...

King Death by Toby Litt

Crime

Skelton, that's the musician, adores his girlfriend. She's certainly exotic with ' ... her hair ... like black oil flowing over a stone.' However, they are only a heartbeat away from breaking up when it happens. What looks like some internal part of the body, animal or even human is hurled from a London train. The pair just happen to be travelling on that very train and they also just happen to witness this unsavoury action. Full review...

Still on the Road: Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2008 by Clinton Heylin

Entertainment

Heylin is also obviously a fan, a very knowledgeable and obsessive one to boot. He has never met or directly interviewed his subject (who is known to guard his privacy quite fiercely most of the time), but his research materials include official recording sessionographies and interviews conducted by others. All this is naturally invaluable information for his analysis and history of all the 600-plus songs the man is known to have written or co-written from 1974 to almost the present day. In terms of his discography, that spans the albums from ‘Blood on the Tracks’, released in 1975 and commonly regarded as probably his best post-1960s set, to ‘Together Through Life’, which appeared in 2009. Full review...

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday by Neil MacFarquhar

Politics and Society

What are the chances of change in the Middle East? is the question central to this book. Since Neil MacFarquhar spent thirteen years wandering the length and breadth of the Islamic stronghold of the Middle East, I feel inclined to believe his in-depth assessment. In descriptive and reasoned terms, he identifies conservative forces which predominate in the region, primarily the religious and political machinery which condemns liberalization and modernization. This discussion of attempts to promote change, for example by individual dissidents or the media, is strengthened in the second half of the book by detailed case studies of six nations with particular reference to their readiness and motivation for change. Full review...

The Horse Dancer by Jojo Moyes

Women's Fiction

Only two things in life matter to fourteen-year-old Sarah: her horse Boo and her grandfather Henri Lachapelle. Henri sees Sarah's skill at horsemanship as her way out of their inner city London life and wants her to follow in his footsteps and become a member of France's elite equestrian academy Le Cadre Noir. Full review...

Impossible by Nancy Werlin

Life is just as it should be for Lucy Scarborough. She lives with loving foster parents and at seventeen is looking forward to attending prom with her friends and her date, who has definite boyfriend potential. The only fly in the ointment is Miranda Scarborough, Lucy's birth mother who, having given birth to Lucy at eighteen, promptly went mad and vanished from Lucy's life leaving her in the care of Leo and Soledad MarKowitz. Lucy's life has been plagued by unwanted visits from Miranda who seems determined to cause as much embarrassment as possible. Full review...

Falling to Heaven by Jeanne Peterson

Emma and Gerald Kittredge are either very brave or very naive. They've made the long journey from America to Tibet. Hardly on the tourist trail and they're not missionaries, so why are they there? This novel is a serious and sweeping narrative trying to answer that very question - and many more. Full review...

The Boy Who Climbed Into The Moon by David Almond

Children's Rhymes and Verse

Paul lives in the basement of a large tower block. He's feeling lonely and out of sorts, so he feigns a headache and stomach ache and has a day off school. Spending his day wisely, he gets to know the eccentric people who inhabit the building, as well as embracing his own eccentric idea that the moon is actually a hole in the sky. Full review...

High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood by Donald Spoto

Biography

In his defence, we must acknowledge Spoto's subtitle. It underlines that this does not in any way shape or form claim to be a biography of the American actress who become Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco. It is an analysis of her film career: a consideration of the "Hollywood years". Full review...

Not Me! by Nicola Killen

For Sharing

A group of kids are playing, and making an awful mess. One by one they're asked if they're responsible, and one by one they deny any involvement. But have they been caught red handed, and will it really fall upon Jess the pup to do all the tidying up? Full review...

Whizz Bang Orang-Utan by John Foster

Subtitled rhymes for the very young, you know what you're getting with Whizz Bang Orang-Utan. It's a poetry anthology, with sweet poems about kids, what they get up to, and of course whizzing and banging orang-utans. Full review...

The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter

There is a certain type of modern fiction I just cannot get along with. It's a narrative that features a concentration on a main character that goes through his plot with unhappiness, making wrong decisions perhaps, getting crapped on by life, and discussing his woes with the reader. I get to the end and think nothing of it, until I read the blurb, where I find the book was supposed to be hilariously funny, the character an insincere cypher for our lives and times, and the whole thing an ironic masterpiece - I should have been disbelieving, disagreeing and dis-everything else with the hapless hero. I hate such books - I always only see the sincerity in the narrative, and never the comedy. Thankfully, such is never the case with this book. Full review...

The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

During World War Two, Max's father decides to move the whole family to a seaside retreat he knows of - a wooden house far away from the city he's grown his family up in. Nobody seems too keen on the idea, neither of Max's sisters, his mother, nor he - and Max is gifted a pocket watch by his loving, talented mechanic cum engineer cum watchmaker of a father, enscribed as "Max's Time Machine". But the house they move to, and its surroundings, are full of more successful time machines - a stash of early home videos, a public clock that runs backwards, a sunken shipwreck, a yard full of statues of a stone circus... And let's not forget the mysterious, spider-eating cat that joins in with proceedings. Full review...

Changes: The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

Fantasy

It's always wonderful to see a series going from strength to strength and getting better as it goes along. However, when this happens, there inevitably comes a point where it gets so good, you can't help but think that the next one can't possibly be any better as it feels like the series has peaked. Changes, the twelfth in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, is such a book. Full review...

Love Me Tender by Jane Feaver

Short Stories

A woman remembers her dead husband playing Love Me Tender (the song made famous by Elvis Presley) on his tenor horn. She is in a daze, feeling the grief of the bereaved widow she is, the betrayal of the deceived wife, and the guilt of having murdered him. The title story of this collection is all the more moving and startling because of its understated style, and what is not said as well as what is. Full review...

Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow by James Rollins

The prologue to this splendid book recounts a terrifying chase, the discovery of fabulous Mayan artifacts, and a shadowy enemy. And that gripping scene sets the tone for the rest of the book. After the strange disappearance of their parents, who were on an archeological dig on the Mountain of Bones, Jake Ransom and his sister Kady are sent a parcel containing two halves of a Mayan coin, their mother's sketchbook and their father's notebook. There is no indication what these things mean or what to do with them. Full review...

St George: Let's Hear it for England! by Alison Maloney

Biography

I was a bit of a patriot, even when it wasn't as fashionable as it is now becoming. Perhaps this is due to my once having played St. George in a Cub Scout celebration and getting the chance to personally slay the dragon in knitted chain mail with a plastic sword. In a world where being English has become synonymous with football violence and the flag of St. George is being used by a political party condemned as racist, it's perhaps unsurprising that more people celebrate St. Patrick's Day than St. George's Day. Full review...

Mr Gum and the Cherry Tree by Andy Stanton

"Woe, woe, woe, and a bottle of glum" declares a character in this story, and you would to if you shared the sensibilities of Polly, her friend Alan Taylor (the ridiculously named gingerbread man who serves as electrified schoolmaster to some ex-goblins), or any right minded person. The problem is that all the right minded people have switched to being wrong minded. For the old granny they call Old Granny has declared the Old Times back, and taken the entire village population (except for a magician who vanishes from the story) to a sacred glade in a nearby wood, where a tree spirit of Old is trying to enslave them. Full review...

Montacute House by Lucy Jago

Cess is the poultry girl at Montacute House. She and her mother live alone - Cess has never met her father. In fact, she doesn't even know who he is. Shunned by the other villagers because of her illegitimacy, Cess has only two friends, both also social outcasts. There's William, who has a club foot - thought of as a curse in Elizabethan England, and Edith, who's been chased out of the village for witchery by the woman-hating local priest. Full review...

Unhooking the Moon by Gregory Hughes

The Rat and Bob are prairie children. Winnipeg is a land so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days. When their father dies and they're orphaned, they are determined to avoid a children's home at all costs and embark upon a road trip to New York City, in search of their long-lost uncle. Bob is pretty much the hanger-on - he knows that the Rat is a special kid who would never make it in an institution and so he puts his fears aside to follow his singular sister. Full review...

Kick-Ass by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr

Graphic Novels

Meet Dave. The average Joe personified, he sits at home with his internet connection, his comics collection, his dad, and very little contact with anyone else. He is a typical loner teenager, nearly friendless, wears glasses at school - especially around the hot, mature biology teacher who for some reason seems to have maths sums on her blackboard... Until one day he decides to emulate the comics in his collection. The only superheroes in his world are those whose colourful adventures he follows on the page - why not get his own costume mucked up, and go and fight crime? Full review...

Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped The World by David Aaronovitch

Politics and Society

What shape is a conspiracy theory? Unusual question, I know, but I think on this evidence it is round. A conspiracy theory is lumpen, ragged, full of holes, and has a huge circular gap where the obvious and sensible has dropped through, leaving the believer or theorist with the implausible skeleton of what they choose to think instead. They certainly have a habit of coming round in circles - if I mentioned a heinous crime caused by a western leader that killed hundreds or more people, purely to get their way and get a war started, I could be referring to Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor, Maggie Thatcher and the General Belgrano, or Bush etc and 9/11. Full review...

No Sorrow to Die: An Alice Rice Mystery by Gillian Galbraith

Crime

Straight away, DS Rice has a gruesome murder on her hands. The victim, a Mr Brodie (a suitably Scottish name) has had to give up a lucrative and interesting career due to ill-health. He's now merely existing. He's waiting to die, basically. He wants to die. So straight away, the plot starts to thicken nicely. We're introduced to a clutch of characters, or, more appropriately, suspects. Apart from the immediate family, the extended family, there's also various others, home helps etc. It seems several people have an axe to grind as far as the recently deceased Mr Brodie is concerned. You have to ask yourself the question at this point, who'd murder a frail, almost-dead man? It would take a particularly callous person. Mr Brodie would have been virtually unable to have put up any sort of struggle. It would have been similar to killing a tiny, helpless kitten. He's so far gone, why not just play the waiting game? Full review...

The Reluctant Tommy: An Extraordinary Memoir of the First World War by Ronald Skirth and Duncan Barrett

Autobiography

Ronald Skirth was one of many young Englishmen of nineteen caught up in the First World War. He joined the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1916, was promoted to Corporal, and sent to the western front. Like most of his contemporaries, when he went he was an unquestioning servant of King and country, fighting for what he believed was right. On the battlefields of Flanders, one day he came across the body of Hans, a German soldier the same age, if not younger. The dead man's hand was clutching a photograph of his girlfriend, who could almost have been the twin sister of Ella, Skirth's own sweetheart. Like two of his friends who had just been killed, Hans had died as a result of the stupidity of others. Full review...

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

The Nephilim have lived among the human race since before the days of the Great Flood. Horrific creatures, the hybrid children of humans and angels, their strength, beauty and cruelty are unmatched, and they have infiltrated human society completely. For centuries, a secret society, students in a branch of theology known as 'Angelology', have studied the ways of the heavens and the Nephilim, and waged a secret war against them – a war that has spanned every continent. But the Nephilim grow weak, their blood contaminated by the blood of their human ancestors. Full review...

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

In 1848, Laurids Madsen and other men of the small town of Marstal go to war to fight the Germans, and an explosion flings him up to heaven, as far as anyone can tell. But Laurids returns, claiming his sea boots were too heavy for him to stay up there – only to be lost to Marstal anyway, as he abandons his family to sail the high seas. Full review...

Blueeyedboy by Joanne Harris

BB - or blueyedboy in his online persona - is a middle-aged man who lives with his mother in the Yorkshire town of Malbry. He has a dead-end job in a hospital although his mother would have it that he's of some importance. BB has a way of escaping his rather boring life; he writes murderous fantasies on his website in company with other misfits, some of whom he knows in real life. It might be fiction on badguysrock but he and Albertine share a troubled history and BB's manipulation of friends and enemies causes his past to unravel. Full review...

White Crow by Marcus Sedgwick

Rebecca is not happy to be leaving London. She's not happy with her dad, she's not happy with her boyfriend, and she just generally an unhappy person. Having to move to a dead-end place like Winterfold doesn't help at all. Her only friend there is a strange girl named Ferelith who one hot summer's day shows her an abandoned mansion where two hundred years ago a priest performed horrible experiments on human corpses. He wanted to learn something from the dead. But what was it? And what does Ferelith really want from Rebecca? Full review...

Deloume Road by Matthew Hooton