132,566
edits
Changes
From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to searchBook Reviews From The Bookbag (view source)
Revision as of 08:16, 29 March 2017
, 08:16, 29 March 2017no edit summary
'''Read [[:Category:New Reviews|new reviews by category]]. '''<br>
'''Read [[:Category:Features|the latest features]].'''<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author= Miles Russell
|title= Arthur and the Kings of Britain: The Historical Truth Behind the Myths
|rating= 4.5
|genre= History
|summary= As the author of the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), written in 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth is commonly recognized as one of the first British historians. His book told – or is supposed to have told - the story of the British monarchy during the Dark Ages, from the arrival of the Trojan Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, up to the seventh century AD when the Anglo-Saxons had taken control of Britain. Being virtually the only work of its kind at the time, it proved very influential, and became well-known throughout western Europe as one of the great works of medieval literature as the first retelling of the story of King Arthur, Lear and Cymbeline. Shakespeare was forever in his debt with regard to the two latter.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1445662744</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Denzil Meyrick
|title=Well of the Winds (DCI Daley)
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=It's not a happy time for DCI Jim Daley. The woman he loved is dead - there are those who blame him for what happened - and his relationship with Liz, his ex wife, and his young son is deteriorating by the day. He's finding solace in the bottom of a glass, whilst the man who used to do that all too often, his friend DS Brian Scott is off alcohol completely and has found exercise. There's a new officer in charge at Kinloch - DS Carrie Simmington - and whilst she might look young, it's unlikely that she got to that position without having a core of steel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846973724</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Nicole Dennis-Benn
|title= Here Comes the Sun
|rating= 4
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= You have to assume the team behind the cover sleeve for Nicole Dennis-Benn's debut novel Here Come's the Sun have a keen sense of irony. Either that or none of them read beyond the first page.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178607124X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview <!-- remove 5/4 -->
|author=W S Markendale
|title=Owen Pendragon
|rating=3.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Monsters are slipping through somehow from somewhere to kidnap children in Cornwall and the army seems powerless to do anything about it. 12-year-olds Owen and Mary assume they too are therefore powerless as they watch friends and neighbours disappear. Imagine their surprise when they realise that thanks to an ancient relative, they have more influence on what happens than they think and not just on what happens on Earth. And their distant relative? The former monarch and head of the round table, no less: King Arthur.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1524667579</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jon Morris
|title=The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains: Oddball Criminals from Comic Book History
|rating=5
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=As much as I like comics – and I do, whether superhero ones or not – I have to admit one thing, namely that the villains in them are a bit pants. What is The Penguin but the world's worst Mafioso, with a hobby of waddling along like his pet birds? Where else do you win an Oscar of all things by playing a two-bit killer who just fell in a vat of random chemicals and changed colour, and got mardier as a result (although recently he's become a nanotech genius – but let's not go there)? And what is it with the gimp in the see-through plant pot because he is the embodiment of cold? And that's just some of the better-known enemies of ''Batman'', one of the better goodies. You can imagine how awful the baddies related to the bad goodies can be. And if you can't, this is the perfect primer.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1594749329</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Stefan Mohamed
|title= Stanly's Ghost: Book 3 (The Bitter Sixteen Trilogy)
|rating= 5
|genre= Science Fiction
|summary= Cynical, solitary Stanly Bird used to be a fairly typical teenager – unless you count the fact that his best friend was a talking beagle named Daryl. Then came the superpowers. And the super powered allies. And the mysterious enemies. And the terrifying monsters. And the stunning revelations. And the apocalypse. Now he's not sure what he is. Or where he is. Or how exactly one is supposed to proceed after saving the world. All he knows is that his story isn't finished. Not quite yet …
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784630764</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michelle Robinson and Emily Fox
|title=Monkey's Sandwich
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Monkeys have been given the reputation of being cheeky, but do you also see them as petty thieves? How can these cheerful chimps be seen as anything other than cute, but mischievous little monkeys? Anyone who has driven through Knowsley Safari Park knows the truth. A perfectly good car drives in the monkey enclosure only to be bereft of wing mirrors, hubcaps and windscreen wipers at the end. Rumour has it that the monkeys sell these parts wholesale at a lockup in South Kirby. The monkey in this tale may not be stealing car parts, but he is a little light fingered when it comes to making the ultimate lunch.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007580010</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Victoria Cribb (translator)
|title=The Legacy: Children's House Book 1
|rating=4.5
|genre=Thrillers
|summary=What do you wish for in your murder mysteries? An inventive death? Well you couldn't go much further than the unusual murder by household device that Elisa suffers here. She's a mother to a young family, whose husband was abroad at a conference. Do you seek awkward, unusual and/or conflicted investigators? Well, here we have a detective from the lower ranks, but the only one clean enough after post-financial crash investigations tainted all his superiors; and a woman who runs a home that investigates and recuperates child victims of sex abuse. She's here because the only witness to the murder was Elisa's very young daughter. And lo and behold, the two adults have history. Do you require taunting clues as to why this crime will be repeated? You can't do much better than the messages in numerals received by other characters and their untold threat. So it's tick, tick, tick – but what of the question marks left by the prologue, where another young family of children was separated as a best case scenario by the adoption agencies after a different nasty event in the past?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1473621526</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Charlotte Guillain and Yuval Zommer
|title=The Street Beneath My Feet
|rating=5
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary=It's one thing for a non-fiction book for the young to show them something they themselves can explore – the pattern of the stars, perhaps, or the life in their back yard. But when it gets to things that are equally important to know about but are impossible to see in real life, why, then the game is changed. The artistic imagination has to be key, in portraying the invisible, and presenting what can only come from the pages of a book. And this example does it at its best, as it delves into the layers of the soil below said back yard, down and down, through all the different kinds of rock, until we reach the unattainable centre of the planet. And there's only one way to go from there – back out the other side, with yet more for us to be shown. It's a fantastic journey, then – and a quite fantastic volume.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784937312</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Alice Feeney
|title= Sometimes I Lie
|rating= 5
|genre= Thrillers
|summary= Christmas is barely over but Amber doesn't have much to celebrate. She's in a coma, trapped with an active mind but an inactive body, able to hear and understand but not respond to what is going on around her. And her mind's a little fuzzy on a few things too, like how she ended up there, who else was involved, and what it all means.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0008225354</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Polly Clark
|title= Larchfield
|rating= 5
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary=I It's early summer when a young poet, Dora Fielding, moves to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland and her hopes are first challenged. Newly married, pregnant, she's excited by the prospect of a life that combines family and creativity. She thinks she knows what being a person, a wife, a mother, means. She is soon shown that she is wrong. As the battle begins for her very sense of self, Dora comes to find the realities of small town life suffocating, and, eventually, terrifying; until she finds a way to escape reality altogether. Another poet, she discovers, lived in Helensburgh once. Wystan H. Auden, brilliant and awkward at 24, with his first book of poetry published, should be embarking on success and society in London. Instead, in 1930, fleeing a broken engagement, he takes a teaching post at Larchfield School for boys where he is mocked for his Englishness and suspected - rightly - of homosexuality. Yet in this repressed limbo Wystan will fall in love for the first time, even as he fights his deepest fears.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1786481928</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Pippa Mattinson
|title=Choosing the Perfect Puppy
|rating=4.5
|genre=Pets
|summary=If you have ever, for even a fleeting moment, thought about getting a puppy, you really ought to read this book. Too many people are carried away in the heat of the moment and ''must'' have a particular breed and go ahead without any thought about the consequences. They then have to live with the problems which ''might'' have been avoided for a decade or more. The puppy and the adult dog also has to live with an owner who might not be able to accommodate his needs. [[:Category:Pippa Mattinson|Pippa Mattinson]] is my go-to author on matters dog related: she talks sense. She doesn't try to talk you out of getting a particular breed or any puppy: she simply presents the facts and allows you to make your own decisions.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1785034375</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Matilda Woods
|title=The Boy, the Bird and the Coffin Maker
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Alberto is a carpenter, the very best in the town of Allora. But after the plague sweeps through the town, taking many of the citizens and Alberto's wife and children, he turns his skills away from furniture and toys to making coffins. Wrapped in sadness, and waiting only for the plague to come and claim his life too, Alberto lives alone, keeping company with the dead who are delivered to his house to await their coffin. One day, however, he realises that he must have a living visitor, as food starts to go missing. He begins to leave scraps of food, to try and discover who his mystery thief is…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407178695</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview <!-- remove 30/3 -->
|author= Mark Aylwin Thomas
|title= Blades of Grass
|rating= 4.5
|genre= Biography
|summary= Any book that has me in tears at the end has been worth my time. Any book that has me hoping it will end differently to the way I know it must is worth the reading. Any book that convinces me that maybe there is still hope in the world – that for all the mistakes made thus far, still being made right now, there is a common humanity which ultimately, eventually, must do some good – that is worth the writing and the reading and the time. Blades of Grass is one such book. It's a forgotten story, an unknown story to most people. It is one that should be told – and reflected upon.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1524676969</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Lucy Jones
|title= Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain
|rating= 4
|genre= Animals and Wildlife
|summary=As one of the largest predators left in Britain, the fox is captivating: a comfortably familiar figure in our country landscapes; an intriguing flash of bright-eyed wildness in our towns. Yet no other animal attracts such controversy, has provoked more column inches or been so ambiguously woven into our culture over centuries, perceived variously as a beautiful animal, a cunning rogue, a vicious pest and a worthy foe. As well as being the most ubiquitous of wild animals, it is also the least understood. Here Lucy Jones investigates the truth about foxes – delving into fact, fiction, folklore and her own history with the creatures. Discussing the debate on foxes, Jones asks what our attitudes towards foxes says about us, and our relationship with the natural world.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1783963042</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview <!-- remove 29/3 -->
|author=Steven Anthony
|title=Isaac Montgomery for the Love of Beth
|rating=3
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=There are words to describe the Isaac Montgomery we meet at the beginning of the story. Unfortunately they're not words you usually use in polite company. He'd worked for many years in stockbroking and had made a substantial fortune, but his life was devoid of much in the way of personal relationships. When he required a woman as an escort, he paid. He assumed that if he was having a good time, then she was too - if he even bothered to think about it. He had a friend whom he didn't see all that often and it was when he thought about Phil that a little ''jealousy'' crept into Isaac's heart. You see, Phil was engaged to Penelope and they were obviously happy. Isaac began to wonder what love was - and how you went about finding someone to share your life with.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>152466815X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Martin Edwards (editor)
|title= Miraculous Mysteries (British Library Crime Classics)
|rating= 5
|genre= Crime
|summary=Consider the following scenario: a policeman hears someone screaming and runs to a house on a particular street, number 13, from where the noise is emanating. When he peeps through the letterbox he discovers a dead man in the hallway with a knife in his throat. He goes to fetch help, but upon returning, finds that the street does not have a number 13 and that the body and the room he saw have both mysteriously vanished...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0712356738</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Brian Moses
|summary= Mia is done with the small town she grew up in, but it only takes one phone call to bring her back. Her twin brother Lucas is missing and, worse still, has been implicated in the death of one of his students. Without him there to speak for himself it becomes her job to defend his reputation while trying to get to the bottom of everything that has gone on.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1785654047</amazonuk>
}}
