Difference between revisions of "Book Reviews From The Bookbag"

Jamie Meldon, ex-criminal-defence attorney, now in private practice, leaves his office very late one night. He's met by the FBI. Very shortly afterwards Jamie Meldon is dead in a dumpster.

Mace Perry is working out, trying to stay fit, trying to stay sane, trying to stay alive long enough to get out jail in a couple of days' time. Perry was a cop. Under-cover, maverick and darn good at her job. Until she ended up stoned on meth, busted for robbery, convicted and sent down. Full review...

The Kingmaker's Sisters: Six Powerful Women in the Wars of the Roses by David Baldwin

Biography

Due to the small amount of surviving personal sources, any book which purports to be a biography of a 15-century subject is almost inevitably going to be more a 'life and times' than a life. In the case of women who were sisters but not sovereigns or consorts themselves, the lack of data will be even more acute. Full review...

The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas

Meet Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. An unlikely police commissaire, he's an acquired taste for his colleagues. Short, ungainly, seemingly thinking about the most obtuse things in his pursuit of the truth, and endlessly doodling, but beneath his deathly slow speech and unexpected diversions into his childhood comes a surprisingly perceptive ability to find the culprit in whatever crime he is forced to solve. Full review...

Too Purply! by Jean Reidy and Genevieve Leloup

It's time for school, but the young girl and her tortoise don't want to wear any of their clothes. They're too purply, too tickly, too puckery, too prickly, and so on. You get the idea. Adjectives abound in this fun getting dressed book. Full review...

The Twelve Dancing Princesses by Rachel Isadora

Bookbag recently loved Rachel Isadora's take on The Night Before Christmas, which put the classic Christmas poem in an African setting. This time round, she has turned her eye to the Grimms' 'The Twelve Dancing Princesses'. Full review...

The Returners by Gemma Malley

'Ducks are cool. Whatever happens, whatever gets thrown at them, they just carry on, their little legs paddling. Unfazed. They always look like they're smiling.'

Will almost wishes he could be a duck. He has precious little to smile about. Sitting watching those ducks go about their business so blithely by the pond, he can't help but remember his mother who committed suicide there some years ago, when Will was just a tiny lad. Full review...

Mousebeard's Revenge (Mousehunter Trilogy) by Alex Milway

If you started this trilogy way back when, you would probably never expect the pirate, Mousebeard, and the hero and heroine, Emiline and Scratcher, to be working together. But they are - so deep is the world of Old Town in intrigue, subterfuge and wicked plans, that they need to combine forces - and get other returning characters back on hand and on their side - to counter Mousebeard's enemies once and for all. Only, one great thing has changed. Yes, that's right. Mousebeard has had a shave... Full review...

A Very British Coup by Chris Mullin

No one had anticipated that Labour would win the election, not least because the party leader was Harry Perkins, a former steel worker. His manifesto included promises to remove all American bases from British soil, public control of finance and the dismantling of media empires. There were a few other things too – but they'll do for starters. The establishment – to a man – was appalled. Press barons, media stars, bishops and civil service mandarins knew that, for the good of the country (not themselves, of course) something had to be done and obviously the end would justify whatever means they had to take to achieve their aims. Harry Perkins had to be removed from office. Full review...

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

Science Fiction

'Ender in Exile' is the most recently published in the series set in the universe of 'Ender's Game', a long standing and one of the best known series of science-fiction by Orson Scott Card. It's been defined as an 'interquel', fitting chronologically between 'Ender's Game' and the 'Speaker for the Dead', the first two (and probably the best two) novels in the sequence. Technically speaking, 'Ender in Exile' actually fits in-between the last chapters of 'Ender's Game' and describes in more detail events outlined in the resolving sections of 'Ender's Game'. Confusingly for the uninitiated, 'Ender in Exile' is also a sequel to the 'Shadow of the Giant', a parallel sub-series from the universe of the 'Ender's Game'. Full review...

The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe

Biography

In the early 1860s a group of young Parisian artists were keen to exhibit their work, despite opposition from the official art world. Their protests at being spurned by the Salon, the French equivalent of the Royal Academy, resulted in their paintings being shown at the rather disparagingly-named Salon des Refusés, where crowds and critics came to view - and jeer. When they held the first of their own exhibitions a few years later, one reviewer said that they 'seem to have declared war on beauty', while another assured his readers that every canvas must have been the work of some practical joker who had dipped his brushes in paint, smeared it onto yards of canvas, and signed the result with several different names. Full review...

My Mum Has X-Ray Vision by Angela McAllister and Alex T Smith

Milo suspects his mum has x-ray vision. She can see through the ceiling downstairs when he's jumping on her bed. She can see through the outside wall when he's making potions in the garden in her saucepans. Is she really a superhero? Milo puts her to the test... Full review...

The Unspoken Truth by Angelica Garnett

I would not normally start a review with the biography of the author, but The Unspoken Truth is presented as autobiographical fiction by a child of the Bloomsbury Group – in fact the subtitle is 'A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories'. The blurb on the inside cover even identifies which character is based on the author in each of the four stories, just in case we are not sure. Full review...

Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz

Rhyming Love and Death is a kind of philosophical love letter to literature, or perhaps more so to fiction. It is a book about how to write, about the compulsion to write, and about the strange world that the writer of fiction must live in. Full review...

Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don't Get Why Men Don't Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

Lifestyle

Men aren't Martian and women don't hail from Venus. We're all Earthlings apparently; which seems like progress of a sort. Even so we still have trouble understanding each other because we speak different languages – Himglish and Femalese. Luckily Jean Hannah Edelstein is fluent in both and has written this light hearted volume to define the problem and translate. Full review...

Winnie's Jokes by Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul

Who turns off the lights at Halloween? The lights witch. What does an Australian witch ride on? A broomerang. Yep, it's a joke book. Full review...

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Teenage boy meets mysterious new stranger in a small town. They fall in love, he finds out she's harbouring a dark secret, the pair of them try to find out if their relationship can work while she tries to keep him safe from her world. This kind of book appears to be released every few weeks since Twilight became so successful – but rarely in the past few years has it been done as well as it has in Beautiful Creatures. Full review...

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

Fantasy

Sometimes with authors you just don't know what you've been missing. Other times you do. Jasper Fforde has long been on my catch-up list. Snippets of Thursday Next and reviews and interviews were enough to convince me I had to get to know this work.

My chance finally came with the first in a completely new series: Shades of Grey. Full review...

Blackout by Sam Mills

'I am a murderer.

'I'm standing in a bookshop, a gun hot in my palm. The bullet that sat in my barrel thirty seconds ago has pierced flesh, blown into brain tissue, metal now fighting consciousness. The woman slumps ont the floor. Blood begins to trickle from her head. It drips onto a pile of signed copies stacked on the floor.'

Oh my word! What an explosive beginning to a book! But what made a boy do something like this? Full review...

Ondine: The Summer of Shambles by Ebony McKenna

Ondine de Groot wants out of psychic summercamp, so together with her pet ferret Shambles, she flees from the tea leaf readings and astral projection classes, back to her family's restaurant. Only, as soon as she leaves summercamp, she starts hearing voices. Specifically a broad Scottish voice – one that seems to be coming from her ferret. Shambles, it transpires, is in fact a man, turned into a ferret by a witch. Ondine starts to wonder what Shambles would look like as a man, but her imaginings are soon interrupted by the arrival of handsome Lord Vincent, son of the Duke, who sets Ondine's heart fluttering. Full review...

More Deaths Than One by Jean Rowden

Constable Thomas 'Thorny' Deepbriar has a broken leg after his involvement in a case and so is taken by his wife, Mary, to recuperate in the seaside town where he worked as a policeman during the war. He expects to be bored - the most interesting thing on the horizon is a case of missing gnomes. Then he bumps into an old colleague - someone who left the force in a haze of suspicion. Shortly afterwards, a body is found on the beach. Even stranger is that the dead man is someone that Thorny and his colleague thought had died during the war. It seems that things are not as they seem. Can Thorny work out what is going on, even with a broken leg? Full review...

The Artist, The Philosopher and The Warrior by Paul Strathern

History

The interaction between three very different, not to say contrasting, personalities of the Renaissance period sets the scene for what promises to be an intriguing title. In 1502 the paths of Cesare Borgia, notorious son of the equally infamous Pope Alexander VI, Niccolò Machiavelli, the intellectual and diplomat, and Leonardo da Vinci, at the time best known as a military engineer though remembered today primarily as a great artist, were destined to cross. Full review...

The Finest Type Of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath

It was just after the end of the Second World War and seventeen year old Laura Trelling was at a loose end in her Sussex village. She didn't really fit in with the other young people and her eccentric parents were becoming more and more isolated, to the extent that Laura was embarrassed by their carelessness of her welfare. A chance encounter with Paul Lovell was to change everything and before long she was on her way to a South Africa not yet burdened with apartheid. Full review...

Truth Games by Bobbie Darbyshire

The central theme in this book is sex - and lots of it. We're introduced to a group of mainly twentysomethings and thirtysomethings. Men and women. Most of them are attractive and hold down glamorous jobs and careers. All in rude health, with wonderful social lives and trendy homes. They all appear, on the surface, to be a bunch of shiny, happy people. What on earth could be missing? Full review...

More Than Just A Hairdresser by Nia Pritchard

Women's Fiction

It's a brand new year, and Liverpudlian hairdresser Shirley is looking forward to the months ahead following one hell of a new year's eve party. What's more, she's going to chronicle her adventures in her brand spanking new diary which she will write in diligently, even when she's feeling a bit 'morning after the night before'. Full review...

The Rescue Man by Anthony Quinn

This love affair tale with the city of Liverpool is mostly told through the eyes of architect Tom Baines. With the Second World War looming, Baines is desperately working on a book to capture the memory of buildings that are at risk, and appears a man more in love with the past and solid, cold structures than mankind. Full review...

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Life in Seabrook College is a mess. Some of the staff are young enough to remember their own school days there, but many are certainly too old for that. A lot of the boys are victims of ragging and bullying for being too chunky, or too smart - but some are so chunky and smart there's a certain kudos to them. The female of the species is a thing only spied from their own school next door, and only met by selling them ritalin as a weight-control pill, or meeting them at the very rare combined school disco. Full review...

Meteorite Strike by A G Taylor

Sarah is not ready. She's not ready to forgive the man who is her father, for abandoning her and her young brother Robert eight years ago. She cannot yet forgive the circumstances of her mother dying, and of the promise they were forced to make, to go to Australia with the man, and start a new life. She is certainly not prepared for the meteor strike to smash into Australia just as they fly above it, which downs the plane in a horrid crash, and seems to carry with it an alien virus which forces many people to drop permanently asleep. Full review...

How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food? by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague

How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? was a witty and visually creative tale of Very Bad Bedtime Behaviour for modern children enamoured of dinosaurs. 'How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food?' continues the formula, this time with table manners. Full review...

A Million Shades of Grey by Cynthia Kadohata

At just twelve, Tin is the youngest elephant handler in his village. Ever since he can remember, Tin has dreamed of working with elephants and he loves his own elephant, Lady, to distraction, even spending most of his nights sleeping by her side. Tin is much less keen on school, but his parents insist that he goes. Tin really can't see the point, as his sole ambition is to become a fully-fledged elephant trainer. His parents may talk about opportunities in the world outside his village but if they don't involve elephants, he's not interested. Full review...

The Tall Man: Life and Death on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper

Politics and Society

Cameron Doomadgee – Mulrunji – was just thirty six years old when he was arrested on Palm Island. Quite why he was arrested was never clear. He wasn't drunk, although he had been drinking beer – and was walking along the road singing Who Let the Dogs Out? Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley felt that there was reason to arrest Mulrunji for creating as public nuisance and he was taken to the police station. What happened next was to be the subject of intense media speculation and legal proceedings over the coming years, but within forty five minutes Mulrunji was dead. Full review...

Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life by Timothy W Ryback

History

As the fictional schoolboy hero Nigel Molesworth might have said, 'any fule kno' that Adolf Hitler was notorious for burning books. Nevertheless he was also an avid collector and passionate reader, as around 1200 surviving volumes once in his possession now in the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress, and a smaller quantity in Brown University, Rhode Island, demonstrate. Among them were world literature classics, such as 'Robinson Crusoe', 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', and 'Gulliver's Travels'. He also owned an edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, in hand-tooled Moroccan leather with a gold-embossed eagle flanked by his initials on the spine. The Bard, he once said, was greatly superior to Goethe and Schiller. Full review...

Taking the Medicine by Druin Burch

Popular Science

In 1898, Burch points out that a new drug was developed and marketed for the treatment of tuberculosis by Bayer & Co. TB is such an ancient enemy of man that there is apparently evidence of an earlier strain to be found in Egyptian mummies. The German firm had discovered a chemical that seemed to work well, and patients and indeed their own staff, who were tested seemed to respond well - it was named Heroin - and its addictive effects were at first missed. Full review...

Chancey by Gigi Amateau

Chancey's dam was Starry Night and her owner loved that horse so much that she wanted a foal who was exactly like her, but when Chancey was born she was bitterly disappointed for instead of the black Appaloosa with white marking Chancey was born albino. It was only his striped hooves which proved his breeding. The owner was not big enough to overcome her feelings and when she fell on hard times it was Chancey who was left out in the field to suffer despite the fact that he was no longer a young horse. Full review...

Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships That Stopped the Slave Trade by Sian Rees

History

The Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed in Britain in March 1807, and the last legal British slave ship left Africa seven months later. Other countries were slow to follow suit. Everyone in Britain knew there would be resistance, and when the abolitionist Granville Sharpe purchased land in Sierra Leone to 'repatriate' freed slaves, Ottobah Cugoana, a former slave living in London, asked if it was possible for 'a fountain to send forth both sweet water and bitter.' Could the slave trade, he wondered, be abolished from West Africa - when West Africa was its source? Full review...

Precious by Sapphire

Precious Jones is a sixteen year old black girl from Harlem – well she's never actually been out of Harlem – and when we meet her she's pregnant by her own father for the second time. Her first child was a girl and she was born with Down's Syndrome. With unconscious irony Precious calls her Little Mongo and leaves her to live with her grandmother. When her second pregnancy becomes obvious she's expelled from school and joins an alternative education programme. Precious really wants to learn and the book is the story of her journey from illiteracy to maturity. Full review...

Calamity Jack by Dean Hale, Shannon Hale and Nathan Hale

I was born to scheme, declares our hero Jack. With flashbacks we see the young lad and a pixie friend, larking about for revenge or small profit. But when his mother's bakery gets more and more into the red, the size of the profit has to increase. And when you add in revenge against the local crime lord - a giant of a man - so does the size of the target of the jape. Full review...

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

Several years ago I joined a funny little book group in London, and one of the first books we read was a Sue Grafton alphabet book. I had, up to this point, never read any crime fiction, foolishly feeling myself above such books, and so I was dubious about what I'd have to say about it. That book changed my literary life. I devoured it. I couldn't get enough! I immediately searched for all the other books in the series and read them quickly, one by one, swiftly followed by a delicious plunge into the world of Agatha Christie which gave me a joyously long reading list. And so now, years later, I find myself with the latest book in the alphabet series lying in my lap, a happy smile on my face as I found I read voraciously once again! Full review...

Online Therapy: Reading Between the Lines by Jethro Adlington

Home and Family

You can get most things online these days and even therapy is becoming more widely available on the internet. It might seem like a simple step to take but many of the signals beyond the spoken word are not available to the online therapist. In a face-to-face situation body language is an added form of communication and even small changes in skin tone can give clues as to state of mind. In a situation where these clues are not available it's essential to make the most of all the clues offered by the written word. Full review...

Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson

Isabel and her sister Ruth are slaves. But they should be free - Miss Mary Finch left a will that said so. But Miss Mary Finch is dead and her greedy nephew and heir denies all knowledge of the will. So Isabel and Ruth are sold to the Locktons and taken to New York. The Revolutionary War is underway and New York is a dangerous place. The Locktons are loyalists, but the patriots are in control of the city. Full review...

Chocolate Mousse and Two Spoons by Lorraine Jenkin

Women's Fiction

From the first sentence: 'With one hell of a crash, Lettie Howell’s dinner service hit the wall…', I knew that I was going to enjoy this tale. An opening thus full of expletive and resounding Welsh Voice immediately makes it clear who’s the boss and I can relax, knowing I’m in competent hands. Welcome, Lorraine Jenkin, to my handful of favourite chick-lit authors. Full review...

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe