Book Reviews From The Bookbag

The Bookbag

Hello from The Bookbag, a 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. We can even direct you to help for custom book reviews! Visit www.everychildareader.org to get free writing tips and www.genecaresearchreports.com will help you get your paper written for free.

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Welcome to Nowhere by Elizabeth Laird

Teens

Omar is a twelve-year-old boy living in Bosra, Syria. He works two small jobs before and after school. He prefers the jobs to school. Omar dreams of becoming a successful entrepreneur with a network of businesses to rule over. He's already developing a successful sales patter. Omar has a clever sister who wants to be a teacher, and a clever brother who few realise is clever because he has cerebral palsy and people can't see past his speech impediment. He has a father who works for the government, a mother who worries too much, a hypercritical granny and a couple of annoying younger siblings. Full review...

A Quiet Kind of Thunder by Sara Barnard

Teens

Steffi has just started a) sixth form and b) medication for her anxiety. It's all rather tricky, as you can imagine, particularly as Tem, Steffi's best - well, only - friend has enrolled at the local FE college to do an NVQ and so Steffi is all by herself. On the first day, a teacher introduces Steffi to Rhys, a new boy to the school and also just starting sixth form. Rhys is deaf and Steffi knows a little bit of sign language, hence the introduction. Both kids have communication barriers - Rhys can't hear and Steffi, who suffers from selective mutism and severe anxiety, often can't talk. And they fall into friendship, attraction, and love. But it's a rocky road... Full review...

Death's Mistress by Terry Goodkind

Fantasy

We start this novel as a Heroine and a hero travelling through the forest, in search of a witch. I immediately love it, when the focus is on the female lead and the male lead is painted as a bit of a pompous twonk, with more care for clothes and jewellery, than for saving mankind. However, it becomes harder to like her as the book winds its tale, when you realise that she is a heartless, murdering, uncaring, psychopath. It becomes relatively clear that she has been damaged from a young age (which was a while ago, seeing as she's almost 200 years old), that has had effects on how she has lived her life until this point. However, their goal of spreading the word of Emperor's Rahl victory over the evil Emperor Janang to the furthest reaches of his kingdom, becomes diverted, when prophecy leaves the world and an old witch imparts the knowledge of an old prophecy that foretells that Nicci will save the world. Full review...

The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

General Fiction

Anthony Peardew lost the love of his life before they married. In the midst of his tragedy he found solace and purpose in collecting 'lost things' - things that were left behind on trains, in parks, or found in the gutter, and he records each and every one carefully, in the hope that perhaps some day they can be reunited with their rightful owner. He writes stories about the items he finds, becoming a published author. However, as he grows older and starts to realise that he is dying, he knows he must hand over the task to someone else choosing his housekeeper, Laura, to take on what is, to her, a completely unknown aspect of his life. Full review...

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

Autobiography

No you haven't stumbled into a music review from the 1970s, I'm talking about The Boss's autobiography. Lots of books have been written about Springsteen by folk who knew him, worked with him and by others who have only read the cuttings. Over the last seven years he has been going about – not putting the record straight, exactly – but telling it from his own perspective. As he puts it: Writing about yourself is a funny business. By his own admission, it isn't the whole truth, discretion holds him back but in a project like this, the writer has made one promise, to show the reader his mind. In these pages, I've tried to do this. Full review...

A Beatles Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Beatles but Were Afraid to Ask by John Van der Kiste

Reference

You might have thought that just about everything which could be said about the Beatles had been said and certainly there's been no shortage of books about what went wrong, what happened to the money and even what went right. But what I've never seen before is a 'miscellany' - all those little facts which are so hard to track down and this is where historian John Van der Kiste comes into his own: he's a man with an eye for detail and the ability to bring everything together into a very readable whole. It's a wonderful collection of the small facts. Full review...

Everything You Told Me by Lucy Dawson

Thrillers

When Sally wakes up in a taxi in the middle of the night, miles from home, dazed, confused and dressed only in her nightie, she is terrified. And so are her friends and family. After the emergency services conclude she's not an immediate danger to herself (despite being found stumbling precariously close to a cliff edge) she's shipped off home where her husband, parents and mother in law rally round to help her care for herself and their two young children. Sally has a battle on her hands, though, as everyone is walking on eggshells, determined not to upset her and yet also unable or unwilling to believe her version of events that night. Full review...

This is a Serious Book by Jodie Parachini and Daniel Rieley

For Sharing

If you want a silly book, this is not the one for you. This is, as the title says, a serious book. And just so there's no doubt, it shows you all the things you won't find in this book (because they are silly and this is serious). So we see pictures of donkeys pulling silly faces and doing backflips but only as a warning. They are examples to show us what we won't find in this book. For they are silly things (yuck). Full review...

Alice Jones: The Ghost Light by Sarah Rubin

Confident Readers

Actors are superstitious creatures at the best of times, but it doesn't help that the cast (including Alice's twin Della) is rehearsing in a historic old theatre once ravaged by fire and haunted, so they say, by the ghost of a former leading lady. After a spate of inexplicable and apparently random accidents threaten the show Alice's sister insists she investigate and stop the culprit before someone is seriously hurt. But can it all be blamed on the shady businessman who wants to tear the place down and build a multi-plex instead, or is the explanation something a good deal more spooky? Full review...

I Don't Know What to Call My Cat by Simon Philip and Ella Bailey

For Sharing

Getting a new pet is rife with things that you have to do. Where will they sleep? What will they eat? And, of course, what on Earth are you going to call them? Giving a pet the right name when they are tiny can be an issue in itself – a cute fluffy dog can grow into a massive hound called Fluffy, or you could call your male cat Claire. Perhaps it would help if the animal itself could tell you what name they want? Full review...

Web to Success by Jo Bird

Lifestyle

Jo Bird (illustrator, designer and… errr.. .wall tattooist) had a lightbulb moment about positive thinking, self-improvement and success. The road to an improved self isn't linear in a 'change this thing and all will be fine' way; it's a web that connects and intersects several paths and subjects that can be summarised under three headings. All successful people (socially as much as professionally) know about self-awareness, personal development and emotional awareness. After having a shot at principles of self-improvement herself, Jo shares the fruit of her experience across a wealth of fields to make one heck of a self-help book. Full review...

Vietnamese Voices by Mary Ellen Guiney

Lifestyle

Mary Ellen Guiney has been diagnosed at various times with schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. The resulting treatment of choice is the conventional western medicine approach and drug regimens that brought with them unpleasant side-effects. Determined to find a better way of symptom control, using her biochemical background, Mary Ellen begins to investigate alternative eastern medicine and therapies in addition to looking at the effect of nutrition and exercise. The results are here: this is Mary Ellen's story written in her own words. Full review...

The Cruise of Naromis: August in the Baltic 1939 by G A Jones

Travel

There's brave, and there is brave. I may well have been born in a coastal county but certainly would baulk at the idea of setting out to sea with four colleagues in a 37'-long boat. Boats to me are like planes – the bigger the better, and the safer I feel as a result. But luckily for the purpose of this book, George Jones was born with a much different pair of sea-legs to mine, and took to the waters of the English Channel, the North Sea and beyond in Naromis with brio. But – and this is where the further definition of bravery comes in – he did it in August 1939, knowing full well that he would be sailing full tilt into the teeth of war. Full review...

St Grizzle's School for Girls, Goats and Random Boys by Karen McCombie

Confident Readers

Dani's mum is a zoologist which – according to Dani – means she's obsessed with penguins' bums. There are lots of penguins in Antarctica and it's, therefore, not surprising that Dani's mum can't turn down the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a three month expedition to study her beloved penguins in their natural habitat. But where does that leave Dani? Mum thinks it means sending Dani to a sensible boarding school for girls. Dani hates the idea and she hates the school even more when she arrives and discovers the new headteacher has made some rather unusual changes. Dani's convinced there is no way she'll ever fit in in a school where students run wild, where the receptionist barely speaks English, and where they have to remember to lock their dormitory door to keep out the resident goat. Full review...

The X-Files Origins: Devil's Advocate by Jonathan Maberry

Teens

Dana Scully can be added to the list of teenaged people upset by their family moving home in those key years. Her naval father being relocated has meant she has been uprooted from a nun's Catholic school to a regular, secular school elsewhere, but echoes of religion are still everywhere – not least a no-longer-used church opposite their new home. But it's inside that the strongest taste of faith is residing – Dana is seeing visions that could be claimed to be precognitive, and dreams possibly peopled by a satanic angel figure. That would all be troubling enough, but school children are dying in allegedly drug-fuelled car wrecks that nobody can really believe in, so straight-edged are the victims – and Dana is having even more troubling experiences as a result. Working out the cause and effect here could fill an X-File, but of course we're in the years long before those exist. Dana might well be on her own in her investigations... Full review...

The X-Files Origins: Agent of Chaos by Kami Garcia

Teens

Give a person a book and you might change their day. Give the right person the right book and you might change their life. That is the philosophy of The Major, the father of the nearest thing Fox Mulder has to a best schoolmate. He may well appear to be a wacky – some could even go as far as saying Spooky – conspiracy nut, with some novel manner in home security, but he certainly swears that the truth to his wife's death, and so much more, is either out there, or in the pages of a Michael Moorcock fantasy novel. It's a situation not a million miles away from that which Fox finds himself in, for he is eternally frustrated at the lack of effort he sees in the search for his own baby sister. But before he can settle back with his new read, and before The Major can really prove himself formative, Fox gets rapt in new, local cases of child kidnap, that even though he and his father moved state recently, have a galling familiarity… Full review...

Mind The Gap by Phil Earle

Teens

When Mikey's dad dies, he stops caring about anything. Indeed, he becomes so desperate to feel something that he deliberately provokes the one person on the estate who no one messes with. Not surprisingly it ends badly and not just for him. Mikey's best mate also ends up in a pool of blood. But that doesn't matter because his friend has already lost something more important. He lost Mikey when his dad died and he's determined to find a way to bring his best friend back. That's why he sets off on a one boy crusade to find a way to help Mikey remember his dad. He just needs to find a movie, a radio extract, or a YouTube clip – something that will allow his friend to remember his dad's voice. Mikey's dad was an actor, so how difficult can it be? Full review...

Rupture (Dark Iceland) by Ragnar Jonasson and Quentin Bates (translator)

Crime

Strange things are happening, as they are most wont to do, in rural Iceland. In a very remote fjordside community in the NW a passing visitor has left the legacy of a dangerous African virus, which has claimed two lives. It's becoming national news, to the extent that a TV journalist is in touch for updates. The community only has two policemen, trying to man their station round the clock between them to make sure instant responses are possible. But one of them has also been asked to look into a mysterious cold case from the 1950s, when a lady died from poisoning – and that in a community of only four adults and a baby. – Or was it five and a baby, as a newly-found photograph suggests? Elsewhere, in Reykjavik, a young couple are troubled by an intruder – but that won't have any connection to the other cases, surely? Full review...

The Liar's Handbook by Keren David

Teens

Everyone tells River that he's a liar but he doesn't see it that way – as far as River is concerned he just thinks up interesting stuff to fill in the gaps in what he knows. His lies are harmless: unlike the lies that his mum's new boyfriend, Jason, tells. Jason is a total fake and River is on a crusade to expose him. However, River's investigation doesn't work out as planned. He does uncover a serious deception (involving his biological father and the police) but will anyone believe him? Full review...

Krysia: A Polish Girl's Stolen Childhood During World War II by Krystyna Mihulka and Krystyna Poray Goddu

Children's Non-Fiction

Most of us would think of Polish children suffering in World War Two because of the Nazi death camps – they and their families suffering through countless round-ups, ghettoization, and transport to the end of the line, where they might by hint or dint survive to tell the horrid tale. But most of us would think of such Polish children as Jewish victims of the Holocaust. This book opens the eyes up in a most vivid fashion to those who were not Jewish. They did not get resettled in the Nazi Lebensraum, but were sent miles away to the East. Krysia's family were split up, partly due to her father being a Polish reservist when the Nazis invaded, and then courtesy of Stalin, who had signed a pact with Hitler dividing the country between the two states, before they turned bitter enemies. Krysia's family, living in the eastern city of Lwow, were packed up and sent – in the stereotypical cattle train – east. And east, and east – right the way across the continent to rural Kazakhstan, and a communal farm in the middle of anonymous desert, deep in Communist Soviet lands. Proof, if proof were needed, that that horrendous war still carries narratives that will be new to us… Full review...

What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible by Ross Welford

Confident Readers

Meet Ethel. Yes, it's an old-fashioned name for such a young girl, but she has connections with the generations that came before, in that she lives with her gran in the far north-east of England. Mother dead, and dad long absent, it's them and the dog, and very little in the way of friendship, mostly because Ethel is not allowed to be as cool as she would wish, and because she has horrendous acne. The nearest thing to a friend would seem to be a boy in class who has allegedly awful BO, and obviously worse, is an Arsenal fan. So why are we meeting Ethel? Oh yes, it's because she woke up one morning, after trying a sunbed that had been offloaded on to her for free, to find she'd been on it well over an hour, and had in fact become totally invisible. Full review...

What Remains of Me by A L Gaylin

Crime

On the hottest night of the year, June 28, 1980 teenager Kelly Lund walked into a wrap party and shot the director, John McFadden dead. Two to the chest, one to the head, dead and centre. She offered no defence, though her attorneys played up her drug use and the heat but she still got 25-to-life. A journalist saw something in her nervous smile on the court steps, part of her defence mechanism others might have argued, called it the Mona Lisa Death Smile and set about building a demon. Full review...

The Liberation: Book Three of The Alchemy Wars by Ian Tregillis

Fantasy

The war between the New Dutch and the New French continue aided and complicated by the Mechanicals' rebellion. In fact the day the world ended comes as a shock to everyone, not to mention a bloody mess. Let the apocalypse begin! Full review...

Blood Lines (D I Kim Stone) by Angela Marsons

Crime

Initially it looked like a robbery gone wrong, or possibly a carjack, only the car was still there and so was the expensive watch and the jewellry. Her wallet hadn't been taken either, but she'd been killed by a single, precise stab to the heart. There was no sign of anger: in fact there seemed to be a complete lack emotion and there was nothing to suggest that the victim had attracted the violence - she was a caring mother and dedicated social worker. D I Kim Stone wasn't alone in thinking that something didn't add up. Then a local drug addict was found with an identical wound. There's nothing to link the two cases other than the wounds and Stone's instincts. Full review...

Becoming Reverend: A diary by Matt Woodcock

Autobiography

Matt Woodcock is enjoying life: successful journalist, happily married and a new dream home bought and heavily mortgaged. The only cloud on the horizon is their struggle to have children but they have faith in the IVF treatment as it's early days yet. Then comes the funny turn Matt has on the way to a story one day. This takes him by surprise but the resulting clergy collar comes as a total shock. He's a normal bloke who always thought of himself as more pint than piety believing in a God who's happy for him to remain in the pews. Errrrm… whoops! Full review...

Dead Man's Steel (Grim Company) by Luke Scull

Fantasy

The fehd move on, killing humanity with ruthless efficiency. The remaining heroes are trying to win the war but they've got issues of their own. Brodar Kayne, the Sword of the North, joins forces against fehd with Carn Bloodfist which has its problems since Brodar killed Carn's father. Davarus Cole and Sasha are slightly imprisoned whereas Eremul the Halfmage is still raging wherever possible. This raging takes turns with coming to terms with the shock of his apprentice's true identity. Indeed the former apprentice, Isaac, is fulfilling his true potential although not on the side that Eremul had envisaged. These heroes – all that remains of the Grim Company - are humanity's only hope… Good luck humanity! Full review...