Book Reviews From The Bookbag
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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Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart
Mathematics and biology don't traditionally mix. As science develops, the boundaries between maths and physics, physics and chemistry and chemistry and biology have become more and more blurred. As it is now, biology requires many mathematical techniques, and it's fair to assume that major biological breakthroughs over the next hundred years will also have a strong basis in maths too. Ian Stewart looks at the major steps forward in the history of biology, and the areas where maths is at the forefront of development. Full review...
Love is the Reason by Mary Malone
Lucy Ardle was driving home, wondering what sort of a mood her husband would be in. When she'd left earlier, words had been spoken. She was nearly home when she was overtaken by the fire engine: the house was in flames and it was touch and go as to whether or not Danny would make it. Thankfully Lucy's friend, Carol Black had seen the flames and called the fire brigade or the outcome would have been much worse. Full review...
Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian
It's been a long time since I read 'Goodnight Mister Tom' at school. Picking it up again twenty five years later I wondered how good I would find it. I needn't have worried. This wonderful story captured my attention from the very beginning and I became so caught up in Tom and Will's lives that I didn't want it to end. Set during World War Two, William Beech has been evacuated from London and is placed with Tom Oakley, thanks mainly to his proximity to the local church, as Willie's God-fearing mother requested he be close to a church. They seem an unlikely match, the gruff old man who keeps himself to himself and the thin, timid young boy, but there lies the joy of the story, in watching their relationship grow. Full review...
The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer
Dory and Robby Lang had one of those marriages that everyone envies. They're not just lovers, they're best friends too and they never seem to tire of each other. They're both popular teachers at Eleanor Roosevelt High School ('Elro' to those who know it well) where their daughter is a student. It's sometimes difficult to have your parent teaching at your school, but everything seems to rub along reasonably well and Dory was delighted when daughter Willa got a part in the school play. It's Lysistrata and whilst the drama teacher has to tone it down a little it still the play about the women who refuse to have sex with their men until they call a halt to the war they're fighting. Full review...
Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite
In 1979, the Soviet Union decided to move into Afghanistan, and special forces killed the Afghan president. What was initially planned as a fairly modest expedition which would see them stabilise the government, train up the army and police, and then withdraw within a year, turned into a war lasting nearly a decade which left both the Russian army and the Afghan civilians counting the cost of the intervention and with their lives changed forever. What went wrong, and why has Afghanistan proved such a difficult place for foreign powers – ranging from the British in the 19th century, to the Russians in this book, to the current armies engaged in the country – to get any sort of foothold? Full review...
Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Let's start, as Geraldine Brooks has, with a fact: in 1665 the first Native American, Caleb Cheeshateaumauk, graduated from Harvard College. Around this, Brooks has created a wholly fictional story (the known facts are so few that this is largely unavoidable). The stroke of genius here is to put the story into the words of the entirely fictitious Bethia Mayfield, the daughter of an English minister on what we now call Martha's Vinyard, where Caleb lived in the Wampanoag tribe. At various points in her life, Bethia sets down events concerning her early secret friendship with Caleb on the island, to accompanying him and her brother to Harvard and the subsequent events. Full review...
How Not To F*** Them Up by Oliver James
Child psychologist Oliver James can be relied on to fight his corner, whether it's about affluent society or toxic parents. Now he puts the first three years of life under the microscope and argues equally vehemently that parents need to identify their own needs accurately and build their children's care into a 'good enough' framework, in order for the whole family to flourish. He's a controversial figure whose interest in parenting goes back to his own childhood (yes, you've guessed it, his parents where psychoanalysts). He argues the case for modifying childcare decisions to accord with parenting styles while avoiding working mums' guilt trips: “'Why embracing your own parenting style is best for you and your child,' as the cover has it. Full review...
The Happy Passion: A Personal View of Jacob Bronowski by Anthony James
Jacob Bronowski was a scientific administrator, poet, philosopher, dramatist, radio and TV personality, best remembered for the series 'The Ascent of Man'. This short book, about 90 pages long, is partly biographical sketch, partly – in fact largely – an overview of his major published works, occupying about two-thirds of the book. In the author's words, it is intended as a personal view of Bronowski as a philosopher. Full review...
Flip by Martyn Bedford
With no warning, no hint of anything wrong or out of the ordinary in his life, Alex wakes up one morning having lost six months of his life and in a foreign house filled with strangers; the morning turns from weird and scary, to outright crazy and terrifying when Alex discovers that the body he has woken up in is not his own but that of a boy called Philip, or Flip for short. Before he has time to even contemplate the horrifying possibility that he isn't dreaming or hallucinating, and is actually stuck in the body of a boy who he has never seen before, Alex is forced to face a day in the life of Philip Garamond, literally. As he goes through every possible route of enquiry, every logical way to at least make sense of his situation, if not try to reverse it, growing panic sets in and a chaotic, thrilling, and truly frightening sequence of events are set off. Full review...
The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons
Elise Landau arrived in England in 1938, a refugee from Vienna where she and her family had had a good lifestyle. In England she's destined for Tyneford in Dorset where she'll be a parlour maid at the big house. She's not exactly looking forward to it, but she's escaped Vienna with some of her mother's jewels sewn into the seams of her dresses and her father's latest novel, in manuscript, is hidden in the body of her viola. Her sister is leaving for the USA and her parents hope to follow. Surely Elise will be able to join them before too long? She knows that she won't like England. Full review...
The Bride That Time Forgot by Paul Magrs
Christmas is approaching in the seaside town of Whitby and Brenda is busy sprucing up her B&B. She hasn't seen her best friend, neighbour and investigating partner Effie for a few weeks, since Effie's strange gentleman friend Alucard has reappeared. Brenda and Effie are the guardians of the gateway to Hell which just happens to be right on their doorstep in Whitby, but since Effie has shut herself away, Brenda has turned to her friend Robert, the owner of the local hotel to help her with her investigations into the ever present strange goings on in the town, involving vampires, monsters and a rather strange car. Full review...
Ginger, You're Barmy by David Lodge
Jonathan is a few days away from completing his National Service. Within the week he will dash off to Majorca with his girlfriend, and who knows, he might even do more than chastely cup her breast under her clothing. But it's a bittersweet week for Jonathan, as he looks back on the beginnings of his two years spent most reluctantly in the army, and especially the time spent with his best companion, and his girlfriend's ex, Mike. Full review...
The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington
It's the 1500s in Europe, and two women are being transported against their will across the continent. One, an African Moorish beauty is being delivered to the King of Spain as ransom payment, but she and two servants are to end up in the home of a mighty necromancer instead. Elsewhere, a Swiss soldier taking a young witch to those in charge of the Spanish Inquisition finds his cargo is even more dangerous than he thought. Full review...
The Heart Specialist by Claire Holden Rothman
We first meet teenager Agnes at home - dissecting a recently-dead squirrel in secret. She knows full well that her family would not approve of this unseemly behaviour, especially from a girl. She's expected to be a young lady and enjoying ladylike hobbies, like playing with dolls. Fat chance. Feisty Agnes is her father's daughter and she has an interest in medicine. It must be in the blood, in the genes. If that's the case it's skipped younger sister Laure. The two sisters are very different. Laure is a gentle and pretty girl but her health is rather delicate. Agnes is a bit of a tom-boy and a go-getter. Their grandmother despairs of young Agnes - what's to become of her? The norm is marriage and a family, this medical nonsense must be stamped out. It's out of the question. This profession is strictly for the men. Try telling that to Agnes. Full review...
Run Rabbit Run by Barbara Mitchelhill
dad in Rochdale, Lancashire. Two months ago their mum was killed by a bomb which fell on her shop. Lizzie is being bullied and taunted at school and on the way home, because her dad won't join the army. He is a conscientious objector who doesn't believe it's right to kill people. As conscription has been introduced making nearly all men aged 18-51 liable to be called up for military service (and therefore required to fight), this means he is breaking the law and may well be treated as a criminal. Dad has decided they are going to move to Whiteway, a Colony (a sort of alternative community), for people who don't believe in war, in Gloucestershire. Full review...
Coping With Chloe by Rosalie Warren
Anna and Chloe are twins who share everything. If anything, the terrible accident Chloe suffered has brought them closer. Apart from teacher Miss Tough and new boy Joe, though, everyone seems worried by Anna's references to her twin. They seem to think Chloe's dead – but can't they understand the two girls are just sharing a body? Then Chloe falls for Joe, who Anna likes herself, and Anna is left trying to see how this could ever work… Full review...
A Man of Parts by David Lodge
The man of parts in question here is HG Wells in this fictionalised biography. He was indeed a man of many talents and interests, although the parts that most exercise the interest of David Lodge are the great author's private parts. You see, not only was HG a prolific writer of fiction that incorporated a staggering amount of visionary ideas (tanks, airborne warfare and atomic bombs) - although admittedly some of his ideas have yet to come to pass such as time machines and Martian invasion - but he was also something of a political philosopher and idealist, being a central figure for a while in the Fabian movement, and an ardent practitioner of the concept of free love. Full review...
Devil's Consort by Anne O'Brien
In the year 1137 fifteen year old Eleanor of Aquitaine is an orphan. Just before her father's death he asked King Louis VI of France to take care of her, and the unscrupulous Louis took advantage of this request to marry her to his pious son Louis VII. When her new father in law passes away, the young woman becomes Queen of France and is determined to safeguard her precious lands from all who want to take them – even if it leads to conflict with her weak-willed husband. Then she meets the Count of Anjou, Geoffrey Plantagenet, and his son Henry… Full review...
The Raw Man by George Makana Clark
The Prologue opens bang up to date: 2011. The language is poetic, lilting, evocative but tinged with sadness and sets the tone for the rest of the book. Lots of unanswered questions hang in the air throughout. The location is South Africa and section headings such as 'The Earthworks of the Universe' and 'The Story-Ghost' give a flavour of its contents. Full review...
The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood
Britain. 1986.
The country became a theocracy during the 1950s and since then outbreaks of secular terrorism have been dealt with by exile. The atheists have been sent to the Island where they can burn churches as they please. Aside from a weekly boat bringing donated supplies, the exiled must shift as best they can on a remote snippet of land in the North Sea. Full review...
Running the Show: Governors of the British Empire 1857-1912 by Stephanie Williams
For some, the glory days of the British Empire were the closing years of the Victorian era and the 19th century. Government ministers in London, and doubtless Queen Victoria herself, would glance at a map of the world and bask in reflected glory at the generous expanses of land coloured red, 'the empire where the sun never sets', to use the old cliché. Full review...
Great Food: A Taste of the Sun by Elizabeth David
There are three people to whom I owe my ability to put imaginative and tasty food on the table: Nigel Slater for taking away the mystique, Jane Grigson for teaching me that food was deeply interesting and Elizabeth David just for being who she was. Initially I found her a little daunting but once I realised that cookery books were about far more than recipes I appreciated her true worth. In the wonderful Great Food series Penguin have given us a selection of her writing and a demonstration of how she changed the way that post-war Britain thought about food. Full review...
Below Stairs: The Bestselling Memoirs of a 1920s Kitchen Maid by Margaret Powell
Below Stairs was first published in 1968, and it's no exaggeration to claim Margaret Powell as the trailblazer for the memoir genre. This book encouraged hundreds of autobiographies of common life, and spawned a whole generation of tv programmes. In its vernacular and popularist way, it was probably as influential as Mayhew's 'London Labour and the London Poor'. Before her, only famous people wrote their stories, and that without too much regard for reality. Unless they were literary writers, achievements were downplayed and emotions hidden away, in the stilted style of the British stiff upper lip. Not so Margaret Powell, who became a publishing sensation when she blasted through with a robust Voice rather than a polished narrative, in the first-ever tale of an ordinary servant writing about everyday life below stairs. Imagine being talent-spotted from an evening class and invited to write your memoir: those were the days! Full review...
Loose-Limbed by David Barrie
Captain Franck Guerin of the Brigade Criminelle was about to learn a lot more about ballet than he ever expected or wanted to know. Sophie Duval was a leading dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet – an etoile – and she was murdered in her home. A chord had been wrapped three times around her neck and then she had been strangled, but why? It seemed simple to rule out professional jealousy and she seemed to have little life outside of the ballet. The Opera Ballet is a tight-knit and dedicated world, but it's not long before it's a world of terror, because Sophie Duval is only the first person to die. Full review...
Meklyan and the Fourth Piece of the Artefact by Stephen Mark Norman
Four billion years after our Sun has become a red giant and died, taking all life with it, there are still humans in the universe. How so? By man-made panspermia. When Earth's civilisation realised it couldn't master long distance space travel in sufficient time to avoid annihilation, it sent out DNA probes filled with bacteria far out into space, to planets in the temperate zones of solar systems; planets that could potentially sustain life. And on eight planets, sustain life they did. Full review...
The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton by Elizabeth Speller
I reviewed and thoroughly enjoyed Speller's The Return Of Captain John Emmett so I was really keen to get stuck into the follow-up. The main character, officer Laurence Bartram is also an important character in the previous book, but both are stand-alone novels in their own right. The front cover is evocative and is also as pretty as a picture - literally. With its intriguing title which had me asking all sorts of questions before I'd even opened the book, it was a good start. Full review...
Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan
Mathilde is unhappy at work. More than just unhappy actually, because after expressing an opinion different to her boss he has frozen her out of the team and bullied her mentally and emotionally for months. Mathilde is a woman on the edge of breaking point, feeling increasingly brow-beaten by both the demands of city life and her awful boss. Meanwhile Thibault is an emergency on-call doctor, racing from one district to another through the nightmares of Parisian traffic, unhappy in his relationship and also struggling, mentally, to survive. Will today be the day that changes everything? Full review...
Blood and Allegiance by Annette Hart
Bryony was orphaned when she was very young and since then has lived in the Abbey at Ambleton, but once she reached her fourteenth birthday her cousin, Unwin, King of Athlandia, required that she join him at court. She lost the only friends she had known, her clothes were replaced with much grander garments and she became a part of the inner circle of the court. It wasn't long before she realised that her cousin was far from benevolent – but he was fighting an uprising and perhaps what he was doing was necessary. Then Milly, her maid, is punished for stepping slightly out of line and Bryony realises how little she knows of other people in Kynbury and even of the history of her own family. Full review...
The Loner by Quintin Jardine
Jardine starts with some background on Xavier Aislado. Even at school in Edinburgh, his bulk and rather serious manner ensures that he sails through his academic courses. This is against the odds of a chaotic life at home. His Spanish father's a bit of a cold fish, his Scottish mother is as meek as a church mouse so Xavier (or Xavi) is really guided and nurtured by his rather ferocious grandmother, Paloma. Even I was afraid of her. She takes no prisoners, wears the trousers in the Aislado household (in both Spain and Scotland) and speaks her mind every time. Although there are certain areas which are out of bounds. But I also loved her too. Jardine has created a terrific character in Paloma, in particular. Full review...
The Secret Kingdom by Jenny Nimmo
Protected by a moon cloak, a ring, and three mysteriously powerful leopards, Timoken the magician and his camel Gabar seek a new home after the boy is forced to flee the secret kingdom. But will they ever find peace with the vicious viradees on their trail? This prequel to the Charlie Bone series contains new and old characters, including a couple of brief cameos from Charlie himself, but is well worth reading as a stand-alone or introduction to the series if you've never heard of it. Full review...
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
Sometime after Mia's husband of thirty years, Boris, suggests a marriage 'pause', Mia goes mad and finds herself in a psychiatric hospital. Although this Brief Psychotic Disorder does not last long, she remains fragile and retreats to the town in Minnesota where she was brought up and where her elderly mother still lives. While Boris cavorts with the Pause, she struggles through the summer, learning to live without him. She builds relationships with her mother's friends, with her neighbours and with a group of teenage girls who form her creative writing class. Written in the first person, the book catalogues her progress using these friendships, her past, her reading and her shrink, Dr S. Full review...
The Devil's Garden by Edward Docx
Set on a research station in an unnamed Amazonian country (although by the indigenous tribes mentioned, this is probably Peru), this first person narrative story is told by Dr Forle, who has come to the area to study ants - specifically the strange phenomenon of a type of ant that appear to destroy their own environment. It's sort of ants on the deck in the jungle, if you like. However the scientific study is interrupted by the arrival of an army colonel and a judge, who at least on the surface of things is there to organize the registration of the local tribes. However when the doctor witnesses a clear act of violence by the soldiers accompanying the colonel, he becomes more engaged with the local goings on. Full review...
The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock
Catherine Rozier is fifteen years old and she has a secret.
Secrets are a big thing on Guernsey, the small Channel Isle that is only three miles across at one point with a population a little over 65,000 i.e. somewhat more than Hereford, considerably less than Lincoln, or about half that of Norwich or Preston. Unlike any of those towns, Guernsey is an island. It is self-contained. It isn't just that everyone knows everyone else; they're almost certainly, quite closely, related. Full review...
Touch by Alexi Zentner
Stephen, an Anglican priest is writing a story of three generations, a haunting tale of his childhood set in Sawgamet, an isolated clearing in the snowy forest expanse of North West Canada. It is the evening before his mother's funeral. One loss brings up earlier losses; relating this deeply poignant tale he relates the disastrous event of his father's attempts to rescue his sister, Marie, when on a skating expedition she falls through a dark hole in the thin ice at the turbulent confluence of two rivers. His terrified sister looks towards her father who plunges into the water and both perish in a catastrophe. Consequently, Stephen is to struggle with for many years to in some way to come to terms with this severe trauma. His grandfather, Jeannot, a resilient settler is a stalwart figure who keeps returning protectively into Stephen's life in order to resurrect his own lost love, Martine from the hereafter. This love between Jeannot and Stephen's grandmother, Martine, and also that between Jeannot's brother and future wife blossom through magical events involving the metamorphosis of gold, trees and mountains which move, and malevolent 'qualuplillumits' ogres from a richly various panoply of magical realism. Full review...
Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa
When I read The Housekeeper and the Professor by Ogawa I fell completely in love with the book. It was gentle, and beautifully written. Hotel Iris is very, very different and really ought to have a warning label on the cover for those who simply recognise the author's name and pick it up hoping for more! This is the story of a seventeen year old girl who is seduced by an old man in a sadistic, distressing manner. Full review...
