Review of Summer of Dreaming by Lyn McConchie

I’ll be honest – I don’t much enjoy reading books in PDF format. I spend most of my working day at the computer – sitting at the darn thing to read a book seems a bit too much like a busman’s holiday. So when Summer of Dreaming popped up on the computer, I wasn’t exactly rubbing my hands with glee at the prospect of reading it. Deciding just to give the first chapter a go before going off to bed, seemed a sensible option, however…

I was still sitting at the computer screen a couple of hours later, absolutely hooked. No way was I going anywhere until I’d finished this delightful YA adventure novel set in New Zealand.

Thirteen-year-old Jo’s best friend is Rangi Jackson, a Maori boy from the neighbouring farm – which is a big problem for her grandmother and Rangi’s great-grandfather, who hate their friendship. When questioned about their hostility, they are both very tight-lipped – but mention a feud stretching back in time. Up to this point, it hasn’t been an issue, but when ill health forces Grandmother to convalesce during the summer at their farm and Jo finds herself sneaking off to meet up with Rangi, the pair decide to get to the bottom of this mysterious incident that has caused such enmity between their families…

Their investigation into their family histories is interspersed with daily events on the isolated sheep farm. McConchie’s fluid prose deftly draws us into this rural corner of New Zealand, giving us a taste of a very different lifestyle, without letting the pace or tension slacken one jot. Told in first person through Jo’s viewpoint, one of the main strengths of this book is the spot-on characterisation of the main protagonist, who jumped off the pages and grabbed my attention from the first chapter and didn’t let go until I’d finished the book. While she ensures that there is nothing too graphic, given the target readership’s age-group, McConchie isn’t afraid to confront her audience with a brutal scenario that didn’t end ‘happily ever after’ for those caught up in it.

Do I have any niggles? Well, I’m not too sure about the title. It makes the book sound less adventurous and action-packed than it is. It would be a crying shame if young readers didn’t pick it up because the title didn’t appeal.
All in all, Summer of Dreaming is a thoroughly accomplished, entertaining read that thoroughly deserves winning the 2011 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Young Adult Novel.
9/10

Review of The Devil in a Forest by Gene Wolfe

A copy of this classic was a gift from a talented friend of mine whose opinion I value, so clearly it had to go right to the top of my reading pile – and I’m not sorry that it did as it started my 2012 list on a really high point.

Deep in a forest wilderness lay a village so humble, so insignificant, that only a handful of people knew it existed – yet it was here that a mighty battle was waged in the endless struggle between Good and Evil.
Led by Fate into the timeless struggle were:
WAT the savage and charming highwayman…
MOTHER CLOOT the cunning and cruel possessor of mysterious powers…
BARROW MAN the awesome spirit of a long-dead warrior… and
MARK not yet totally seduced by Evil, not yet totally convinced by Good…

And there you have it – the back cover blurb. As you can see they did things slightly differently back in 1976 – for starters they didn’t see fit to tell you at least half the plot although there were lots of capital letters and slightly portentous pronouncements due to the Tolkein effect still rippling through the genre at the time. And the blurb gives no insight whatsoever as to what the book is actually about. Neither does the cover. I was expecting major battle scenes… nasty armoured beasties lurking around every tree… which simply doesn’t happen. It’s SO much better than that.

Told in third person limited pov from Mark’s viewpoint, this little book gives you a slice of the gritted business of surviving in an isolated community that has seen better times when their religious shrine brought in a steady stream of pilgrims. But now, thanks to the depredations of their very own highwayman, Wat, that trickle has all but dried up and everyone is having to tighten their belts. A lot.

Mark is an orphaned fourteen year old apprentice to the village weaver. Which means he often goes hungry and has learnt to take care of himself – something that stands him in good stead when a foray into the forest with the innkeeper’s daughter turns into a dark and dangerous adventure. Where his future and very soul is at stake…  Wolfe has a trick of utterly subsuming you into his created world. We accept that Mark spends a large chunk of time so hungry that his stomach gripes with the pain. That he has to always pick his words carefully to the adults around him, because there is no one who innately cares about him. We learn just how unnerving Mother Cloot’s behaviour can be – and what Mark does when he comes across a murdered man…

The huge forest rustles with hidden food and threats, the river offers fish and the risk of drowning – and threading through all this is the scalding knowledge that life is precarious and cheap. And Mark has been caught between forces that he cannot hope to prevail against. All this occurs without an ounce of sentimentality and in just over 220 pages, Wolfe produces a gripping adventure that had me reading faaar into the night to discover what would happen to Mark, and Wat and Mother Cloot. The writing is pin-sharp and exquisite, with wonderful dialogue, superb scene setting and an interesting cast of characters, who are initially offered up as ciphers – and then, refuse to behave as you’d expect.

So Mark is less defiant and more accepting of the clear injustices that Life has dealt him; more suspicious of nearly everyone and their motives for being friendly; and very aware of the occult and dark forces in play around the village. Mother Cloot is a tough, wise old woman – and then something else a whole lot darker… As the violence escalates and events spin out of control, this tale gripped me and would not let go. And by the end, I felt I had a far clearer understanding of what it meant to part of an underclass in a small village during the Dark Ages – despite the fact that I have a teaching Degree in History and regard myself as reasonably knowledgeable about that period.

As you might have gathered, this 1970’s offering mightily impressed me and confirmed what I’ve always known – that superb writing is timeless. If you enjoy excellent adventure Fantasy in an historical setting, then hunt down this little book – it’s worth the effort.
10/10

Review of Graceling by Kristin Cashore – Book 1 of The Seven Kingdoms trilogy

I discovered on Google that this New York Times Best Seller is a YA book. Although I had guessed from the restraint shown in both the fights and romantic scenes, I wouldn’t let that label dissuade a more mature reader from picking up this fantasy book. The characters are well drawn, particularly the main female protagonist; and the world has some interesting original touches that drew me in. Cashore writes with pace and this enjoyable tale kept me reading far into the night, when I should have been asleep…

In a world where people born with an exceptional skill, known as a Grace, are both feared and exploited, Katsa carries the burden of a skill even she despises: the Grace of killing.  As a Graced killer who has been able to kill a man with her bare hands from the age of eight, she’s forced to work as the king’s thug. Feared by the court and shunned by those her own age, the darkness of her Grace casts a heavy shadow over Katsa’s life.

When the King of Liend’s father is kidnapped she investigates and stumbles across a mystery. Who would want to kidnap the old man, and why? The intrigue surrounding this crime offers her a way out of her violent life that she has come to loathe. But little does she realise as she plunges into this adventure that the menace awaiting can even overwhelm her superhuman strength and threatens to engulf all the Seven Kingdoms…

Katsa is related to King Randa, which doesn’t stop him coldly using her as a tool to perform his dirty work, when his grasping, bullying tactics do not work on his hapless subjects. Katsa is, unsurprisingly, damaged by her upbringing – and Cashore manages to depict the flaws in her heroine, without holding up the story in any way. Given Katsa’s ability to battle and kill quantities of foes, Cashore manages to come up with an ingeniously wicked villain who poses a real threat to this apparently invincible protagonist. The inevitable romantic sub-plot is also well handled, managing to deliver some unexpected twists along the way and building to a strong ending. It comes as no surprise to learn that Graceling has appeared on a number of listings, including the ALA’s William C. Morris YA Award and was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction & Fantasy Award. Altogether, a satisfying and engrossing read that had me immediately reaching for the second book in the series, Fire.  At present the final book in the series, Bitterblue is due to be released in June 2012 .

9/10

Review of My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher

This debut novel has been creating something of a stir – but it was my husband who ordered it from the library after seeing a poster about it on the way to London…

Ten year old Jamie hasn’t cried since it happened. He knows he should have – Jasmine cried, Mum cried and Dad still cries. Roger didn’t, but then he’s just a cat and didn’t know Rose that well, really.  Everyone kept saying it would get better with time, but that’s just one of those lies that grown-ups tell in awkward situations. Five years on, and it’s worse than ever. Dad drinks, Mum’s run off with Nigel from her Support Group and Jasmine wears black and has pink hair. While Jamie is left with questions he must answer for himself.

As for Rose, Jasmine’s twin – bits of her are in an urn on the mantelpiece and the book opens with Jamie explaining exactly which bits of her ended up in the urn and why. This is a brave, thought-provoking read about the on-going consequences of a child’s unexpected death. However, Pitcher has managed to depict the family’s painful dysfunction with an assuredness that is impressive in a first novel. It is Jamie’s voice that saves this book from descending into a bleak miasma of misery, as in his viewpoint Pitcher leavens this book with a number of funny scenes. Like the majority of children in really tough situations, Jamie doesn’t waste a lot of time on self pity. He’s too engrossed in trying to adjust to life in a new school in the Lake District and making friends with Sunya, a Muslim. In the normal course of things, this wouldn’t be a problem, but Rose died in a terrorist incident similar to 7/07, so Dad hates Muslims.

So, on top of giving us a ringside seat on a family’s suffering over the loss of a child, Pitcher also adds the tricky issue of hardening attitudes towards an innocent community due to the actions of a handful of murdering fanatics.

I think she’s managed to succeed in nailing Jamie’s voice – no mean feat, given the storyline and once I got into the book, I couldn’t put it down until I’d finished it. And when I surfaced, I was feeling more than a bit wrung out…

Any niggles? Hm… as it happens, yes. As an ex-primary school teacher, I had no problem with Pitcher’s unsympathetic treatment of Jamie’s class teacher or headmaster. But, while I would be quite prepared to believe that Jamie’s records or lack of them might have been overlooked in an hard-pressed inner city school, where anything between 30% to 50% of the pupils may move in a year – in a country school where he is clearly the ‘new boy’ and treated as an outsider, the fact that he wears the same t-shirt for a whole term and is clearly neglected wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. These days, teachers are legally bound to report any concerns over a child’s welfare to a superior and/or visiting social worker and I find it difficult to believe that some details of the family’s circumstances wouldn’t have become known to the school in that timeframe.

However, given Pitcher’s achievement in managing a very difficult subject with such adroitness, I’m quite prepared to cut her some slack over this issue. The novel has been marketed as a children’s book, but it is one of those special stories suitable for anyone aged ten and over – and if you don’t believe me, get hold of a copy and give it a go. You’ll thank me if you do…

9/10

Review of Glass Houses – Book 1 of The Morganville Vampires by Rachel Caine

This is yet another urban fantasy vamp tale – but worth a serious look because Rachel Caine is also the author of the very successful and nicely plotted Weather Warden series.

Morganville is a small college town filled with unusual characters. But when the sun goes down, the bad come out. Because in Morganville, there is an evil that lurks in the darkest shadows – one that will spill out into the bright light of day.

For Claire Danvers, high school was hell, but college may be murder. It was bad enough that she got on the wrong side of Monica, the meanest of the school’s mean girls, but now she’s got three new roommates, who all have secrets of their own. And the biggest secret of all isn’t really a secret, except from Claire: Morganville is run by vampires, and they are hungry for fresh blood…

This tale is definitely aimed at the YA market. However, that doesn’t preclude many books from being an equally enjoyable read for those of us who a lot longer in the tooth – in a completely non-vampire way, of course. Authors such as Juliet Marillier and Trudi Canavan are often parked on the YA bookshop shelves, which doesn’t prevent me being a solid fan of both. The style and tone of this book did come across as rather young as it is written in Claire’s viewpoint and I did skim the sections where she is obsessing about the boy in her life. It isn’t a criticism, so much as an observation – I’m not, after all, the target audience this book is written for – and I was prepared to go with the flow as I found the storyline sufficiently intriguing.

One aspect I very much applaud is that Caine’s young protagonist is a highly gifted student who has been fast-tracked to college several years early. It makes a refreshing change to have an academically gifted heroine who is being seriously hazed for it, rather than the normal fashionably dumb girl very into clothes and/or shoes. It gives this fantasy a sharper, grittier edge to see school life through the eyes of this neglected minority, who after all have the potential and ability to shape our future society – and who are all too often singled out by their less able classmates.

The other aspect that sets this tale apart is Caine’s excellent pacing and atmosphere – this book hits the ground running and doesn’t let up. The initial action was all the more shocking for being committed by a gang of girls, and as Claire becomes ever more mired in Morganville’s dark side, a real sense of menace and danger is created. There is nothing remotely sexy or fun about Caine’s vampires in this book – they are lethal predators and those living alongside them are quite rightly absolutely terrified and cowed by them.

The plot twists were engrossing and the cast of characters well drawn, with several enjoyable surprises along the way. By the time we came to the cliffhanger ending, I was sufficiently hooked to want to get hold of the sequel and discover what happens next.

8/10