Steady for This

Steady for This by Nathnael Lessore

Book of the Week: 3 March 2024

Cover illustration by Arnaud Derepper

A warm-hearted story about family and friendship that stands out for its colourful use of language.

Shaun and his best mate Shanks pride themselves on their rapping skills so when Mr Rix, their English teacher, asks everyone in class to tell him an interesting fact about themselves, Shaun thinks he’ll impress Tanisha (his latest crush) with the boast that he ‘… can MC off the dome’. He has also been working out twice a week, hoping that Tanisha will notice. As he says, ‘… it’s important to exercise your triceratops, your lorax and your Lithuania.’ Shaun has a bottomless supply of malapropisms. Grudgingly, Tanisha agrees to go on a date to the cinema with him, but he not only brings Shanks along for moral support, but has a strange notion about what constitues a cinema snack. No spoilers, but this scene made me laugh out loud.

Worse things are to happen when he and Shanks go viral for something so embarassing that they think they’ll never live it down and he, his mum and his brother are threatened with eviction from their home. Can Shaun solve their problems by winning the cash prize in a rap contest and will he ever restore his reputation in school?

It took me a couple of chapters to get used to the vocabulary when I first started reading this book, but Shaun is a funny and endearing narrator whose eternal optimism and sense of humour keep you reading.

The Agency for Scandal

The Agency for Scandal by Laura Wood

Book of the Week: 4 February 2024

Cover illustration by Mercedes Debellard

Eighteen year old Isobel Stanhope leads a double life. Most of the time she is a rather forgettable young woman, outshone by her friend Teresa Winter and Sylla Banaji, the socialite daughter of a baronet. It being 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, most of society is centred on celebratory parties, theatre trips and fancy dress balls, all of which Isobel attends, mainly in the hope of seeing the handsome Max Vane, the eighth Duke of Roxton. Not that he seems to care. She has been introduced to him several times and he never even remembers her name. Not even Isobel’s closest friends know that, when her father died, he left the family with hardly any money and consequently she is working hard to support her mother and pay her little brother’s boarding school fees. Her mother is an invalid who keeps to her room, rather like Miss Havisham, and is unaware that nearly everything in the rest of the house has been sold to raise money. Isobel’s darkest secret is that she works for an undercover detective agency called The Aviary, run by the formidable Mrs Finch. The agency exists to investigate infidelities, thefts and murders and is run by women for the benefit of women. Isobel is a valued member of staff because she has been taught to pick locks by her father and is able to pass as a young boy. She dresses as a street urchin called Kes and has contacts in the criminal underworld.

When she is recruited by a villain called Rook to steal a valuable ruby brooch at the Devonshire House fancy dress ball, she realises she is mixed up in a dangerous plot that may involve the powerful Lord Morland who is angling to be Britain’s next Prime Minister. She has mixed feelings when Max Vane gets involved as she is not sure whose side he is on.

The author Sarra Manning calles the book ‘A perfect mash up of Bridgerton and Enola Holmes‘. I would add the recent Apple TV series The Buccaneers to the comparison. The story romps along with plenty of action and subterfuge, as well as romance. I have read a couple of novels for adults with some similar themes and settings recently and found this one a lot more fun.

There is a sequel called The Season for Scandal which has just been published.

Northern Soul

Northern Soul by Phil Earle

Book of the Week: 14 January 2024

Cover illustration: Shutterstock

If you are looking for a quick, funny read and want to feel better about behaving in the cringiest way in front of someone you’d like to impress, look no further.

Marv has never thought about girls – he’s too busy playing football and hanging out with his best mate Jimmy. Then, a new girl arrives in school and he is unexpectedly smitten. What’s more, she lives on his street.

‘You’re in my form, aren’t you?’ Carly said.

Her accent was northern too, but not from round here. Barnsley maybe. God, it sounded exotic.

Marv contemplates asking his dad for advice, but what’s the point of telling a man who wears Crocs and shorts everywhere and runs a failing record shop, that you are hoping to date someone you consider to be way out of your league?

Fortunately, or catastrophically, help arrives in an unexpected form from the past. Marv does his best to follow the advice, but to say things don’t always work out smoothly, would be an understatement.

A relatable and entertaining read.

If you would like to sample the first chapter, it is available here.

HappyHead

HappyHead by Josh Silver

Book of the Week: 20 August 2023

Cover image by Shutterstock

The HappyHead Project offers young people the opportunity to find lasting happiness and success and Seb Seaton, who has been selected as one of its first intake of students, is on his way to the isolated campus to take part.

His parents are concerned about his failing grades and his mental health and although Seb is dreading having to mix with strangers and take part in possibly challenging activities, he wants to please his parents and perhaps experience a fresh start after some problems in school.

He and the other students are welcomed with a speech from the founder Dr Eileen Stone, who tells them that emotional problems amongst young people are at an all-time high and that loneliness and dysfunction are preventing them from achieving their potential. HappyHead is going to help them deal with these challenges and, at first, the disciplined routine and mindfulness sessions seem designed to achieve that. Seb is introduced to his team mates who range from the shy and reticent Ash to the ultra-competitive Eleanor. The most intriguing person he meets is the unsettling Finn with his piercing gaze, tattoos and uncooperative attitude. Seb doesn’t know what to make of him but can’t get him out of his mind.

As the days pass, Seb, who has been slightly sceptical to begin with, starts to feel more and more uneasy about many elements of the course. Finn tries to persuade him that there is a threatening purpose behind all the exercises and the almost fanatical emphasis on happiness. Should he be believed and who can Seb truly trust in this bewildering new environment?

HappyHead has been compared to The Hunger Games, and it does have the element of survival tests and ongoing tension, but includes more low-key and relatable dilemmas. Seb is a sympathetic and witty narrator who we can all root for.

A sequel called Dead Happy is due in 2024.

If you enjoy reading dystopian fiction that features sinister organisations, try The Disappeared by C.J. Harper and two books by William Sutcliffe – Concentra8 and We See Everything.

More dystopian fiction can be found on this list I created a few years ago.

Bad Influence

Bad Influence by Tamsin Winter

Book of the Week: 2 July 2023

Cover illustration by Amy Blackwell

Amelia should be enjoying her time at school. She has just started Year 9 and is good at schoolwork, loves reading and plays cello in the orchestra. Despite her achievements, she is not only unpopular but is being bullied. She and her best friend Nisha have been rated as being in ‘the extreme fug zone’ [fug means ugly] by classmates on social media. She suspects that a particularly annoying boy in her class, called DJ, might be responsible because he was the person who started calling her ‘Maggot’ in Year 7 – a nickname that has stuck. It doesn’t help that her older sister, Hannah, is beautiful and on track to be Head Girl and that her baseball-obsessed father believes that coming second in anything is being ‘first loser’.

It takes a couple of chapters to find out about Amelia’s life, however, because the book opens with her being in trouble at school thanks to a photograph that has been shared on social media. What the photo shows, who shared it and what led to it being taken is revealed in the rest of this cleverly-constructed plot. This sympathetic and readable story would be a great book club choice as it would provoke plenty of discussion about the pressures of fitting in, the perils of social media and its effect on real-life relationships; plus it is all told in a lively, relatable and witty style that avoids being over-earnest.

Try this is you have enjoyed Tamsin Winter’s other books , or books by writers such as Jenny McLachlan , Susin Nielsen or Lisa Williamson

PS: The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ross won the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing in June this year.

The Blue Book of Nebo and The Blackthorn Branch

The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ros and The Blackthorn Branch by Elen Caldecott

Books of the Week: 26 February 2003

Cover design by Becca Moor

Cover illustration by Rachael Dean

It has been a long time since I’ve picked a book of the week, so I decided to read two books from the recently-announced longlist for the Yoto Carnegies. To remind me of my homeland, I chose two stories set in Wales, both of which highlight the importance of stories and reading and the power of the natural world.

The Blackthorn Branch is a middle-grade fantasy and The Blue Book of Nebo is a post-apocalyptic novel aimed at older readers.

The Blue Book of Nebo

Fourteen-year-old Dylan, his baby sister Mona and his mum Rowenna live near the village of Nebo in ‘the middle of nowhere’. From their house they can see the towers of Caernarfon Castle, the sea and the island of Anglesey. One day, when Dylan is six, Rowenna hears a radio announcement at work saying that bombs have been dropped on big American cities. She drives to the nearest large town, where she loads up a hired transit van with supplies and returns home. A couple of days later, the power goes off and the frightening chain of events that Dylan and Rowenna call ‘The End’ changes the world forever. The two decide they will write their experiences in a blue notebook that they scavenge from the local village. Rowenna will write about ‘olden days’ and Dylan about what their lives look like now. They promise not to read one another’s entries.

This ‘blue book’ makes for a brief, powerful and bleak read, but never a hopeless one. Despite the harsh conditions, Dylan and Rowenna find much more of a connection with the natural world. Dylan discovers a gift for growing food and a sensitivity to nature. Rowenna sees human emotions in the environment where a ‘potato field is kind on a warm spring day’ or the house develops a hole in the roof because it is ‘fed up’. They gain strength from books and reading, especially from exploring Welsh literature. Dylan notices that the books he used to read, that took cars and computers and phones for granted, don’t make as much sense as they used to and he turns to reading much older stories, including those in the Bible. This is a thoughtful and reflective read with themes that resonate long after the book has been put down.

A couple of good companion reads to The Blue Book of Nebo would be Z for Zachariah or Island of the Blue Dolphins.

The Blackthorn Branch

In the small village of Penyfro in North Wales, Cassie and her cousin Siân are trying to cast a spell using ‘a mush of leaves and rabbit poo and bottle tops’ stirred in a plastic bucket. Siân is confident it will work, but Cassie isn’t convinced that any spell will be able to transform her grumpy, teenage brother Byron back into someone who was fun to be with, rather than a giant sulker who doesn’t seem to care about her, or their Mam and Dad, any more.

One Saturday, when Byron has stormed off in yet another huff, the two girls follow him up the hill outside the village to the old railway line; a quiet, overgrown place since the decline of local industry. They spy on Byron from behind some bushes as he and three other teenage boys dance around a fire in front of a rusting car wreck. Cassie and Siân don’t recognise the boys and, when a flash of blue light erupts from the tunnel, they are so unnerved that they run back home.

The following morning they learn that Byron didn’t come home that night. When he fails to turn up as the day wears on everyone becomes anxious and afraid and a search is mounted. Cassie and Siân feel that the searchers are looking in the wrong locations. They know there is only one place they must venture in order to find him: the dark and dripping tunnel with its weird blue light where he disappeared.

This fast-moving read is an engaging mix of the magical and the everyday. The fantasy is rooted in Welsh myths and legends involving the type of fairy folk (tylwyth teg) who are given to deception, trickery and malice. In contrast, Cassie and Siân, their parents, their Nain (Welsh for ‘grandmother’) and the community of Penyfro are portrayed with warmth and understanding. Woven throughout are lyrical descriptions of the natural world and some messages about the value of stories and reading and the importance of nature. It all adds up to a charming and satisfying read.

The Blackthorn Branch is suitable for readers in Year groups 3-7, but can be enjoyed by anyone. If you are older than this, and like stories based on mythology and faerie, try the much more frightening ‘The Call’ by Peadar O’Guilin or ‘The Cruel Prince’ by Holly Black.

Wildlord

Wildlord by Philip Womack

Book of the Week: 2 January 2022

Cover by Karen Vaughan

Tom is not looking forward to spending a lonely summer holiday at his private school. His distant guardian is busy in Hong Kong and he will be one of only a few pupils drifting around the buildings and grounds of Downshire College. As he is reflecting on the upcoming eight weeks, following a raucous evening celebrating the end of Year 12,  a strange boy hands him a letter from an uncle he didn’t know he had, inviting him to spend the summer at Mundham Farm in Suffolk. After being refused permission to leave school by his tutor, he is walking in the grounds one evening when a tall, thin man with a tattooed face tells him to stay where he is and ‘not wake the past’. The man delivers a slash to Tom’s arm with a blade and disappears. Perversely, this makes Tom determined to discover what is going on, so he skips school and catches the train to Suffolk where he is met at the station by a silent, silver-eyed boy who transports him to Mundham Farm in a horse and cart.

At first, Tom is enthralled by the ancient farmhouse enclosed within a moat and is welcomed warmly by his charismatic Uncle Jack and the thin, pale Zita who speaks like a ‘bright young thing’ from the 1920s. Gradually, however, he realises that all is not what it seems and that an atmosphere of unease and distrust prevails. Why does his uncle tell him to watch Zita and the silver-eyed Kit? Who are ‘The Folk’ who must be kept out at all cost? Why is he assailed by incapacitating pain when he tries to catch a bus to a nearby town?

Philip Womack knows how to create a deeply magical story with an undercurrent of dread. The vividly evoked Mundham farmhouse reminded me of Thackers in Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time and the ancient magic would have not been out of place in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. As in The Call by Peadar O’Guilin, this is a faerie world of menace and danger rather than of cosy wonder.

Not My Problem

Not My Problem by Ciara Smyth

Book of the Week: 5 December 2021

Cover illustration by Spiros Halaris

Aideen and Maebh are personalities who are destined to clash. Aideen is struggling with most subjects at school and is more worried about her mum drinking and skipping work. She answers her form tutor back and forges notes from her mother to avoid lessons. In contrast, Maebh is the Principal’s daughter and ‘the intense overachiever type, with no hobbies other than winning’.

When Aideen finds Maebh sobbing in the girls’ changing room, Maebh explains she is so overwhelmed with work that she won’t succeed in the upcoming election for president of the student council, which she desperately wants to win. Her solution is to ask Aideen to push her down the stairs so she will break her ankle and can drop some of her commitments. Aideen unwillingly obliges, the ankle is sprained and a boy called Kavi Thakrar, who overheard the whole thing, scoops Maebh up to take her to the sick bay.

The following day, Aideen’s best and only friend, Holly, is disappointed to hear that Maebh, who is her only opponent in the race to be student council president, might not run for office. She dislikes Maebh with a vengeance. ‘Did she trip over her own ego?’ she asks, ‘Did she simply collapse under the weight of her own arrogance?’ Aideen doesn’t admit her part in the incident and doesn’t want to tell Holly that she and Maebh are now texting one another. The enthusiastically puppyish Kavi adds to the complications by bringing students to Aideen in secret because he believes she has the potential to be a fixer of problems. Aideen now has to keep various people’s secrets, including her relationship with Maebh and her own difficult home life, from everyone’s attention, particularly that of her sarcastic but dedicated teacher Ms Devlin, whose sharp repartee hides a willingness to go out of her way to help her students.

Some outrageous incidents and plenty of sharp banter don’t distract from the realism of Aideen’s life with her unpredictable mother and her chaotic school environment. Friendships are portrayed as complicated and, even when characters sabotage themselves and others, they are shown sympathetically. This is a funny, engaging read and a reassuring one, where events might not work out as you intended but where, if you are able to ask for help, there is always hope for the future.

If you like the Channel 4 TV series ‘Derry Girls’, or ‘Sex Education’ on Netflix, you might like this book because it has elements of both.

Suitable for older readers.

Tremendous Things AND Worst. Holiday. Ever.

Tremendous Things by Susin Nielsen

Worst. Holiday. Ever. by Charlie Higson

Books of the Week: 18 July 2021

Cover design by Jack Noel

Illustrated by Warwick Johnson-Cadwell

 

Now that the temperature here is registering 30 degrees celsius and there are only a few days of term left, here are two great reads that feature holidays.

In Tremendous Things we are back in familiar Susin Nielsen territory with loving families, quirky friends and a central character who is self-conscious, awkward and sympathetic. Wilbur recounts his life of what he sees as an agonising list of failures and embarrassments, before a French exchange student called Charlie lands in his life and things start to look up. Charlie is gorgeous, self-confident and sophisticated and Wilbur is smitten, but can he get her to look past his eccentric mums (who he calls The Mumps), his 85 year old best friend Sal and his dachshund Templeton who has some pretty unappealing habits? When Charlie returns to France, Wilbur’s friends persuade him to undergo a ‘Queer Eye’ type transformation and, in the romantic setting of Paris, set him up to try and persuade her to view him in a different light.

Worst. Holiday. Ever. is a departure from Charlie Higson’s action-packed adventures like Young Bond and The Enemy series. Stan is an ordinary boy who doesn’t have to deal with zombies or super-villains. He is, however, worrying about all the things he hopes he never has to do:

  1. Bungee jumping
  2. Anything where you have to use a parachute
  3. Dancing
  4. Dancing in public
  5. Going on Strictly Come Dancing
  6. White-water rafting
  7. Fire-eating
  8. Alligator wrestling
  9. Kissing
  10. Going on holiday with people you don’t know
  11. Octopuses

The problem is that he is going to have to do number 10 and it may even involve number 11. Felix in his class was meant to be going on holiday with his best friend Archie, but Archie broke his leg and everyone else was booked up. In desperation, Felix invites Stan and Stan panics and accepts. Now Stan is stuck in a villa in Italy with a motley collection of Felix’s family and friends and feeling very out of his depth. There’s Felix’s distant and slightly scary dad, a group of intimidating girls, a man who spends his entire day on the internet and another who is never seen without a glass of wine. Stan is not only worried about disgracing himself but, when the news from home is less than reassuring, he wonders if he will be able to cope at all.

Charlie Higson conjures up a believable cast of characters that are alternately worrying, touching and hilarious and a holiday situation that we can all imagine ourselves experiencing. This is, in my view, his best. book. ever.

 

On Midnight Beach AND The Great Godden

On Midnight Beach by Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick

The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff

Books of the Week: 30 May 2021

Floating figure by Robert Fiszer. Other images by Shutterstock.

Photograph [unknown]

Since retiring in December I have spent time catching up on all the books aimed at adults that I hadn’t got round to reading when I was at work. Although I have read about thirty adult books since December 2020, I’m glad to say that books for young people are slowly edging their way back on to my to-be-read pile.

Here are two books set during long, hot summers in the hope that we might get some sunshine and holiday time in which to read them.

Both have seaside settings, feature first love and have characters called Kit, but the beaches, the relationships and the Kits are all very different.

In The Great Godden a big, happy, middle-class family prepares to spend their usual summer at the seaside in their periwinkle-blue beach house as they have done for years. Just down the beach is their father’s younger cousin Hope and her long-time boyfriend Mal, beloved by all the family. Hope’s godmother is away filming and asks if her sons, Kit and Hugo, can come from LA to spend the summer with them. Hugo turns out to be surly and awkward, but Kit is something else – handsome, tanned, charismatic and charming. The entire family is captivated. The scene is set for a one-idyllic-summer-when-I-fell-in-love-and-everything-changed. What we get, thanks to the perceptive and observant narrator, who is the eldest member of the family at about 17 or 18, is something a lot more interesting. Beneath the family meals, board games and fun, are undercurrents that eddy about, altering and re-altering our sympathies and perceptions. Once you reach the end of this short and intriguing story, you will want to turn to the beginning and re-read it. The Great Godden was shortlisted for the 2021 YA Book Prize.

The beach in On Midnight Beach is one belonging to a small fishing village on the coast of Donegal. It is the summer of 1976 when the temperatures are soaring and the young people of the village of Carrig Cove want to spend their days lounging by the sea. Emer has problems escaping from her work in the family shop, but when a dolphin is seen swimming in the bay she and her friend Fee creep out at night with Dog Cullen and his friend Kit to swim in the sea alongside it. They name the dolphin Rinn and it soon becomes a tourist attraction to everyone living around the bay. But before long, the situation inflames rivalries between the young people of Carrig Cove and those who live in the bigger town of Ross, and raids and fights are the result. Emer, who is falling in love with local hero Dog Cullen, is worried about his safety and about how the clashes over Rinn are getting out of control: ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have named him,’ I said. ‘We claimed a wild thing and lost it in the same breath.’

The book is based on an Irish legend called, in English, The Cattle Raid of Cooley and a look at a synopsis of this shows how cleverly the author has created modern versions of the characters and events. However, you don’t need to have read the legend to enjoy this tale of love, rivalry, friendship and the power of the past to create bitterness and division in the present.

On Midnight Beach is currently shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, the winner of which will be announced on 16 June.