Monthly Archives: March 2019

How to Rob a Bank

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How to Rob a Bank by Tom Mitchell

Book of the Week: 31 March 2019

Fifteen-year-old Dylan accidentally sets fire to his friend Beth’s house and makes her and her family homeless. He needs to make it up to her, not just because he feels guilty, but also because Beth looks so like Emma Stone that people stop her in the street to tell her that. Dylan is also fed up of her hanging around with Harry, who is a drip and who thinks everything is ‘lame’, so he decides his only option is to rob a bank. Unfortunately, a few things stand in his way: his eagle-eyed sister Rita, his mum and dad’s insistence that he gets a holiday job and that fact that he is far from being a criminal mastermind. Oh, and some pressing History homework that he can’t get round to completing.

If you enjoy books like The Private Blog of Joe Cowley, Socks Are Not Enough or My Brother is a Superhero, this is a must-read. I will be adding it to the Funny Stories list at the next update.

Truly Devious

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Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

Book of the Week: 24 March 2019

Cover art by Leo Nickolls

We start this story at an exclusive boarding school in the mountains of Vermont in the 1930s. One foggy April day, new student Dottie Epstein stumbles upon the entrance to a tunnel in the woods, follows it and finds herself in a domed building on an island in the lake. Shortly later, a stranger enters the dome and Dottie is no more. The fog also seems to have hindered the return to school of the wealthy founder’s wife and daughter. In the ensuing panic, Albert Ellingham, the wealthy philanthropist who built the school, receives a telephone call to say kidnappers are holding his wife and daughter and demanding a ransom.

In the present day, detective fan and new student, Stevie Bell, is arriving at Ellingham Academy for the first time with a vast knowledge of the murder and kidnapping and a determination to solve it all.

Whilst this has all the expected ingredients of a murder mystery: grand country house (converted into a school), isolated setting, unsettling atmosphere, a cast of idiosyncratic characters who may or may not be trustworthy and a determined investigator, it also looks at school life and the difficulties of fitting in and does not neatly tie up loose ends because the author wants to hold you in suspense for much longer than the duration of the book. It is only the first in a trilogy.

Warrior Boy

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Warrior Boy by Virginia Clay

Book of the Week: 17 March 2019

 

Illustration by Kerry Hyndman

On Tuesday we will be welcoming author Virginia Clay who will be speaking to Year 7 about her life and work.

Ben lives in London with his mum who makes conservation films and campaigns against elephant poaching. Although Ben hopes to be a doctor when he grows up, the sight of blood makes him faint. When his mum suggests that he accompany her on a trip to Kenya to meet his father’s family, and he hears ceremonial blood-tasting might be part of the welcome, he feels apprehensive as well as excited. He is not reassured when his uncle Senteu seems to disapprove of him at first sight. Fortunately, his cousin Kip is far friendlier and together the two boys face a series of challenges on the plains of the Masai Mara that test their resilience and courage.

Full of authentic detail and insight into the challenges faced by the Masai in a land that needs tourism and trade, whilst protecting their way of life and combatting the ruthlessness of poachers, this is a fast-moving story told with a light touch.

Find out more about Virginia Clay here

Piglettes

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Piglettes by Clémentine Beauvais

Book of the Week: 10 March 2019

Cover design: studiohelen.co.uk

Students of the Marie Darrieussecq High School in Bourg-en-Bresse hold a cruel competition annually and vote in the Pig Pageant on Facebook for the ugliest girls in the school. Tough-minded Mireille jokes about only winning bronze, whereas in the past she came top, but newcomer to school, Astrid, and Hakima from Year 8 are hurt and upset.

Mireille persuades them to cycle across half of France to Paris to gatecrash an important event. They will survive by hauling a trailer from which they will cook and sell sausages along the route. Hakima’s parents insist that her older brother Kader, who has been invalided out of the armed services, after losing both legs in a conflict, accompany them in his wheelchair.

The resulting road trip gives them unwanted attention by the media and, although basically light-hearted, covers subjects such as coping with disability, body-shaming, bullying as well as a wonderful appreciation of French food and the countryside.

Origins

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Origins: How the Earth Made Us by Lewis Dartnell

Book of the Week: 3 March 2019

Cover photograph Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Getty Images

So many of you have enjoyed Sapiens by Noah Yuval Harari that when Origins was compared to it by reviewers, I bought it immediately. I have managed to find a geography graduate who has read it and here are his comments:

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 when it was 6 billion kilometres from Earth. Carl Sagan wrote ‘Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.’ But how did it get that way? Why did we humans develop that way and, in just 10,000 years, go from the Stone Age to having wheeled-rovers exploring Mars?

When we look back at our history we tend to think of leaders, great wars, political tensions, disputes over territories or borders but fail to realise that the Earth itself has determined our destiny. The continuing movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates has changed the very shape of our planet from one single continental mass to the globe we recognise now. Mountain ranges have been thrust up, causing fundamental changes in weather patterns and sea currents; ice ages have been a regular feature throughout millennia with massive changes in sea-levels occurring as water gets locked up in ice and then released in a thaw. Civilisations were able to grow and develop because they were fortunate enough to have suitable weather, animals capable of domestication and types of grass that were selectively bred for cereal crops, as a result of millions of years of geographic meandering of land masses and volcanic underground turmoil. 

Origins outlines the many factors that had to happen, in sequence, to make our Earth as it is and for humans to become the most developed creature that has so far lived. The probability of life is astonishingly small and this book shows the path from a world with no oxygen and one giant land mass, to the place we recognise. The ‘entire history of civilisation is just a flash in the current interglacial period.’ In 50000 years the next ice age is predicted to begin. Earth made us. 

If you enjoy this, you might like Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge, or, if you like books that cover ‘big topics’, you may like The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan or Noah Yuval Harari’s books. These are all in stock in the Tim Pigott-Smith Library.