Tag Archives: Death

Grief Angels

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Grief Angels by David Owen

Book of the Week: 6 December 2020

Cover design by Leo Nickolls

A book about dealing with grief and the changing nature of friendships.

Duncan is taking medication to help him deal with depression. Despite being friends with Matt, Lorenzo and Saeed for what seems like forever, he can’t bring himself to confide in them. When new-boy Owen joins their school, Duncan is curious about why he has moved schools in the last term before GCSEs and why he keeps to his own company so much. We discover, as soon as we hear Owen’s voice as narrator, that he recently lost his father after a heart attack. He is not only haunted by grief, but keeps seeing a flock of other-worldly birds circling over him when he goes outside – something he understandably feels he can’t share with anyone else. Do these birds actually exist or are they creatures from another dimension sent to transport him to a different reality?

The strength of this book is the way it deals with the initially reluctant but growing friendship between Owen and Duncan and the changing dynamic of their relationships with other people in their lives. The banter between the group of school friends, often crude, funny and rivalrous, is convincing but doesn’t shy away from the deeper undercurrents going on under the surface.

David Owen acknowledges his debt to Skellig by David Almond, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Eren by Simon P. Clark.

The book has some similarities too with November 15th’s book of the week – The Wolf Road by Richard Lambert.

The Boy in the Black Suit

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The Boy in the Black Suit by Jason Reynolds

Book of the Week: 9 February 2020

Cover images have been adapted from ones on Shutterstock.

Matt’s mother died recently and he and his dad are coping with grief in their different ways. Matt visits a local fast food restaurant to find a job and is attracted to the girl who serves him, but not so impressed by the customers or the young girl who rushes in and throws up. When the neighbourhood undertaker, Mr Ray, asks him if he wants to help out with funerals, he decides it’s preferable to the fast-food joint. Soon, he is attending funerals as helper or pall-bearer and finding a strange comfort in seeing how other people are coping with grief.

Matt is cool and streetwise, but a thoughtful and sensitive character who rejects the often macho approaches of the men around him. At first, his life appears to lurch from bad to worse until he gets involved with the people in his neighbourhood and begins to see a path back to the kind of life where he can begin to deal with grief.

Despite the themes of grief and death, this manages to be a sometimes humerous look at ordinary, and not so ordinary, life in Brooklyn, New York City.

Long Way Down

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Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Book of the Week: 4 March 2018

Cover illustration by Chris Priestley

This is American author Jason Reynolds‘ first book to be published in the UK and he says his aim is not to write boring ones. He has succeeded with this short, sharp and raw story of a boy’s search for the right thing to do after his brother is shot and killed.

The story is told entirely in free verse and opens a day or two after Will’s brother Shawn has been shot in the street. Their mother is distraught, and after Will shuts himself away in their shared bedroom to grieve, he notices a middle drawer of their dresser sitting awkwardly. When he investigates, he finds a gun and although he is shocked, he decides he knows who killed Shawn and sets out to get revenge.

The remainder of the plot happens extremely quickly in real time but takes longer to read. In that time, we learn about people who are important in Will’s life and about what happened to them as a result of urban violence.

As much thought has gone into the design of the print on the page, and the atmospheric drawings by Chris Priestley, as the story itself.

The violence and a sprinkling of strong language may mean unsuitability for younger readers but it is as compelling as it is simply-told.

The Bubble Boy

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The Bubble Boy by Stewart Foster

Book of the Week: 18 September 2016

bubble-boy

Joe has an immune deficiency condition that means he has had to spend his entire life in a sterile hospital room. As if this isn’t enough, his parents were killed in a car crash some years ago and his only relative is his sister Beth who is studying to be a doctor. Beth visits him as often as she can but she has her own life to lead and her studies mean she has to move from London to Edinburgh. Joe’s other relationships are with the nurses and doctors who take care of him, particularly his nurse, Greg, who calls him ‘mate’, and with Henry who lives in America and has a similar condition.

Joe is frequently poorly and understandably anxious about the outside world. He likes watching football and superhero movies and sometimes the life that goes on outside his hospital windows. Into this closed environment comes a new nurse, Amir, who acts slightly crazy and who seems to believe in extra-terrestrials. Joe wonders if he is for real but also finds that Amir has plans to enliven the routine of hospital life. Should he go along with Amir’s schemes or carry on with life as he knows it?

If you are looking for an action-packed plot then this is probably not the book for you. If, however, you enjoyed books such as Wonder by R.J. Palacio, Ways to Live Forever by Sally Nichols and Life Interrupted by Damian Kelleher you may like this.

Noggin

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Noggin by John Corey Whaley
Book of the Week: 4 May 2015
Noggin

A story about a teenager undergoing a head transplant might suggest a science fiction thriller or even a black comedy but Noggin is neither of these. It is a thoughtful exploration of what would happen if the world had moved on but you remained the same.
Life was going well for Travis Coates. He had a best friend called Kyle, was doing well in school and had fallen in love with a girl called Cate. But this was before he fell terminally ill. There was one ray of hope – undergoing the experimental process of having his head cryogenically frozen in the hope that a donor body would be available in the years to come. Travis expected to wake in the distant future but when he does come round, he finds only five years have passed. His ecstatic parents are delighted he has survived, but he has a brand new body that belonged to someone else, his friends are now twenty years old and his girlfriend is about to marry someone else. Travis has to adapt to a world that has changed far more radically than he imagines.
If you have enjoyed books such as The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, The Year of the Rat by Clare Furniss or Before I Die by Jenny Downham you might find that you like this too.
John Corey Whaley’s website is here