Tag Archives: Friendship

Steady for This

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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.

Not My Problem

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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.

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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

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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.

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.

Sweet Sorrow

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Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls

Book of the Week: 4 October 2020

Illustration by Natasha Law

First love and long, hot summers are made for one another – something that Sweet Sorrow exploits to the full.

Charlie and his mates have finished their GCSEs, gone wild at the school disco (it is 1997) and are waiting for their futures to start. Charlie is not looking forward to avoiding his dad who is jobless and resenting his mum who has moved out. He doesn’t think that doing his part-time job at the local petrol station, whilst waiting to hear about a string of failed exams, holds much promise. But long, hot summers have a way of surprising you, and one day, when he has biked out of town, he comes across an amateur dramatic society rehearsing Romeo and Juliet in the grounds of a country house. They invite him to join them, something that would normally make him run in the opposite direction, but for the fact that one of those asking him is a girl to whom he has taken an instant shine.

The story of the summer that unfolds is one of love and friendship, the clash of people from different backgrounds and the life-expanding contact with new ideas. None of this is as earnest as it sounds. The dialogue is sharp, funny and realistic and, as we learn that it is all being remembered by an adult Charlie, tinged with nostalgia. As a bonus, it evokes the magic of Shakespeare and the transformative power of drama played out in gardens and orchards under a cloudless blue sky, without ever being sickly sweet or promising a fairy tale ending.

Best suited to older readers and grown-ups.

The Rules

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The Rules by Tracy Darnton

Book of the Week: 20 September 2020

Cover images by Shutterstock

It’s December and Amber is at the bowling plaza with Julie, her social worker. Although Amber feels her life has improved since being at Beechwood, a boarding school, Julie is saying they are having problems placing her with a foster family over the holidays. Amber responds with her usual defensive sarcasm until Julie says a letter has been received from Amber’s father who is trying to get in touch. Julie thinks this is good news because she, like everyone else, has been taken in by him. Amber, however, knows better. She knows how her father operates and that she has to take her ‘grab-and-go bag’ and leave immediately. She gets a train and heads north to a holiday home owned by some previous foster parents.

Amber’s father is a ‘prepper’or survivalist, but is also controlling and abusive. Amber’s mum became mentally ill under the pressure and violence of their life and had to be hospitalized. Amber managed to escape, but her father has been searching for her for the last two years in between trips to see his family and contacts in the States. Now he is trying to hunt her down. When she hears the creak of upstairs floorboards in her holiday refuge, she gets ready for fight and flight, but it turns out to be a young guy who shared her foster home for a brief spell. Josh lives on his wits and by a combination of busking and charity and is as cheerful and easy-going as Amber is tense and organized. He seems to want to tag along, but will he be more of a liability than an asset?

The cleverly-structured game of cat and mouse plays out in bleak, windswept countryside and isolated villages with the threat of discovery a constant source of tension. The grim situation is regularly lightened by Josh’s playful presence, and the uncertainty of his and Amber’s fate will probably ensure you read this in a single sitting.

A must read for fans of Tracy Darnton’s ‘The Truth About Lies’ or books by M.A. Bennett or Sue Wallman.

Becoming Dinah (Book of the Week: Lockdown edition)

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Becoming Dinah by Kit de Waal

Book of the Week: 7 June 2020

Illustrator uncredited

This is successful novelist Kit de Waal’s first book aimed expressly at young people and cleverly uses elements of the classic novel Moby Dick.  There is no need to have read Melville’s famous story in order to enjoy it, although it does add to the enjoyment to recognise some of its tropes.

We first meet Dinah as she is shaving off her hair and preparing to go on the run because her life is in ruins and there is no other option, or so she feels. She has been brought up in a commune and home-schooled, until she managed to persuade her mother to send her to school in the sixth form. As much as she yearns for a life outside the small group of families in the New Bedford Fellowship, adapting to life at school proves painful as well as exciting. There are so many things she doesn’t know – how to dress, how to fit in, how to make friends. Her life starts to change drastically, not just at school but at home in the form of family breakup. With her choices running out, she is persuaded by her cantankerous neighbour Ahab to drive a camper van and chase the people who stole his vehicle and his prosthetic leg. The problem is that Dinah hasn’t even passed her driving test. What could possibly go wrong?

Dinah is a sympathetic and relatable teenager and you don’t have to be raised in a commune to understand many of her feelings of being left out, misunderstood and isolated. This is a warm and likeable story of finding your identity in life and facing up to your fears and mistakes.

Slick

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Slick by M. M. Vaughan

Book of the Week: 26 January 2020

Cover design by Leo Nickolls

‘My name is Danny, and I need your help. First off, I should tell you that this isn’t my story – it’s Eric’s. Well, the name he was given was Eric, but I called him Slick, and he was my best friend. I say was because he died six months ago … Two, and this is kind of important: Slick was a robot.’

We are told from the very beginning that Slick is a robot, or android, but how he became Danny’s best friend and why he ‘died’ are the questions we need answering. Slick and his family have just moved to Ashland and are keen to get to know everyone. Danny, who regularly gets into trouble in school and who worries about his mum since his dad left them, is really only interested in computer games. When he first meets Slick he discounts him as a ‘weirdo’ who takes everything literally and is obsessed with brand names. After this unpromising start, Slick proves impossible to avoid and Danny becomes more and more intrigued about his mysterious weekly visits to a dentist and his parents who either ignore him, or turn up uncannily quickly when he gets injured. As the story progresses, being told alternately by Slick and Danny, we realise that Slick has no idea what he actually is and is only eager to make friends and understand the world. Danny, however, is intent on finding out where Slick came from and what exactly is going on with his unusual new friend.

This is an intriguing science fiction book that makes us think about what it means to be human and how the power of friendship can alter our lives.

Darius the Great is Not OK

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Darius the Great is Not OK by Adib Khorram

Book of the Week: 19 January 2020

Cover art by Adam Carvalho

A leisurely and sensitive read about the power of friendship to transform lives.

Darius, like his father, suffers with depression and gets picked on at school. When his family discovers that his grandfather from Yazd in Iran is terminally ill they go to visit. Darius has never met his grandparents and knows little about his Persian heritage, except for his specialist knowledge of tea-making. Everything is disorientating until he meets Sohrab, the son of his grandparent’s neighbours. and they strike up a friendship. Gradually, Darius starts to feel almost more at home in Iran that he does in America.

This is Adib Khorram’s first novel and it is hard to believe he has never visited Iran. There is plenty of attention to detail and vivid descriptions of food, drink and the Persian way of life.