Tag Archives: Grief

The First Move

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The First Move by Jenny Ireland

Book of the Week: 20 October 2024

Cover illustration by Janelle Barone

Seventeen year old Juliet thinks there should be a disclaimer at the start of all teenage movies, telling us that real life is not like this. Despite this, she still uses them as comfort viewing to help cope with the frequent pain she endures from her psoriatic arthritis, a condition which means she has aching swollen joints for which has to take painkillers, attend frequent medical appointments and use crutches to walk. Her friends Tara and Michael encourage her to socialise, but that is hard when just trying to attend a party results in days spent recovering in bed.

When new boy Ronan starts at her school everyone is initially transfixed by his good looks and air of detachment, but Juliet decides that, although he looks as if he’s just stepped out of an American rom-com, he has a bad attitude, wears earbuds in class, skips school and seems unwilling to socialise with anyone. She is unaware that Ronan finds himself drawn to her, despite her hostility.

So far, we have seen several tropes from rom-coms: the bad-boy central character, the girl who feels herself to be an outsider, the gay best friend (Michael) and the Queen Bee (Tara). There is a further one when Juliet starts to play chess and chat with someone called ‘Alonelypawn’ on a chess forum. Without either of them knowing the identity of the other, Ronan and Juliet have connected in the online world and find themselves on the same wavelength and developing a crush on one another. (This references the plots of rom-coms such as You’ve Got Mail or The Shop Around the Corner)

Reality begins to intervene when Ronan’s family life starts to complicate matters and when other characters are revealed to have less than straighforward home lives. Will there be a romantic and happy ending for Ronan and Juliet, or is sad drama going to be a more likely conclusion?

This book won the Young Adult prize in the 2024 Diverse Book Awards. The portrayal of Juliet’s disability always rings true; the author, Jenny Ireland, mentions her own experience of arthritis in the acknowledgments. The characters are interesting and flawed as well as likeable. I particularly enjoyed the sympathetic and exuberant Michael and Juliet’s overprotective but immensely kind parents. This warmly-told story gives the reader plenty to get their teeth into.

The book contains content relating to drug abuse, some sexual references and ocassional strong language.

If you like books that compare their plots to those of romantic movies, try Holly Bourne’s It Only Happens in the Movies.

Grow

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Grow by Luke Palmer

Book of the Week: 14 July 2024

Cover design by anneglenndesign.co.uk

A powerful and convincing story about grief, isolation, racism and being radicalised.

Josh’s father was killed two years ago by a terrorist bomb, leaving him and his mother coping with grief as best they can. A couple of racist students in his schoool draw him into the frightening world of white supremicism and for a while it seems like a way to channel his anger.

This would be a good companion read with The Wolf Road by Richard Lambert. Both writers have an authentic and poetic style and portray angry, grief-stricken young men and the bullies who prey on them, vividly and convincingly. The plots are different, but the books are both outstanding.

Luke Palmer’s website is here.

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 Wolf Road

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The Wolf Road by Richard Lambert

Book of the Week: 15 November 2020

Illustration by Holly Ovenden

The Wolf Road is a powerful and painful exploration of a boy’s grief after his parents are killed in a car crash and he has to live with his prickly-natured grandmother in the wilds of the Lake District.

Lucas is convinced a wolf caused the car crash by stepping into the path of his parents’ car. Once he is in his grandmother’s cottage he believes the wolf is shadowing him as well as killing the neighbouring farmer’s sheep. Lucas cannot concentrate at school and is too angry to respond to those people who try to help him or form a relationship with him. Nothing in this book is cosy or easily resolved. Just like the short, vivid depictions of the natural world that surrounds Lucas, everything is raw and messy and wild. The bullies in the story are believable and chilling.

Some books that share similar themes include:

 

The Soup Movement

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The Soup Movement by Ben Davis

Book of the Week: 27 September 2020

Illustration by Julia Christians

We first meet thirteen-year-old Jordan when he is up a tree trying to rescue a cat. Despite not being keen on cats or heights and frightening his over-protective mum, he gives it a try; and Jordan is definitely a trier. His family have moved to the quiet town of Pondstead to give him a healthier life after being ill in hospital. He’s missing his friends, particularly the one he met when he was in hospital, and is finding it hard to fit in. His dad is being overly-hearty, his mum overly-protective and his sister Abi overly-everything. He is doing his best to settle down and ward of memories of his past life, but just as he thinks he has made a few friends, he antagonises a boy called Will in his class and, by offering some soup to a homeless man in the park, starts a whole new chain of events that angers as many people as it helps. Will his life ever get back on an even keel?

There is lots to enjoy in this warm-hearted story that deals with some serious and emotional issues whilst always keeping its sense of humour.

Ben Davis is the author of the Private Blog of Joe Cowley series and you can find out more about him here.

Other great fiction that deals with homelessness includes No Fixed Address by Susin Nielsen and Sofa Surfer by Malcolm Duffy.

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.

How Not To Be a Boy

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How Not To Be a Boy by Robert Webb

Book of the Week: 20 May 2018

Cover design by Peter Adlington

If you are revising for GCSEs or A-Levels, reading has been shown by one study to be 68% better at reducing stress levels than listening to music and 700% better than playing video games (1), so why not try Book of the Week in the shape of How Not To Be a Boy?

You don’t need to know who Robert Webb is to enjoy this book, as this is far from being a typical celebrity memoir. There is a touch of the Adrian Moles at the start of the book where he describes situations such as trying to avoid contact with the ball in football matches, or playing with his gang of twelve imaginary friends who he calls the ‘Guy-Buys’. Coming from a working-class background in a small Lincolnshire village, Robert didn’t have a sense that the world would be his oyster. He sat the eleven-plus without realising it as Mrs Benson, his teacher, regularly handed out tests and didn’t tell her pupils when it was ‘the real thing’. Once in grammar school, where he started acting in sketches, his form tutor, Mrs Slater, noticed his love of such things and encouraged him. When he started wondering how funny people met one another, he came to the conclusion that “a suprising number of them met at one university in particular. Some kind of comedy club called the Cambridge Footlights…. I ask Mrs Slater if it’s ridiculous of me to think of Cambridge. ‘No, not ridiculous,’ she says quickly, and then, ‘We’ve certainly sent dimmer people than you there.” He decides to ‘read everything’ to get good enough results to get there but a family tragedy strikes when he is in sixth form which threatens to derail everything and it looks as if he will have to give up on his dream.

If you know anything about his success as an actor and comedian, you will know that he did manage to hold on to his ambitions, but it is fascinating to find out how he achieved what he did. The strengths of this touching book are the humour and the frequent reflections on traditional expectations of what is appropriate behaviour in boys and how helpful or unhelpful those attitudes might be in life and their effect on mental health.

(1) Chiles, Andy, ‘Reading can help reduce stress, according to University of Sussex research’, The Argus, 30 March 2009 <http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/4245076.Reading_can_help_reduce_stress__according_to_University_of_Sussex_research/> [accessed 20 May 2018]

 

Recommended for older readers due to occasional strong language, some sexual references and events some younger readers may find upsetting.

Optimists Die First

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Optimists Die First by Susin Nielsen

Book of the Week: 4 June 2017

Sixteen year old Petula tells Mr Watley, the school counsellor, that ‘… age aside, studies show that in general, optimists die ten years earlier than pessimists’ and that he is only sceptical about that because he is an optimist himself. Petula is determined to err on the side of pessimism because she thinks it’s more realistic and pessimists take more precautions. Petula wasn’t always this way but years ago, when she was babysitting her younger sister Maxine, the little girl choked on a button and died. Ever since then Petula has been trying to ward off catastrophe. When she is enrolled in a Youth Art Therapy group (or Crafting for Crazies as she thinks of it) her organised life comes under threat from a group of diverse individuals struggling with problems of their own. She is particularly confused over her feelings for Jacob who has a prosthetic arm after his involvement in a car accident.

To quote the review on the Book Trust website:

“As is usual with Susin Nielsen’s books, the prose flows effortlessly and the most serious of subjects are tackled with the lightest of touches. Optimists Die First sweeps you into Petula’s life and mind so tenderly and vibrantly, one feels almost bereft on finishing the last page. Susin Nielsen always leaves you wanting more – and at the end of Optimists Die First she delivers a little extra nugget for fans of Word Nerd (we meet an old friend in the epilogue)…

There are sexual references, but most 12 year olds will be comfortable with them or can easily skip past if they need to.”

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.

A Year in the Life of a Total and Complete Genius

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A Year in the Life of a Total and Complete Genius by Stacey Matson

Book of the Week: 28 February 2016

Year in the Life

 

This story, told in the form of diary entries, assignments, letters and notes from teachers, features the ‘genius’ Arthur Bean. Arthur fancies himself as a great writer of the future but can’t seem to get started, let alone finish, an original piece of writing. He also has a huge crush on Kennedy who is popular and pretty and can’t stop writing ‘LOL’ in every single email she sends. He is meant to be helping a struggling student called Robbie Zack, who finds spelling a problem, but Arthur complains about him constantly. Arthur’s real sadness is the recent death of his mother and dealing with his grieving father. Fortunately, he has the support of some extremely understanding teachers and discovers that friendship can be found in unexpected places.

Arthur is nerdy and overly-confident in the tradition of Adrian Mole and Michael Swarbrick but often veers from being amusingly self-deluded to being plain annoying. There are lots of jokes and funny scenes to balance this out and, if you enjoy creative-writing, there is masses of useful advice from the teacher-characters.

Stacey Matson joins other good Canadian authors who have come to the fore recently. Susan Neilsen’s We Are All Made of Molecules was popular in the Year 9 Book Award last year, as was The Dogs by Allan Stratton. There is also Graham McNamee who writes pacey thrillers such as Acceleration and Bonechiller.

Here is the first page of A Year in the Life of a Total and Complete Genius if you would like to sample the style.

A Year - first page