Tag Archives: Road trips

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.

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.

Charlie and Me

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Charlie and Me by Mark Lowery

Book of the Week: 13 May 2018

Cover illustration by David Dean

Martin is running away with his little brother Charlie to go back to the place where they had a happy summer holiday. Every day in St Bernards in Cornwall they would stand at the harbour and look out for the dolphin who was a regular visitor. This was a time before Dad was at work for long hours and Mum became tired and sad. Martin has to be a responsible big brother because Charlie has never been quite well from birth and is prone to asthma attacks. It doesn’t stop him from being talkative and like ‘a flea with an itchy backside’ most of the time. Together, they catch trains and avoid ticket inspectors, and even the police, once their parents realise they are missing. When Martin has to get off the train in a hurry to avoid detection he thinks the game is up, but an angry-looking girl with blue hair, who he met on the train and read his poetry (without even asking), decides he needs help. Will he reach St Bernards in time to show Charlie his beloved dolphin again?

Mark Lowery wrote the hilarious Socks Are Not Enough and its sequel Pants Are Everything.

If you like the kind of warm-hearted family stories written by authors such as Phil Earle, Annabel Pitcher and Kim Smart, then give this one a try.

See You in the Cosmos

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See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng

Book of the Week: 24 September 2017

Alex is mad about all things space-related, particularly rockets. He has even called his dog Carl Sagan in honour of his astrophysicist hero. Being an independent type, Alex sets out with Carl Sagan, his home-built rocket Voyager 3 and his Golden i-Pod to a launch event in the desert called the Southwest High-Altitude Rocket Festival or SHARF (Alex is a big fan of acronyms). He feels he already knows many of the participants from his hours spent online on Rocketforum, a social media site for amateur rocket enthusiasts. He leaves his mum some pre-prepared meals and catches a train to New Mexico. We gather that his mother has ‘quiet days’, doesn’t seem to mind what he does and takes a lot of long walks but, for now, not much more is explained. Alex’s father died when he was young and his brother, Ronnie, is a sports agent in Los Angeles, so along with Carl Sagan, he is a free agent. The unfolding story turns out to be not so much about astronomy and rockets, as a journey about finding out who you really are. Alex encounters a varied cast of characters on his road trip and he describes them vividly in his audio-diaries. He is creating a series of podcasts about his life on Earth which he intends launching into space on his Golden i-Pod. Lots of incidents are therefore conveyed in dialogue and ‘stage directions’.

This is a warm-hearted book and Alex is an engaging character. If you enjoy books like Smart by Kim Slater or Wonder by R.J. Palacio, then See You in the Cosmos is definitely one to try. You can read an extract here.

 

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Why We Took the Car

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Why We Took the Car by Wolfgang Herrndorf

Book of the Week: 20 September 2015

Why we took the car

Why We Took the Car is a good, old-fashioned story of teenage rebellion. It is the translation of a best-selling book called Tschick by German author Wolfgang Herrndorf, centering around a road-trip by two friends, Mike and Tschick.

The story begins in school where loner Mike Klingenberg, also known as Psycho, spends his time carving boomerangs, admiring the beautiful Tatiana and fretting about his alcoholic mother and workaholic father. There are also the usual over-confident classmates and overbearing teachers to help make his life a misery. Into this mix comes a new student, the surly and rebellious Andrej Tschischaraoff, who is uncooperative in the extreme and who drinks alcohol during school hours. Mike finds Tschick annoying at first but after a particularly bad day, and one too many arguments with his father, he is persuaded to set off across Germany with Tschick in a stolen Lada in search of adventure.

What unfolds is a believably wild escapade, conjuring up encounters with quirky characters and revealing a growing, if uneasy friendship, between the boys. Amidst the irresponsible and criminal behaviour is fun, sarcasm and the intensity, sadness and magic of a summer of growing-up.

Recommended for older readers.