Tag Archives: Romance

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.

The Agency for Scandal

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The Agency for Scandal by Laura Wood

Book of the Week: 4 February 2024

Cover illustration by Mercedes Debellard

Eighteen year old Isobel Stanhope leads a double life. Most of the time she is a rather forgettable young woman, outshone by her friend Teresa Winter and Sylla Banaji, the socialite daughter of a baronet. It being 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, most of society is centred on celebratory parties, theatre trips and fancy dress balls, all of which Isobel attends, mainly in the hope of seeing the handsome Max Vane, the eighth Duke of Roxton. Not that he seems to care. She has been introduced to him several times and he never even remembers her name. Not even Isobel’s closest friends know that, when her father died, he left the family with hardly any money and consequently she is working hard to support her mother and pay her little brother’s boarding school fees. Her mother is an invalid who keeps to her room, rather like Miss Havisham, and is unaware that nearly everything in the rest of the house has been sold to raise money. Isobel’s darkest secret is that she works for an undercover detective agency called The Aviary, run by the formidable Mrs Finch. The agency exists to investigate infidelities, thefts and murders and is run by women for the benefit of women. Isobel is a valued member of staff because she has been taught to pick locks by her father and is able to pass as a young boy. She dresses as a street urchin called Kes and has contacts in the criminal underworld.

When she is recruited by a villain called Rook to steal a valuable ruby brooch at the Devonshire House fancy dress ball, she realises she is mixed up in a dangerous plot that may involve the powerful Lord Morland who is angling to be Britain’s next Prime Minister. She has mixed feelings when Max Vane gets involved as she is not sure whose side he is on.

The author Sarra Manning calles the book ‘A perfect mash up of Bridgerton and Enola Holmes‘. I would add the recent Apple TV series The Buccaneers to the comparison. The story romps along with plenty of action and subterfuge, as well as romance. I have read a couple of novels for adults with some similar themes and settings recently and found this one a lot more fun.

There is a sequel called The Season for Scandal which has just been published.

Northern Soul

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Northern Soul by Phil Earle

Book of the Week: 14 January 2024

Cover illustration: Shutterstock

If you are looking for a quick, funny read and want to feel better about behaving in the cringiest way in front of someone you’d like to impress, look no further.

Marv has never thought about girls – he’s too busy playing football and hanging out with his best mate Jimmy. Then, a new girl arrives in school and he is unexpectedly smitten. What’s more, she lives on his street.

‘You’re in my form, aren’t you?’ Carly said.

Her accent was northern too, but not from round here. Barnsley maybe. God, it sounded exotic.

Marv contemplates asking his dad for advice, but what’s the point of telling a man who wears Crocs and shorts everywhere and runs a failing record shop, that you are hoping to date someone you consider to be way out of your league?

Fortunately, or catastrophically, help arrives in an unexpected form from the past. Marv does his best to follow the advice, but to say things don’t always work out smoothly, would be an understatement.

A relatable and entertaining read.

If you would like to sample the first chapter, it is available here.

Bad Influence

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Bad Influence by Tamsin Winter

Book of the Week: 2 July 2023

Cover illustration by Amy Blackwell

Amelia should be enjoying her time at school. She has just started Year 9 and is good at schoolwork, loves reading and plays cello in the orchestra. Despite her achievements, she is not only unpopular but is being bullied. She and her best friend Nisha have been rated as being in ‘the extreme fug zone’ [fug means ugly] by classmates on social media. She suspects that a particularly annoying boy in her class, called DJ, might be responsible because he was the person who started calling her ‘Maggot’ in Year 7 – a nickname that has stuck. It doesn’t help that her older sister, Hannah, is beautiful and on track to be Head Girl and that her baseball-obsessed father believes that coming second in anything is being ‘first loser’.

It takes a couple of chapters to find out about Amelia’s life, however, because the book opens with her being in trouble at school thanks to a photograph that has been shared on social media. What the photo shows, who shared it and what led to it being taken is revealed in the rest of this cleverly-constructed plot. This sympathetic and readable story would be a great book club choice as it would provoke plenty of discussion about the pressures of fitting in, the perils of social media and its effect on real-life relationships; plus it is all told in a lively, relatable and witty style that avoids being over-earnest.

Try this is you have enjoyed Tamsin Winter’s other books , or books by writers such as Jenny McLachlan , Susin Nielsen or Lisa Williamson

PS: The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ross won the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing in June this year.

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.

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.

Wranglestone

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Wranglestone by Darren Charlton

Book of the Week: 8 March 2020

Illustration by Jana Heidersdorf

Wranglestone weaves together a tense, and sometimes gory, plot about zombies in a future of isolated communities, with a tender love story, all vividly and lyrically described.

In a dark future of no internet, electricity or modern conveniences, Peter and his dad live on Skipping Mouse Island in a house on stilts where they dread the coming of winter. With the first fall of snow, their friends and neighbours gather together for a final social before digging in for winter. The freezing of the lake means the Restless Ones can drag themselves across the ice and prove more than just a threat. Some of Peter’s neighbours decide he is a hazard to the community after he fails to stop a dangerous stranger from trying to join them. He has to be saved from disaster by his dad and Cooper, a boy he has long admired from afar, who lives on a neighbouring island. It is decided that Peter needs a trip to the mainland in order to toughen up and it is here that he and Cooper discover that the adults around them have been economical with the truth and that true danger comes in forms other than those of the Restless Ones.

Amongst the tension and terror runs a thread about how we create enemies through a tendency to ‘other’ those who are unlike ourselves and the importance of empathy and understanding in counteracting this.

If you would like to find out more, the author’s website is here. I was amazed that he wasn’t actually born and brought up in the American wilderness after reading such wonderful descriptions of the scenery.

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.

India Smythe Stands Up

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India Smythe Stands Up by Sarah Govett

Book of the Week: 13 October 2019

Illustration by Nina Duckworth

India Smythe should be introduced to Sam from The Gifted, the Talented and Me by William Sutcliffe – I’m sure they’d have a lot to talk about. Sam’s family became rich, forcing him to mix with ‘the gifted and talented’ and India sounds posh thanks to her Grandad changing the family name from Smith to Smythe. Thankfully, they are both ordinary teenagers coping with things that plague most young people – cool, good-looking kids who make everyone feel inadequate, teachers who they class as either supportive or pitiful (India thinks their deputy head is ‘massively old and deaf’ which is probably code for ‘over 40’) and parents who are embarrassing in the way that only parents know how.

India has been invited by the cool crowd to join them at ‘the Fence’, one of those romantic chain-link kind, that separates the girls’ school from St Joseph’s, the neighbouring boys’ school. Here she meets Ennis, who is prone to dim comments and winking, but who is considered so hot that she feels she must date him. Can she resist the forces of geekery, represented by her practical friend Anna who dresses as if she is going hiking and is consumed by ‘the political intrigue of orchestra practice’, or will she join the cool crowd?

Although we may well guess the answer to that question, it doesn’t stop us identifying and having sympathy with India and enjoying the laughs along the way.

This addition to the recent crop of great funny books is rendering my reading list out of date. Check out How to Rob a Bank by Tom Mitchell and Pay Attention Carter Jones by Gary D. Schmidt.