A Good Read
Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Praise for this novel, first published at the beginning of 2015, has spread like wildfire and it has become THE book to read. So just in case you are one of the few that hasn’t succumbed to this thriller, why should you pick it up?
Whether you are a regular commuter, like the central character Rachel, or not, you will easily be able to identify with the opening section. How many times have you sat on a train and looked out of the window into the garden or kitchen windows of the houses that back onto the tracks, as you speed past on your way to your final destination. As you catch glimpses into a life that you don’t know, do you wonder about the people that occupy those houses?
Rachel doesn’t have to wonder. She passes familiar houses every day and purposefully looks for Jess and Jason, a young professional couple who live a perfect life. She knows them and is in many ways envious of their relationship. Seeing them in their garden is a moment of comfort as her own life is falling apart.
But is all as it seems? On one day, as the train slows down at a signal by the house, Rachel notices that something is amiss. Suddenly she is sucked into a nightmare that seems destined to reveal everything, and that will shock you as her commuter journey turns out to be anything but normal. It’s a small world, but when that world comes crashing down around you, it becomes all too clear that this small world is a lot smaller than you first thought.
Midnight for Charlie Bone by Jenny Nimmo
It is now nearly a decade since the last Harry Potter book was published, and a new generation are quite rightly discovering this wonderful world of wizards and magic. Just like the generation before them, they are left with a void after reading them all, and so where do they turn? The Charlie Bone series of books may well be just what they are looking for. Published in 2002, Midnight for Charlie Bone is the first of this eight book series.
Charlie is a fairly normal 10 year old boy. His father died when he was little, and he lives with his mum and two grandmas, and hangs out with his best friend Ben. One Friday Charlie hears voices coming from a photograph, and then his whole life changes. He learns that his three unmarried great- aunts, known as the Yewbeams, are going to fund his education and a private school called Bloor’s Academy. Charlie is not happy about this: he knows the school to be a stuffy place for geniuses, and he certainly won’t fit in there. But the Yewbeams are insistent: and besides, they pay for his mum’s living expenses and so he really has no choice. They explain to Charlie that he is ‘endowed’ and can read the minds of people in photographs.
Everyone at Bloor’s Academy has a talent. Charlie’s father went there and he was a musician. But what is Charlie’s talent? Placed in the music department at Bloor’s, despite having no musical talent, it becomes clear that there is another group of children at the school who are all endowed with some mystical magical talent. Soon he finds that he was born into a world he never knew existed.
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