BfK 10 – 14 Middle/Secondary continued


of the sisters’ favourite pastimes was for Emily to tell Holly stories about her favourite teddy bear, Bluey. The bear lives in an imaginary land called Smockeroon.


The imaginary land is one of the things Emily misses most when her sister is dead. She even begins to dream that animals from Smockeroon come to visit her. There is a doorway between Smockeroon and what is termed ‘the


 But that door has been broken. As a result, a black toad of despair has forced its way into the imaginary world, spreading gloom. Bereaved humans like Emily must take the lead in searching for the Sturvey, the authority that can establish order         


We See Everything 


William Sutcliffe, Bloomsbury, 272pp, 978-1-4088-9019-6, £12.99 hbk


     writer for young adult readers living in our own troubled times. His previous novel Concentr8 memorably described a world where suppressant drugs like Ritalin had become part of the everyday


diet. This current


story, also set in the future, features two adolescent narrators. Lex helps       country’s occupying oppressors and Alan, working for the other side, directs one of the ever-present drones       letting off a rocket with lethal effects on targeted civilians below.


Set in a newly bombed out London, with most well-known landmarks reduced to rubble, this nightmare world draws on several books written about what it is like to live in contemporary occupied Gaza, cited as sources in an end note. It all makes for a gripping if bleak tale,  and indeed coming as something of a surprise. There may be a tad too much self-analysis going on while each of the main characters tries to understand himself better, given that both are keen to engage with the opposite sex but only one of them has any success. Yet both personal accounts are sensitively done and substantially ring true. Non- Londoners may sometimes feel a bit out as Lex cycles to and from closely      to those who know about them and probably nothing to most others. But in broader terms this novel provides an unforgettable picture of daily life resembling a hideous video game but within which normal human fears and aspirations still exist. Lex and Alan remain recognisable teenagers throughout although now living in what is still, at least in this country, an unrecognisably horrible new urban world. NT


Hope 


Rhian Ivory, Firefly, 304pp, 978-1-9100-8062-7, £7.99 pbk


Rhian Ivory’s debut The Boy Who Drew the Future was a tense, atmospheric thriller, partly set in the seventeenth century. Her new novel Hope is thoroughly contemporary though with equally high levels of drama and tension.


Hope has lots to deal with: she and her mother are grieving for her father, who died suddenly and unexpectedly while the three of them were visiting his  as an actor but as the book opens,   we – and she – only discover later, she is suffering from PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder). This condition heightens her sense of despair and helplessness, causing her moments of terrifying, irrational rage against herself as well as her friends. No wonder she feels that she has no future, not even a plan B now that her dreams of drama 


Help comes in different forms. Travelling back from her disastrous audition Hope meets a boy on the ferry.


Riley is good looking, funny


and with a sharp sense of humour. He starts texting and emailing after they both get home and their sparky,


30 Books for Keeps No.227 November 2017


Saunders does not shrink from giving an accurate and piercing account of       young people who are bereaved. But she casts such a sense of humanity and resilience over the grief that her book becomes uplifting. The inchoate desire sensed by every child that toys might come to life is here expanded to a global view of life and experience. The book has no illustrations as such. But it is illuminated by countless instances of intertextuality, references abounding to C.S. Lewis,


14+ Secondary/Adult


genuinely witty conversations provide some of the book’s liveliest moments. Forced by her mother to take part in a Singing Medicine scheme at her local  initial resistance, she is able to help the sick children and adolescents she sings for. It’s at the hospital too that she discovers more about her PMDD, not from a doctor, but from a         pillar in her support network is her beloved Italian grandfather Nonno, who proves that far from being stuck at a dead end, there are lots of opportunities open to her.


Ivory manages all these different themes slickly and with skill, balancing Hope’s genuine misery with a sense of ordinary teen life, and always emphasising the importance of friendship. Hope’s relationship with her best friend Callie is particularly well-observed, and there are some very moving moments with her mother too. Readers will understand how deeply her mother cares for Hope, even at those times when she is struggling to understand her daughter.


The story ends on a positive note with Hope looking forward to a new        scene reunites her with Riley, who has sorted out his own problems too. RB


 Ivory.


Everybody Hurts 


Joanna Nadin and Anthony McGowan, Atom, 343pp, 978 0 349 00291 0, £7.99 pbk


If Lexy had been there, Sophia tells us, she’d have said, “This is totally like Romeo and Juliet thing is that Sophia knows Lexy would have been right. Lexy is Sophia’s       she insists on taking the role, since she’s a drama queen and Sophia’s a walking life-or-death drama, given that she’s got a tumour the size of a tangerine growing in her brain. That tumour is the reason Sophia has an appointment at Mickey’s (aka St Michael’s Hospital, Leeds) where, out of nowhere and after a


few witty exchanges, a boy she’s       would have come in, since the whole          Verona’s glitterati, but the canteen at Mickey’s where Matt – the unknown boy - has just used some fake coins to get a plate-load of trans fats at the McDonald’s counter.


Matt and Sophia tell the tale in alternating chapters which often race along in breathless stand-up comedy mode. Matt’s a novice at chatting up girls, let alone kissing them. Sophia’s more experienced, at least as far as the technical side of things goes. But neither has known anything of what  page 1 of Everything Hurts lists 5 things Sophia doesn’t believe in and        Sophia and Matt long for subtleties and connections which go well beyond fumbling sex for sex’s sake. There are further echoes of R&J: a party when things are clearly going to go badly,       ending in a bloody stabbing - though here the feud is not between “two households, both alike in dignity”, so much as the cultures of two schools from different sides of the tracks, one private, one comp.


Their narrative voices, however, could hardly be less Shakespearian. A trawl of a few random pages produces: Fucknuts, wankers, knobhead, “he’s such a dick”, frick-fracking (Sophia’s favourite, as in “frick-fracking Jesus”),   Yet at the same time, there might be references in Sophia’s chapters to Sartre, Joni, Leonard Cohen and – frequently – The Great Gatsby while Matt reveals an old-fashioned decency and an honesty about what  privacy of their writing, both couple 


Much of their narration thinks through their feelings for each other. Nadin and McGowan may employ elements which are very familiar to experienced YA readers: the serious illness, the 


A.A. Milne and Lewis Carroll to name only three.


The risk in such a narrative is that the character who dies at the opening becomes a mere cipher. But Emily’s memories of her deceased sister are so vivid and so real that she remains an active protagonist in this captivating story. All children may     book. But for children who have suffered a bereavement it will be RB


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