BfK 14+ Secondary/Adult New Talent Beautiful Broken Things HHHHH


Sara Barnard, Macmillan, 400pp, 978-1-5098-0353-8, £6.99 pbk


Caddie (short for Cadnam; don’t ask!) and Rosie are best friends. Truly best friends though


now go to different schools. Then Suzanne arrives in Rosie’s class – beautiful, dazzling, outrageous and troubled Suzanne. Can three girls be best friends? And what does being a best friend mean? Sara Barnard in her debut novel is treading familiar ground; there is the shy, unassuming teenager still in her chrysalis, longing to be a butterfly; there is the catalyst with her troubled background and dangerous fascination; there is the first person narrator. The content is nothing new. And yet, Sara Barnard has managed to create a narrative that has a welcome freshness. Told from the point of view of Caddy but not in the (ubiquitous) present, the voice has a confidence and assurance that is impressive. These are very real girls that the reader can get to know. Certainly it is very much based in the contemporary world – references to shops, bands,


Silence is Goldfish HHHH


Annabel Pitcher, Indigo, 366pp, 978-1-7806-2000-8, £10.99 hbk


This


outstanding talent does not disappoint. Much of it takes place in the head of lonely and over-weight Tess, a Manchester teenager with only one friend.


cruel gang of contemporaries and at home her own fantasy-driven father can’t stop fussing over her. Faced by a new crisis of identity when she discovers by chance that she was in fact fathered by anonymous sperm donation, Tess retreats into elective mutism. She still talks but this time silently to a pocket torch shaped like a goldfish – hence the title. He answers her back, usually sensibly, but their on-going dialogue finally freezes out everyone real in her life however hard they try to keep in contact. All this is hauntingly described in


a novel that begins slowly but soon turns into a gripping account of a battle between still surviving sanity and near-madness. At some stage a fairly unbelievable boy-friend hoves into view, but few readers would begrudge Tess just some luck in her otherwise sad life. The same applies to an ending where she finally manages to leave her troubles behind rather too patly. But these minor cavils apart, there is much wit as well as psychological understanding in these pages. Having already scored with My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece and Ketchup Clouds Annabel Pitcher proves in this story that she is a major novelist. It will be fascinating to see what she comes up with next.


NT She is otherwise the butt of a third novel from an already they


forcing him to kill the man, disturbs the uneasy threesome.


cannot accept the killing, leaves and is murdered in the woods. Things unravel further when Anna debases herself with the pharmacist to get the pills he so desperately needs. Harsh life has intruded on their relationship and the Swallow Man sends her to safety. All of humanity is in this story, the warmth of human kindness, the brutality of war, understanding the ways of people, and most importantly the search for something better. In an extraordinary and many layered novel which is not a child’s story of war, but an adult’s view of it with all the questions it raises of ethics and morality. Gabriel Savit has written An accomplished first book, likely to appeal to young adults with open and thoughtful minds.


Anything That Isn’t This HHHHH


technology that will inevitably date, but the emotions, situations, the characters will remain familiar. What is particularly refreshing is the absence of romance. If this sounds boring, it is far from it. At the heart of her novel, providing a rich emotional backdrop, is the friendship between three very different characters. This is Sara Barnard’s first novel. She is clearly a talent to watch. FH


Anna and the Swallow Man HHHH


Gabriel Savit, Bodley Head, 230pp, 978-1-7823-0052-6, £9.99 pbk


This is one of those novels which defies categorisation, wide in its scope


within. It starts in Krakow in 1939 where Anna, only seven awaits the return of her professor father from a meeting. He does not come back and the encounter with the Swallow Man defines the next few years of her life as together they walk the length and breadth of Poland avoiding people and particularly the Wolves and the Bears, German and Russian soldiers respectively. Anna is a remarkable seven


languages and putting her life in the hands of a man she does not know. Time is not important in this story,


year old, speaking many


more it is the relationship of Anna and the Swallow Man whose real name she never knows and who ask her not to reveal her name to anyone. “Names are ways for people to find us” he tells her. It is not clear until the end why the man is walking or indeed where he is going but as they travel, often physically a way apart, he imparts his view of life. In his bag he carries city and country clothes for them both, his medication, a gun, knife and a baby’s shoe. The encounter with Reb Hirschl, a Jew who gives Anna a view of the world she had forgotten, of fun and laughter, changes things as does the discovery of a mass grave. Their discovery by the Pedlar who threatens them after all the Swallow Man’s endeavours to keep them safe


30 Books for Keeps No.216 January 2016 and the ideas contained


Chris Priestley, Hot Key Books, 468pp, 978-1-4714-0464-1, £8.99, pbk


Forgive a personal reminiscence – maybe it will trigger one of your own. As a late teenager long ago, I wasn’t ready for Kafka; reading The Castle was unsettling. I was drawn into the frustration of K’s experiences but I was also irritated by the lack of what I thought of as plot. This was all outside my frame of reference; I couldn’t work out what kind of book I was reading. Echoes of Kafka came quite early


Hirschl


as much as the place); and then the publisher’s blurb reported that the Children’s


detected ‘the unmistakeable whiff of Kafka’. By that time, though, location and literary influences had become less important. As in my youthful reading of Kafka, I’d been failing to let the text shape how to read. This novel surely invites a flexible, shifting response, and readers will make many different readings.


Laureate, no less, had JF


as I read Anything That Isn’t This; partly because the 17 year old central character, Frank Palp, lives in a city where no-one is to be trusted, everyone is observed. ‘The Student’ sits, day in day out, in the corner of the cramped flat of Frank’s family, making notes which they know will be despatched to the Ministry offices up at the Castle. Frank is coming to the end of schooldays devoid of intellectual or social excitement,


or invention. His life, everyone’s life, is Grey; both literally in the grime and mist of the streets, and spiritually. Along those streets anxious figures scurry by, hunched against the bullets of the rumoured Sniper on the rooftops. Frank’s future offers no change, no colour. He might get a clerical job up at the Ministry, much like his father, once a soldier hero, now faceless in the warren of corridors in the Castle. This isn’t a British dystopia, following


without laughter


book; for example, trying to discover what loving a woman might mean or wondering whether he can ease the stranglehold the state has upon him as a citizen. He is looking for colour amongst the Grey, for a life of the imagination, and finds it only in visits to the grave of his writer/storyteller grandfather, who tells him fabulous tales from underground. Episodes such as these, and the appearance of a Ghost Tram which rides the rails of the empty city long after curfew, may help a young reader to look beyond the literal. Frank’s search reveals that he is


eco or nuclear disasters which adolescent readers (and viewers) know well enough. Take the citizens’ surnames: Prothorax, Calypter, Pulvillus, Spiracle, Cremaster; yet first names are familiar - Frank, Dawn, Olivia, though there’s also a Petra. We’re not in the reader’s present: no mobiles, no laptops, no social media, though there are grindingly boring Ministry films on television. At once, we’re here and elsewhere. Searching for


read, I settled for a location in Eastern Europe, before the Wall came down. Later, the Acknowledgements at the end of the book confirmed that Mr Priestley’s novel had found its origins in two visits to Prague (the people


solid ground as I


not alone. Even The Student turns out to have feelings, and risks his own death to help Frank; while Dawn, the girl upstairs, is far wiser than Frank in matters of love. In the end, not unlike Coleridge’s Mariner, Frank puts others’ needs before his own at some risk to himself. It’s a step he couldn’t have taken 400 pages earlier. He is moving from self-absorption towards awareness of others. Illustrations (by Priestley) extend the text, reinforcing the sense of menace and inscrutability which oppresses Frank. Priestley tells us in his Acknowledgements that the book is ‘not about Prague – although Prague lends a lot to the location. But I grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the 1970s and it has far more to do with my teenage feelings of needing to escape from what I felt was a life that did not, and could never, fit me’. Implicitly, the novel could well teach much about growing as a reader; a powerful, memorable experience - at once, allegory and adventure. GF


Frank is searching throughout the


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