BfK 14+ Secondary/Adult


He writes about such characters in the novel with affection and respect, giving them all the best lines including quotations from great figures from the past and their views on the need for


respecting the environment.


Members of the group call themselves the canaries after the little birds that used to be lowered into coal mines to utter warning cheeps when the atmosphere began turning toxic. Young people


currently involved


in the Climate Change Protest and the Extinction Rebellion will find plenty


for others the story could well start to drag.


to interest them here. But Ash’s emotional as well as


physical passivity is hard to take over so many pages and the opinions put forward in his supportive group are never challenged by other characters with contrary beliefs. environmentalists,


suspecting Snowflake, AZ HHHH


Marcus Sedgwick, Zephyr, 278pp, 9781788542333, £12.99 hbk


Every novel by Marcus Sedgwick is an adventure in ideas different from anything he has written before. This current novel is no exception, and may well be his most challenging yet. It is told by American teenage Ash in a colloquial style half-way between Huckleberry Finn and Caulfield in Catcher


Struck down by a mystery condition that


absorbs all his energy


in the Rye. Ash


finally winds up with a small group of fellow-sufferers living in a community outside Snowflake, a small town in the Arizona desert. These have self- diagnosed themselves as possessing Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, or MCS for short. This condition, they argue, is a compound of severe allergies to all the chemicals and general pollutants increasingly surrounding us in the modern world. Any occasional visitor from outside has first to go through a lengthy body and clothes de-toxifying process


before they are allowed


indoors. The story takes place some time


in the near future. Wearing a mask whenever he goes into town for fear of catching anything bad in the air, Ash passes a strange late adolescence in the company of a fifty-plus woman who has similar problems. He stays there for six years, mostly lying in bed but occasionally doing the odd minor chore. Money never seems a problem in a community that has turned its back on anything resembling regular work.


how he himself had previously been struck


In a foreword Sedgwick describes down by Chronic Fatigue


Syndrome for over five years and at one time had stayed with a group of fellow-sufferers living in the desert near the real-life town of Snowflake.


Extreme a


series of government cover-ups that no-one other than themselves have ever spotted, do not generally make for easy company. The same could be said


of this brave, angry and


resolutely opinionated story. But if Sedgwick does eventually turn out to be right about the way we are progressively


poisoning ourselves,


God help us all. NT What Magic is This?


HHHH Holden


Holly Bourne, Barrington Stoke, 167 pp, 978 1 78112 885 5, £7.99 pbk


Sophia, Mia and Alexis are three girls, best friends, in Year Nine. One night the three decide to cast wishing spells in order to solve their various problems. Sophia is the narrator. She is desperate for Aidan Chambers, the best looking boy in her year, to reunite with her. Mia has a more serious problem to resolve. She needs to stop self-harming. Alexis wants to resurrect her recently expired dog Casper. Are the three girls really juvenile witches? Or is there a different kind of magic at work? If so, it might be a kind of magic the girls can’t control. This is a problematic book. Holly


Bourne has established herself as a successful writer. But this book may not be quite what her admirers would expect. Her readers have come to expect books of 300 pages or more in length, giving Bourne the opportunity to develop characters and narrative in a measured and effective style. This much shorter book develops its themes in a manner which seems more abrupt and far less satisfying. A final point. Quite why Bourne


chose to give the teenage boy in her story the name of Aidan Chambers, in the real world a well-known writer and the winner of a Carnegie medal, is quite baffling and distracting for anyone who has heard of the real-life Aidan. RB


30 Books for Keeps No.238 September 2019


Heartstream HHHH


Tom Pollock, Walker Books, 346pp, 9781406378184, £7.99 pbk


We all know that there is a growing trend to open up our lives to others, using social media, but what if you could have an implant on your scalp that would allow your


followers to


feel all of your emotions in real time, even your most personal and heart wrenching


thoughts? This is the


premis that we are introduced to at the beginning of this story; when Amy is attending the funeral of her mother, having shared the latter’s terminal illness with social media. But just as we think that we know what is going on we are introduced to a parallel story with totally different characters and no sense of how the stories relate in space and time. The only connection is that Cat and her friends, especially Evie, are super fans of a pop group and spend a lot of time tweeting and blogging about them; however Cat has a secret which could tear apart her friendship and spoil the whole fan following for the group. This was a book that took a while to


get in to, especially with the two very distinct stories but it definitely paid off in the end. The author took us on a roller coaster of a ride and provided so many twists and turns that it felt like a ride at a theme park. The gradual realization of how the


stories are


linked and the relationships that are revealed will have the reader on the edge of their seats. We are asked to question the concepts of loyalty, family, friendship and what impact the advent of social media has on these. It has definitely been a book that has made me think about the way that technology is interfering with and even changing the way we live our lives. It is a really great read for those 14+. MP


Furious Thing HHHH


Jenny Downham, David Fickling Books, 375 pp, 978 1 78845 098 0, £12.99 hdbk


Nearly sixteen years old, Alexandra Robinson, known as Lexi, lives with her mother, her mother’s boyfriend John and her half-sibling Iris aged six. John and Lexi’s mother are planning to marry. But John for no apparent reason despises Lexi and the feeling is mutual. John has a son named Kass by his earlier marriage. Kass and Lexi have known each other for years. Lexi has a big crush on Kass. Can this


something more significant and more dangerous at work? Despite this reviewer’s


habitual


avoidance of spoilers, it is necessary to explain that domestic violence and coercive control form the substance of this novel. The importance of this novel lies in its rarity value. There are few books in which domestic violence and bullying are candidly depicted, and even fewer in the catalogue of children’s literature.


A central feature of this book is


Lexi’s unreliability as a narrator. Her behaviour is often difficult to defend. At school she throws a chair through a window because she objects to auditioning for Caliban instead of for Miranda in The Tempest. There is nothing good that can happen to Lexi that she cannot spoil. Her anger makes it hard for the reader to untangle any dependable elements in her narrative. By the end of the book however the reader has come to grasp, understand and sympathise with the complexity of her world view. The book poses another problem


to which no obvious answer emerges. On two occasions John uses the word ‘retard’. This word is no longer part of the permissible vocabulary, if it ever was. Of course it can be argued that John’s use of such a term is a valid indicator of his extreme mental and emotional condition. Nevertheless it can also be argued that any use of such prejudicial terms increases the risk of their attaining currency in the vocabularies of young readers. RB


We Hunt the Flame HHH


Hafsah Faizal, PanMacmillan, 496pp, 9780374313647, £7.99 pbk


This is the world of Arawiya, five kingdoms each


autonomous but family unite? Or is there


ruled from Sultan’s Keep. Once they were full of magic, but no more. The kingdoms are dying as the Arz, the Empty Forest that devours those who dare enter it, spreads over the land and the Sultan is no longer the overseer but rather the overlord, taking over the kingdoms one by one.. Zafira is the Hunter, a girl disguised as a boy in order to help her people; Nasir, the Prince of Death, a crown prince trained as an assassin – and tasked with killing the Hunter. Their common quest – to find the mysterious Jawarat, an artefact that will restore magic and balance. Can they overcome their distrust of each other to save their world? Here is a richly imagined world


that draws its inspiration from the deserts and legends of ancient Arabia – the author’s use


of a


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