BfK 8 – 10 Junior/Middle continued


Catsup High Detective Agency HHHH


Margaret Ryan, ill. Vicky Barker, Catnip Publishing, 96pp, 978-1-8464-7189-6, £4.99 pbk


When cats in the town of Catsup start to disappear cat detective Malarkey decides to recruit a new assistant to the Catsup High Detective Agency. At first Malarkey is reluctant to hire a


kitten, even one with special powers, but he is eventually persuaded by his fellow office residents, an intellectual spider, and a family of constantly nibbling mice, to


chance. The cat detective duo set out to solve the mystery of the missing cats, armed with Malarkey’s magic flying scarf and Sparkie’s amazing electric paws and ability to find clues, and feline mayhem ensues.


give Sparkie a New Talent Longbow Girl HHHH


Linda Davies, Chicken House, 374pp, 978-1-9100-0261-2, £6.99 pbk


Merry loves her home, Nanteos Farm, in the middle of Wales. It has been in her family for centuries and she is steeped in its history and traditions. Above all there is the tradition that the Owens of Nanteos would always provide an archer skilled in the longbow for the king – or lose their land. Now there is no son, only Merry; she is the Longbow Girl. Nanteos is under threat and attracting the greedy gaze


landowning neighbours. Can Merry find a way to save her home?


of the de Courcys, their being too


Though Linda Davies has already made a reputation as a writer of adult thrillers, she is a new talent in writing for a younger audience. She makes the transition with ease. In this time-slip story she marries the past and the present through the character of the lively, headstrong, likeable Merry and the very attractive young James de Courcy. The action is fast paced, though a time-slip will always require a certain level of disbelief to be suspended. The prose throughout is contemporary without


My Name’s Not Friday HHHH


Jon Walter, David Fickling Books, 368pp, 978-1-9102-0043-8, £12.99 hbk


It may be coincidence


Walter’s first novel, which tells a story set on an American slave plantation, appears so soon after the film adaptation


that Jon


slave narrative, Twelve Years a Slave. But there are definite similarities. Samuel, the hero of this story, begins, like Solomon, as a free black who is kidnapped and illegally sold into slavery, although as a child rather than an adult. And, in an afterword, Walter


of Solomon Northrup’s historical reveals


sources, on Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. He also says that he did not


information, among other that he relied for


background is conveyed through atmosphere and description. While there is an element of romance, the climax is centred on the archery contest in front of Henry VIII, the contest through which Merry’s skill will secure Nanteos in the future – or not.


This is very much in the tradition of the romantic thriller but directed at a younger audience. Competently written and confident, it will certainly attract young readers who will then look forward to Davies’s next book. FH


set out to write about slavery or even a historical novel. This may explain the hazy historical context of Samuel’s life in an orphanage for black children before he is sold off, and the scarcely credible circumstances of his kidnap and sale, which are not fully revealed until the end of the story. It is really only when Samuel reaches


plantation that we feel that we are in a fully realised world with strong and complex characters, whose lives are in various ways governed by the South’s ‘peculiar institution’. This is a small plantation, pictured towards the close of the Civil War, when its owner is away fighting and it is left in the hands of his wife and young son, Gerald. Their lives are intimately bound up with those of the people who, at the same time, they hold as property, and buy and sell and cruelly punish at will. Walter’s story appears


26 Books for Keeps No.214 September 2015 the jarring; the historical


Margaret Ryan’s skill and experience in writing funny, fast-paced series fiction for younger readers are well evident in this humorous tale. The story is full of jokes, puns, wordplay and comic situations and the language is carefully chosen to add to the humour and to develop the vocabulary of its readers. Malarkey and Sparkie form a classic comic duo of bumbling detective


bright assistant, and all the extra characters contribute to the sense of fun. The illustrations by Vicky Barker


10 – 14 Middle/Secondary


to owe a lot to earlier literary accounts of slavery, not only slave narratives, which played their part in mobilising Abolitionist sentiment, but also


the classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with Gerald substituting


Eva, as the white child who wishes to set the slaves free. But Walter tells his own vivid and compelling story. His characters engage and intrigue; the plot is fast moving (sometimes so fast that interesting themes and characters drop out of sight before you feel they have been fully explored); and he exposes tellingly some of the strange contradictions of slavery – the owner who brutally whips her slave in public and then returns in private to salve his wounds. Curiously, for this reader, it is Samuel himself who, as narrator, remains something of an enigma: his relationship with God, with which Walter makes great play, never quite defines him in the way it is intended. However, this is a novel of immense promise. It is fitting that an episode featuring A Christmas Carol should appear for Walter has, like the great man himself, the ability to tell a cracking story filled with memorable characters, and the tackle big questions.


Sophie Someone HHHH


Hayley Long, Hot Key Books, 258pp, 978-1-4714-0480-1, £10.99 hbk


Before she begins her narrative, Sophie tells us: ‘Some stories are hard to tell … And some words are hard to get out of your mouth … Because they spell out secrets that are too huge to be spoken aloud … So here’s my story. Told the only way I dare to tell it … In my own special language.’


256 pages later, when those secrets are out, Sophie’s best friend Comet reveals why – and how – the novel came to be written: ‘You don’t have to tell me any more, Soph. Not if you don’t want to. But maybe you should write it down.’ Teenagers writing novels as therapy is a time-honoured, if improbable, convention in YA fiction, but Sophie can’t just ‘write it down’. Some ‘brainless drongo’


might post it on the introvert (yes, that’s internet in her ‘own special language’) so she follows Comet’s advice to ‘throw in a few random code worms to keep any nubber pickers


out there for the saintly to


on their togs’ (throw in a few random code words to keep any nosey parkers on their toes – right?). Maybe an echo of the Nadsat argot in The Clockwork Orange, only the code words come more frequently.


Sophie’s story is close to incredible, but then you could say that the Great Train Robbery or the Hatton Garden jewellery heist stretched fact beyond fiction. When she was little – she’s now fourteen – she and her mambo and her don (that’s her mum and her dad) left the UK in a hurry for Belgium and a new life, even adopting Nieuwenleven as their family name and abandoning Pratt which, it turns out, was far more appropriate. As Sophie slowly learns, her dad had got involved in a bank robbery in the UK as the getaway driver. He’s not really cut out to be a bad guy though, and so he was easily tricked out of his share of the loot. They end up more or less down and out in Brussels.


Once


ambition to CB


secrets, she ferrets around on the internet, takes Eurostar to London and then a train to Norfolk to meet the gran she’s never known. Sophie’s a likeable, resilient character and she learns a lot about places and people (including herself) along the journey which terminates in a sort-of happy ending.


There is enjoyable comedy of both plot and character


pleasure on offer in this tale mostly lies in how it’s told. After a few pages of the coded narrative, you’re into the flow of it. These examples must stand for the many on every page: ‘Pulling my eyes


here, but the Sophie guesses there are and


complement the text perfectly and add considerably to


effect of the story. There are plenty of visual clues and jokes as well as maps and character profiles to keep readers engaged and the use of page space and comic-book style draw the reader in and increase the pace of events. All in all, this is a funny and appealing book for younger readers, fulfilling the need for engaging books to bridge the gap between beginner readers and longer fiction.


SR the


comic


companion screen, I looked over my shrugger to the living root dormouse.’ A vocabulary crib-list would show: companion/computer;


shoulder; root/room; dormouse/door. Sophie tells her little bruiser (brother) to ‘Shush your


reference to that popular novel, The Hunger Graves;


‘mis-used’ to disturb the expected sense, often with comic effect. But just a moment. If we readers can crack the code easily enough, then why not all those dangerous drongos out there? I’m not being too literalist, but you do need a rationale which stands up. And when new coinages occur, you probably have to pause. Sadly, that means the telling may be more in the forefront of the reader’s


mush’, so,


or familiar words shrugger/ there’s


away from the


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