reviews


courage to stand up to dangerous and threatening bullies. Josh finds a true friend in the vet’s daughter Yvonne, and wins the admiration of the tightknit crofting community, as well as unlocking emotions buried deep in his uncle’s heart. Animal lovers will be rooting for Reggae, the super- intelligent and skilled Border collie, who is also the hero of the story! LT


The Blitz Next Door HHH


Cathy Forde, Kelpies, 172pp, 978-1-7825-0203-6, £5.99 pbk


Pete has and his family have moved from London to Glasgow as his father has a new job. Life is not great at home as his mother finds looking after his colicky baby sister


difficult, but after living in a flat, Pete likes their new semi-detached house – though actually the other half is just a ruin. Then Pete hears a girl crying through the wall ... This girl turns out to be Beth, who lived next door during the Second World War, and has returned to look for a box containing her memories – in particular


photograph of her mother, who died in the bombing raid which destroyed their house. Pete’s new friend Dunny finds Beth’s journal, and the boys read it together in the old air raid shelter. Increasingly Pete’s


taken over by Beth and he goes back in time to help her. When he is hurt, the doctor who comes to treat him is none other than Beth’s son Hugh, over from New Zealand where his mother is now dying.


Up to this point this is a very enjoyable story: there is a good portrayal of a male friendship that


on their love of football; and Beth, both as a girl and as an old lady, is a convincingly drawn character. However, the appearance of Hugh is too contrived to be convincing, even if it does round the story off very neatly.


is based life is a very


book disturbing: when Katy becomes disabled, her cousin Helen (who is already disabled) tells her that she is learning important lessons in ‘God’s school of pain’ and they may shy away from the notion of an omnipotent deity who punishes disobedient children by making them disabled, and even more so from the concept that submission to God’s will leads to a ‘cure’.


In books of the Coolidge vintage, there is a tendency for disabled people to live in a bubble, inhabited by them and their impairment and nothing much else. In this updated version of Katy’s story, Wilson has explored in detail, and most convincingly, the context of a disabled person’s life. We see Katy confronted by medical treatment that doesn’t always meet with her approval. We see her gaining enough confidence to apply for admission to the mainstream school which she was going to join before her accident. She finds that the science classes take place in an upstairs classroom: there is, of course, no lift. The school has organised a friend to help her find her way around and the friend is Eva Jenkins, the one girl from her old school that Katy really detested. Her PE teacher devises a ball game that Katy can play in her wheelchair and during a game Katy barges into Eva. Her parents complain, Katy gets a red card, and Health and Safety ban wheelchair users.


Katy often uses the word ‘cripple’ which, in almost any context, is deeply offensive to disabled people. But then I once heard the famous wheelchair athlete Tanni Grey-Thompson say, ‘me and the other crips’ … Perhaps it’s authentic that Katy, being disabled, would use a term that wouldn’t be tolerated from anyone able bodied – but for me it still jars.


I once criticised Jacqueline Wilson for


This is a reissue of a book previously published in 2001 as Think Me Back; presumably the reissue is due to Cathy Forde’s growing success, but it really could have done with some editing. While it is very readable and full of interesting details of the bombing of Glasgow certain things – like the mention of Hallowe’en, which was surely not celebrated in 1941 – don’t ring true.


JF Katy HHHHH


Jacqueline Wilson, Penguin Random House, 471pp, 978-0-1413-5396-8, £12.99 hb


Susan Coolidge’s famous story about Katy Carr was published in 1872 and is still widely read today. It is the story of a girl who disobeys an adult, has a serious fall and becomes paralysed as a result. Coolidge tells the story of Katy’s adaptation to being disabled.


Wilson’s latest book is a modern retelling of Katy’s story. In this version Katy is really breathtakingly naughty. Her father, as in the earlier version, is a busy doctor. The Aunt Izzie who in Coolidge’s book tries, largely without success, to control Katy and her five siblings, is in Wilson’s version a stepmother. The modern reader may find certain threads in the Coolidge


The Bakehouse HHHH


Joy Cowley, Gecko Press 140pp, 978-1-7765-7007-2, £6.99 pbk


The Bakehouse is a war story with a difference. Set in war-time New Zealand, it offers a perspective on the Home Front in a country other than Britain through the eyes of eleven- year-old Bert. He can’t wait to grow up and fight in the war – to use weapons, to defend his country and to live a life of adventure. The problem is that seventy years on, 1943 is history soup in the fading memory of an elderly Bert who is no longer able to separate what he did during the war from what he was told or what he read.


On the day of his sister’s funeral, Bert’s great-grandson calls to pay his respects and to ask him about the Bakehouse. For a brief period, within which the narrative resides as a flashback, Bert’s memory suddenly becomes crystal clear – of his parents and his two sisters, of his aunt whose husband is fighting in the war, of her peroxide hussy friend Jean who puzzlingly gets ‘in the family way’ even though she isn’t married, and of the catalyst of the story, the ailing deserter whom they find hiding in the abandoned Bakehouse.


who was too one-dimensional. This is certainly not a charge that could be levelled at this excellent book. RB


creating a disabled character


reviews


It’s a story told through the eyes of a boy trying to make sense of social mores, of sexual attraction and the motivation for a range of adult behaviours. As the plot becomes increasingly complex, the reader is faced with various moral dilemmas – should Bert


the deserter or take care of him? Should they swear six-year-old Meg to secrecy? Is it okay to tell lies, even to the military police? And in the shocking and powerful denouement, was Bert right to do what he did, especially as he was acting out of anger and frustration?


The characters in this gripping novel are complex and carefully layered as the ups and downs of normal family life are played out against the backdrop of the war. In the end, the decision Bert makes determines the outcome of Betty’s whole life. As the mists close in again on his fading memory, Bert bids a final farewell to his sister and prepares to take the seventy-year-old secret to his grave.


I would highly recommend this book to any readers who appreciate vivid characters and an intriguing plot, who are interested in war stories with a difference, or who like to grapple with moral complexities. The questions will remain with you long after the final page has been turned.


Here Be Dragons HHHH


Sarah Mussi, Vertebrate Publishing, 416pp, 978-1-9102-4034-2, £6.99 pbk


For 16-year-old Ellie, living with her mother


means that life is different from many of her contemporaries. She has her friends from schools, but her nearest friend is George who lives in a nearby cottage. Both Ellie and her mother are


rescue team and it is on a call to find a teenage girl lost on Christmas day that Ellie first sees a mysterious boy on the mountain. She later meets him and there is an instant attraction. However, not only is Henry a member of the nobility but he is hiding an even bigger secret that is linked to ancient Welsh mythology.


Sarah Mussi has blended together elements of Welsh myth and legend and put them in a thoroughly modern setting. The issues that Ellie face are the same as most young people today: will she get to sixth form college?; will she ever get a boyfriend?; when will she be treated as an adult? There are major issues around friendship – like what you do when your best friend fancies the boy next door – and peer pressure. Perhaps it is appropriate that Ellie’s neighbour is called George, as he sees himself as her protector. Balanced against this is the much greater conflict between good and evil which has been raging for hundreds of years and which is shown as a fight between the Red Dragon of Wales and the White Dragon of Wessex. The battles occur every 72 years as the dragons become human, so they can try and find someone to give their heart to. The author has left a bit of a cliff-hanger and as the book is in the ‘Snowdonia Chronicles’ I am hopeful that we will have more stories to carry on the tale. There is a strong plot, plenty of action and a real sense of Welsh legend that


connected to the mountain at the base of Snowdon and Betty report


makes you want to find out more. I really enjoyed this book and the characters that inhabit it, so I hope that it will find a large readership.


MP Only We Know HHHHH


Simon Packham, Piccadilly Press, 230pp, 978-1-8481-2427-1, £6.99 pbk


‘Katherine


block like a vegetarian on a school outing to the abattoir.’ This kind of observation is characteristic of Year 11 narrator


language consistently enlivens the mundane world of home and school. Not too many real-life Year 11s could sustain such a comic stance and if Simon Packham were pretending to any kind of YA gritty realism, credulity might well be stretched. But he’s not – and Lauren’s voice is one which many readers will much enjoy. This is all the more remarkable since at the novel’s core is the experience of gender transition, an area where you might think humour could easily be misjudged; risky territory where maybe only a stand-up comedian – as Mr Packham was in an earlier incarnation – might dare to tread.


GR


Lauren has transferred to a dull new school in a dull new town. She and her family – Mum, Dad, and Year 10 sister Tilda – have just moved there; reluctantly, it seems, and solely prompted by something Lauren has done. Exactly what that is may not be spelled out until the closing chapters, but regular clues are planted. Readers might well feel that Mr Packham is being


manipulative, in playing this game; but then he does need to defer the revelation for the climax of his novel to work as well as it certainly does.


That apart, readers should be swept along by the pace and wit of the telling. To start with, all goes surprisingly well for the anxious Lauren at St Thomas’s Community


most fictional schools, the important stuff is rarely interrupted by actual lessons. The teachers are concerned to help her settle in, they are informal and often funny about themselves, especially the few who are aware of her secret past. Lauren is allocated the highly articulate and literary, not to say geeky, Katherine as a minder (in another novel, you might query her credibility too); but she makes other friends readily and soon finds herself helping to plan a fashion show in which teachers positively


the chance to risk looking foolish as models. She even begins a friendship with the attractive Harry, deputy head student, though she knows – but does he? – they’ve met in that earlier life. Harry is considerate and gentle, steering Lauren safely through her first party, an almost obligatory set piece in teen fiction. Then things fall apart. Someone is leaving ‘presents’ for her – a Paddington Bear with a knife stuck in his back, a Woody from Toy Story left hanging by his neck in a subway she’s likely to pass through on her way home one night with, on one foot, her initials, and on the other, R.I.P. These objects hold memories for her – so someone knows her past. The persecution which almost broke her at the last school begins all over


Books for Keeps No.214 September 2015 29 grab College where, as in a little arch, not to say Lauren, whose agile approaches the art


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