reviews


through apparent truths to the real centre; and even this may turn out to be a trick. The plot, on the face of it a modern family story, is also a mystery with a real twist at the end; a twist that shocks the characters and the reader. And it is perfect.


Funny, moving, gripping, this is a novel to recommend to adventurous readers who want to be excited and entertained.


Girl on a Plane HHHH


Miriam Moss, Andersen Press, 272pp, 978-1-7834-4331-4, £7.99 pbk


I’m just old enough to remember the hijack in September 1970 of four planes by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The planes were forced to land in a remote desert airstrip in Jordan, and four tense days followed as the hijackers threatened to kill the hostages if their demands were not met. Miriam Moss was a passenger on one of those planes. Aged just fifteen, she was flying alone from Bahrain to London to return to boarding school. Forty-five years on, she has written a novel based on her experiences, and very fine it is.


FH


Anna two companions, a boy called David who is her own age, and nine-year-old Tim, travelling with his terrapin Fred, and more concerned with Fred’s well-being than his own predicament. As Moss explains in a postscript, it is a work of fiction, though grounded in her own ‘life- defining’ experiences – there was a boy with a terrapin, though she never spoke to him. Some of the other episodes – completely truthful – seem almost surreal: the arrival of a group of journalists allowed on board to take photos and keen for close-ups of the hostages’ suffering; a group photo organised by the hijackers of them lined up under the plane’s wing with the female passengers, which reminds Anna exactly of her school photo. This event makes her see the men as humans – somebody’s brother, father, uncle; men with a cause. Moss is careful throughout to explain the PFLP’s motives, though readers are in no doubt either as to the very real threat to the hostages: in another incident, also based on a real event, Anna’s buckle catches on one of the gunmen’s belts, crammed with bullets and grenades, and he grabs her, pushing the muzzle of his gun into her neck.


It’s a unique and extraordinary story, exceptionally well told. Miriam Moss


enables her readers to share her own ‘life-defining’ experience; we can only


admire the courage and resilience shown by her and the other human beings caught up in it.


AR The Edge of Shadows HHH


Elizabeth George, Hodder, 376pp, 978-1-4447-2005-1, £16.99 hbk


Two opening chapters describe the busy preparations for school, and indeed a new home. Anna (Moss’s fictional alter ego) is a Forces child, and her father has a new posting – we quickly get a sense of Anna’s warm family life, and particularly her mother, whom she calls Marni. By chapter three, Anna is on the plane and the hijack is underway, the suddenness as shocking for the reader as it is for her. The description of the days that follow makes for extremely tense reading as Anna and her fellow hostages are held prisoner in the unbearable heat of the desert with hardly any food or water, surrounded by men with guns and explosives. Anna thinks often of her parents, and occasionally the action cuts away to them and the agony they are going through, but mainly our attention is with Anna, in the plane. It’s riveting, unputdownable reading and yet, despite the tension, there’s humour too: Moss gives


Set on Whidbey Island in the state of Washington, where the author also lives, this novel has enough plot to keep a whole series going let alone a single title. It involves a set of young people, some of whom belong to local families often struggling to get by. They are joined by recent incomers, one of whom, Becca King, has the ability to hear what others are thinking. We first met Becca in The Edge of Nowhere; this is now her third fictional outing. Her psychic ability would seem to give her an advantage when it comes to tracing who is responsible for an outbreak of arson on the island, but even so the solution to the mystery is only solved at the end of


densely written story. Before that, she conducts a strong teenage romance also knowing what the other person is thinking and feeling at the time – not always an easy matter.


Elizabeth George is an experienced writer, and hooked-up fans will find everything here that entertained them in the previous two books. Others, new to the genre, may find that one teenage


difficult to distinguish from another, and that the author’s very firm hand on the fictional tiller leads to a certain over-explanatory tone in the text that can become wearisome. But there are still plenty of surprises along the way, and teenage love is described with admirable frankness, which is not always the case when writing for a young adult audience.


character is sometimes NT this Drop HHH


Katie Everson, Walker, 336pp, 978-1-4063-5627-4, £7.99 pbk


Sometimes when there


outstanding work on a subject it is difficult for another book to step out from its shadow. Drop is always going to struggle with comparison to Melvin Burgess’s Junk, but the comparison is unfair.


Carla is an intelligent girl from a successful family, but she has moved house so many times she has never set down roots. Now her mother has her dream job and they seem set to stay in London at least until Carla finishes school. Carla is determined to fit in and makes some friends early on at the new school. But then the class heart-throb and bad boy takes an interest in her, and she decides that this is the opportunity


invent herself as one of the popular kids. As her relationship with Finn develops and she becomes one of the cool crowd, the pressure to join them in taking drugs begins. There is no heavy-handed pushing, but as she spends more time with them it seem harder not to try them out. When she does it is BRILLIANT!!


The power of Drop is its ordinariness. Carla is just an ordinary girl who wants to be cool, her life is not a wreck, her mum could be around more, but all in all things are okay. She takes drugs because her friends do, and the drugs make her feel great. She goes into a decline, but it is slipping from an A* to a B grade, not mugging old ladies for money. In the end she comes near to death when someone spikes her drink, and she realises that what she thought was cool is anything but.


This is a very readable, realistic book with some characters the type of which are found in every school. It is honest in its dealing with teenage drug use, and the pitfalls. It is a book that will have its moment – but Junk hasn’t been eclipsed just yet. CD


The Secret Fire HHHH


C J Daugherty and Carina Rozenfeld, Atom, 432pp, 978-0-3490-0219-4, £6.99 pbk


‘Jump!’ There’s a super-dramatic opening to The Secret Fire: Sacha, cocky,


extraordinary degree, voluntarily jumps from the top of a five storey building for a bet. That’s shocking enough, but then he gets up and walks away. It’s the kind of first chapter that defies the reader to put the book down. By the time we find out just what gives Sacha his apparent immortality, another teen has entered the action: Taylor, also seventeen,


is studying hard for her ‘A’ levels, determined to win a place at Oxford. She’s about as different to Sacha as you can get, but when the two start to talk on Skype, in a kind of online school exchange scheme designed to


atmosphere crackles, and not just because of Taylor’s sudden freaky tendency to blow electricity circuits simply by her presence.


improve Sacha’s English, the lives in England and French, reckless to an to re-


Teens with special powers are nothing new in YA fiction, and it probably won’t come as a surprise


discover that not only is Sacha’s life in Taylor’s hands, but that she is the only person on the planet strong enough to take on dark forces threatening humanity. However, its authors – this is a co-creation between C J Daugherty and best-selling French author Carina Rozenfeld – certainly know a lot about creating atmospheric, involving thrillers. The second half of the book in particular is terrifically tense, with a very real sense of impending danger. The paranormal element – Taylor is the last in a long line of female alchemists – is clever and original, and I was taken too with the sharp Buffy-esque dialogue and tone. A welcome piece of authorly entente cordiale!


MMa When I was Me HHHH


Hilary Freeman, Hot Key Books, 272pp, 978-1-4714-0492-4, £6.99 pbk


Ella Sampson is a Londoner aged seventeen. One morning she wakes up to a number of surprises. In her bedroom is a wall that wasn’t there when she fell asleep. The decoration is now pink. When Ella sees her mother, her mother’s hair is white instead of brown. At college Ella finds she is studying science subjects instead of the arts subjects she was taking. Her old online profiles have disappeared. Her former friends are there at the college, but they are no longer her friends. In short, her entire existence has evaporated. Her parents think her puzzling new behaviour is the result of a car accident she had while her father was teaching her to drive. The questions posed by the novel are: what has actually happened? and which of Ella’s two lives can be classified as ‘real’?


Two very disparate cultures converge in Freeman’s book. It is impossible to


Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who woke one morning to find that he had been metamorphosed into a giant beetle. But the book also leads to an exploration of the way contemporary quantum physics (with particles being located in two places at once) leads to


Books for Keeps No.214 September 2015 31 read it without thinking of to readers to is one


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