BfK 14+ Secondary/Adult continued


the concept of different and co-existing universes. Freeman also raises the interesting question of the extent to which each person’s identity is shaped by the company that person keeps.


This is a book of startling originality and consummate story-telling. Not many books for young adult readers have


quantum. The ending of the book is clever, but perhaps unsatisfactory. It is a culmination that would appeal to Schrödinger, whose simultaneously Freeman


different possibilities, each one just as plausible as the others. One of the founders of the quantum said that he hated it and wished he had never studied it; one is inclined to understand what he meant.


RB These Shallow Graves HHHHH


Jennifer Donnelly, Hot Key Books, 482pp, 978-1-4714-0514-3, £14.99, hbk


Charles Montfort, newspaper owner and partner in the powerful Van Houten Shipping Company, is found in his study in his elegant home in New York’s Gramercy Square with a bullet through his head and a gun in his hand. His daughter Jo receives the news in the common room of Miss Sparkwell’s School for Young Ladies in Connecticut where she is busy editing the school newspaper. Once home, Jo soon questions the accepted view that her father has taken his own life.


So begins a deftly plotted trail of mysterious deaths, which leads Jo into the seediest shadows of the underworld, as well as the drawing rooms and offices of the city’s richest families. One by one, the wealthy partners of Van Houten – pillars of an elite Society which guards its frontiers jealously – are murdered. The motto of the Montforts is Fac quod faciendum est – Do what must be done and Jo soon discovers that she is moving in worlds, high and low, where that dictum is ruthlessly implemented, if necessary at the cost of life itself.


In one sense,


abroad, her education and home life equipping her with little knowledge of life outside her social circle. However, her natural curiosity is coupled with a fearless courage to get at the truth. In this, she is helped by her meeting with Eddie Gallagher, a young and ambitious reporter at the Standard, her father’s paper. What’s more, Jo is disconcerted to find that there’s an immediate electricity between herself and Eddie, with a physical charge she has never known before. That is troubling enough, but she also has to reckon with the assumption of the elder Montforts that she is to marry her lifelong friend, Bram Aldritch, New York’s most eligible bachelor – and the sooner, the better. With Eddie, she follows a dangerous trail which takes her to the morgue, where she meets Eddie’s friend Oscar Rubin, a forerunner of those engaging forensic pathologists who, in TV policiers,


Jo is an innocent gives alive the reader and cat


dead. three


was the courage to tackle the


often get the best comic lines. Then it’s on to brothels, an academy for pickpockets whose master – the sinister ‘Tailor’ – acknowledges Fagin as his inspiration, a bleak lunatic asylum where the sane might be incarcerated by their enemies, and a warren of grimy alleyways peopled by scar-faced men with knives. There is even a moonlit excavation of a shallow grave to exhume a corpse decorated with tattoos with their own secrets to tell.


Readers familiar with crime in print or on screen will probably guess the identity of the killer very early on. The herrings get redder, the hints heavier throughout the story, but our interest may well be not in the whodunit, so much as how Jo will resolve her relationships and her future. Without giving too much away, it can be said the Epilogue leaves the door well ajar for Jo’s further adventures.


The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo


HHHH


Catherine Johnson, Corgi, 272pp, 978-0-5525-5763-4, £7.99 pbk


This much seems to be agreed: in 1817, Mary Willcox, a woman in her early twenties


Witheridge in mid-Devon, was found wandering


Gloucestershire. At first she remained silent, but when she spoke it was in an unknown foreign tongue. She was despatched to the workhouse in Bristol, but eventually she was taken in by the Worralls, a wealthy local family. For whatever reason, she persuaded the Worralls, and many others, that she was Lady Caraboo, a princess from a distant Eastern clime. For some ten weeks, sundry experts became convinced of her authenticity and she achieved celebrity in the locality and the press. Mary was the most unreliable of witnesses, but a glance at Wikipedia would provide BfK readers with more detail of her probable earlier history and eventual fortunes.


Catherine Johnson broadly this version


in Gloucestershire. The fiction also allows insights into Caraboo’s thinking and the invention of characters who gather around her at Knole Park, the Worralls’ home. Cassandra, their 16-year-old daughter, is Johnson’s own creation. Steeped in romantic novels,


The narrative wisely stays close to Jo’s perception of things throughout the 100 chapters, so that on such a long and winding road confusion is avoided,


to the reader. Thus we experience Jo’s


pities the girls she meets trapped in an inevitable


pickpocketing to prostitution – that she herself is trapped on a parallel journey from her restricted upbringing to an arranged marriage with no escape, into a life she shapes for herself. Excitement is relentlessly maintained, not only through cliff- hangers, the threat of violence and coincidences enough to satisfy any Victorian reader, but also


relationships snared in a web of social hierarchies and prejudice. Readers of Donnelly’s 2003 Carnegie-winning A Gathering Light will not be surprised to find a strong sense of place; the streets of New York, rich and poor, become characters in themselves, one of several features which invite comparison


distinguished Sally Lockhart novels, set a few years earlier in London’s underworld. GF


with Philip Pullman’s 32 Books for Keeps No.214 September 2015 through


critical recognition – as she graduation


from


Frankenstein, Cassandra’s thoughts run mostly on visits to the dressmaker and the milliner, and upon young men. Appearance is all. She is captivated in an instant by the ‘dark and long’ eyelashes of the local innkeeper’s son, though when it comes to a choice, she’s rather more entranced by Edmund Gresham, school friend of her brother Fred (‘He would look at her the way he had done at the ball – his eyes intense, almost desperate’); his charms are enhanced by the prospect of a life at Gresham Hall and the title which marriage might one day bring.


including Mary Shelley’s without condescension


Cassandra’s shallowness serves to emphasise the courage of Caraboo/ Mary and, ironically, her integrity. Johnson’s Caraboo is only 17 but she has already suffered the loss of a still-born child, and the book opens with her rape at the rough hands of a couple of farm boys. Her own quick- witted inventions


life she has endured, the scriptural stories


to read at Sunday school, and the bedtime tales she made up to distract her anxious little sister back home in Devon. So, as each challenge comes along – facing a phrenology and linguistics expert, resisting a rum- soaked fraud of a naval captain who’s never been to sea – she responds with an increasing awareness of her own strength. Eventually – and this is probably the strongest strand in the novel – it is her encounter with Fred which changes things for both of them.


We meet Fred early in the tale on one of his regular visits with his friends to a brothel, close to Westminster School, where he is in his final term. Ahead lie the tedium of Oxford (he’s


through which she learned derive from the of Mary’s adventures adopts on a country lane in from the village of


no scholar) and a lifetime in his father’s bank in Bristol. On his return to Knole Park for the holidays, Fred sees through Caraboo’s pretence. But to his surprise, he comes to recognise Mary’s intrinsic honesty; she is toying with a social class with pretension at its core. Fred is convinced that in the end, ‘Every one of us is a liar’. In a wildly romantic conclusion, it looks as though the unlikely couple will leap every barrier the differences of social class put in their way.


Some of the social commentary seems heavy-handed (‘She’s intelligent – for a woman. And an American’); and until Fred’s


readers may feel there are longeurs where


Cassandra remains no more than an amusing caricature, but even so, the tale of Lady Caraboo – a curious one indeed – and the transforming relationship between Mary and Fred make for an entertaining read.


GF Counting Stars HHHH


Keris Stainton, Hot Key Books, 324pp, 978-1-4714-0463-4, £6.99 pbk


Anna could not bear the thought of going to university. Then she is offered a job at a theatre


Liverpool, so heads there instead. Her housemates are a mixed bunch of people, most of them studying at a media college.


in the


self-awareness dawns, plot


lacks incident.


This is the story of their lives and about Anna’s journey towards true adulthood via the events that take place during her first few months in Liverpool. We also have Anna’s alter ego as a vlogger with lots of followers, and eventually the two worlds collide with painful consequences.


This is a complex book full of relationships ranging from flatmates and siblings, to parents and lovers. It is a series of almost parallel narratives, which connect through the house that the young people share. None of the characters have straightforward


central character, starts off as a young and naïve person surrounded by people vastly more worldly-wise than she is, and even she finds her safe world has shaky foundations when her job falls through and her parents’ business fails.


The book is about how young people go about finding themselves in a tough world. One of the significant lessons that Anna has to learn is that life on the web is not private; everything can be linked and even a slight hint can give unwanted outsiders some access to things you’d prefer to keep out of the limelight.


This is a book that grew on me the further I read. The language and sexual content make it suitable for post-16s and I would definitely suggest that librarians and teachers read the book before deciding where it would sit in their school. As a fable for our modern age, this is a book for people to read before they go off to university so that they will have a broader idea of issues that can (but hopefully won’t) take place.


MP lives. Anna, the


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