reviews Lorali HHHHH


Laura Dockrill, Hot Key Books, 337pp, 978-1-4714-0423-8, £6.99 pbk


On his way to celebrate his sixteenth birthday, Rory comes across a scruffy naked girl on the beach. Immediately intrigued, he smuggles her home and soon discovers she’s even stranger than he first thought – she’s never eaten cake before, takes huge bites out of a block of butter, drinks vast quantities of water, and immerses herself in next door’s pond at the first opportunity. It turns out that she’s a Mer princess who, unbeknownst to the other mermaids, has made the irreversible decision to ‘surface’ – to grow legs and live among ‘Walkers’. Lorali’s devastated mother Queen Keppel is desperately worried that she’s been captured like her own poor mother, who was horribly tortured by pirates; her skeleton is still attached to the front of their ship. Rory knows that he must keep Lorali’s presence a secret but when he goes to his friend Finn for help, it transpires that Finn’s ‘mad’ grandfather knows rather a lot about her. As Rory and Lorali fall in love, Keppel goes to increasingly extreme lengths to find her, causing much trauma and incurring the wrath of the Mer people.


Laura Dockrill has created a richly detailed and fascinating Mer world. We find out that the first mermaid came about when hundreds of fish kissed a murdered woman on the mouth, blowing air into her lungs; no one is born into the Mer world, they’re people


worthy enough to be ‘saved’ who’ve been


wonderful range of other characters including pirates (bad and very bad), revolting sirens, a traitorous friend and a celebrity-obsessed mermaid (who provides much humour). Lorali is a highly inventive, sometimes rather dark, but always entertaining, read.


RW All of the Above HHHHH


James Dawson, Hot Key Books, 336pp, 978-1-4714-0467-2, £6.99, pbk


Sixteen-year-old Toria has moved with her family to Brompton-on-Sea – a rundown seaside town. She is starting in the Sixth Form at the local school. Toria has low expectations of Brompton-on-Sea and her fellow students. Then she falls in with one of the groups at school – the Freaks – and starts to make friends with Daisy, Polly, Alice, Beasley and Nico. They hang out together at school and on the mini golf course. Slowly, Toria starts to settle in. However, life can be surprising, and in one dramatic year, Toria loses a good friend, has a serious relationship, and then finally falls in love.


All of the Above is a superb piece of


growing self-awareness. It completely captures the teenage female voice and emotions, using both humour and empathy. This coming-of-age novel has


out, tackling a lot of other topics, as well as homosexuality, that have previously


in Young Adult novels. It is not just a great read – it is a great read with a great message. ARa


The Accident Season HHH


Moïra Fowley-Doyle, Corgi, 288pp, 978-0-5523-7130-2, £7.99 pbk


Cara Morris is seventeen. She lives in Ireland with her mother, her older sister Alice, and Sam, the product of a now defunct relationship on the part of her mother. In October of every year the family experiences ‘the accident season’, in which every routine move seems to lead to a physical injury such as a broken bone.


sea and remain the age that this happened; they must all go through a resolution ceremony which reveals their personality, innermost thoughts, and details of their whole life. Lorali fled to the human world just after her resolution – so what was revealed that made her do this?


The story is told by three narrators: Rory, the Sea, and Lorali. Using the Sea is a particularly useful device as it can see things even if only a small amount of it is present – so for instance we learn the goings on in a hotel room where a mermaid is staying as she has seawater there to protect her tail. There’s also a


considered at


This is a story about life, love and growing up. More importantly, it is a story about identity and how different kinds of love are not only important but also equal. The story blurs the dividing lines between heterosexual and homosexual love, showing that love is the same regardless of gender. It also subtly shows us that it is not who we love that is important, but who we are.


A few months ago, I reviewed Read Me Like a Book by Liz Kessler, and wrote about how there was not just a space but also a need for novels about homosexual teenagers. I saw it as a milestone in British Young Adult


homosexuality is openly and actively part


David Leviathan has also


brilliantly on teenage homosexuality.) Books featuring homosexuality can not only be enjoyable fictional works, they also provide a resource


writing, whereby teenage of the narrative. (US author,


written


young adults who are trying to work out their own sexuality and identity. They are important for heterosexual teenage readers too, as they promote tolerance and understanding.


for


Cara’s school runs an unconventional operation known as the Secrets Booth. During the term pupils are invited to sit at an ancient typewriter and leave an anonymous record of some secret. At the end of term these typed secrets are assembled into an art installation. The pupil who manages this booth is named Elsie. After Cara sees Elsie just once, Elsie seems mysteriously to disappear from the school. Various questions now arise. What is the accident season? Does it have a reality? Or is it just a pattern imposed on a series of coincidental events? And what relationship does Elsie have with the Morris family? The last third of this book delivers a telling denouement. These pages make sense of the labyrinthine and amorphous passages that have preceded. Alas, the complexity and apparent disconnection of the build- up could easily deter a reader from continuing. To which genre does this book belong? Is this a thriller? Is it a psychological study? Cross-genre novels are notoriously difficult to write.


Too many books of this kind litter the early text with heavy-handed clues that make the denouement all too predictable. This book goes to the opposite extreme. Its denouement is unexpected, stunningly contrived and genuinely moving. But how many readers will struggle through to reach it?


RB Monsters HHHH


Emerald Fennell, Hot Key Books, 340pp, 978-1-4714-0462-7, £7.99 pbk


I am sure I will never think of Fowey in quite the same way again. This is a story of mysterious deaths and dark goings-on in the holiday resort. It is narrated by one of the two central characters, both aged twelve, but we are never told her name. She is staying in Fowey at her uncle’s hotel for the summer, whilst the grandmother she lives with is away on holiday. This year she meets a boy called Miles who is also staying at the hotel and they discover they share a similar interest in the subject of murder. When dead female bodies start showing up in


been writing about growing up and been incredibly well-thought underrepresented


the sea around the coastline their morbid interest only grows. But what is behind all the murders and will the children solve the mystery?


This is a truly chilling story, told in a very matter of fact way by someone it is very hard to associate with. The narration by the female protagonist is bare and to the point. We gradually get a feel for the personality of the two children and particularly Miles, who is at the hotel with his overly possessive mother. They seem to look at everything in a clinical impersonal way, although the girl does show some fear and empathy. Underlying the murder story is the relationship between some of the main characters: there is a suggestion that the girl is being molested by her uncle; Miles has a rather ‘unhealthy’ relationship with his mother; and even the adults seem scared of someone.


This is definitely a book for the older reader. The language and underlying themes, as well as the description of the dead bodies, make this a teen read, although I am sure that many would argue that it is no scarier than some of the horror series that abound at the moment. I suspect that this will be a great hit with the intended audience.


MP Nest HHHHH


Esther Ehrlich, Oneworld Publications, 326pp, 978-1-7807-4809-2, pbk


It’s 1972 in Cape Cod. Naomi Orenstein (known as Chirp, because her hobby is bird-watching) is aged eleven. She lives with her father, mother and older sister Rachel. Her mother is a dancer. Chirp is very close to her mother, slightly less so to her psychologist father. The family life is disrupted when mother is diagnosed with multiple


course of a dancing career. The illness brings on a nervous collapse and the mother must be moved to an institution her daughters call ‘the nuthouse’.


The remainder


charts the efforts of the family to cope with this devastating situation and the ways in which relationships are formed and fragment.


Chirp has a rare moment of elation at school when she earns admiration and applause from her teacher and her classmates by imitating the action of a bird she has observed. And at that moment, out of the blue, comes a life-changing event.


Ehrlich construct a narrative has a marked that


ability to rings


true, in part the result of her lead character’s authenticity, the language and idiom of the 1970s being convincingly captured. A child of eleven may have enough knowledge of the world to grasp events around her, but not enough to manage them effectively. Ehrlich gives Chirp exactly this measure of worldly knowledge. Above all Ehrlich deals with the issues of physical and mental illness in a supremely balanced way. She neither dramatises nor flinches.


RB of Ehrlich’s novel sclerosis,


the end of


Books for Keeps No.214 September 2015 33


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