reviews 10 – 14 Middle/Secondary continued


beautiful, bizarre and bonkers local people and wildlife. There is a grizzly bartender who serves nothing but beer, stew or customer’s own body parts, and there are tribal religious zealots ready to sacrifice anything that moves. There are also lots and lots of brains in jars. None of these peoples are as weird as the professor, though, who is hundreds of years old, rides a moped and insists on stopping for tea and sandwiches, even when being chased


by magical-spear-


wielding warlords! Sadly, the excitement offered by intergalactic whistle-stops


these


is rather short-lived as the entire second half of the novel takes place on one planet: Outlandish. Outlandish is home to all manner of mythical creatures


made ultra-famous in other stories. Gold-hoarding dragons


schemes to vanquish villains. Though there


are subtle


that have already been soar


the heads of wistful woodland elves, while knights and wizards


over hatch twists on these


familiar characters (the knight is called Sir Brenda, for example), even younger readers will feel that they have ultimately met them all before, which is a shame as the predictability that emerges detracts significantly from the humour and excitement that is prominent in early chapters. Alfie and The Professor are a great


team and readers will be rooting for them as they stumble their way across the universe trying to get home in time for tea. Their cosmic atlas maps out many fascinating locations, though readers will have visited some of them a few times already. SD


Girl 38 Finding a Friend HHHH


Ewa Jozefkowicz, Zephyr, 196pp, 9781786698971, £10.99 hbk


Reading this sweetly told morality tale is to return temporarily to the world of children’s fiction fifty years ago. Children and parents like each other, there are no swear words or examples of teenage argot, teachers are benign, elderly


neighbours respected and


main characters eventually realise they have do the right thing. There is always room for novels like this concentrating on the theme of moral growth while also telling a good story. It’s just that it


all feels a little old-fashioned. So


too is the comic strip adventure that Kat draws for herself, involving heroic space-travelling Girl 38 and her mortal enemies the Vllks. But all in all this is indeed still a good story. Shy Kat even at the age of fourteen is dominated by her bullying friend Gem. When an artlessly innocent but potentially popular new boy joins the class Gem temporarily put in the shade sets out to make his school


life unbearable. Kat weakly


goes along with this, despising herself for doing so. But things change for her after she befriends Ania, an old lady living next door who over time


tells the story of her own young life. Partly based on the author’s Polish grandmother’s harrowing experience during World War Two, it describes how as a young girl Ania rescues her Jewish friend Mila from certain death in one of the ghettoes. Heroism of this dimension goes some way towards balancing out the evil it was up against and here acts as an inspiration for Kat finally to put things right. So there is a lot


for


readers in this novel, and it would have made an excellent off point for


The Closest Thing to Flying HHHH


Gill Lewis, Oxford, 240pp, 978 19 274948 2, £6.99 pbk


Samira Solomon is eleven years old. She lives as an illegal immigrant in modern London


and Robel. Robel is the same man who trafficked the two of them from Eritrea.


Samira’s mother


very little English. She is under the complete control of Robel.


Samira and her mother are abused by their criminal companion. On one of her rare trips out of the


home Samira finds and buys a hat decorated with a stuffed green bird. The hat came in a box. In that box she also finds a diary kept by twelve year old Henrietta Waterman in the 1890s. The diary entries reveal that Henrietta is starting to question the norms of that Victorian world. Supported by her beloved Aunt Kitty, Henrietta begins to challenge those values. Reading Henrietta’s brave words, Samira finds comfort and courage. The question posed by Lewis is how the book Samira has found will change the lives of all those concerned. It is sometimes said that


young readers find history boring and


uninstructive. This book


demonstrates that it need not be so. Lewis achieves a feat which has become increasingly popular in young literature – combining a narrative from a past age with issues all too prevalent


in contemporary society,


such as trafficking of people. She also shows how some contemporary organisations have their origins in the past. In this case she describes the founding meeting of what was to become the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. This reviewer’s


main misgiving


about an otherwise outstanding book is that the narratives of some of the characters are developed enough to whet the reader’s appetite but not enough to satisfy that appetite. There are some unfinished portraits. RB


with her mother


speaks Both


Monsters HHHH


Sharon Dogar, Andersen, 451pp, 9781783448029, £12.99 hbk 978-1-5098-7004-2, £7.99 pbk


This is an outstandingly good book, so congratulations to Charlie Sheppard for commissioning it and to Sharon Dogar for then coming up so splendidly with the goods. Already described by Philip Pullman as ‘a talented storyteller,’ she exceeds even these high expectations in this story about the complicated and often tragic life of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein and lover of the famous poet. It is their relationship, rather than the genesis of the famous title, that forms the basis for this current novel. Mary met Shelley when she was


16 and the poet only five years older. The young love that followed was passionate and intense, even surviving a series of appalling setbacks along the way. Mary herself comes over as desperately earnest as well as incurably romantic. Shelley, in return, shares her idealism and reciprocates her love while never quite escaping a type of thoughtlessness stemming from owning a place in British aristocracy


expectations of money eventually to come. Other important


plus the characters


play their part too. There is Mary’s father, the insufferably self-righteous social reformer William Godwin, and also her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, who died twelve days after Mary was born


but whose


younger jumping


classroom discussion


when such things still happened untied to any National Curriculum or ‘comprehension’ exercise. NT


14+ Secondary/Adult What a cast, then, and what a story


ensues as the couple contends with extreme poverty, prejudice and the problems of trying to live along with others while following ideals


that


sound better on paper than when experienced for real. Dogar lets this turbulent narrative largely tell itself. Artfully dropping hints on the various origins of Mary’s great novel found within her own life, she remains fair to all parties involved. Also packed with minutely researched historical detail, not to mention al the complications of inheriting closely guarded money, there is so much going on here. Always interesting as well as emotionally involving, what’s not to like? NT


Tales from the Inner City HHHH


Shaun Tan, Walker, 224pp, 9781406383843, £19.99, hbk


How might you portray the relationship of humanity and the natural world and the threat of habitat destruction and


species extinction? Perhaps,


on the one hand, with the statistics of decline, or a documentary horror show–a dead de-horned rhino or a sea-bird ingesting a plastic bag. And, on the other hand, the fascination of an Attenborough documentary, all the natural glory of what we take for granted and are losing. In these twenty-five tales and poems, as you might expect, Shaun Tan takes a different approach. In prose that is at turns reflective, anguished, angry, sad and ironic, and in jaw dropping illustrations, he moves within and beyond


these straightforward


reactions. Perhaps taking his cue from those animals who have long lived with us and those others who have adapted


themselves to city


habitats, living mostly in secret in our midst, he imagines a surreal urban landscape in which animals and humans co-exist in various ways. Here


our mutual dependence is


acknowledged and our own animal self is never forgotten. And what can I say about these illustrations? They are remarkable, sometimes creating a dramatic


narrative,


evoking wonder, our


response, always whose opening our


sometimes provoking eyes


in so many ways. It is a masterful collection,


visionary power ground-breaking


feminist ideals were to remain with her daughter all her life. Enter too Jane, later known as Claire, Mary’s half-sister of equal age who also falls for Shelley, as did so many others. And lastly Lord Byron, very much mad, bad and dangerous to know in life as well as in these pages.


is perhaps best expressed in the story of the Moonfish. The single illustration for this story graces the cover of the collection, and, in the classic stance of the fisherman and his catch, encapsulates both our love and pride of the natural world and our impulse to exploit it. This beautiful creature,


whose


embodies its vulnerability and its glittering glamour, is destined for the restaurant table. CB


transparency


Books for Keeps No.235 March 2019 29


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