reviews 10 – 14 Middle/Secondary continued


to normal he knows that can never happen. Immobilised by anger and regret he retreats further and further into himself, avoiding his home and his father and visiting the places where he was most happy with his mother. It is when he is visiting one of


these refuges, the seashore, that he meets Alice. She, too, is lost, trapped in a cycle of flight from her mother’s violent partner Ross and condemned to live in one tiny B and B room with her two younger brothers. She is wracked with a potent mix of fear of Ross finding them and anger at her mother’s inability to fully rid herself of him. After a hostile beginning, the two form an unlikely alliance, each finding something in the other which is missing from their lives and which they can trust. Ainsworth writes with conviction


about the difficult territory of male grief and how it isolates so utterly because those experiencing it rarely have the vocabulary to discuss it. She weaves in its components clearly and demonstrates how they erode what society expects in the behaviour of males, young and old. When Archie is his team’s star player, this provides a framework within which his friends can respond to him. When he steps out of that territory friends drift away, unsure of how to deal with the situation. The narrative alternates between


the past and present and Ainsworth tackles Alfie’s Mum’s illness and death through his eyes. She spares the reader no details, writing up to and including the moment of death, highlighting starkly the very different ways in which Alfie and his father react to it. Lost is a story of great emotional rawness but also one of redemption, of a knowledge that the cliche ‘Life must go on’ is a cliche simply because it is true. Alfie, his father and Alice find their way along the next part of the road by sharing the bedrock of emotion which lies underneath the worst experiences. VR MP


Good boy HHHH


Mal Peet, Illus Emma Shoard, Barrington Stoke 74pp., 978-1-78112-852-7 £7.99 pbk


This Barrington Stoke publication is classified as reading age 8, but YA, as the content is more suitable for older readers, so this belongs in what is sometimes called Hi-Lo. It starts with Sandie’s nightmare


as a child about a black dog which is chasing her, and it is frightening enough for Mum to need to comfort her.


Professional advice leads to


the family getting a friendly dog, and sure enough, having Rabbie sleeping under her bed means that he growls when her sleep is


disturbed, and


she can stroke him “Good boy!” and go back to sleep. The nightmares gradually stop, Sandie has a happy time at university, and all is well until Rabbie dies on the day that Sandie


learns that she has been accepted into the police force. The nightmares return, Sandie gets too little restful sleep and her work suffers, so she is recommended to get medical help, but does not take the pills prescribed. One day, she and her partner in


the police car are summoned to an incident in a block of flats, and, leaving her partner to look after the injured, Sandie takes a risk, goes up to the roof and comes face to face with a man with a gun. The black dog, just as in her nightmare, appears on the next block- and jumps…. There is a twist, and the reader is not entirely sure what has happened, but all is well. Mal Peet was indeed a master


storyteller, and his widow Elspeth is still finding unpublished stories. Emma Shoard’s illustrations, mostly in black and


white, D-Day HHH


Michael Noble, ill. Alexander Mostov, Wide-Eyed, 48pp, 9781786036261, £12.99, hbk


Published to coincide with the 75th anniversary, this tells the story of D Day partly through the eyes of twenty real life participants, whose experiences


are used to provide


insights into aspects of the invasion. There is a good range amongst the twenty, from front-line


soldier to


back-room boffin. Most are on the Allied


side, but the Germans are


represented by two field marshals and a bewildered guard taken prisoner in one of the first actions of the invasion. There are four women, among them intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and a French aristocrat, Brigitte de Kergolay, whose chateau is requisitioned first by the Germans and then


the of the aftermath. Allies. There is a


good balance, too, between these individual experiences and a general account


invasion and its However, it’s a book


which doesn’t live up to its promise. It cheats a little in its presentation. This, I imagine, might have something to do with the costs of doing it properly. So, while the book promises


us


there is nothing in quotation marks. The author speaks


individual accounts, for everyone.


Each participant is introduced in a box on the top left hand corner of each double page spread, with a photograph. Sometimes these photos are obviously of the persons themselves: from a personal album or, for the field marshals, a more official source. But sometimes you have no idea if the person concerned is in the photograph accompanying the account of the role they played. Is Helen Denton one of the typists in her photograph? Is Helmut Roehmer one of these German prisoners of war? The reader has no idea, since the text


do have a


nightmarish quality to match the tale, and with a suitable warning about the content, this could be popular. DB


is silent. And why is Martha Gellhorn accompanied by Japanese military here? The reader will never know. Much of the text is in quite small


print found in boxes dotted about the double page illustrations by Alexander Mostov. And, while I can understand the


problems a strange illustrating accounts


almost caricature human figures seem


particularly inappropriate, accompaniment


photographs of the actual actors in the event. CB


The Good Thieves HH


Katherine Rundell, Bloomsbury, 320pp, 9781526614551, £12 hbk


Stories where children their


various


own still manage to solve serious


problems,


entirely on often


including crime, have been a staple part of children’s literature ever since Erich Kāstner’s superb Emil and the Detectives. At its best, this genre feeds children’s


wildest fantasies while


also reminding them every now and again that their powers particularly when up against dangerous adults often remain very limited. But there are also other more flattering but basically escapist stories where child characters


are all obstacles


shown overcoming however


fearsome


on their way towards an idealised ending. Unnaturally clever pets often play a crucial part here while their young masters and mistresses forge ahead, drawing on sometimes quite extraordinary skills of their own while leaving their parents in the dark until the last chapter. Such was Enid Blyton’s


heady


and cheerfully undemanding fantasy formula in her Famous Five stories, and so too, surprisingly, is it found in Katherine Rundell’s approach in this novel. Young Vita in search of a stolen necklace on a trip to New York has first to outwit a powerful crook plus his murderous henchman in order to succeed. She is helped by new friends she finds on the way, including a young pick-pocket with almost superhuman powers and other children working in a circus. They all get involved in a number of scrapes, at times quite literally when walls are climbed and windows are forced, but the gang stays loyal throughout. But by this time all tension has disappeared as everything keeps going their way, leading up to a triumphant climax that seems predestined ever since plans were first mooted. Nina Bawden’s story A Handful of


Thieves, published in 1967, remains a wonderfully wise and witty account of the lows as well as highs involved when children try to take the law into their own hands and almost inevitably sometimes get it wrong. It still offers better and far more substantial fare than this deeply disappointing fifth novel from writer capable of doing so much better. NT


to


there might be in of war, these


High Rise Mystery HH


Sharna Jackson, Knights of, 360pp, 978 1 9996425 1 8, £6.99, pbk


I welcome a murder mystery set in an urban tower block that has two sisters as its underage sleuths. When Norva and Niki find antique dealer Hugo dead in a skip, they set out in the usual way to solve the mystery of who-dun-it. They seek to establish time of death, to work out a series of pertinent questions to ask the limited range of suspects, and to gradually discover who might be the killer. Of course, in precisely the way of Midsomer Murders or Death in Paradise, the whole business turns out to be much more complicated than they could have imagined. It’s complicated, too, by the fact that their dad, the on-site manager of the tower block, is the prime suspect. There’s a touch of realism in the idea that it’s not police ineptitude or stupidity that puts them so far behind the girls in solving the case, just simply that the police don’t have the necessary number of officers to devote to it. It’s written in a pared down punchy style, with touches of humour and street dialogue and some nice to and fro between the girls. However, I found it difficult to work my way through the twists and turns of the plot, and this unravelling isn’t helped by the way in which the sisters’ documentation of their enquiries is set out by the publishers in tables of small faint print. At over 350 pages, despite the short chapters, I found it rather too long. CB


The Butterfly Circus HHHH


Francesca Armour-Chelu, Walker Books, 224pp, 978-1406384369, £6.99 pbk


This is a story of lost and found – lost courage, lost memories, a lost sister. It’s set in an other-world that feels magical, though any ‘magic’ is just illusion, because this is a world of circuses and sideshows. Twelve-year-old Tansy and her big sister


Belle are stars of the Butterfly Circus, trapeze artists flying above the heads of the audience as if on wings, until the day when Tansy makes a mistake, and falls. She is saved, miraculously, no-one quite knows how but though she recovers, she


Books for Keeps No.237 July 2019 29


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