reviews


where it lands, to read only one of the two possible endings. Will readers actually do this? Not this one. I couldn’t leave one of the two possibilities unknown, I needed to know what the writer had imagined for Jess and Jack, to know whether they faced tragedy or the possibility of a more conventional happy ending. Strangely, both endings were satisfying and hopeful and neither of them will disappoint. This story, which is not at all about things being wasted, will give readers of all ages a lot to think about. Highly recommended. LK


Editor’s


Choice The 10pm Question


HHHH


Kate De Goldi, Templar, 240pp, 978 1 84877 467 4, £10.99 hbk


12-year-old Frankie’s mum works from home making cakes for restaurants. Frankie, who suffers from chronic anxiety and imagines every worst case scenario is about to happen, takes comfort in asking her at bedtime about his latest anxieties – hence the book’s title. As the story unfolds we come to realise that not only does Frankie’s mum work from home – she never leaves it. For the last nine years she hasn’t put a foot outdoors. Despite having a great best friend, Gigs, and a new friend, Sydney, an elder brother and sister and a loving father, it also emerges that Frankie thinks it is his job to look after his mother: when cake ingredients are needed, for example, she depends on him to go to the shop. And despite the 10pm question moment with his mum, there are the questions that Frankie finds he can’t ask – why does his mum not go outside? Does his own anxiety mean that he will turn out like her?


A Web of Air HHHHH


Philip Reeve, Scholastic, 304pp, 978 1 407115 17 7, £12.99 hbk


To begin with, things are pretty quiet; domestic, even, since sometime Engineer Fever Crumb (eponymous heroine of the first prequel to the Mortal Engines quartet) is very much at home as stage technician to Persimmon’s Electric Lyceum, a travelling theatre newly arrived to play a season at Mayda-at-the-World’s-End. Fever, for whom rational thought is all, finds a complementary spirit in Arlo, a native of Mayda. Unlike his superstitious fellow citizens, Arlo is both pragmatist and dreamer, with skills bequeathed to him by his ship- building father. He’s close to creating a flying machine and once he learns to trust Fever, he sees that her technical expertise can develop the engine he needs to power his new airship. Such a breakthrough, though, with its implications for exploration, trade and militar y supremacy, would render obsolete all the work going on back in London to transform the city into the greedy juggernaut familiar to readers of Mortal Engines and its sequels.


And then, suddenly, Fever is bundled into a sedan chair on a dark street, her kidnapper is assassinated, and she herself squirms out of a toilet window and goes on the run from a deadly killer. London and its ruthless agents cannot allow the aircraft to fly. The novel takes off and never lands again, twisting through the dangerous alleyways and out to the islands off


De Goldi has created a subtle, engaging and humorous portrait of a family that appears ‘normal’ yet its members are complicit in not addressing the disturbance and fragility at its core. As the tale progresses Frankie comes to resent the responsibilities he has


Mayda where murderers, spies and double-agents lurk. Reeve readers will relish the edgy mix of violence, danger and mystery, tempered by humour. His ingenuity is there in the language as well as the artefacts – especially the buildings mounted on water-driven funiculars, ascending and descending within the volcanic crater which is the heart of Mayda. Reeve’s adventurers rarely win through without cost. Fever has only just admitted to herself that her emerging love for Arlo transcends her rationalism when circumstances and misunderstandings drive them apar t. The closing pages find her watching from the harbour wall as Arlo’s ship shrinks into ‘the huge emptiness of night and sea and sky’, knowing she will never see him again.


Well, maybe. Let’s hope a third prequel to the mighty quartet will confound her fears.


GF Mistress of the Storm HHH


M L Welsh, David Fickling Books, 320pp, 978 0 385 61766 6, £10.99 hbk


Verity Gallant lives in the remote harbour town of Wellow, and often feels like a misfit, especially when compared to her pretty and popular


acquiescence in the face of a hitherto unknown relative’s sudden appearance in their lives is a little unconvincing. However, as the first in a planned series of four stories about Verity Gallant, there is enough nautical appeal here to make you hope that future instalments will set full sail. CS


would like to be. Some of her characters too, verge on the two- dimensional. Verity’s menacing grandmother feels a bit pantomime; and Verity’s parents’


timid


unwittingly taken upon himself and experience them as a burden – and thereby emerges the possibility of asking what has seemed unsayable.


The world of boys on the threshold of puberty is richly depicted – the collections (words, model soldiers), the creation of private language, the rituals, the sharp observation of and delight in the idiosyncracies of adults. This is a powerful depiction of a boy struggling to engage with the world despite his mother’s difficulties in so doing. Not since Jacqueline Wilson’s The Illustrated Mum has this been achieved with such sensitivity and wit.


(Those adults for whom it could be problematic should note that the language is sometimes robust.) RS


sister, Poppy. She catches herself gazing out to sea and wishing she could pick herself up in the air and fly away. But one day, whilst in the town librar y, her customar y hideout, a mysterious 6-foot tall stranger in a patchwork velvet coat gives her a large red book. It recounts the legend of the Keeper of the Wind, a beautiful but terrifying heroine, and of stories that come true when told aloud. Slowly but inexorably, Verity is drawn into the book’s power ful magic, uncovering the murky history of her smuggling forebears. With the help of her friends, Henry and Martha, she is soon battling the forces of a dark power which threatens to engulf not only her own family, but the whole town too.


M L Welsh spent her formative years in the Isle of Wight sailing town of Cowes, a clear source of inspiration for the fictional community of Wellow. The maritime elements of her novel are its most successful aspect: the salty coastal town and the tightly-knit lives of inhabitants drawn always seaward are evocatively described, as are Verity’s own first attempts at sailing. Welsh’s story however is not always so successful: occasionally elements resonate familiarly from stories read before, and it therefore does not feel as wholly original as it


Annexed HHHHH


Sharon Dogar, Andersen, 336pp, 978 1 84939 124 5, £12.99 hbk


Sharon Dogar invites her readers to revisit life in the claustrophobic annexe above Otto Frank’s Amsterdam warehouse – this time through the eyes and feelings of Peter van Pels (the Peter van Daan of Anne’s Diary of a Young Girl) who is at first intensely irritated by Anne but then, in some sense, falls in love with her.


What makes those slow days in the annexe so absorbing this time around is what is not in the Diary. We are familiar with Anne’s sometimes moody view of her own mother, Peter’s parents and the annoying ‘Alber t Dussell’; and indeed her shifting relationship with Peter. We now return to many of the events of Anne’s account, filtered through Peter’s very different perceptions; and Dogar has inventively added some ‘fictions’, if you like, which Anne could never have known. Here, Peter brings with him to the annexe the secret of his passion for Liese, a Jewish girl who has disappeared, bundled into the back of a Nazi truck. For many months, her loss colours his adolescent dreams and his view of those incarcerated with him in the warehouse. Readers previously captured by Anne’s story might well set passages from this book alongside their counterpar ts in the Diary; and that will prompt admiration for the subtlety and empathy with which the hesitant Peter is drawn.


This story does not end with the sudden silencing of Anne’s voice as we learn of the arrests at the annexe.


Books for Keeps No.184 September 2010 27


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