BfK 10–14 Middle/Secondary continued


Peter’s story continues through the stench of the cattle trucks as they rumble to the camps and then the death march which we know he endured through Poland and Austria to the infamous Mauthausen. There is some doubt about what happened to him there, but it seems likely he died only days before the camp was liberated in May, 1945. This last section is haunted by the terrors of nightmare, since Peter is sometimes in delirium. The camps have been written about for young readers several times in the last two decades and this book matches the most poignant of those accounts. The publisher’s blurb claims that Peter’s story will ‘appeal to fans of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’; Annexed is a more truthful book than that.


GF


events of the day on which Mina takes her SATS tests: they will never seem the same again.)


The world as it is will, one suspects, always find its Minas difficult to accommodate. To her loving mother she may well be ‘a girl with her own opinions and attitudes’ but to the majority of others, such as the beautifully named Ms Palaver from the local ‘Pupil Referral Unit’, she will almost inevitably remain merely ‘an imper tinent girl with her pompous crackpot notions’. It is only when she meets some of the other children attending the Unit – ‘a bunch of misfits in a place that accepted them as misfits’ – that she begins to feel free from the constrictions of conventional thinking; it is also here that she realises the need to tell her own story in her own terms, a far cry from the ar tificial exercises of school ‘composition’. It all amounts to a poignant, heart-warming novel, fuelled by Almond’s generosity of spirit and his endorsement of childhood’s individ- uality and quirkiness. As a footnote, it should be added that in terms of structure and presentation it is as strikingly original as Mina herself. RD


Space Crime Conspiracy HHH


Gareth P Jones, Bloomsbury, 320pp, 978 0 7475 9981 4, £5.99 pbk


My Name is Mina HHHHH


David Almond, Hodder, 304pp, 978 0 340 99725 3, £12.99 hbk


A cat called Whisper, a school called St Bede’s Middle, a former neighbour called Mr Myers, a friend called Sophie Smith, a part-time journalist mother and, most significant of all, a dead father whose grave is in the local churchyard: these are the principal signposts to the world inhabited by nine-year-old Mina, the wonder fully realised and immediately engaging heroine of David Almond’s novel. Although it is being promoted as ‘the prequel to Skellig’ it stands totally successfully by itself, essentially because Almond’s depiction of its central character is so convincingly true to life that, right from the opening sentence, she immediately jumps into the reader’s consciousness. Fond of quoting Blake – ‘Blake the Misfit, Blake the Outsider’ – she argues vigorously for a child’s liberation from societal and educational norms and wittily emphasises the case for the creative and linguistic imagination. (In a book with many brilliant set pieces there is a particularly hilarious – but at the same time extremely thought- provoking – episode relating the


‘I don’t understand how this morning no one knew who I was but now I’m stuck in a room full of weird hairy alien policemen, in a space station that smells of cabbage and farts.’ Few of us finding ourselves in a similar predicament would regard it with anything less than the incredulous horror with which young teenager Stanley Bound confronts it in Jones’s romp – through space – of a novel. Unhappy in both his London home and school environments, Stanley finds himself abducted by aliens into distant realms of intergalactic space, his crime apparently being that he has murdered one President Vorlugenar. What follows is a protracted effort on the boy’s part to clear his name, a pursuit in which he is alternately helped and hindered by a cast of diver tingly bizarre (and occasionally sinister) characters. Best by far of those befriending him on his quest for justice is a creature known as Spore, a sort of talking mushroom, complete with his own engaging idiolect. Those ranged against him include the megalomaniac Commander Kevolo and a gang of bird-headed pirates known as the Marauding Picaroons. Picaresque in moments it all cer tainly is, culminating in a trial scene which, in its zany inconsequentialities, makes the one in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland seem a model of order and propriety. It is all very inventive and good-humoured – and not totally without taking some opportunities to raise rather more serious matters (about, say, political corruption and genetic engineering) along the galactic way.


RD 28 Books for Keeps No.184 September 2010 Sisters Red HHH


Jackson Pearce, Hodder, 336pp, 978 1 444 90058 3, £9.99 hbk


Beads, Boys and Bangles HHH


Sophia Bennett, Chicken House, 320pp, 978 1 906427 43 6, £6.99 pbk


This is the second book in the series about teenage fashion designer Crow and her friends Nonie, Jenny and Edie. The premise for the series is an interesting and contemporary one – Crow and her brother have fled from war in their native Africa and her aim is to produce clothes which are original and exciting without using Third World child labour. Edie’s website campaigns against such practices, but when she is accused of publicising Crow’s work for Miss Teen designs despite the fact that the company allegedly uses child labour, she and the girls decide they must go to India to see for themselves what really happens in the manufacture of the clothes.


Their travels, shocking discoveries and determination to help eradicate child labour – which readers are also encouraged to do – are interwoven with Nonie’s ‘romance’ with Alex- ander, a self-obsessed ballet dancer, Jenny’s attempts to establish herself on the stage and a plethora of fascinating detail about fashion and the industry which produces it. There is also a positive feeling that young people can effect very real change for the better.


The book has a heart – its message about exploitation is clear – but it also unashamedly enter tains with char- acters and events from the world of fashion and celebrity. The attention to these kinds of detail is sometimes over-lavish and the Nonie/Alexander relationship is too slight to merit the protracted treatment it is given in the book, but this novel will appeal to fashion-conscious teenage girls who like to think before they buy.


Red Riding Hood appears and reappears all over the world as everything from innocent muppet to teasing TV Commercial for Chanel No.5. Here, her personality is split between the March sisters, Scarlett and Rosie, united in their hatred of the Fenris, werewolves who slaughter young women in their neck of the woods in Deep South Georgia. They saw their grandmother killed by a travelling salesman werewolf who knocked at their cottage door when they were small. Scarlett slew that Fenris, at the cost of an eye and lurid scars on her face. From that time on, her life is dedicated to killing Fenris; she is deadly with a hatchet. Her beautiful younger sister’s weapons of choice are a pair of hunting knives, but her role is also to serve as delectable bait for the werewolves. She is less single-minded than Scarlett. When their friend Silas, whose own hunting skills derive from his woodsman father, returns from a yearlong trip to San Francisco, there’s room in the hearts of Rosie and Silas for each other.


The difference between the sisters, whose hearts once beat as one, is emphasised by the perspectives offered by chapters in which the girls alternate as narrators. There are numerous bloody encounters with werewolves, especially when the three hunters move to Atlanta to intensify their effor ts – things are getting urgent, since the wolf pack is searching for the Potential, a human who, when the moon is in the right phase, can be transformed by a single bite into a rapacious monster. The problem here, though, may be that one fatal punch-up with a werewolf reads much like another, and despite the gory subject matter and a narration which adopts the fashionable breathlessly dramatic present, the tension slackens. The identity of the Potential, given a cast of only three main characters, is not hard to guess and the reader’s interest shifts to the relationships between the three protagonists.


It’s a truism that vampires and werewolves are rampant in children’s books; and publishers will mine any successful vein to exhaustion. This novel is so explicit that little space is left for the unspoken fantasies and fears which have charged the LRRH myth for over 300 years; here, the seductive threats of rape and violence are ever present. The novel may well develop a substantial following; a look at the Twilight saga will demonstrate that poor writing and plotting are no constraint to sales figures.


VR


If you like the notion of a (literally) all- singing, all-dancing author – or think your young readers will – then it’s worth checking out Jackson Pearce’s home page and You Tube clips. It seems she’s giving Hansel and Gretel the treatment next.


GF


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32