reviews 14+Secondary/Adult continued The Pieces of Ourselves HHHH


Maggie Harcourt, Usborne, 375pp, 978 1 4749 4069 6, £7.99 pbk


This character-led mix of romance and historical detective story slowly builds in intensity and draws the reader in to Flora’s


lonely, fearful, that led painfully


honest but ultimately hope-filled world. Flora’s life is constricted and defined by the mental health-related “incident”


to her leaving


school right in the middle of sitting her GCSEs. This manic episode led to therapy, medication, a diagnosis of Bipolar 11 and to a hidden away life of work in a country house hotel. When Hal arrives at Hopwood Home to research a missing World War 1 soldier Flora’s help is offered by the hotel manager. Flora used to love history before the ‘incident’ but now the idea of spending time with a stranger is a nightmare. Gradually though, as Flora and Hal begin to piece together the story of World War 1 soldier Albie and his lost love, housemaid Iris, stories, settings and timelines between present and past seem to merge as Flora and Hal too begin to fall in love. Flora’s narrative voice is believable


and moving. Her struggles with her mental health are presented in an empathetic way and her descriptions of


her thought processes as she


desperately tries to work out which are manic responses and which are true give the reader real insight into what having Bipolar entails. Both love stories,


historic and contemporary,


are gripping and convincing and as the timelines dissolve and stories entwine the reader will be drawn into this emotional, honest, poignant and powerful YA novel with its themes of mental health, self-acceptance and lost and found love.SR


Most Likely HHH


Sarah Watson, Scholastic, 978-1-407195-49-0, 384pp, £7.99, pbk


Ava, CJ, Jordan and Martha have been inseparable since they were five and have come to rely on the close and supportive nature of their relationships different


challenges of


to navigate the their


very lives.


However, their high school days are ending and they are only too aware that


their career choices will end


the proximity with each other which underpins their lives. Watson is adept at creating


characters who come alive on the page but the situations in which she places them are so crowded with issues which need to be resolved that they feel at times more like a tick-list to be worked through than credible dilemmas. The narrative bowls along at a brisk pace-the girls have important decisions to make and there is much to consider in their emotional lives, too, but Watson tends to fall into the


trap of cliché - particularly when high emotion is involved. The book begins with a cliffhanger


as one of the girls is sworn in as the first female President of the United States, but the girl’s identity is withheld until the end. Watson weaves expectation into the story’s set pieces, giving clues, hints and red herrings and these keep the mystery alive. I like the insistence that women can achieve at the highest levels but, again, this is wrapped up rather too neatly when all the girls get to the highest levels in their chosen careers. Sarah Watson writes and produces


for television and this, her first novel, often feels like a script for a sitcom, with its many emotional scenarios and rather


implausible situations.


However, in the end, it must be recognised that Most Likely will hook in young female readers who may well find answers to some of the problems which they are facing. VR


Burn HHH


Patrick Ness, Walker, 383pp, 9781406375503, £12.99 hbk


Tolkien restored dragons original terrifying presence


to their in the


imagination, and Patrick Ness is now going down a similar path. While one of his dragons is sensitive, well-spoken and much given to under-statement, his special enemy is a murderous super-powers with a bitter


confusingly structured. If there are more to come, they will have to do a lot better to win anything like an equivalent reception. NT


The Falling in Love Montage HHHH


Ciara Smyth, Andersen Press, 394pp, 978 1 78344 966 8, £7.99 pbk


The long summer ahead needs a plan, thinks Saoirse.


‘That’s Seer-


sha, by the way,’ murmurs narrator to reader, initiating a convention of such asides as early as page 2. This confiding voice will not only entertain, but also allow Saoirse to provide a running commentary on the action: maybe a single kiss with Ruby, so complex that it requires a lingering page of description; or – by contrast – the devastating sadness of visiting her psychotherapist mother in her care home, lost in the wilderness of dementia at 55.


A condition which


Saoirse knows can be hereditary. Saoirse’s narrative has many voices. For example, there’s the flickering interplay of smart conversation which YA readers expect – exceptionally alive in this novel; or her own tenacious voice reflecting her struggles to understand : her feelings for Ruby; a betrayal by a lifelong friend; the loneliness


of Oliver Quinn, a boy


she has loathed for years but is now beginning to like; and why her ex just walked away. At one level, this is a quick-moving At another, a knowing, on a quick-moving


rom-com. satirical


hatred


of the human world, out to bring it to an end by engineering a nuclear wipe-out. The time is 1957 and the Cold War is at its height. It all makes for a properly daunting picture. The rampant racial prejudice in America existing at the time of Eisenhower is also effectively portrayed So much, so good. But although


there is no copyright on imaginative constructs, the fact that this story has a girl hero, a prophecy she thinks she has inherited, an inexorable assassin after her blood and a series of different universes with only a few able to pass from one to another inevitably brings to mind Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. On this admittedly challenging comparison. Burn does not fare so well. While Pullman’s epic draws on a rich hinterland involving not just Milton and Blake but many others, Ness’s fiction is more reminiscent of an action-packed and occasionally gory video game. Its over-explanatory story-line


soon becomes repetitive


and the good characters are never as convincing as the really bad one. An exception here can be found in a gay sub-plot put over with real feeling for the two adolescent boys concerned and described in a welcome economy of language. There are enough loose threads


left over by the ending to suggest there may be follow-ups. Ness’s last trilogy, Chaos Walking, won many plaudits and prizes. This novel is not in the same league; too long and too


take


rom-com. At another, an untypical rom-com since the lovers are late teen girls. And,


novel becomes a painful account of the difficulties families face when dominated by illness and its impact on relationships. The


storyline unconventionally.


begins simply, if Saoirse’s


just


finished A-levels and left school in her seaside town to the south of Belfast. She’s very bright, works hard. Oxford has offered her a conditional place, to the embarrassing delight of her Dad, whose own life hasn’t run easily for the last few years as his wife’s early onset dementia tightened its grip. They’ve divorced, but that doesn’t mean Dad’s love for her has died, as the novel reveals. Even so, to Saoirse’s astonished disgust, he’s about to marry a business contact, Beth. Saoirse’s had it with schoolwork, she’s been dumped


by long-love


Hannah, she’s not sure she wants Oxford. What she wants this summer is – well, she’s not sure what. She doesn’t


want relationship, another long-term with its truth-telling


and problem-sharing, especially with family issues like hers. Maybe a summer with someone involving serious kissing, parties, a fair amount of quality vodka, much laughter and no strings. Yes, that’s a workable plan. Enter Ruby, an English girl, staying for the summer with the family of her rich-boy cousin, Oliver. Why? She’s not saying. So she’s keeping secrets too. Ideal.


for a while, the


between them is irresistible; not least because neither


The immediate magnetism is inclined


to resist. As the days go by and the quickfire dialogues reveal Saoirse’s passion


for Ruby’s for


on the latter as a kind of template for


their summer together. Their


analysis of the rom-com ‘formula’ (wittily handled by Smyth with its list of required elements, illustrated by specific movies), leads to a scheme to live out a ‘falling in love montage’ (no strings, of course). That’s the theory. This plan is not going to work, as any YA reader would know. As they tick off the stages of the montage formula, real


life overtakes them.


As it would. So we end up reading a different kind of novel from the one we began, bringing deeper questions and satisfactions than readers might have foreseen. GF


A Phoenix First Must Burn HHHH


Patrice Caldwell (Ed.), Hot Key Books, 354pp, 9781471409301, £7.99 pbk


This is a complete cornucopia of short stories featuring black women and ‘gender-nonconforming’ individuals. The range of themes covered is very wide but perhaps the underlying topics veer towards magic, science fiction and fantasy. They are set in the past, present and future and the thing that connects them is that they reflect the interests and concerns of their BAME authors. We have a collection of sixteen stories written by American writers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, including Elizabeth Acevedo (winner of the Carnegie Medal in 2019) and several new authors. Many of these authors bring their own history and cultural background to the stories, but others have just wanted to see themselves included in the type of stories that they enjoy. At a time when many people are


finding it difficult to concentrate on a full-length novel these stories provide an opportunity to dip in to whichever


tale Some people takes your will decide


fancy. to go


with a favourite author; some will read from beginning to end, whilst others will just take pot luck. There are stories of hope, resilience, love and


characters that range from witches and


perseverance; vampires


to and magicians. time stories and the Although the book


is aimed at the YA market there is nothing overtly offensive in any of the


relationships


are dealt with in a very positive way. The characters are strong and find ways to cope with the often difficult situations that they find themselves in; I have also found them to be generally sympathetic and positive. This really is a book that has turned out to be a treasure trove of exciting and often challenging stories.


It is


something that I will keep dipping in to and I hope it will find a place in many school libraries as well as on personal bookshelves. MP


Books for Keeps No.242 May 2020 31


horror movies and rom-coms, they agree


all featuring travellers


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