BfK 14+ Secondary/Adult Shades of Scarlet HHHHH


Anne Fine, David Fickling Books, 273pp, 9781788451352, £12.99 hbk


Long gone are the days where


young people set out from home on adventures supremely confident that the same domestic structures will necessarily remain intact while they are away. In this story the family itself and its survival has now become the focus for the main action.


Its main


character, the ferociously outspoken teenage


to discover husband. Although


Scarlet, is determined why her 43-year-old


mother has left her dull but sweet- natured


at


least half her class at school have already experienced family break-up ‘sometimes twice over’, nothing has prepared her for this change in her own domestic life. Anne Fine is merciless in pointing out


how painful such separations can prove to everyone, particularly offspring. But she also makes it clear that there can usually be no way of going back. Scarlet eventually has to accept that parents have rights to their own lives just as their children do. Looking for blame is tempting, but ultimately gets no-one anywhere. Scarlet’s parents are human, not monsters. They both love her and even each other yet still their marriage has ultimately come unstuck beyond repair. Fine is an old hand at describing


different variations of family mayhem, and this novel is well up to her past high standards. The blackly comic mind-games played between Scarlet and her mother, each determined to have the last word, are truly something to


behold. Sub-plots involving a


best friend, a baby and a potential boyfriend offer temporary respite from their epic battles, but ultimately this is a story about mother and daughter fighting it out each in their own way as one climactic row follows hard on the next. Sometimes exhausting but more often exhilarating, this is a brilliant as well as a timely novel. NT


Nevertheless She Persisted HHHHH


Jon Walter, David Fickling Books, 327pp, 9781788450263, £8.99,pbk


From the first chapter where Nancy has a baby, which is then taken by her sister Clara and given away, to the final reversal of fortune for the two sisters, the reader is taken on a journey through the fight for women’s suffrage


and the


women had to make. Clara works at


choices young Holloway Prison,


where many suffragettes, the more militant of the movements for votes for women, are taken and when on hunger strike force fed.


Her sister


Nancy, raped by her own father, is taken by Clara to join her as a warder, after the birth of the baby. On the suffragette wing, Nancy becomes


Guard Your Heart HHHHH


Sue Divin, Macmillan Children’s Books, 416pp, 978 1 5290 4167 5, £7.99 pbk


In her Author’s Note, Sue Divin


suggests her novel is ‘a Romeo and Juliet, a love story across divides’. Readers might well think Iona and Aidan faced more intractable problems in contemporary Londonderry than those which cropped up in fair Verona. The summer of 2016 is charged with a violence whose roots lie a hundred


30 Books for Keeps No.248 May 2021 fascinated, indeed obsessed, by


Daisy Divine, an actress, witnessing her courage as she is force fed. and is slowly drawn into the movement, which ultimately culminates in her own arrest for a bombing. Clara wrestles with her desire for a career but chooses another path. The courage of the suffragettes


and the ‘cat and mouse’ techniques where they are released until they are well enough to be re-arrested grips the reader. The scenes of force feeding are hard to read, but at the heart of the story are the choices women had to make and the lives they led as a result. Clara who also suffered at the hands of her father, has made her move out of the family home


and started a seemingly


successful career, but is torn by her love for Ted, and the knowledge of what


marriage would mean, the


loss of all her dreams, even that of owning a bicycle. For today’s young women these choices are spelled out all too clearly. Nancy starts as a girl who feels she has been weak and manipulated learns she has courage to strike out on her own. This book is a tour de force and a


must read for all young women, telling them of the courage and conviction of those women who fought for their vote, and ultimately the lives they can lead now. It would have been good to have some suggestions for further reading but this is a small point. JF


years deep in Dublin’s Easter Rising. Divin tells her story through a series


of parallels. Iona and Aidan share a memorable date of birth: that of the Good Friday Agreement, 10th April, 1998. Both are now completing their A-levels and leaving school. After a couple of dramatic chapters narrated by Aidan, the following 41 chapters are told alternately by Aidan and Iona, enabling readers to share in the pair’s different


and their discovery of each other, alongside


perspectives their


journeys within their on events


private emotional respective


families which, on the surface could not be more different, yet at deeper levels have strong echoes of each other.


Aidan shares a small house in


the Catholic Creggan district with his older brother Sean. His sister Saoirse, upon whom both boys depended, is travelling abroad. His mother has died, though she remained unbroken in spirit to the end despite a husband active in the IRA throughout The Troubles, an alcoholic and a brutal domestic abuser who eventually quit the family home. Sean now seems to be following his Da’s footsteps, as the New IRA gathers impetus and recruits. On his mother’s death when he was still only fifteen, Aidan had spiralled into drink and drugs. Against the odds, with the support of a couple of far-sighted teachers, he’d discovered an interest in his school subjects, including Politics, and made it through to A-levels. Protestant Iona’s voyage through


her late teens seems far calmer. But she too has a controlling father; an ex-police officer, veteran of The Troubles, leaving him with PTSD and unresolved prejudices, despite his professed belief in tolerance and community. Now, Iona’s elder brother has recently completed his police training. Younger brother Andy is in a Loyalist band. In this male household, Mother plays a subservient, peace- keeping role. Her hope is that Iona will graduate from Queen’s in Belfast with a good degree and a nice fiancé from the Christian Union. Not unlike R & J, things kick off


within the opening pages with a savage street brawl, leaving Aidan broken and bleeding on the ground, assaulted


by Loyalist thugs. By


chance, Iona and Andy witness the incident but can do nothing to stop it. Iona picks up Aidan’s fallen phone and, on an impulse, films the attack. Her decision to return the phone to Aidan the next day brings the two together, and their unlikely journey begins. From their first meeting, Divin


traces their relationship with insight and respect for the complex intensity of early adult feelings. Aidan, with his confusions and his honesty, is unlike any male Iona has ever met.


she is learning about herself, that she challenges her family’s assumptions about male dominance – there’s a fine scene in which she asserts her 18 year old’s independence from her father. She is not without conflict; her longing to make love with Aidan has to be balanced against her quiet certainty, stemming from her faith, that she wants to wait for marriage to the one with whom she will share her life. She is so lost in Aidan at times (‘Aidan was clueless to how he melted me’) that she hardly knows the part she plays in releasing Aidan’s search to find ways into a future which, constrained by culture, money and religion, had seemed to offer nothing. At the same time, he finds himself pushing towards a spirituality which transcends his childhood experience of Catholicism (‘all bells and incense’). In those alternating chapters, Divin skilfully maintains two attractively distinct voices – they have different idioms tempered by different senses of humour. Importantly, Divin also sets her story with an insider’s knowledge of the dynamics of Derry itself. All of which will surely prove absorbing to potential readers for whom much of the novel’s territory will be unfamiliar as well as to those within the island of Ireland. GF


House of Hollow HHHH


Krystal Sutherland, Hot Key Books, 302pp, 9781471409899, £8.99 pbk


The three Hollow sisters survived a horrendous


event ten years


previously to the events of the book, when they had suddenly disappeared, when out with their parents; they then


with no memory of what happened. Fast


re-appeared a month later, forward to the


present and


they are still a subject of awe, fear and questioning. Iris, the youngest sister just wants to be normal, but her two sisters, Vivi and Grey, are at the centre of media interest. Where they are, odd


things very often


happen; so, when the eldest sister, Grey disappears her two siblings feel a desperate need to find out what has happened.


Strange things are


going on around them, even finding a decaying body at Grey’s flat and then there is the weird man who appears to be following them, with the intention of causing harm. There are so many questions that we need to be answered in this story; will they save Grey, what is the mystery behind their disappearance and can they ever live normal lives? This is the sort of story that properly


It is through their relationship, and what


takes over. As someone who doesn’t like horror stories, I was amazed at how much I needed to keep reading this extremely dark and scary tale. The idea of a parallel world, or even somewhere between life and death


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