Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

Andi is in many ways a poor little rich girl, in her senior year at St Anselm's prestigious expensive school in Brooklyn, New York. She is largely ignored by her father with his new girlfriend, a brilliant geneticist in pursuit of his dream of unlocking the genome. But she is engulfed in an ocean of depression and grief, tortured by her inability to save her little brother Truman and struggling to provide for her equally stricken artist mother, who does little but paint pictures of her lost son. Andi is failing at school, well, in all areas but music. It is only here that she feels understood. Her music teacher Nathan who does not tell her to get over her grief, but shows her how to express it through her exquisite guitar playing.

When Andi's father arrives at the house he is horrified and takes action. He puts Andi's mother in hospital and takes Andi with him to Paris to write the outline for her thesis on Amande Malherbeau, a French composer who wrote his music to the backdrop of Revolutionary France. Her father has been engaged by his friend G to undertake the examination of a heart thought to be that of the lost King of France, Louis XVII, son of the guillotined Louis XVI. Andi's father leaves her at G's house, a theatre which G is transforming into a museum of the Revolution.

Andi is at first determined to return to her mother and strikes a deal with her father to have the outline finished in time to return to her within a week, but then she finds the diary of Alexandrine and is drawn back to Revolutionary France. And when she is busking and meets Jules and Virgil, boys from the impoverished banlieue of Clichy, something begins to reach through the haze of drugs and grief that cloak her and draw her back to life.

Extremely good on the sense of being a teenager and struggling with such painful issues at a time when emotions are turbulent enough, but I just felt that at times the plot was a little obvious and forced. Still powerful enough to keep me reading through the night, and very well informed, the sections on both modern day but especially Revolutionary France are evocative and detailed.

Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare (Book #2 of the Infernal Devices)

This second book of Clare's Infernal Devices series was a great read. Tessa Gray is living under the protection of the Insitute in a London that features all the dirtiness, darkness and danger of Dickens but with a new layer. Magic and magical beings exist but are invisible to 'mundanes': people without magic. The Nephilim are half angel law enfocers of this world and are at war with the nefarious Magister, a creator of clockwork minions. Tessa can shape change into a person if she touches something of importace to them, but she is a mystery to herself and those around her, with the power of those known as warlocks but missing their marks of inhumanity.

But Charlotte and Henry Branwell, heads of the Enclave and Tessa's protectors, are also at war with divisions within her own ranks, particularly with the devious Benedict Lightwood and his machinations to have her ousted. The Institute are given two weeks to find the Magister by Consul Wayland, head of the Enclave, and a breakneck story takes off. Tessa has to cope with one twist and turn after another as she comes face to face with her brother - who betrayed her and is working with the Magister - with her questions about what she is, with betrayal from those around her and with her powerful feelings for the two Nephilim who brought her to the sanctuary of the Institute: Will and Jem.

As in the first book, Clare's plotting is tight and fast paced but combined with the passion and emotion of teenage love sesitively handled with an excellent understanding of Victorial norms and morals.

Heaven Eyes by David Almond

Erin Law is an orphan, living in Whitegates children's home with 11 other children. Her closest friends are January Carr - named for the month and the hospital he was found on the steps of - and Mouse Gullane, a child desparate to please. Before his father abandoned mouse he tatooed 'Please look after me' on his son's arm. Life is haunted by loss and sadness, by the attempts of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and care workers to get the children to express their griefs and Erin's resistance and anger.

The children often run away, returning after a day or up to a week away, but always returning. January comes to Erin with a new idea, no one has yet run away from Whitegates by raft, and he has made one hammered together from wooden doors abandoned on the local tip. Absconding under the cynical observation of two care workers that they will be back they acquire Mouse along the way and escape downriver, becoming marooned on the Black Middens, a mud flat they crawl across to the security of dry land. They are brought out of the mud by a strange girl their own age, who names herself as Heaven Eyes and asks them if they are her brothers and sisters. She brings them to an abandoned warehouse where she lives with an old man known only as 'Gramps' and offers them food and shelter. Gramps is unstable and confused, and Heaven Eyes has some decidedly odd concepts about people and a sad past herself, but Erin learns about creating a family when you have none.

Moving and interesting, but too brief and concepts of lovelessness and coping alone are not as well developed as in his other novels

Secret Heart by David Almond

Young Joe Maloney does not fit. He stutters, is constantly bullied by the children of the bleak suburbanan town of Helmouth and cannot seem to stop truanting. Alone he wanders the wastelands around the nearby motorway, he sees things others do not and though his mother, raising him alone, his carney father gone before he was born, she worries for him.

Then one night he dreams of a tiger, Almond's description weaving its rank smell and the feel of its fur and awesome power thorough our minds. He wakes to find Hackenschmidt's Circus in town on its final tour, but there are no tigers at this circus. There are no animals of any kind, only a threadbare sky blue tent, gaudy paintings washed out and acts well past their prime. Joe is drawn to trapeze artist Corinna, a parentless girl his own age, and she takes his hand and guides him through his part in a lyrical wake for the dying circus.

An achingly beautiful story about difference, and how sometimes when you are different it is not you who are 'wrong', but the world itself. Joe rises beyond the stunted grey life of the aptly named Helmouth and enters into a world of colour and imagination. As always with Almond, we cannot be sure of what we witness, it is ineffable, but of the highest value.

Gloves by Susette Palmer

A great book for those starting out with knitting gloves, each pattern gives instructions for working both using straight needles and in the round. Palmer takes you gently through patterns of increasing complexity, beginning with a pair of children's gloves that are a mirror image of each other, and a pair of baby's mittens, right through to lace, cable, fair isle, colour knitted and textured patterns. Plenty to keep me going for quite some time, great value for money, I just have to choose what to knit next.

Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare (Infernal Devices #1)

16 year old Tessa Grey is arriving in Southampton from New York on board the steamship the Main.  Her American aunt, leaving her alone and Tess is more than ready to be reunited with her brother Nathan at the docks and travel with him to their new home in London.  He is not there to meet her and she goes willingly with the strange people sent to meet her on his behalf, but they are not benign.  Kept prisoner by the sinister Dark Sisters she is forced to undergo changes that drive her to the edge of madness.  At last she is rescued in a shower of rubble by two strange boys her own age and pitched into a world where magic and the supernatural live alongside and unseen by 'normal' people.

A great steampunk evocation of Victorian London with a supernatural twist, very well written and plotted.  Any book that opens with the lines. 'London.  April 1878.  The demon exploded in a shower of ichor and guts' is going to get my attention, but Clare kept me gripped beyond for the full 472 pages of this book.  Mostly written from Tessa's point of view, Clare never loses the pace of the plot but also deftly handles the compelling developing relationships between the characters of her book in a way that is commensurate with the mores and conventions of society at the time.

Mortal Chaos by Matt Dickinson


A butterfly flaps its wings in America and a storm breaks over China: the essence of the butterfly effect where one small change in our chaotic world can have massive consequences.  In Mortal Chaos Dickinson takes this theory and builds a thrilling story around it.

Dickinson charts the chain of events from a literal butterfly emerging into the world from it's chrysalis into the world in rural Wiltshire.  As it startles a young rabbit it sets in motion a chain of consequences for a host of seemingly unrelated people: a Japanese girl attempting to be the youngest solo climber of Everest; her father on his way to do business in the UK; a airline pilot racing against time to reach her flight at Heathrow; a pair of teenage boys playing truant from school with a shotgun; a jockey exercising a thoroughbred in readiness for the Newbury races; a father with his family on a birthday treat to a local theme park; a NASA pilot transferring at Heathrow on his way to Space City in Russia; a young boy in Malawi struggling with famine; a thief working the crowds at Heathrow, and a psychotically paranoid man in Washington DC hellbent on revenge.

The plot is great and fast paced, each event dovetails well into the chain of events and the story is well constructed, however, at times the writing itself falters.  Still, great adrenaline ride of a book.

Words Words Words by David Crystal


As a primer and brief introduction to the sublime world of words, of lexicographers and word hounds, this is a nice little book that sits well in the hand.  Crystal distils his encyclopaedic knowledge of epistemology into 6 fascinating sections

1. the universe of words, their number and how we learn them
2. the origin of words, their beginnings and construction
3. the diversity of words, worldwide diversity, specialist language, group speak
4. the evolution of words, births, deaths, changes and futures
5. the enjoyment of words, wordplay, word sound and games
6. becoming a word detective, how to take your interest further, further reading and how to estimate your personal wordhoard (vocabulary), both what you use everyday and what you understand but don's use regularly.

A good starting point which left me wanting more.

The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith (Isabel Dalhousie #7)

This Isabel Dalhousie novel was still charming and thoughtful, just not as gripping as some of the others. Isabel is asked to vet three candidates for the headship of a nearby boarding school, feeling obliged she takes it on and finds the affair complicated by one of them being her neice Cat's new boyfriend. Juggling life with baby Charlie, partner Jamie, plans for weddings, work for the Review of Applied Ethics and the machinations of her nemesis Christopher Dove, this is a low key reflection on the subject of family, and of the place of gossip in a small community which Edinburgh, despite it's status as a city, is beneath the surface. Deftly written.

Kit's Wilderness by David Almond

When 13 year old Christopher, known as Kit, Watson, comes to live in the ex mining town of Stoneygate he is coming to a land where his roots run deep. His paternal grandmother has died and he and his parents have relocated from Newcastle to take care of his elderly grandfather. As he comes to terms with life in a small village his grandfather shows him the local landmarks, where the mines lie under the ground leaving hollows and humps scarring the landscape.   He tells him tales of the pits and his time working there, of the ghost known as Silky, a benign spirit who haunted the mines, of the ponies and children sent to work and die and lost beneath the earth.

As Kit adjusts to life as the new boy at school and is befriended by the volatile charmingly wild Allie he watches the village children play in the Wilderness, an area of wasteland with a collapsed pit entrance at its heart.  He is approached by John Askew, a morose dark haired boy who challenges him to undertake a frightening game.  Known as Death Askew only invites the children of the oldest families of the village to play, it is a game that establishes a deep bond between two boys of the same age but with such different upbringings. As Kit's grandfather takes Kit to see the monument in the church graveyard to children lost in Stoneygate's 1821 mining diaster he reads off his own name, that of Askew and relects on the ghosts that he is beginning to see around him.

But now with the waning of the year Kit's grandfather begins to slip away from the family, little by little disappearing into a blankness from which he is slower and slower to return. As Stoneygate dips towards midwinter Kit's relationships with Askew and Allie come to a head beneath the earth.

A wonderfully moving book, Almond at his best telling a deceptively simple compelling story. By telling it from Kit's point of view, a boy who is a natural storyteller with a vivid imagination, we are given an unreliable narrator, that is, we can't be sure if what he says is true, but it becomes clear that the concept of 'truth' does not matter. Almond has woven a masterful narrative about the power of stories, of ghosts and the power of the past and a the ability of place and history to reach out and affect the present.

Jackdaw Summer by David Almond

It's summer, and it's hot. Liam is on the edge of his teenage years, wandering with his best friend Max through his coutry Northumberland home town in a landscape rural and idyllic but defined by conflict, Border Reivers, Romans, soldiers on exercises and jets screaming overhead as Blair and Bush take the UK into war in the Middle East, trying to avoid the savage bully Nattrass.

They are playing in the garden when Liam digs up an old knife and indulges in the fantasy of it being an ancient relic. But a chattering jackdaw yelling at them as they wander the village seems far more intent, they follow it and find an abandoned months old baby. Taking it home they become overnight celebrities and the baby changes their lives in small ways, like the pebbles that start an avalanche.

As the baby, now named Alison, is fostered Max and Liam begin to grow apart as their interests diverge, and visiting Alison brings Max into contact with foster children Crystal, orphaned by fire, and Oliver, a Liberian war refugee. Liam is largely left to his own devices by his writer father and artist mother and the bruising war games he plays with the other boys of the village lead to the climax in the hills above the village.

Almond writes with a deceptive simplicity, the narrative is told by Liam and has the directness of a young boy's experiences, but there is a complex web of themes and nuances about war, savagery, responsibility, conflict, innocence and childhood.

After the Snow by SD Crockett

Willo is alone, hiding in the snow on the mountain above his home. His family are gone, his father, stepmother, brothers and sisters dragged away by strangers.

As Willo's speaks in his own demotic speech his life takes shape before us. Willo is very unusual in being born on the edge of the Welsh mountain he is hiding on. Most people live in what is left of the cities but he is a 'straggler', a person living on the edges of a diminished society. We are not too far in the future, global warming has caused the Atlantic currents to shut down resulting in the Snowball Earth scenario - Britain is covered by snow which only thaws for a very brief period in the summer time. Willo has been taught by his father to survive in these extreme neo Ice Age conditions, to hunt, set snares, make furs and clothing from them.

Willo gathers his courage and goes in search of his lost family, aquiring Mary, abandoned by her father, and struggling to survive in the much altered city of Manchester. He navigates his way haphazardly through a host of characters Dickensian in their suffering in an anarchic city teetering on the edge of total disaster: an old couple sewing fur coats for the rich with a secret utopian hope; a ratcatcher who gives Willo and Mary shelter for the night; an impossibly rich beautiful woman living in luxury; and roaming gangs of brutal inebriated enforcers and feral children. Resistance to the authorities is swiftly crushed, and when Willo finds himself betrayed by the one person he trusted most all seems lost. But there is always hope.

I really enjoyed Crockett's book. Willo's idiosyncratic speech mannerisms bring to life a young man on the edge of adulthood unwillingly promoted from pack member to lone wolf. His wildness and connection with the landscape are vividly communicated, as is the bleak possible future we all face if our climate does fail. I found Willo's choices brave, his struggle between his survivalist 'dog' mind and his deep humanity compelling. Crockett's plotting is brave, she doesn't allow for improbable happy endings and Willo has to endure terrible horrors to become the person his father raised him to be, a 'beacon of hope'.

A perfect dystopia, in that it made me reflect on the present but wasn't completely pessamistic, there was hope that perhaps humanity can do better than just devolve into savagery

1Q84 Book 3 by Haruki Murakami

In the third and final book of the 1Q84 trilogy Murakami continues his alternating chapters chronicling Tengo and Aomame's lives, she on the run from the Sakigake religious cult, he coping with the slipping of his estranged father further away from him into a coma.  But we now have a third set of chapters, from the grotesquely deformed private detective Ushikawa, employed by Sakigake to find Aomame and establish the truth regarding her role in the death of the cult's Leader.  As two moons, our normal satellite and a malformed smaller green companion, rise in the sky, the three main narrators dance around each other, slowly drawing closer until their worlds collide and Aomame takes a stand.  As the climax comes the narrative begins to fragment, words begin to slip and continuity becomes a little shaky.  The chapters don't run in chronological order, time sliding in this 'wrong' world.  And all beautifully written.