Iron Council by China Mieville

Mieville's conclusion to the Perdido Street Station trilogy is dense, magical, bewildering and brilliant.  Out in the wastes beyond New Crobuzon a rag tag band  searches for the legendary Iron Council, a train taken by rebels into the wilderness when the City refused to pay their wages.  In New Crobuzon unrest is rife and the people are in covert revolt against their authoritarian rulers, themselves at war against the mysterious Tesh, and the two strands come into painful contact

Mieville introduces us to an incredible cast:  Remade, people punished by the authorities by being surgically altered to be part machine; their rebel counterparts the fReemade; magicians; golems; all manner of creatures part bird, bat and insect; stomach churning spells, the visceral urban grit of New Crobuzon and the bewildering landscape outside where smoke turns to stone petrifying its victims and nothing is fixed.  And all this in an opaque bewitching language that often had me reaching for the dictionary.  Worth the work though.

Fire Spell by Laura Amy Schlitz

We open the book to find an old witch Cassandra dreaming of being burned alive.  She wakes remembering a man called Grisini who had told her the opal that gives her her magic would burn her alive.  She tries to smash the stone, then...

We shift to London in the autumn of 1860.  Clara is a upper class young girl hoping that Grisini the puppeteer will be allowed to come to her birthday party.  She lives in material wealth but abject emotional poverty, the only survivor of the cholera that took her 4 siblings including her twin brother.  Her mother's grief makes her home a haunted melancholy place, Clara has to be silent and never to be a child.

Lizzie-Rose and Parsefall are orphans, employed and sometimes fed by Grisini.  Parsefall is learning to play the puppets, Lizzie-Rose does the fetching and carrying.  Dirt poor and unloved they marvel at Clara's house as they bring the puppet stage in.  Paresefall has his mind on petty theivery, but Grisini has something much worse in mind and the children find themselves unwittingly caught up in his spell casting and ancient feud with Cassandra.

A lovely well written book, you can really feel the texture of London both from the viewpoint of Parsefall and Lizzie-Rose struggling to stay alive and Clara who has the money to pay road sweepers to clear the roads of horse dung for her should she step down from her carriage.  Schiltz conjures the cold, the filth, and the suspense as the narrative hurtles onward.  A great read for I would say 9-13 year olds.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Probationary Police Officer Peter Grant is doing sentry duty in Covent Garden in the aftermath of a body being found missing its head when he spots a possible witness, but as the short pale faced man steps into the light identifying himself as Nicolas Wallpenny it becomes clear that he is, in fact, transparent. Well trained PC that Grant is he continues with the interview and it becomes clear that Wallpenny's information is credible. Grant only speaks of his experience to fellow probationer (and unfulfilled love interest) Lesley May, but goes looking for Wallpenny for more information and it's then that he is asked what he's doing by Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale who responds to Grant's honest reply that he's looking for a ghost with interest. Nightingale turns out to head up a division of the Met that deals with the supernatural, but the joy of this book is that Grant is never more than a good well trained police officer so there is a strong thread of self deprecating humour throughout. The ideas are fascinating, a murderous spirit and personfications of the buried rivers of London, turf wars on a supernatural scale. There are similarities to writers such as Mieville and JK Rowling, tv staples such as X Files, Torchwood and Doctor Who, to Hot Fuzz and the graphic novel character Constantine but Aaronvitch writes about it all in a completely fresh way creating a world that whilst fantastical is still completely consonant with present day London and all its horrors, grime, wonder and human character.

The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick

Two children, Boy, nameless servant and Willow, assistant to singer Madame Beauchance. A magician and alchemist named Valerian using Boy and infernal powers to create illusions for his act at the Great Theatre.

It is the Dead Days, those oddly quiet days between Christmas and New Year. And a terrible drama plays out in the City, a great sprawling decaying metropolis gripped in winter, once magnificent and powerful, now rotting and impoverished.

Valerian was always unpredicatable, carrying out his mysterious experiments in the rambling ruin of the Yellow House. But now he is becoming increasingly volatile as New Year and his deadline for an infernal pact runs out. Boy and Willow are drawn into a breakneck adventure trying to find a mysterious book that will let the slippery Valerian once more cheat his fate but at a terrible price.

Sedgwick's writing is fast paced but also evocative and haunting, you feel the cold of the City seep into your bones as you're borne away on his adventure.

Hollow Earth by John and Carole E Barrowman

13 year old twins Matt and Emily Calder are in the National Gallery in London and they are bored, it's summer, it's hot, their mother is talking to someone and they just want to go swimming.  Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres is tormenting with them with it's vision of people dozing in the sun on the banks of the Seine.  They take out a drawing pad to entertain themselves, but these children are extraordinary.  As they draw their picture it comes to life and they get the swim they wanted, and a world of grief from their mother.

The incident sets in motion a series of consequences and before long the family are fleeing for Scotland and the home of their grandfather, their father's father: the ancient Monastery of Era Mina on a tiny island off the coast at Largs.  Here they meet others who can do what they do and the people who guard them, a new friend Zach and find out more about the mysterious disappearance of their father and the Hollow Earth and the history of Era Mina.

Brilliantly paced and written, the Barrowmans' book carried me through and left me eager for the next instalment. The characters are well delineated and vibrant, setting and descriptions so clear that the magic could really be real.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

We are in Ancient Greece, a young boy Patroclus fails to live up to the hope of his father the king and finds himself exiled for being too weak to defend himself after accidentally killing another boy. His weight in gold pays for his place at the court of another king, and it is whilst trying to make himself invisible that Patroclus comes to the attention of golden child and prince Achilles. Deemed by prophecy to be unbeatable in battle, Achilles is the child of the king and a sea nymph. The story follows the boys as their friendship deepens, through their time studying medicine, astronomy and hunting with the centaur Chiron to the Trojan War and the events of The Iliad. 

I was captivated, the story was well told and the fantastical elements of gods walking with mortals, begetting children and influencing events never seemed like whimsical fantasy, they were as real as the other characters.

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.

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.

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.

Touch by Alexi Zentner

In less deft hands Zentner's plot is historical romantic fiction, a man sits by the bedside of his dying mother recalling his memories of the small northern logging town founded by his grandfather.  There is drama and pathos, hard winters, terrible choices and losses set against the backdrop of goldrushes and lost dreams.  But this book is far more than that, invoking the spirits of the forests and the mythology of a family where the fantastical and the everyday live side by side.  Zentner speaks  the snow and ice of the frozen winters and the terrible dangers of logging and living on the edge of human existence into being in a book I didn't want to end.

Faery Tale by Signe Pike

I really enjoyed this book but did have to constantly struggle against my inner sceptic saying 'yes but' and being rational all the time.  Signe Pike, disillusioned by city life in America, goes in search of fairies, first in Mexico and then to the great Celtic heartlands of fairy lore in England, the Isle of Man, Ireland and Scotland.  But it's less simple than a deluded new age hippie searching for magical beings.  Pike is desperately trying to come to terms with the death of her beloved, brilliant but difficult father and searching for the sense of wonder she had as a child.  I may not believe the same way as her, but the inward journey and a belief that the world is more than we can see with our terribly limited faculties makes sense to me, and her quest to recapture the childlike wonder that can heal any hurt is bewitching.  A little kooky in places, but a great lesson.

The Amulet of Samarkand: A Bartimaeus Graphic Novel adapted by Jonathan Stroud & Andrew Donkin

This graphic novel adpatation of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimeus book is excellent.  Nathaniel is the young apprentice of a magician in a modern day London where the ruling class of politicians are replaced by magicians, and the underclass is those without magic.  Nathaniel is humiliated by Simon Lovelace, ruthless and powerful contemporary of his master and in order to take revenge summons the ancient djinn Bartimaeus.  Great plotting, great adpatation and wonderful artwork of the story of a young magician to rival Timothy Hunter.

The Relic Master by Catherine Fisher

The Relic Master is science fiction / fantasy at its best, tightly plotted and beautifully written. We are introduced to the world of Anara through the eyes of Raffi, an apprentice to Galen of the Old Order, outlaws that are intimately connected with the world around them, practice magic and follow the teachings of the Makers, shadowy god-like beings that came from beyond the stars. They are pursued by the Watch who belive the magic of the Old Order is illusion. The Old Order uses relics, odd pieces of debris of the Makers' culture that are tantalisingly recognisable to us, a CD, a watch. On their pilgramage to Tasceron, a post apocalypic city devastated by the war between the Order and the Watch, they are joined by the Watch spy Carys and a Sekoi, an indigenous Anaran half cat half human being. Fisher writing is so good everything is believable and well realised, an author I'm happy to have found.

M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman

A collection of short stories for children, some of which I've encounterd before. Gaiman's imagination never fails to entertain, and here where he's writing for children he writes less self consciously, children don't need to be asked to suspend disbelief! In this collection of short stories I most loved the short story about the boy born in a graveyard but wanted more of it, luckily Gaiman also felt the same and expanded it into his The Graveyard Book. I particularly liked reading again 'The Price' which is about a family who are adopted by a mysterious black cat who sustains terrible injuries night after night.