Ethan's Voice by Rachel Carter

Ethan has stopped speaking.  Living on his parents narrowboat Deity he doesn't go to school either, home schooled after being bullied but his parents and Mary from the council want him to return.  Then a girl arrives moored on a shiny boat near his.  Polly doesn't seem to mind that he doesn't talk, tentatively he begins to show her his world, the riverbank, the den that his father built for him.  And Ethan begins to believe that maybe, just maybe, he could want to speak again and face the hidden fears that made him mute.

Carter's skill is that she writes so eloquently from Ethan's point of view and in his voice, despite his voicelessness we hear the sadness and isolation of a young boy who doesn't fit and share with him his journey in this little tale.  Loved it.

The Long Shadow by Mark Mills

13 year old Ben Makepeace watches his friend Jacob Hogg sledge a dangerous corner and come careering off into a field of wickedly sharp saplings.  As he runs down the hill to the body lying still  he is briefly convinced Jacob is dead but as he opens his eyes and smiles Ben is both relieved and angry.

31 years on Ben is an unsuccessful screenwriter trying to be there for his 13 year old son Toby as his ex wife Madeleine moves on with her life with new partner Lionel, and keep his head above water.  His agent calls to say billionaire Victor Sheldon has expressed an interest in Ben's screenplay and wants to meet him at his country pile, Stoneham House near Oxford.  Victor turns out to be Jacob, the boy who took up the world of high finance and immense fortune that both Jacob and Ben were groomed for as schoolboys at Dean House boarding school.  Victor offers Ben space at Stoneham House to finish his screenplay.  Ben meets and begins to fall for sculptor Mo, he plays cricket with the local villagers, Toby comes to stay and meets Victor's son Marcio, and after helping Victor out with the purchase of a vintage speedboat Ben is rewarded with the offer of a lifetime.  But doubts begin to creep in as small events expose cracks in the rich beauty of the surface of Victor's life and Ben finds himself facing a past in which a single misunderstanding has blighted a life.

My only reason for not giving this 5 stars was the predictability, however, it is beautifully written, a sad story about what man a childhood can create if the child is not loved and cherished.

I freely admit, when it comes to a book I like closure, real life isn't like that so I like books to be like that. 

12 year old Adam Ryan is found standing in a clearing with his shoes full of blood. The police have been searching for him and his friends Peter and Jamie, they are never found. Adam has no memory of what happened to him or his companions.

Twenty years on Adam is now known as Rob and heading up a murder investigation. An archaeological dig is taking place on the site of the woods his friends disappeared in. A little girl's body has been found on a ritualistic stone table, her name is Katy and she was a star ballerina about to go to the Royal School of Ballet. As Rob and his DI partner Cassie investigate their progress is slow and difficult, but there is clearly something wrong at the heart of Katy's family. Rob's life begins to unravel in the presence of the place where so much unknown horror unfolded in his own life and the tension is ratcheted up and up.

I understood the reasons for Rob's constant reflections along the lines of 'this is how it all went wrong' but it irritated me, as did the lack of resolutions. I like neat ends in books, so sue me!

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.

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.

The Roundabout Man by Clare Morrall

Quinn Smith is approaching old age and is in retreat from his past. His mother was a children's author, as famous as as Shirley Hughes, AA Milne, Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton, and he and his triplets are the infamous stars of her books. But real life growing up in Quinn's family was very different, as bereft of love as rich in priveledge and he has grown old without growing up, fixed like a fly in amber at the age of 5 in the pages of his mother's books. As The Roundabout Man opens Quinn is living in anonimity in a caravan on a motorway roundabout, hidden away in the trees that remain of Primrose Valley and existing by scavenging from the service station of the same name. But his peace is disturbed when he is approached by a young ambitious journalist unaware of his past, who breaks his solitude. As tragedy strikes he is forced into contact and engagement with the staff of Primrose Valley service station and begins at last to question his past and separate the fiction of his mother's books from the reality of a painful upbringing. Delicately asking the question as to what happens to those like Christopher Robin who have fame thrust upon them by others.

What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz

Detective John Calvino has a wonderful life, three sparky intelligent children - artistic 13 year old Zach, dreamer Naomi 11, and 8 year old latent psychic Minnie - home schooled by his artist wift Nicky and tutors. But he is haunted by the horrors of a childhood, orphaned and robbed of his two sisters by a man of unspeakable depravity and violence. Now a 14 year old boy Billy has turned on his family in an eerily copycat violent spree and evil appears to be awakening. Vintage Koontz, where he pits good and innocence against mailign and less over forms of evil, without ever seeming trite or patronising and combining the earthly and grounded with the supernatural and demonic.

The Water Children by Anne Berry

This book is as much about water as about the characters, about the contrast between the summer drought of 1976 and four people bound, ironically, to the element of water so lacking during that long hot summer.

In The Water Children four children are scarred each in a different way in connection with water, through drowning, falling through ice and of water as a refuge from an unbearable present.  Naomi, renamed Mara, is the eldest, an orphan raised in terrible deprivation and punishment, coming of age in the Summer of Love, deeply disturbed and desperate for love.  Owen bears the weight of a childhood mistake which cost him the affection of his mother, Catherine is unloved by her narcissistic mother and seeks to escape, and Sean feels trapped by his small farm Irish upbringing.  All come into each other's orbit in London during the summer of 1975 and the life of a new child - Catherine and Sean's baby Bria - becomes the price of redemption for all four.

But more than that, this is the first fast read I have come across for a while that is beautifully and heart-rendingly written with passages of description that are just wonderful. In some ways, the narrative is quite simple, but it's Berry's talent that makes this book so beautiful

DYSTOPIA #9
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

A sad dystopia of utiliarianism taken to its logical conclusion, to the creation of clones to provide the raw materials for medical experiments and operations, and their fate if they are raised not in a factory but in a boarding school setting.  Explores with delicacy and deep feeling the relations between children raised together and the nature of friendship backed by a morally horrendous premise.