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.