"Out of the Ashes" by Michael Morpurgo

Written in the form of diary entries, the diarist being the 13 year-old daughter of the farmer, this harrowing YA novel charts the visitation of foot and mouth disease to a farm in Devon. The reader knows from the outset what is going to happen ... but there is still a twist in the tale.

It made even cynical old me tearful.

Selected quotes:

• “As I was praying I got angry, angry with God. Why did he let it happen?” (Monday, March 5th)
• “The smell of death is stronger than perfume, and lasts longer.” (Friday, March 9th)
• “I want tomorrow never to come. But tomorrow always comes.” (Monday, March 12th)
• “This evening the farm is still, is silent. The fields are empty, and it's raining.” (Tuesday, March 13th)
• “So the worst wasn't the worst. Some prayers do work after all.” (Thursday, April 5th)

March 2026; 112 pages

First published in 2001 by Macmillan

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Forgive me, Leonard Peacock" by Matthew Quick

 A young adult story set in a high school in the USA about the first world problems of a privileged teenager. The narrator is Leonard Peacock; today is his eighteenth birthday. He plans to take a gun to school, shoot fellow student Asher Beal and then kill himself. But first he has to deliver a gift to each of four friends.

Obviously this is a great premise for a book. It was well-written and easy to read. But I found the necessary suspension of disbelief difficult to achieve. Leonard lives on his own because his fashion designer (and extraordinarily unmaternal) mother lives and works in New York and his one-hit wonder rock star father is in South America, on the run from the tax authorities. That's great for the plot but lousy for verisimilitude. Leonard has no financial problems, being able to spend $200 on a cab. Poor little rich kid? "I understand I am relatively privileged from a socio-economical viewpoint, but so was Hamlet" (Ch 15); OF COURSE he compares himself with Hamlet. One of his friends is a virtuoso violinist. He has a holocaust class at school. "There are no black people living in our town". As a result of these niggles, I never really felt any sense of empathy with the narrator and so I didn't really care about his problems.

I kept reading because I wanted to see how the story was resolved, clearly there were secrets about his relationship with Asher Beal which were key to Leonard's motivation. When they were revealed I wasn't surprised: I hadn't predicted the detail but the general outline of the issue was clear from early in the book. 

There are repeated echoes of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger but this is decidedly less edgy.

I enjoyed the extensive use of footnotes to provide a sometimes witty commentary upon the main narrative. I was less excited by the occasional use of unorthodox typography.

It is good pacing, with key turning points at the 50% and 75% mark.

Selected quotes:

• "The lies are so vivid, they're beginning to burn out my retinas." (Ch 19)
• "You're different. And I'm different too. Different is good. But different is hard." (Ch 19)
• "If god existed and he created the whole universe ... why would he need our help, let alone our praise?" (Ch 21)
• "I got the sense that she didn't really believe the things she was saying so much as she was clinging to those answers because she didn't have any other answers and maybe having the wrong answers was better than having no answers." (Ch 22)
• "It's crazy the pessimistic shit we're made to memorize in school and then carry around in our skulls for the rest of our lives." (fn 54; Ch 25)
• "These people we call Mom and Dad, they bring us into the world and then they don't follow through with what we need." (Ch 26)
• "It's a fend-for-yourself free-for-all in the end, and I'm jut not cut out for that sort of living." (Ch 26)

A canon 'gainst self-slaughter with an unlikeable protagonist in a unlikely environment.

June 2023; 273 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Cooking with Caroline" by Katharina Marcus

 This superb book is a delightful YA novel with all the hallmarks of a classic of its genre; of a quality comparable with the works of , for example, John Green (An Abundance of Katherines, The Fault In Our Stars, Paper Towns, Turtles All the Way Down etc).

It is written by the narrator-protagonist in the third person past tense, with regular first-person present tense interjections in which she comments on the process of writing the story and her reasons for writing it, from which we gather that something terrible has happened: this brilliant device acts as a compelling hook and keeps us reading as the third-person story and its characters develop.

Wise-cracking, self-doubting, overweight Kirsty signs up for a cooking class with celebrity chef Caroline. Also in the class is Jake Deacon, the bad boy of the sixth form. Kirsty learns more about Jake's mysterious life as their friendship develops. 

A compelling read told with humour and compassion. 

Selected quotes

• "Nice word, simplistic. So much more complicated than mere simple."
• "The pea brains of Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber obviously haven’t caught up with reality yet."
• "Jake Deacon’s job description at Gull Cove was to be in everybody’s face at all times."
• "I’m just wallpaper, aren’t I? Part of the general ambience. One of the people you need for others to stand out."
• "He straightened up again, cocked his head and let his eyes roam freely over her shape, so blatantly body scoring her that it didn’t even feel intrusive. Insulting, maybe, but not intrusive."
• "When Kirsty wore an apron, no matter what colour, she always ended up the spitting image of a stout, pre-revolution, Russian peasant crone, as depicted in her year nine history book."
• "Zach and Noel were genuinely hilarious, the kind of friends who finished each other’s sentences while constantly mocking and taunting each other in the best possible way."
• "fit for a boy band member. Maybe not the lead singer, maybe not even one of the guys directly left and right of the central ornament but definitely fit for casting as the wild card on the outer edges."
• "You bestow love on people as if there was an infinite supply of the stuff. Like it’s the one natural resource that isn’t running out fast on the human race."
• "Because she understood what he meant. This was beyond the vanities of attraction. It was as real and as magnificent as life ever got."
• “I feel like I’m in some stupid Hollywood romdram without the rom,”
• "If I look out of your bedroom window I can see the same stupid sun doing the same stupid sunset routine but nothing feels good, nothing is right, everything is wrong."
• "Those are the rules, right? Either ‘I love you,’ brings the person back from the brink of death, or the words act as the final release form: ‘I love you.’ Croak."
• "A glimpse at his clenched jaw made Kirsty’s own teeth hurt in sympathy."
• "It occurs to me that writing is a lot like cooking: hours of preparation and then the finished product is devoured in a fraction of the time. Luckily, there is no washing up here."
• "It looked somewhere between a nightmarish vision of a government facility where genetic experiments were being conducted, and a really big, recently refurbished, insanely posh public toilet."

February 2022

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Floating Church" by Alexandra Peel

This delightfully charming novella is set in the Spring of 1603. In the opening chapter we are introduced to the villagers of Hope Ghyll, through the eyes of narrator and principal protagonist Susanna, an innocent girl fast approaching womanhood who goes to the woods to confide in her doll and idol, 'Oak Tree Jesus', telling him all her dreams, from becoming May Queen to kissing the dreamy-looking James Joseph. But growing-up has its dangers and its consequences.

I'm not an expert on this period but to me the details and the descriptions and the dialogue seemed pitch perfect. At the start of the book the countryside is idyllic: the villagers work together and live together in a close-knit but tolerant co-dependence; Susanna is happy to be surrounded by her kith and kin and comforted by the certainty of the village traditions. But change cannot be prevented. A new preacher arrives, who challenges the easy paganism of village life. And Susanna's own longings prove disruptive too. With the dreadful inevitability of a gathering storm, clouds loom on the horizon. Tragedy, when it strikes, is terrible.

The plot is perfectly paced (the May day celebration, half way through, is the turning point) and the prose is lyrical. The writing seems simple and effortless which is a testament to the writer's skill. 

Some selected quotes:

• "And if there was one thing John Assheby was, it was certain."
• "The white thing lay across a large rock, soaked through, plastered to the stone like a second skin. One sleeve trailed into the water, whilst the other lay across its own body. The watery arm wafted back and forth waving to her."
• "The abandoned parson’s house where an apple tree wrapped its branches around one corner of the roof, as a parent embracing a child."
• "James, simply thinking his name made her sigh with bliss, would come home tomorrow. Perhaps."
• "Moths were a sign of death, and it was unlucky to kill them."
• "The road rose uphill to the church and cemetery and climbed from there at a rate Tom Ballard's mare and even John Baker's donkeys struggled to ascend. She remembered her father once comparing it to the long climb to Heaven, but Heaven was a steeper journey, no doubt."
• "If I had looked in more windows before marrying, tried the goods, well...who knows how things might have turned out.”

A simple tale, beautifully told. Magnificent. August 2021.

Alexandra Peel has also written:

• Beneath the Skin: a steampunk adventure in two parts:
• Where Sleeps the Serpent
• The Song of the Nightingale 
• The Life and Crimes of Lockhart & Doppler: another steampunk novel

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Witch child" by Celia Rees

Mary is a witch, or at least the granddaughter of a witch, and, orphaned, more or less, she ships out to the New World with a bunch of Pilgrim Fathers. In a slightly meandering narrative she describes the establishment of a settlement in the forest, encounters with native Americans, and the battle with the stereotypically hypocritical protestant patriarchy. 

It is presented as a journal entries that have been discovered in a quilt, with the punctuation, spelling and paragraphing modernised, but it reads like a modern novel. In particular, the attitudes of the narrator and the sympathetic characters are very late twentieth century. This presentation is not really used: there is no frame narrative or editroial footnotes. It appears to be only an attempt to add verisimilitude.

Well researched (I was impressed with "crying over milk shed" instead of "spilt milk" and I find that version can be dated to 1659) and well written but all the characters are a bit predictable. This is fiction to comfort and reassure.

Some great moments:

• "Lies are not rooted in the mind in the way truth is." (entry 7)
• "Too much wind is as bad as too little." (entry 20)
• "The children of Israel were forty years in the wilderness, which is a long time to be wandering and homeless. God took His time before getting them out." (entry 35)

October 2020; 235 pages

"Red Shift" by Alan Garner

Three young men, from three different time periods:

• Macey, fighting through Cheshire with the Roman Ninth Legion.
• Thomas, trying to protect his wife from Irish soldiers during the English Civil War/ War of Three Kingdoms in the 1640s.
• Tom, an intelligent teenager perpetually showing off his knowledge of facts and quotations and making silly puns, living in a caravan near Sandbach with his mum and dad and trying to maintain a long distance relationship with Jan. 

They are connected through the colours blue and silver, a tower on Mow Cop, the stars of Orion and an ancient stone hand-axe.

The stories all involve the relationship between the man and a woman. The women can bear children, they are the nurturers and protectors, although they may be damaged and wounded and hurt and abused. It seems the men are singled out for some special lunacy, being subject to fits of madness of one kind or another. The stories in the past are overtly violent: no one is far from the threat of violent death. Modern Tom's father and grandfather were soldiers (Jan's are health professionals) but there is no war in the modern setting; despite this the Tom and Jan story has incredible poignancy.

It isn't an easy read. Much is carried in short sentence dialogue, often without speaker-tags so the reader sometimes has to reconstruct who is speaking. Spoiler alert: The stories are not well-resolved and each is left a little open as to what exactly happens. It is not made clear whether Jan and Tom eventually have sex; there are gaps in between lines of dialogue by the same person that indicate lacunae but it isn't clear of what length; the characters say things that might be taken as suggesting that they have had sex. But it is all very enigmatic.The ending of the Jan and Tom story carries an implication that they do not meet again (their regular parting words are 'Hello' but on this case it is 'see you' and the final line 'It doesn't matter. Not really now not any more.' sound like a break up. The very last page, after this last line, is a letter written in the 'Lewis Carroll' cipher which Tom and Jan use for their correspondence. No code word is given which makes the cipher hard to break but wikipedia (here) offers a code word and a translation of a letter from Tom to Jan. 

Some great moments:

• "They returned to the gloom and announcements and people, trains drawing hands apart." (p 60)
• "Spiders under my skin." (p 62)
• "Services aren't what they were now that we understand them." (p 66)
• "not really now not any more." (p 108)

Poignant. Enigmatic. Hard to decipher. 

October 2020; 190 pages

Garner is author of a number of novels, mostly aimed at children, in which ancient legends and magical worlds impact upon everyday life:

• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and the distinctively different concluding part to the 'trilogy', Boneland.
• Elidor, a Narnia-style children's fantasy
• The utterly brilliant Owl Service (aimed at young adults)
• Red Shift, also aimed at young adults and perhaps the darkest of Garner's novels. A line in Elidor - "The legend says that there was once a ploughboy in Elidor: an idiot, given to fits. But in his fit he spoke clearly, and was thought to prophesy." (C 6) - seems to be a link with one of the characters in Red Shift. There are alos several links between Red Shift and Boneland.
• The definitively adult Thursbitch
• Treacle Walker, perhaps Garner's late masterpiece

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Back End of Nowhere" by Jenny Sullivan

 When I was a kid I used to read stories about children who became involved with magic, often involving King Arthur or Merlin; stories such as The Dark Is Rising, a series by Susan Cooper, or Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath. This book was a refreshing take on the genre, starring a delightfully American teenager who is wonderfully outraged at being asked to move from the good old U S of A to rural Wales. Naturally she is initially reluctant to accept the Call when the locals all tell her she is the One to fulfil the local legends. The first half of the book was a delight. The second half was more or less a standard example of the genre: Catlin swiftly lost her Americanness and the magical adventures became standard Harry Potter fare. I was hoping for some challenges - the heroine and her male friend are teenagers - but this was no Owl Service. 

But there were some memorable moments:

• "It might turn on you one night, and dismantle you, bone from bone, sinew from sinew, until your blood runs like wine on the earth." (Prologue: The Legends: The Earthstone)
• "Dawn slid sideways between the trees of the grove" (Prologue: The Legends: The Earthstone)
• "A musical saw played by a real whizz sounds kind of like someone screaming in tune. A musical saw played by my Mom sounded like someone being tortured." (C 2)
• "Why do Moms get in such a snit about tidyness: I know where everything is, and with the world in such a mess, why should my bedroom be the exception?" (C 6)
• "I would rather untangle the knots in my friendships than wait for then to get so big they, like, strangle it, you know." (C 11)
• "Mom would have had a triple-dip conniption with extra nuts if she'd seen me!" (C 15)

A brilliant rendition of American teen-speak in an interesting fusion of the YA genre with magical fantasy.

August 2020; 214 pages

Love, Simon" by Becky Albertalli

Originally published as Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda,

This is a YA novel set in an American High School and thus comparable to The Fault in Our Stars and, especially, Paper Towns both by John Green.

There is a great hook right at the start. Martin has read Simon's emails to Blue and discovered that Simon, 17, is secretly gay. Martin proceeds to blackmail Simon into setting Martin up on a date with Simon's friend Abby. But Simon has another problem too. He is falling in love, by email, with Blue who, he has deduced, also goes to the school. But he doesn't know who Blue is.

At which point there are a number of scenarios. Blue could be some old pervert tricking Simon into these emails and intending to lure him into a compromising situation and even rape. Blue could be Martin himself, twisting Simon round his little finger, or some other member of the class out to tease and humiliate Simon. Blue could (Simon hopes) be Cal who is stunningly hot.

Simon's other problem, of course, is giving Martin enough for Martin not to expose him. And of course he has to negotiate the pitfalls and perils of teenage sexuality complicated by the need to 'come out' (which means talking about his sex-life with his parents, gross) not to mention all the other problems that a kid at school growing up routinely has.

It's a great little story which twists and turns and keeps you hooked to the very end.

Great lines:

• “People are like houses with big rooms and tiny windows.” (p 18) 
• “The whole point of everything is to find a shore worth swimming to.” (p 18) 
• “My mum was the one who got obsessed with the idea that I had a girlfriend even though I had never had one before. I don't know why that came as such a freaking surprise to her, since I'm pretty sure most people start out never having had one.” (p 55) 
• “It's a little fucked up that teachers think they get to dictate what you think about. It's not enough if you just sit there quietly and let them teach. It's like they think they have a right to control your mind.” (p 108) 
• “Straight people really should have to come out, and the more awkward it is the better.” (p 147) 
• “My dad invented the concept of Simon logic ... it means wishful thinking supported by flimsy evidence.” (p 151) 
• “My heart is a pinball” (p 204) 
• “A couple of the girls put some junk in my hair to make it messy, which is basically like putting high heels on a giraffe.” (p 214)

March 2018; 303 pages

"The End of Everything" by Megan Abbott

Lizzie and Evie are best friends growing up and experiencing the hormones of puberty that have started to make them see boys as more than nuisances. They share everything. So Lizzie thinks. Till Evie disappears.

Lizzie turns into the key witness. She identifies the car she saw and she knows who drives it, the father of a school friend; he too has disappeared. She finds the cigarettes he smoked as he was stalking Evie. She even breaks into the Shaw house to search for evidence the police haven't found.

Lizzie's amateur sleuthing stretched credibility. Were the police really so stupid firstly to believe Lizzie's often improbable lies which could so easily have been checked and secondly not to be a little more observant of the perpetrator's wife? And could we really believe that a thirteen year old girl, often clad in little more than a tee shirt and knickers, could spend so many nights roaming around a neighbourhood in lockdown after an abduction? Lizzie's mother seems repeatedly negligent and Evie's mother is almost a complete non-entity as is  Mrs Shaw; mature women in this story are faintly drawn to the point of invisibility.

At the same time she is always around Evie's house, comforting her father in a relationship which, from Lizzie's point of view although she does not necessarily recognise it, is swiftly developing into love. And there is the complicating factor of Evie's elder sister Dusty, the one that all the teenage boyts adore, the one who ought to be abducted if anyone is.

Told from Lizzie's point of view this is an interesting exploration of the love between young girls and older men. Lizzie's feelings were intense and sometimes slightly repetitive but always kept away from melodrama. The feelings of the other characters, which the narrator had to surmise from their words and actions, sometimes reaching different conclusions from the immature protagonist, were drawn with deftness and subtlety. At the end the precise natures of the relationships between Dusty and Evie and their father, and the feelings of Evie's dad for Lizzie, are always open to alternative interpretations.

• "We were that close. Sometimes we blinked in time." (p 27)
• "It felt like she knew her own zig-zagging heart, and I was just killing time." (p 27)
• "An old velvet poster that said 'Mott the Hoople', which I always thought was a Dr Seuss book." (p 70)
• "The awkward slouch of boys who grew so fast they themselves seemed bewildered by it, faintly dazed in their own skin." (p 73)
• "You can't ever know anyone's private darkness." (p 148)

A haunting exploration of the feelings of a newly pubescent girl. March 2018; 246 pages

"Wonder" by R J Palacio

August was born with a deformed face; after endless plastic surgery he looks like a cross between the elephant man and a zombie: "I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse." (p 3) "I feel ordinary. Inside. But I know ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds." (p 3)

And Auggie has a challenge. After years of home schooling he is going to a real school. He has to face all the normal perils and pitfalls of young adolescents growing up and in particular the issue of no one wants to be my friend.

This is a delightful story about growing up, full of the language of young kids and the magic of their on-off relationships and their insecurities. But what makes it even better than the usual is that it is told from multiple perspectives:

• August
• His big sister, Via. She has problems of her own. And they are not helped by being Auggie's sister. "I've gotten used to not complaining, and I've gotten used to not bothering Mom and Dad with little stuff. I've gotten used to figuring things out on my own: how to put toys together, how to organize my life so I don't miss friends' birthday parties, how to stay on top of my schoolwork so I never fall behind in class. I've never asked for help with my homework. Never needed reminding to finish a project or study for a test. If I was having trouble with a subject in school, I'd go home and study it until I figured it out on my own. I taught myself how to convert fractions into decimal points by going online. ... My worst day, worst fall, worst headache, worst bruise, worst cramp, worst mean thing anyone could say has always been nothing compared to what August has gone through." (p 83) 
• The girl who sat at his table at lunch when every other kid avoided him as if he had the plague
• His best friend although the relationship is a bit on and off. Jack has problems too. He is very poor compared to the other kids at school and he desperately wants to be accepted by the cool kids.
• Justin, the boyfriend of the big sister who lives half the time with his mum and half with his dad and neither of them seem to care (he avoids capital letters except for Names): "if it really was all random, the universe would abandon us completely and the universe doesn't. it takes care of its most fragile creations in ways we can't see. like with parents who adore you blindly. and a big sister who feels guilty for being human over you. and a little gravelly-voiced kid whose friends have left him over you. and even a pink-haired girl who carries your picture in her wallet. maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. the universe takes care of all its birds." (p204). If it was a great idea having multiple perspectives on the action it was an even better idea to have a character who is virtually on the fringe of it all and who can therefore observe and pass judgement like the Chorus in a Greek drama. 
• The big sister's best friend who loves Auggie even though she is no longer friends with Via.

In fact the other characters were often even more interesting than the 'main'.

A great read. May 2017; 313 pages