"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

"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

"Tyrell" by Coe Booth

Tyrell is a fifteen-year-old black lad living in New York with his ten-year-old brother and his moms; his father is in prison and the family, homeless, have been sent to a cockroach infested motel with other homeless families. He earns money using NY Metro season tickets which he uses to swipe commuters through the station gates in return for a dollar. He is an intriguing mix of toxic masculinity (aggression and a 24-7 sex drive; "Guys gotta act stronger and tougher when females is watching them." C 13) and 'new man' protection: if he has to kill someone to protect his girl, he reflects, he will just have to go to jail. He wants to earn enough money to get his family into an apartment; the only way he can do this quasi-legally is by setting up a rap party using his pop's DJ equipment. This is a 'lets do the show right here' story set in a context of squalor, homelessness, petty crime and hunger.

He has a great and seemingly authentic voice, there is a lot of verisimilitude and there is a great plot with some fine characters. It has been perfectly st up for a sequel; I suspect there will be a series.

A lot of the book is focussed on food. Tyrell never talks about his hunger but he chronicles every meal, from the one at the church where he has to sit through a two-hour service first to the ten dollar breakfast at McDonalds (two egg-McMuffin meals) and all the times he is invited to share someone's food and wolfs it down:

• "Troy keep eating and eating like someone gonna take the food away if he don’t eat everything in, like, five minutes." (C 7)
• "I’m eating so fast, I ain’t even picking my head up in between bites." (C 7)
• "I ain’t thinking ‘bout no cigarette. I don’t want nothing to spoil the taste of that food in my mouth." (C 8)
• "And what’s messed up is that I’m really hungry too. Starving. I need this food." (C 27)

There are moments when the hopelessness of homelessness is perfectly captured:

• "I gotta do something. I wanna go somewhere, but I don’t got nowhere to go." (C 4)

But Tyrell also rages against the impotence of people like his mother who refuse to take responsibility for picking themselves up off the floor:

• "Everyone on this bus got some excuse for why they here. None of it is they fault." (C 3)
• "I’m tired of the way she act, like everyone s’posed to do everything for her all the time. Even if she don’t do nothing. Even when my pops was home, she never did nothing for herself. She just sat ‘round expecting him to do everything for her and buy her things. No matter how he got them." (C 4)

Other great moments:

• "I never really believed in God ‘cause I knew if there was a God he wouldn’t never take my pops away from me. And my pops always taught me not to depend on nobody but myself." (C 8)
• "I leave that store with a little over a dollar. Damn, I need to make some money soon." (C 8)
• "Here we ain’t got no kitchen table to sit at, so we gotta work on the bed, which really don’t cut it." (C 9)
• "That ain’t who I am. Shit, my pops ain’t raise me to be no pussy." (C 11)
• "That woman was on me like white on rice, let me tell you." (C 11)
• "I never used to hate snow, but when you ain’t got no warm coat or boots, snow ain’t cool. Not only that, but I ain’t got no other sneakers to put on, so I’ma be stuck in these all fuckin’ day." (C 13)
• "If my brother can have some fun while we in this situation, I’ma let him. He don’t deserve to be at Bennett. He should be outside with a good coat and boots playing in the snow, so why I’ma stop him from having a good time?" (C 13)
• "Life is so fucked up for Troy right now. Someone need to let him win sometime." (C 13)
• "Just ‘cause she hooked up with a lot of guys don’t mean she wasn’t being used by them." (C 16)
• "Females don’t know how hard it is sleeping with them when you ain’t doing nothing. Shit ain’t right. My whole body was hurting to get with her." (C 17)
• "Teachers took one look at me and started putting me in programs for at-risk kids, then at-risk boys, then at-risk teenagers. Personally, I ain’t never knew what the fuck I was s’posed to be at risk of, except growing up Black" (C 17)
• "Cal has a pops so bad, he make my pops look like one of them TV fathers." (C 19)
• "Last time they let him out, you shoulda seen him, walking around in clothes from, like, fifteen years ago, trying to pick up young girls with his old-ass self.” (C 19)
• "Cal a happy drunk, but I’m like one of them sorry-ass drunks you see crying on theyself on the train." (C 19)
• "My opinion, weed ain’t nothing compared to alcohol. They made the wrong thing legal." (C 21)
• "My school wasn’t nothing like this. It was more like a prison, you ask me. We had to go through metal detectors just to get in, and if them alarms went off, we had to go to another room to get searched again with one of them hand wands like they use at the airport. And no matter what you had on you, they would say it was a weapon and take it away from you, even when you was bringing it for school. Shit like compasses for geometry and them little staplers wasn’t allowed in my school. Even rulers. Like we was gonna file them down and make knives outta them or something. The whole thing never made no sense to me. They was s’posed to be getting us ready for college, not a life behind bars." (C 23)
• "Damn. She giving me handouts. I mean, I know she being nice and everything, but all I feel is embarrassed." (C 27)
• "I don’t know why, but females always think they know what guys need. Like we too dumb to run our own life or something." (C 28)
• "And the truth is, when you pay nothin’, you get nothin’." (C 29)
• “I need your father,” she say, and she look kinda lost too. “I can’t do it by myself no more. I need him.” (C 31)

A super young adult book from the other side of the tracks.

Also read: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

August 2020

"Turtles All the Way Down" by John Green

John Green is the author of young adult phenomena such as Paper Towns (my favourite) The Fault in Our Stars (everyone's tear-jerking favourite) and An Abundance of Katherines.

He is superb at creating strong young characters and interacting them with superbly witty dialogue:

• Narrator Aza lives in a state of permanent anxiety about her microflora, fearing that she will one day die of sepsis or some other microbial infection. She is so anxious that, having kissed her boyfriend and realised that she gas just imbibed an estimated 80 million of his bacteria, she has to go to the bathroom and drink hand sanitiser.
• Her best friend Daisy writes very popular fan fiction about the romantic life of Chewbacca from Star Wars. She initiates the hero's journey by proposing that the pair of them investigate the mysterious disappearance of a local billionaire so they can get the reward money of 100,000 dollars.
• Daisy and Aza therefore go snooping at the billionaire's house and meet Davis, his son. Aza and Davis begin dating (which is awkward when you don't like kissing).

I loved the idea of you not being you but rather a host to a whole ecosystem of microbes. This raises questions of selfhood: who are 'you':

• The book starts with the narrator realizing "I might be fictional" (C 1) because her life is controlled by her school's timetable: "I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell. ... You think you're the painter, but you're the canvas." (C 1)
• "Humans are approximately 50 per cent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not you at all. ... It often seems like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me." (C 1)
• "If half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate." (C 1)
• "Self is a plurality, but pluralities can also be integrated, right? Think of a rainbow. It's one arc of light, but also seven differently coloured arcs of light." (C 8)
• "There are all these things living inside of me that eat my food for me ... I'm not a human person so much as this disgusting, teeming blob of bacteria ... Which means that I have maybe, like, no more of a soul than the bacteria do." (C 8)
• Even the outside environment is in control: "You never think much about weather when it's good, but once it gets cold enough to see your breath, you can't ignore it. The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around." (C 17)

Other great moments:

• "The whole problem with boys is that ninety-nine percent of them are, like, okay. If you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they'd be totally acceptable." (C 5)
• "I have the soul of a private jet owner, and the life of a public transportation rider." (C 5)
• "Wait, oh God, I just said I'm in love. We've been hooking up for under twenty-four hours and I'm dropping L-bombs." (C 10)
• "It's a weird phrase in English, in love, like it's a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don't get to be in anything else - in friendship or in anger or in hope." (C 12)
• "I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that's what life is like. ... It rhymes, but not in the way you expect." (C 12)
• "What I love about science is that as you learn, you don't really gets answers. You just get better questions." (C 14)
• "My whole life I thought I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along." (C 21)

Great fun to read. Another brilliantly written and thought provoking book from John Green.

March 2020; 286 pages

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

"The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas

American black teenager Starr lives in the inner city where drive-by shootings, gang warfare and drug-dealing is rife but goes to a posh school in the suburbs. She is the only witness when her oldest friend Khalil is shot by the police. Should she speak up when raising one's head above the parapet might put her and her family in danger?

The structure of this book is unusual. There are many classic elements. For example, Starr's relationship with her rich white boyfriend is disrupted by the polarisation of her community into black and white. Normally classic plot points such as this are not resolved, one way or the other, until the very end of the book. But in this story there are a number of resolutions by the end of part one which is about two-thirds of the way through the book. This does introduce a degree of tension as one realises that this story is straying from convention and that therefore what might happen in the remaining third of the book might surprise.

The book is also enlivened by the entangled relationships between the members of the black community. Starr's father went to jail for the local drug baron with whose wife he had previously had a child, Starr's half-brother Seven. Starr's father is now a reformed character, a Christian and local store owner whilst still being a militant Black Panther, and there is tension between him and his son's stepfather. Starr's mother's brother, who acted as surrogate father for Starr whilst her real father was in jail, is a cop. This enables the author to extract maximum conflict from relatively few characters.

There are a couple of moments when it gets a bit preachy. Daddy puts Starr through a catechism in Chapter 10 to investigate the reasons for drug dealing in black neighbourhoods. Hailey seems to be a character developed so that the author can develop arguments about racism. But if Victor Hugo can spend page after page of Les Miserables lecturing about the Battle of Waterloo, or the iniquity of monasticism, I guess any author is entitled to disrupt their story with a page or two of preaching.

But the real beauty of this book is the freshness of the prose:

• “There are just some places where it's not enough to be me. Either version of me.” (C 1)
• “Guys in their freshest kicks and sagging pants grind so close to girls they just about need condoms.” (C 1)
• “Spring in Garden Heights doesn't always bring love, but it promises babies in the winter.” (C 1)
• “He always has [the party] on the Friday of spring break because you need Saturday to recover and Sunday to repent.” (C 1)
• “She's the perfect height for modelling ... but a little thicker than those toothpicks on the runway.” (C 1)
• “Hoedom is universal.” (C 1)
• “that's more difficult than buying retro Jordans on release day.” (C 1)
• “He wipes his nose like he always does before a lie.” (C 1)
• “He couldn't carry a tune if it came in a box.” (C 3)
• “How could he sell the very stuff that took his momma from him? Did he realise that he was taking someone somebody else's momma from them?” (C 4)
• “Did he realise that if he does become a hashtag, some people will only see him as a drug dealer?” (C 4)
• “Khalil matters to us, not the stuff he did. Forget everybody else.” (C 4)
• “Good-byes hurt the most when the other person’s already gone.” (C 4)
• “I left his house pissed and horny, the absolute worst way to leave.” (C 5)
• “Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. They key is to never stop doing right.” (C 9)
• “If babies can count as humans when they’re little, veggies can count as veggies when they’re little.” (C 12)
• “Brave peoples’ legs don’t shake. Brave people don’t feel like puking. Brave people sure don’t have to remind themselves how to breathe ... If bravery is a medical condition, everybody’s misdiagnosed me.” (C 16)
• "I didn't know a dead person could be charged in his own murder" (C 16)

A very enjoyable read.

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

"Dodgers" by Bill Beverly

Winner of the 2017 crime/thriller prize in the British Book Awards.

Four black teenagers from Los Angeles are sent by their gang leader to drive in a van to drive to Wisconsin to murder a Judge who is a forthcoming witness in a trial. One of them, the narrator East, is related to the gang leader. With him are his half brother Ty, a thirteen year old psychopath, fat Walter, a genius at forging id, and Michael, the nominal leader. East, who led a team of crackhouse lookouts till a police raid closed the house down,  sleeps in an abandoned office building but pops home from time to time to look after his alcoholic mother. He finds the journey across the country a revelation.

These are bad boys, bred bad, brought up to badness, on a mission to kill. But they are still teenagers and their deprivations show at every moment. You can't help liking East and dreading the likely outcome of his criminal behaviour. 

And then there are moments when the plot twists and you walk, unsuspecting, into an ambush.

Brilliantly plotted, with great characters, great dialogue and moments of lyricism. 

Selected quotes:

• “Michael laughed almost every time he talked. It wasn't that he thought everything was funny; it was like his sentence wasn't finished yet without it.” (p 47)
• “All East’s life the mountains had been a jagged base for the northern sky. ... He’d never seen them broken into what they were, single peaks dotted with plants scrub and rock litter, and the open distances between.” (p 66)
• “Wandering blind, their shadows spilling out in eight directions.” (p 71)
• “The windshield filled with sunrise working its way up to blue.” (p 92)
• “He could sense something about the chasm, all the time piled up there. Close to forever. more time than he had in a hundred lives like his.” (p 96)
• “Ty belonged to nobody now, an unknowable child, indolent as bees in autumn” (p 99)
• “A thunderstorm hovered, prowling its own road.” (p 101)
• “Trying to press his gut out like a toothpaste tube.” (p 102) This is when East is sitting in the toilet, constipated. The physicality of this book is tremendously honest. When he is beaten up it hurts.
• “Gym muscles down his belly like puppies in a litter.” (p 107)
• “But do they get a signal out here? Negative bars.” (p 157)
• “Flight, they called it. One part fear, one part the blindest excitement you’d ever known. It freed you from time, from who you were or the matter of what you’d done. You darted, like a fish away from a net, like a dog outrunning a dogcatcher.” (p 206)
• “If there were such a thing as far enough, it wasn't a place you could walk to.” (p 249)

What to compare it to? It has won awards from crime and thriller writing but it isn't really in that genre.  In some ways it is a novel about a troubled teenager growing up so it is a sort of Catcher in the Rye. The road trip reminded me of the road trip in John Green's Paper Towns. But the element of honesty about a boy trying to survive in a world with a different system of morality puts it into a class of its own.

A very worthy winner of the Gold Dagger from the Crime Writers' Association in 2016. Other winners include:

• The Dry in 2017
• The Wench is Dead in 1989
• The Spy who came in from the Cold in 1963

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