Category Archives: Books

Storm by Kevin Crossley-Holland a Carnegie Medal winner

Posted on by
2

Storm by Kevin Crossley-Holland won the Carnegie Medal in 1985. I have a bit of an ongoing personal project going, to read as many of these medal winners as I can. This one has been utilised as a Reading Ladder book, presumably some sort of educational tool. This has whittled the pages down to just 46 and as it’s heavily illustrated it’s a very quick read indeed, and unlike any of the other Carnegie Medal winners that I’ve previously read.

Annie is a young girl who lives with her parents in a remote country area, her much older sister Willa is married and living in a town three bus journeys away, but she is going to be having a baby soon, and her husband who works away from home isn’t able to get home in time for the birth. It’s almost Christmas and Willa makes the journey to her parents’ house.Despite the age difference the sisters get on well, and Willa is able to tell Annie the details of a local ghost story about a man who had been murdered by highwaymen near the ford – hundreds of years ago.

Three days later a terrific storm arrives, and it looks like Willa’s baby is determined to arrive too, but the phone lines are down so they can’t get through to the hospital.

Annie is sent out into the storm to fetch the local doctor, she’s frightened of meeting the ghost, but a horseman picks her up and takes her to the doctor’s house, and all is well.

I think that this book has been somewhat shortened, edited to fit the Reading Ladder. It’s a well written story, and I like the illustrations which are by Alan Marks, but I’m not sure about pushing ghost stories onto children, so I find it to be a strange choice for the Carnegie Medal. I hope their teachers tell them that ghosts aren’t real!

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Let the Circle be Unbroken by Mildred D. Taylor

Posted on by
8

Roll of Thunder, Here My Cry and Let the Circle be Unbroken by Mildred D. Taylor were published in 1976 and 1981 in the USA.  I read editions from the Puffin Plus series. Thanks Jennifer for these ones, I hadn’t even heard of the author before.

The first one begins in 1933 in America’s deep south. Mississippi.  It’s a tough time for farmers but particularly for black farmers, but the Logan family are a bit better off than most of their neighbours who are only sharecroppers. The Logans actually own their land, but the wealthy white landowner who owns the land adjoining theirs is determined to get their land for himself.

Cassie Logan is the only girl in her family, she has three brothers and lives with her parents and her grandmother. Her father is having to work away from home for most of the time though, so that he can earn money on the railroad, that money pays the annual tax which is due on his land.

Life is difficult for the children too, just getting to school in the morning is a nightmare as they have to walk on what is often a muddy track, having to try to dodge the white children’s bus as the driver is determined to splash them with mud while the white children cheer. Life for the black people is just one humiliation after another, but it’s the night riders (Ku Klux Klan) who terrify the black people. Just a rumour of ‘disrespect’ from a black person could end up with them being lynched or burnt out. Cassie has a lot to learn, and none of it makes sense. This one won the Newbery Medal.

Let the Circle be Unbroken is set two years later. Things are even worse for the black people now, the Depression is biting deeper and the ‘solutions’ put forward by the government are only making things worse, especially for sharecroppers. Granger, the main white landowner is conning the Logan family out of money which was due to them from the government and Cassie’s mother has lost her teaching job.

Mr Morrison has become part of the Logan household, he’s over seven feet tall and Cassie’s father won’t worry so much about his family while he is away on the railroad work. But it’s young T.J. Avery who gets into big trouble. He’s a young black neighbour and is rather full of himself. When a couple of white lads befriend him you just know it’s going to end in tears.

Stacey Logan, the eldest son decides that he is going to leave and find work elsewhere, but he just runs off and they hear nothing from him, everyone fears the worst.

These are both really good reads, if somewhat depressing, as in some ways things don’t seem to be getting a lot better for the black people in the deep south of the US.

20 Books of Summer 2024

Posted on by
4

I completed 20 Books of Summer, in fact I probably read getting on for 30 books in that time, but a few of them were for young adults so they were fairly quick reads. Only about half of the books that I read were on my original list. With requested books coming from the library I had to concentrate on those ones. I had an unusual fail when I got to about half way through Maugham’s Cakes and Ale as the chapters went back to the beginning and there was no sign of the last half of the book – so annoying!  My copy of the book is about 50 years old, it’s not the first time that I’ve had a problem like that. One of my old books has two halves of entirely different books in it. I thought it would be easy to get another copy of Cakes and Ale from the library, and it should have been but so far it hasn’t arrived.

So these are the books that I read and managed to review:

1. The Wrench by Primo Levi (for The Classics Club)

2. The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory

3. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

4. Post After Post-Mortem by E.C.R. Lorac

5. The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean

6. Gideon Ahoy by William Mayne

7. Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud

8. Dissolution by C.J. Sansom

9. The Secrets of Blythswood Square by Sara Sheridan

10. Where the World Ends by Geraldine McCaughrean

11. Mayland Hall by Doreen Wallace

12. The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon

13. The Runaway Summer by Nina Bawden

14. Making It Up by Penelope Lively

15. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

16. Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders

17. Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

18. The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

19. The Hemlock Cure by Joanne Burn

20. The Fall of Kelvin Walker by Alasdair Gray

Looking back it seems like a lot longer than three months since I read some of them. Five were by authors that I hadn’t read before:  William Mayne, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Doreen Wallace, Esther Freud and Yasunari Kawabata. I would probably read more books by all of those ones. The only author that I will probably avoid in the future is Philippa Gregory as her grip on known historical facts is poor, possibly deliberately so. When an author writes about Mary, Queen of Scots having black hair you have to wonder about them and all the other details within the books.

Anyway, June was a very wet month this year and July and August weren’t an awful lot better, I’m glad that I had plenty of books to keep me busy.

Thank you Cathy @ She Reads Novels for hosting this again.

Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders – 20 Books of Summer

Posted on by
Reply

Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders is a continuation of E. Nesbit’s book Five Children and It.  This book was first published in 2014.

It begins with a prologue set in London in 1905.  Cyril, Anthea, Jane, Robert and the Lamb had found the Psammead, a sand fairy, a desert god from the times before the ancient Egyptians. He’s a  cantankerous brown furry grump with a small stout body, eyes on stalks and long arms and legs, he usually lives in hot sand and any hint of dampness near him causes him terrible pain. He had been sleeping for years but the children decide to wake him up, the Psammead has the power to grant wishes. They ask him to take them to the future, somwehere quite near, and they end up in 1930, in the home of their old friend the Professor where they see some photos of themselves as they will be as adults, but they aren’t all in the photos, it’s a bit of a puzzle. Of course the older children are just the correct age to be involved in the First World War, and the Psammead whisks some of them to the Western Front.

I’m usually not all that mad keen on continuations written by a different author, but I think this idea really works, inevitably it is a bit sad, but realistic.

At one point (chapter 10) the children and the Psammead go to see the play Peter Pan. The Psammead is thrilled by it, especially when the audience is asked to clap if they believe in fairies. I was almost as thrilled as the Psammead. J.M. Barrie is a much underrated author nowadays.

You can read  Linda Buckley-Archer’s review of the book in The Guardian here.

Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs

Posted on by
Reply

Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs  (of The Snowman fame) was published in 1998, it’s the biography of his parents’ lives and relationship and it’s a delight. At just 102 pages of mainly illustrations I read through it very quickly and then turned back to the beginning again to savour his charming and so detailed illustrations.

Ethel was working in service for two snooty looking women when she fell for Ernest who often waved to her as he cycled past her employers’ home. Ernest is a milkman and the two of them decide to get married and buy a home of their own. The illustrations show them looking around the empty house as Ethel wonders if they can afford it, and bit by bit you can see them gathering furniture and ‘stuff’ to make their quite large nest. Sadly after Ethel has a tough time giving birth to Raymond they are told to have no more children. Ernest says, but we wanted a proper family! It wasn’t to be.

Apart from all the landmarks in a couple’s life such as Ethel being thrilled to have a gas copper for washing the clothes in, there are also all the stand out moments such as the BBC announcing that we were at war in 1939. Then all the preparations involved in that, the gas mask, building an Anderson shelter in the garden, a Morrison’s shelter in the living-room, making blackout shutters and Raymond being evacuated to safety. Just as well as their home is badly damaged in a bomb blast.

This book starts in 1930 and ends in 1971 as Ethel and Ernest both die in that year. Obviously Raymond’s life appears in the book too. It’s a real love letter to both of his parents in their memory. They come across as being a lovely couple, so human and quite different from each other in outlook, with Ethel beinng a bit of a snob, as befits an ex ‘ladies maid’. Ernest is all for the working man.

I’m just amazed that in 1930 a milkman could afford to buy a large terraced Edwardian house with living-room, dining-room, four bedrooms, scullery, kitchen AND bathroom.  They lived in that house all their 41 years together. Apparently this book has been made into an animated film, that seems so fitting.

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Posted on by
Reply

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson is the second novel by the author and it was published in 1997.  I must admit that it’s a while since I read this one, I’ve put off reviewing it as although I like her writing I find it very difficult to write about. I now realise of course that I should have done it while it was clearer in my mind. As often happens in Atkinson’s books the action slips between different times, so this is a bit of a conglomeration of historical fiction, mystery, time travel and also has a 1960s setting in the village of Lythe which is very ancient.

Isobel is the narrator, she’s 16 and has a brother Charles. They have been abandoned by both their parents. Their mother apparently ran off with her boyfriend and their father couldn’t cope and left them, supposedly looking for their mother, but when he comes back seven years later he has brought a new wife with him.

It was their mother’s sister who looked after them, she had given up her home and moved in with them, and was a bit surplus to requirements when an actual step-mother arrived. Their grandmother is also part of the household. From time to time Isobel slips back to the Lythe of Shakespeare’s time.

The book is ful of Scottishisms, you would never know that Atkinson wasn’t born and brought up in Scotland. I believe she went to Edinburgh to study when she was 18 – and stayed, but according to an interview which appeared in the Guardian she regards herself as Yorkshire through and through!

Now 72, and having lived in Scotland for many years, she’s clear that this vision of Englishness – still cleaved to by nationalist politicians – is very much a south-of-the-border issue. Her own identity, she insists, lies in neither country: “I’m not English. I’m from Yorkshire. It’s different.” She left after she wrote Behind the Scenes at the Museum, “but when I die, open me up and Yorkshire will be carved on my heart”.

You can read the full interview with Alex Clark  here.

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar – 20 Books of Summer

Posted on by
Reply

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar was first published in 2018 and I think I’ve had it since then, waiting to be read, it’s one of my 20 Books of Summer. I must admit that I did have a few qualms at times about this book but I ended up really enjoying it. The qualms were because I’m one of those people that prefers to have the bedroom action in books staying in the bedroom with the reader staying on the other side of the door.

The book is set in 1785/86 and Jonah Hancock is a merchant and ship owner, he’s waiting for word of one of his ships to reach him, it’s always a fraught time as so many ships are wrecked and never heard of again. This time his ship has not arrived but its captain Tysoe Jones has, telling Jonah that he has sold his ship so that he could buy a ‘mermaid’. Jonah is dumbfounded but Tysoe explains that the oddity will make him a fortune as people will pay good money to see a mermaid. In truth it’s a dried up and ugly impish thing, but Tysoe is correct and people come from far and wide to see it.

Jonah Hancock had led a quiet and blameless  life for almost twenty years since his wife’s death in childbirth along with his baby son, but he is now catapulted into high society, a place of sex, sin and debauchery. Very young women are exploited by older women, who sell their bodies to wealthy men but the girls get nothing except clothes, board and lodging.

So bawds and bawdy houses feature in this book, some quirky but believable characters, and some problems which are still with us nowadays. The exploitation of young women, by other women as well as men. This was a good read though.

 

 

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata – 20 Books of Summer

Posted on by
4

Snow Country by Yasanuri Kawabata was first published in 1956. The Penguin Modern Classic which I read was translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. It’s a short read at just 121 pages.

Shimamura is a married man and has children, he’s a wealthy man, he inherited his money and is in the habit of leaving the city and travelling to the west coast mountains of Japan, where winter arrives early. He’s travelling there by train and he recognises Yoko by her reflection on his window. She’s a part time geisha and it transpires that she had chosen that profession as her fiance is seriously ill, and she needs to pay for his medical care. The young man is travelling with her and Yoko is tending to him wrapping him up against the cold, he looks seriously ill.

It’s another geisha that Shimamura has come to see though. He believes he’s in love with Komako, she’s very quiet and demure and really not at all the sort of woman who you would expect to become a geisha, hired out every day to entertain strange men at parties – and more. I imagine that a Japanese reader would get much more out of the book than I did, although the translation seems faultless with no clunky bits. There are lots of mentions of moths and apparently they signify the non permanence and transient nature of life – according to Google!  I suppose that is what the book is about. There are some lovely descriptions in it, which I always enjoy in any book.

Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, this was one of the three novels cited by the Nobel Committee.

 

 

 

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Posted on by
2

Book Cover

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy was published in 2022 and it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023. The book begins in 2015 but swiftly moves back in time to Belfast of the 1970s.

Cushla is 24 and a Catholic primary school teacher, but she also helps out as a barmaid in the family pub. That’s where she meets Michael, he’s a 60 year old barrister who is happy to take on any legal cases, be they for Catholics or Protestants, including IRA members. Cushla is immediately attracted to him despite the age difference, religious difference and the fact that he is married.

Cushla is still living at home with her alcoholic mother, her brother Eamonn doesn’t realise how out of control their mother is. He runs the pub and is married with young daughters and he is totally unaware of his sister’s relationship with Michael.

As often happens with teachers of young children Cushla becomes involved with the family of young Davy, one of her pupils. He’s looked down on by the whole class because his mother is a Protestant, and as they live in a Catholic area she can’t hang washing out on the line as the charming neighbours pelt the clean clothes with shit. It means that her children’s clothes have absorbed all the smells of her cooking and mustiness as they take so long to dry indoors. Davy is a poor wee soul, looked down on by his classmates, and particular the nasty school priest, but Cushla befriends the family which only leads to more problems for them.

There’s only going to be one sort of ending to this tale, a sad one, but a very common situation back in those days.

I was a bit trepidacious about reading this book as I’m of an age to remember the beginnings of ‘The Troubles’  in Northern Ireland, and then the common bomb scares which disrupted simple shopping trips for years. Then there were the genuine bombs when we moved close to London in the late 1970s, but this was a good read.

I was puzzled by one thing though. Cushla’s lover’s name is Michael, a Protestant lawyer. As I grew up in the west of Scotland which at that time had a very similar Catholic/Protestant ‘tradition’, names were descriptive things and anyone called Michael would definitely have been a Catholic, so it seemed a strange choice for a Protestant by the author.

Thankfully there have been so many ‘mixed marriages’ over the last few decades that have gone a long way to the demise of that toxic sectarianism, in Scotland anyway.

Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud – 20 Books of Summer 2024

Posted on by
2

Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud was first published in 2014, by Bloomsbury. I had meant to read this book when it first came out, not ten years later. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer.

It’s well known I think that Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh moved from Glasgow to Suffolk when his career in architecture had ground to a halt.  As World War One progressed they got into trouble with the authorities as some of the locals decided that the strange couple with the odd accent (Scottish) must be spies. Esther Freud has woven a story around them, embroidering what had happened to them there and how it impacted on them, as seen through the eyes of Thomas Maggs, a young boy with a damaged foot, something that he has in common with CRM.

Thomas lives on the Suffolk coast, his father is a publican, he’s abusive as a father and husband, and of course he has a drink problem, so Thomas doesn’t have a good relationship with him. When Mackintosh and his wife arrive in the area Thomas is attracted to the couple who show an interest in his own drawings and befriend him.

The Mackintoshes have money problems and Mac can’t even sell his exquisitely painted botanical art, never mind get architecture commissions, to make matters worse there are problems within Margaret’s family so she has to be away in Glasgow at times.

I enjoyed this one although it is tinged with sadness as the war takes its toll of the locals. There’s some lovely writing, descriptions of flowers, scenery and seascapes.  But as you would expect The Glasgow School of Art also features and in the author’s acknowledgements at the end of the book she adds her own ‘heartfelt appreciation of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service for the skill, courage and determination they showed in overcoming the blaze that raged through the Glasgow School of Art just as this book was going to press.’

Of course fire came back again for a second bite of that building, such a tragedy. The remains, just a shell, are still wrapped in plastic, waiting for some sort of decision. It’s a deeply depressing sight.