Raelia
The Medoran Chronicles Book II
Lynette Noni
Pantera Press
Pub: 23 March 2016

Back when I reviewed Noni’s first installment of this series I concluded that I would be more than happy to return to Medora for another helping of her heroine Alex’s adventures, and here I am.  Noni’s first book introduced us to Alexandra (Alex) Jennings is a sixteen year old girl with jet-setting archaeologist parents, who finds herself stranded in own little Narnia, in this case a strange fantasy world called Medora.  Enrolled in a school for teenagers with extraordinary gifts, Akarnae Academy, she managed to make friends – Jordan, Bear and D.C.  – and one major enemy – Aven the banished prince from the Lost City of Meya – as she found herself in the centre of a battle between old warring factions.

As we rejoin Alex, her parents have been brought into the story (and Medora) and Alex’s life remains threatened by Aven. With the stage set in book one, this time we get to explore Medora in more detail and also learn more about various character’s powers. Noni does a good job of bringing her world to life and the central teen relationships have a believability. There are a couple of nice plot surprises, a teenage romance or two, some solid action set pieces and once again, Noni’s comic touch adds to the overall enjoyment.

Two books in and you’d be hard pressed to find a better or more engaging YA fantasy series out there. A guilty pleasure? No. Pleasure should never be a cause of guilt.

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Review Copy provided by Pantera/NetGalley

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The Poison Artist
Jonathan Moore
Orion Publishing Group
Pub Date: 10 Mar 2016 

As this book opens, San Francisco toxicologist, Caleb Maddox, is picking pieces of glass from a wound to his head. He has just had a serious and violent break up with his girlfriend, Bridget, and he is off in search of  solace and somewhere to drown his sorrows. He finds a local bar and  starts up a conversation with a beautiful and mysterious woman – Emmeline. She quickly becomes a burning obsession, and a secret he wants to protect at all costs, even when he subsequently discovers another man from the same bar that evening has been found murdered. The murdered man was poisoned , tortured and dumped in the bay; and he is not the first. Caleb soon finds himself assisting his best friend, Henry, the city’s chief medical examiner, in trying to find the cause of death, and a murder who seems set on  inflicting maximum pain on his or her victims.

The police, and one policeman in particular, are also very interested in the case and Caleb, as hints are given to a connection with his past. This past is mentioned frequently in passing but Moore obfuscates and keeps this past – which you instinctively know must have a bearing on events –  shrouded in the type of fog that San Francisco is famous for. He also avoids addressing – for much of the book – what caused the fight between Caleb and Bridget and why it caused such an extreme reaction.

As Caleb fights to help Henry solve the crime, and keep on top of securing valuable research data on how much pain a human body can endure to help the University secures a lucrative grant, he is constantly blindsided by his desire for Emmeline, he need to keep her secret and their promise not to lie to or hurt one another.

This was a great read. The writing is crisp and flows as readily and precisely as the absinthe in the book; and whilst the key aspect of the plot is not new, and has been done better (without saying where and giving it away) it is executed well, and does keep you turning the pages until the end.

I felt the end itself was slightly disappointing, but getting there was (despite the horrors in the book) fun. Expect the sales of absinthe to go up after this.

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Review copy provided by Orion/NetGalley

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The Painted Ocean
Gabriel Packard
Little, Brown Book Group UK
Corsair
Pub Date: 03 Mar 2016 

Well, well, here is a book destined to cause arguments in Book clubs around the world.

The debut novel from Gabriel Packard is one of those arriving with stellar praise for some big hitting writers. Colum McCann says of the novel ‘as fearless tour de force. It is a rare achievement – an emotionally rich work of literature, delivered in the form of a gripping, page-turning story.”

So, what’s it about. This is certainly one of those instances where the book you end up getting is not the one you think you’re getting at the start. Most of the first half of the book is set in England and follows 11 year old  Shruti. Her dad left home when she was younger and now it’s just her and her mom. This is fine for Shruti as she has her mom all to herself. But, there is no happy ever after on the horizon in this story. Her mother is under pressure to return to the Punjab and remarry. Her Uncle Aadesh has lined up a good match, but there is a catch – she has to leave Shruti – put her into care. Shruti is sure her mother will not abandon her, but her uncle is persistent. Meanwhile life at school is no better. She physically and verbally picked on and bullied for being Indian. Her life is falling apart. Then a new girl, Meena, joins the school and immediately transforms Shruti’s life. Confident and confrontational, she soon has the bullies wrapped around her finger and coming to Shruti’s defence. She also has some suggestions on how to keep Shruti’s mother in the country. Shruti becomes obsessed with her saviour.

This first half of the novel, depicting Shruti’s childhood life was a mostly engaging tale of British Indian adolescence and was told with an air of believability and verve that at times reminded me of Meera Syal. Her voice felt true and there was a real sense of the loneliness, neglect, rejection, feelings of abandonment, racism, and bullying that pervades her life. She feels real and as a reader you care about what will happen to her.

Where things start to go wrong however is when the book suddenly moves ahead in time to University and beyond. At first you think we are going to go all ‘stalker’, when in fact it goes all Lord of  the Flies/The Beach and becomes totally preposterous, losing any sense of reality.

If horrible things happened in the first half of the book, really horrible things happen in the second half of the book. The problem is that  I quickly became so emotional unengaged, that ultimately I wasn’t truly bothered what happened to any of the characters as these horrors descended. One of the main faults for this lies with the fact that Shruti’s voice remains the same. What had first felt like a sense of authenticity, just starts to jar and not fit at all with where things are and what is happening.  She ceases to be at all believable.

This is not say that parts of this second half of the book  aren’t well written, and tense, they are; it is just they don’t gel or feel part of what preceded it.  I presume we are meant to view the second half of the book as allegorical and as a further exploration of the themes we have already covered in the book’s first half, but whilst that may be fine and dandy, it doesn’t really cut it for me if the story-telling doesn’t support it.

The ending is equally ridiculous and meta with a self critic of the novel – trying to address the criticism of the book before it even happens.  It is all a bit too knowing and ‘look at me, aren’t I clever’  from a man who teaches writing at New York’s Hunter College and has worked for literary big hitters such as  Peter Carey, Jonathan Franzen and E.L. Doctorow.

That all said, there is still just enough to like and admire in Packard’s debut, to make him an author to watch in the future, but The Painted Ocean is ultimately an uneven and confused disappointment.

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Review copy provided by Little Brown/NetGalley

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The Madwoman Upstairs
Catherine Lowell
Touchstone
Pub Date: 01 Mar 2016

“Sunshine has a way of softening the recollection of the previous evening. But when I walked outside in the morning, the sun was nowhere to be found. The sky was a dull shade of concrete.”

Catherine Lowell’s delightful debut novel follows the only remaining descendant of the Brontë family – Samantha Whipple – as she arrives at Oxford University and (to quote the marketing material) “embarks on a modern-day literary scavenger hunt to find the family’s long-rumored secret estate, using only the clues her eccentric father left behind, and the Brontës’ own novels.”

Samantha, at the behest of her dead father, has taken up a seat at Oxford to study English Literature, but is less than amused to arrive to find that her accommodation is a room at the top of an isolated old tower, attached to the old college, that once housed victims of the plague. It is a grim place with peeling red paint and a horrible painting of an old woman (called The Governess ) hanging on the wall. All she want is to get on and learn – a task she thinks might, at least, be interesting when she discovers her tutor J Timothy Orville III is pleasing on the eye.

But as her ‘Bronte’ identity is revealed by the college newspaper, and everyone begins to think her father must have left her whole host of Bronte goodies – when in fact he left her nothing but a cryptic ‘Warnings of Experience’ message – events start to take a strange turn as personal copies of her dad’s books that should have perished in the fire that claimed his life, mysteriously start to appear in her room, and a literature hide-and-seek game ensues.

This is a wonderfully constructed piece of fiction, that constantly plays with the very concepts and ideas that lie at the heart of classics it references. The setting of the university and the tutor/pupil relationship especially allows Lowell to throw in conflicting approaches to literary criticism whilst at the same time driving forward the plot.  So we examine that age-old question of whether this is truth in fiction or fiction in truth, or both; the question of how far you project an author’s actual live onto their work, to explain their work; the ‘reliability’ of the narrator. It also looks at also idea of editing, and how things were often sanitised and managed by estates to protect the author/artist including willful destruction of diary entries, letters etc. that would contradict the character ‘created’ for them, and questions how often the thing you think you want most, is not really what you want.

This is, quite literally, a literary novel.

I loved it. Samantha is a likable wise-cracking protagonist, and the blend of the literary and the mystery is handled well enough to make this a genuine page-turner.

Of course the idea to take classic fiction and use its themes and/or characters for a new book is nothing new, and indeed, one of my favourite recent(ish) examples of this was Autoro Perez-Reverte’s Dumas Club (I loved that book) In fact I remember someone once describing Dumas Club as a beach book for intellectuals, and I suppose the same could be said for this. I’d have been more than happy to have been on a beach reading it (as opposed to being in a cold, wet, London).

Early days yet, but certainly the most enjoyable book I’ve read so far in 2016, and one that I’m likely to buy as gifts for others.

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Review copy provided by Touchstone/NetGalley

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Professional dog walker. Is that a thing? Are most dog walkers maintaining their amateur status to compete in the Dog Walking Olympics.

Lily and the Octopus
Steven Rowley
Simon & Schuster
Pub Date: Jun 7, 2016 

Given that it is still five months until this book comes out, it is odd that I was hearing about this book almost a year ago. By the end of the year it was already garnering ‘book of the year’ type plaudits from those who had read galley copies, including Patrick Ness (Chaos Walking trilogy ) in the Guardian’s author’s books of the year round up back in December    who said “I also read what might be my favourite book of next year: Steven Rowley’s Lily and the Octopus (Simon & Schuster), about a man whose dog’s cancer takes the form of an evil talking octopus. Yep. Weird, hilarious, and you’ll cry all over everything.”

Sounded like my kind of thing, so I searched on NetGalley and there is was.  I was also fascinated by it for an even simpler reason. My best friend for the first 10 year of my life was a guy called Stephen Rowley. Born one day apart, lived in the same street. That simple reminder of long ago also drew me to this novel. And … well, let’s come to that; first what’s the book about.

As Ness said, at its heart it is the simple tale of a man whose dog gets a tumour, and how that impacts his life. The man, Ted, not only talks to his dog – a dachshund called Lily – but images full conversations and shared activities with her: Pizza nights, monopoly nights – “Do you want me to roll for you?” “Does it look like I’ve suddenly grown hands?” and also just has set days for doing things: “Thursdays are the days my dog Lily and I set aside to talk about boys we think are cute.”

But one morning Ted notices Lily has an octopus on her head. What follows is a look back on how Lily came into Ted’s life, Ted’s past relationships, his current emotional state and a story of love and companionship. I don’t really want to say much more than that really, as the book does go off at some interesting tangents, that are best experienced through reading the book.

What the book does well is to get across just how decapacitating loss can be, and how we use things to withdraw from real life, into a seemingly real alternate existence often without realising it. It also addresses the often connected issue of how we hold onto anger: ” I am so very small. Physically small, but also petty. Why am I driven more by revenge than by forgiveness?”, and how that can anchor us to the past instead of freeing us to live in the present and future.  This is not to say this is a depressing book, as despite its central subject matter and inevitable ending, this is a surprisingly funny book (the octopus get’s some great dialogue).

There is no doubt that the book will strike a chord both with those of us who have lost beloved pets down the years – I have – but also other (human) loved ones, especially to cancers. There is a genuine warmth to Rowley’s writing. In his author’s note he says his aim when writing the story was ‘to strive for emotional truth’ no matter where that took the story. Given some of the places the book goes, you can’t say he doesn’t keep to his aim. And, you do need to be a pretty cold fish not to be moved by at least some of the book. I will admit some tears were shed in the latter parts of this book.

Despite that I’m not sure I have felt the love for the book other pre-publication readers clearly have. I liked it, yes; loved it? Not really.  Am I glad I read it? Absolutely.

If you’re on Netgalley it’s worth checking it out and making up your own mind, for everyone else, expect to be hearing a lot about this book in the second half of this year. Maybe an outside bet for the Booker longlist too.

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Review copy provided by Simon & Schuster/NetGalley

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Sounds Like Teen Spirit (2016 Edition)
Stolen Melodies, Ripped-Off Riffs, and The Secret History of Rock and Roll
Tim English
Self-Published
Pub Date: Jan 11, 2016

If you listen to a lot of music, you do find yourself regularly thinking ‘that sounds like …’ This book looks at those songs and artists who have been *cough* ‘inspired’ by other songs.

There are chapters devoted to serial ‘borrowers’ such as The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Brice Springsteen and Bob Dylan (who doesn’t stop at music for his plagiarism), as well as more recent proponents of the skill – Oasis and Green Day, Robin Thicke, Sam Smith and Coldplay. And a lot of fun it is too.

• Did you ever listen to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Outlaw Pete’ and think, hang on this is ‘I was Made for Lovin’ You’ by Kiss? or hear the guitar riff in Gun’s and Roses’ ‘Paradise City’ and immediately think ‘Macarena’! ? or maybe listen to Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldier’ and wonder why he starts to sing the melody from “The Banana Splits Theme!” ?
• Do you know John Denver has a writing credit on a New Order song?
• Or know the Green Day ‘song’ that manages to rip off four different tracks?

This is the book that will have you checking out Jorge Ben’s – Taj Mahal (Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy rips it off), and Jimi Hendrix’s Third Stone from the Sun (a song I’m very familiar with but until this book had never linked to Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m So Sexy!’ – but, it’s TRUE!)

Great Fun for music geeks everywhere.

There’s a Dragon in my Dinner!
Tom Nicoll
Little Tiger Group/Stripes Publishing
Pub Date: Feb 11, 2016  

“So they managed to smuggle me into a box of beansprouts and that’s how I ended up here in Mexico.”
There was an awkward silence as I stared at Pan.
“Did you say Mexico?”

Having reached the grand old age of six, my daughter is now open to listening to the occasional ‘chapter book’ for bedtime story and not just  our more traditional picture book options (a post on some of those Coming soon-ish). Anyway, after reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (a great pre-cursor to her watching the film – Gene Wilder version OBVIOUSLY) it was time to try something that was new to both of us. Enter Tom Nicoll and There’s a Dragon in my Dinner!

This is the first in planned series of books about a nine year old boy, Eric (well, nine by the end of the book anyway), who finds a Mini-Dragon (Pan) in a box of bean sprouts included in the families Chinese take-away order. As you do.

Clearly, at first, Eric doesn’t believe it.

Where is he from? Can he help him to get back? What do you do with mini-dragon?  Will doing anything result in a ‘strike’ against him as his birthday get’s ever closer and his prize Scooter awaits? Who opens a Chinese restaurant in Antarctica? And most importantly, how does Eric keep Pan out of the hands of his friend Toby, who wants this ‘toy’ for himself and is prepared to do whatever it takes to get his own way.

This first helping of lightly comedic dragonica is highly enjoyable.  According to the author the books are aimed at 6-8 year olds, and I think that’s about right. My daughter’s 6 year old attention was held; her love of picture books sated by the nice accompanying illustrations from Sarah Horne, and we both ended the book in the mood for more adventures with Eric and Pan.

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Review copy supplied by Little Tiger Group / NetGalley

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The Noise of Time
Julian Barnes
Random House UK, Vintage Publishing
Jonathan Cape
Pub Date: Jan 28, 2016   

” A soul could be destroyed in one of three ways; by what others did to you; by what others made you do to yourself; and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself”

I really enjoyed Julian Barnes’ last novel, his  2011’s Man Booker prize-winning ‘The Sense of an Ending’. Whilst it was short, it was also one of his best – a lovely book of memory and regret.

His latest, ‘The Noise of Time’ is also quite short, and one might argue also about memory and regret. It tells the story of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer both feted and condemned by the Soviet state during his lifetime. It starts with the expectation from Shostakovich – in 1936 – that he is going to die. He has been questioned by the NKVD about his relationship with a some people who have plotted against Stalin. He says he knows nothing but is given the weekend to  get his story straight. So he waits each day by the lift, suitcase in hand, for them to come and take him to the Big House “‘Many who went to the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt never emerged again”.

But his fears fail to materialise, partly because his accuser becomes the accused in typical totalitarian state style.

What follows is an interesting looks at who Shostakovich might have been – as Barnes himself notes: “Shostakovich was a multiple narrator of his own life,”  added to which several revisionist versions of his life designed to paint him in a better light  also muddy or clear the waters depending on your point of view. Did he believe in the Soviet ‘project’ ? did he merely go along with anything that allowed himself to survive? As Barnes’ Shostakovich  says he had paid Caesar and Caesar had not been ungrateful ” he swam in honours like a shrimp in shrip-conktail sauce”. But similarly Barnes has him muse “When you chop wood, the chips fly: that’s what the builders of socialism liked to say. Yet what if you found, when you laid down your axe, that you had reduced the whole timberyard to nothing but chips”

We inhabit Shostakovich’s consciousness in the book, fearing for him as his star ebbs and flows with his country’s leaders, laughing as he gets digs in about TS Eliot,  Picasso, Satre. Pitying him as he has to be a good citizen whilst representing his country at the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace and over his resentment at never getting foreign car , whilst other seemingly less rewarded composers did.

It manages to say a lot about music, art and politics –  “Art belongs to everybody and nobody” – and about fear and survival and the deals we make with our own conscious to get through life – “the bad luck 1972 intended for him was not his dying, rather his continued living”, and yet still a fairly light read. This is due purely to Barnes’ skill at writing beautifully clean and flowing prose.

It may even lead you to check out some Shostakovich.

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Review copy provided by Random House/ NetGalley

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