Category Archives: book reviews

Great Opening Paragraph… 48

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche - half of a yellow sun 10-6-13“Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair. Ugwu’s aunty said this in a low voice as they walked on the path. ‘But he is a good man,’ she added. ‘And as long as you work well, you will eat well. You will even eat meat every day.’ She stopped to spit; the saliva left her mouth with a sucking sound and landed on the grass.”
‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

#BookReview ‘Divergent’ by Veronica Roth #YA #fantasy

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Divergent by Veronica Roth is a book that had passed me by until I read online reviews, which prompted my Kindle purchase of the trilogy. Veronica RothI wonder what percentage of Young Adult [YA] fiction currently published features a dystopian world. Are our teens disenchanted with their own real world and so want to read fantasy? Certainly Suzanne Collins and Stephanie Meyer have a lot of responsibility for this, their two series have dominated the bookshelves and cinema screens. And they are all entertaining, in different ways.
Divergent is set in a city which was once Chicago where every citizen belongs to one of five factions. Each faction represents a human virtue: Candor [honesty], Amity [kindness], Dauntless [fearlessness], Abnegation [selflessness], Erudite [searching for knowledge]. At 16, teenagers are assessed for their affinity to the factions and can choose the faction they will be for the rest of their life. Anyone whose test results are inconclusive is labelled ‘divergent’. Tris, the protagonist, is divergent. This is her story and is the first of a trilogy.
Tris embraces her non-conformity. She is brave enough to be true to herself even though at times she is not sure what that is. She learns to be suspicious of labels, not to pre-judge people. But for me some factions verge on cliches. In particular, the fearlessness of the Dauntless verges on stupidity, danger for the sake of it. It is that particular computer-game type of violence that doesn’t hurt on the page but would seriously damage/kill in real life.
I’d like to see more character development, none of the depth here of The Hunger Games, but this is the first book of the trilogy so there is a world to set-up. Also I’d worked out the ending before I got there. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book but just that it seems superficial in comparison with The Hunger Games, which from page one gives you the sense of the deep back story. My expectations are set high.

Click the title to read my reviews of the other books in this series:-
INSURGENT #2DIVERGENT
ALLEGIANT #3DIVERGENT

If you like this, try:-
‘Gregor the Overlander’ by Suzanne Collins #1UNDERLANDCHRONICLES
‘The Queen of the Tearling’ by Erika Johansen #1TEARLING
‘The Magicians’ by Lev Grossman #1THEMAGICIANS

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Jq via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Wake’ by Anna Hope #historical #WW1

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Amongst the profusion of novels about the centenary of the Great War, Wake by Anna Hope stood out for me from the rest because it is about the aftermath rather than the fighting. The spine of the narrative is the journey of the body to be entombed in Westminster Abbey as the ‘Unknown Soldier.’ Anna HopeI have visited the tomb but had not considered its selection, the post-war politics and social consequences of choosing one soldier’s remains rather than another. Anna Hope handles a delicate topic – isn’t everything to do with war emotionally-delicate? – with confidence. Wake is a powerful novel by a debut author.
There is something unsettling about the first scenes where un-named soldiers drive out into what was no-man’s-land, not knowing where they are going or why. They are directed to dig up the remains of a soldier: unidentified soldiers dig up the remains of an unidentified victim. Four bodies are laid out, not so much bodies as heaps of remains. A Brigadier-General closes his eyes and rests his hand on one of the stretchers, this body is put into a thin wooden coffin. The three not chosen are put into a shell hole at the side of the road, a chaplain says a short prayer, and then re-buried. The chosen one is taken to London.
Three storylines run parallel to this central spine. Hettie and Di are dancers at the Hammersmith Palais. Charging 6d for a dance, Hettie is skilled at spotting the injured soldiers who are disguising the lack of a limb, she is skilled at matching the rhythm of her dancing to theirs. Dancing is the bright spot in her life; her home is under the shadow of her father’s death and her brother’s shell shock.
Evelyn works in a Government department, her job is grey, her surroundings are grey. She is no longer close to her brother who returned from the war seemingly uninjured but is emotionally removed from life. Every day she deals with former soldiers, struggling to make a new life, and each soldier she sees reminds her of her lover who died in the war. She wants to move on from the war but feels that she, like everyone else, is trapped in a cycle of grief, disability, guilt and memory.
Ada is still grieving for her son, a grief which puts distance between her and her husband. Her solace is her neighbour Ivy, also grieving. Then one day an ex-soldier knocks on the door, wanting to sell her dishcloths, and something happens which sends her to a medium.
All are drawn to the streets of London on November 11th, 1920, looking for catharsis.

Read my review of THE BALLROOM, also by Anna Hope.

If you like this, try:-
‘Life Class’ by Pat Barker
‘A Long Long Way’ by Sebastian Barry
‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview WAKE by Anna Hope via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-LK

Great Opening Paragraph… 47

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ian McEwan - enduring love 10-6-13“The beginning is simple to mark. We were in sunlight under a turkey oak, partly protected from a strong, gusty wind. I was kneeling on the grass with a corkscrew in my hand, and Clarissa was passing me the bottle – a 1987 Daumas Gassac. This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man’s shout. We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing, I was running towards it. The transformation was absolute: I don’t recall dropping the corkscrew, or getting to my feet, or making a decision, or hearing the caution Clarissa called after me. What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak. There was the shout again, and a child’s cry, enfeebled by the wind that roared in the tall trees along the hedgerows. I ran faster. And there, suddenly, from different points around the field, four other men were converging on the scene, running like me.”
‘Enduring Love’ by Ian McEwan

#BookReview ‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore #WW1 #historical

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I found this to be an unbelievably poignant novel. In The Lie by Helen Dunmore, Daniel Branwell has returned home to Cornwall from The Great War. The stories of his childhood, his war, and his return are interwoven seamlessly. It is also the story of all the lost men who returned from fighting in 1918 and didn’t know where to go or what to do. They faced their futures alone, unsure if they were mad, if their memories of war were correct or whether they were strong enough to resist the memories of carnage. Dan’s life unfolds like a thriller, with mysteries and suspicions, so that I turned the pages looking for answers and before I knew it I had reached the end. Helen DunmoreDunmore is an accomplished novelist and poet who handles her emotionally explosive subject with sure hands, juxtaposing the daily reality of post-war Cornwall with Dan’s memories, perhaps true, perhaps confused, of battle. Truth is the unknown. The war is in every move Dan makes, every thought, every dream. Needing food, he digs the earth to plant vegetables but cannot escape the battlefield: “It was the smell of earth. Not clean earth, turned up by spade or the fork, to be sunned and watered. This earth had nothing to do with growth. It was raw and slimy, blown apart in great clods, churned to greasy, liquid mud that sucked down men or horses. It was earth that should have stayed deep and hidden, but was exposed in all its filth, corrosive, eating away at the bodies that had to live in it. It breathed into me from its wet mouth.”
Soil is an important presence throughout the book. Dan is a gardener, a skill he soon finds on joining the army will not exempt him from fighting as it does the blacksmiths, chefs and mechanics. “Skilled men had their hands full, and weren’t likely to find themselves in the fire-trench. But there wasn’t any call for a gardener. You’d be marched through a village which had been knocked to bits by shelling, and all there’d be left of a hundred gardens was a bit of green straggling out of a gash in a wall.” Instead, Dan digs. Fields don’t look the same as the fields in Cornwall. “Once you got near the line, there wasn’t much you could recognise as a field, any more than the woods were woods. It was all a jumble.”
His childhood in Cornwall with his best friend Frederick, and Frederick’s sister Felicia, resonates throughout the book. Their differences – poor boy and rich boy, the squaddie and the officer – are at the centre of the book. Dan visits their large house with its library full of shiny red-leather bound volumes, smuggling out one book at a time up his jumper. He reads and memorizes: “I hoarded new words and brought them out like coins.” Frederick, who is sent to private school, has no mind for books and envies Dan’s photographic memory. But when war comes, Frederick is sent to officer school and Dan to basic camp.
In Belgium, before the night-time trench raid which changes their lives, Frederick asks Dan to recite a poem. The prospects of the two men are so fragile that the juxtaposition of war and the poem by Matthew Arnold cannot help but be moving:
“And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
When Dan returns to Cornwall he has nowhere to go. As he struggles to survive, shunning company, preferring solitude, he meets Felicia again. The memories come flooding back and he struggles to repel them.

Read my reviews of two other novels by Helen Dunmore:-
BIRDCAGE WALK
EXPOSURE

If you like this, try:-
‘Wake’ by Anna Hope
‘A Long Long Way’ by Sebastian Barry
‘The Bone Church’ by Victoria Dougherty

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE LIE by Helen Dunmore http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Lw via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Perfect’ by Rachel Joyce #contemporary #time

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In 1972, two seconds were added to time because it was Leap Year and because time was ‘out of joint’ with the movement of the Earth. It is the addition of these two seconds which causes such upheaval in the life of Byron Hemmings, an imaginative 11-year old boy, and his school friend James. Perfect by Rachel Joyce is about the impact of those two seconds, one stiflingly hot summer. Who would have thought that such a small stumble in time could disrupt so many lives? Rachel Joyce Joyce is an accomplished storyteller with a simple style which is deceptively complex. She weaves together Byron’s story with Jim’s, a troubled man who cleans tables in a supermarket café whilst battling his inner demons. Not once does she explain the link between these two stories, allowing the reader’s imagination to suggest possibilities, until right at the end when she surprises us with the truth. Car accidents feature in both strands, but neither car accident is what it seems. Both accidents are catalysts for what comes next.
The voice of the boy/almost teenager Byron is an interesting choice which allows Joyce to show us the inside of his parents’ marriage, without Byron fully understanding what he is seeing. At once he has both a child’s perception, and an adult’s. Joyce trusts the reader to believe or not believe Byron’s interpretation of things.
She has a similarly subtle approach to observation, hinting at the differences between Byron’s mother Diana, and Diana’s new friend Beverley, by how they walk. Diana’s ‘slim heels’ go “clip clip”. Beverley’s sandals follow with a “slap slap.” Diana is a wisp of a character, light, graceful and young, young in comparison with her son. Very young compared with her husband Seymour who dominates the house, despite his absence during the week, with his stern rules of do’s and don’ts. Diana’s car, a Jaguar he bought for her as a means of demonstrating his success, comes to symbolise his power over her. First she accedes to his control, then chafes against it and finally rebels.
Byron watches this with discomfort and uncertainty, unsure who this new mother, this new Diana, is. As his mother grows more mentally frail, he begins unconsciously to echo his father. He doesn’t like Beverley calling his mother ‘Di’ for example. “It was like cutting her in half.” As Diana leaves household tasks undone, he does them for her.
Joyce has a deft way of handling the mood. One moment, light-hearted, then with a sentence she twists the heartstrings and adds another small touch of mystery.  Jim learns that having a friend means laughing at things and seeing them through the friend’s eyes, as if the friend is “the part of themselves that is missing.” Do we all have something missing, which is provided by our friends and loved ones, or is it just Jim? And what happened to Jim to mess him up like this?
Perfect is about the nature of time, starting with the extra seconds and moving onto Diana’s abandonment of clocks. An exploration of whether time can heal a painful past.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Rachel Joyce:-
MAUREEN FRY AND THE ANGEL OF THE NORTH
MISS BENSON’S BEETLE
THE LOVE SONG OF MISS QUEENIE HENNESSY

And read here the first paragraph of THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY

If you like this, try:-
‘Somewhere Inside of Happy’ by Anna McPartlin
‘The Language of Others’ by Clare Morrall
‘Mobile Library’ by David Whitehouse

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview PERFECT by Rachel Joyce via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-KD

#BookReview ‘The Hen who Dreamed she could Fly’ by Sun-Mi Hwang #historical #birds

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The Hen who Dreamed she could Fly by Sun-Mi Hwang is definitely a book that you will want to buy spare copies of to give to your friends. Sun-Mi HwangA South Korean fable, it tells the story of Sprout, a hen whose sole purpose in life is to lay eggs. She is an egg machine. From her coop she watches the hens and ducks in the yard with their babies, and longs for a chick of her own, to cuddle it and take care of it, sleeping safely in the warm barn at night. Then one day she realises she will never have her own chick because the farmer takes all her eggs. Her motivation to eat disappears, she becomes eggless, scrawny and weak and so is culled from the coop.
I loved Sprout, she is a brave female heroine who shows the bullies that they cannot beat her. Like all fables, there is a message. This story warns against watching what others have and thinking they have it better than you do. Sprout longs for the greener grass, but when she finds herself living in that green grass she learns the realities. It is about being brave, about being proactive, about getting out there and making something of your life even if people tell you it will never happen.  Along the way it also deals with motherhood, adoption, racism, prejudice and rejection, but it is a simple story to read. She is, after all, a hen.
Suitable for all ages, it’s one of those books that has a narrative for children and adults alike. The line drawings, which illustrate each new chapter, are beautiful too. A gem of a little book.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Choice’ by Claire Wade
‘Paper Cup’ by Karen Campbell
‘Doppler’ by Erlend Loe

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE HEN WHO DREAMED SHE COULD FLY by Sun-Mi Hwang http://wp.me/p5gEM4-JB via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Crow Blue’ by Adriana Lisboa #contemporary

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Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa is a story of a teenage girl unravelling the mysteries of her identity. Vanja is 13, newly arrived in Colorado from Brazil, living with a man called Fernando about whom we know nothing. “I was 13. Being 13 is like being in the middle of nowhere. Which was accentuated by the fact that I was in the middle of nowhere.” Vanja’s mother dies and she leaves behind the ‘crow blue’ shells of Copacabana beach for the USA. Adriana LisboaHer voice grabbed me from the beginning and, although at times I was a little lost with the narrative drive of her story with lots of side roads telling Fernando’s history as a freedom fighter in Brazil, Vanja’s voice kept me reading. I wanted to know the answers to the questions she was chasing on her road trip from Colorado to New Mexico.
She is on the cusp of womanhood and this gives her some nice observations of American society, words from the mouth of an innocent who is starting to see the world and people around her in a more adult way. “A woman passing my chair as she returned from the pool said I had a nice tan. When she smiled, her eyes disappeared into the folds of fat that covered her face. She looks like a feather pillow, I thought.” To Vanja, swimming pools in Colorado mean large bikinis and full-piece bathing suits; swimming pools at Copacabana, where she grew up, meant butt cheeks.
The sections on guerrilla warfare left me cold, I’m afraid. I had no idea of the history of Brazil at this time, which probably would have helped me, and I didn’t identify with the characters and their confusing code names. These sections were an intrusion into Vanja’s story.
As the road trip comes to a close and Vanja approaches her 14th birthday, she considers what it will mean to become an adult. “Fourteen was at least a nose in the adult world. And I had to unlearn all the codes I had learned to make way for others. Curiosity, for example: children had a gift for curiosity. Adults kept it chained up.  In adults, curiosity shook paws, fetched balls and played dead.”
Lisboa was named on Granta’s list of ‘Best of Young Brazilian Novelists’ in 2012, she has written numerous novels and won prizes. But her name is relatively unknown here. To be fair, this book is set in the USA and is as much a comment on American society as Brazilian. It reflects our modern multi-cultural world and is a hopeful tale about finding your place in the world, finding your identity, and making a home wherever you are.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

If you like this, try:-
‘Freya’ by Anthony Quinn
‘Angel’ by Elizabeth Taylor
‘Girl Runner’ by Carrie Snyder

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview CROW BLUE by Adriana Lisboa via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-DN

#BookReview ‘The Signature of all Things’ by @GilbertLiz #historical

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I’ve never read Eat Pray Love, never seen the film, and didn’t know what to expect from The Signature of all Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, not having read any reviews. I don’t know why, but I half expected not to like it. Very unfair of me, and completely wrong. Elizabeth GilbertFirst it’s a historical novel, not what I anticipated at all, starting with 18th century luckster, thief and botanist Henry Whittaker and later moving onto his daughter Alma. Born near Kew Gardens in London, son of a poor horticulturalist, Henry lifts himself out of poverty thanks to Jesuit’s bark, the newly-discovered treatment for malaria. He makes one fortune at home in Kew, stealing plants from Kew Gardens and selling them to wealthy protectors, he makes another fortune in the Far East by commercially cultivating Jesuit’s bark, and makes a third fortune in America where he imports medicinal plants from around the world, then raises native American plants and exports them abroad, so the holds of his ships never sail empty.
The opening paragraph of the book tells us of the birth of Henry’s daughter Alma, and then she is not mentioned again until part two. Alma is born to Henry and his Dutch wife Beatrix when they are settled into Philadelphia, he becomes the richest man in town and the third richest in the western hemisphere. The Dutch connection is important, but how important is not discovered until much later in the book. The Whittakers do not have much time for society and society doesn’t much like them, finding their manners a little coarse and their pedigree poor.
Alma grows up, encouraged to question everything, note everything down, and at an early age she will not let go of a question until she has an answer. “She wanted to understand the world, and she made a habit of chasing down information to its last hiding place, as though the fate of nations were at stake in every instance. She demanded to know why a pony was not a baby horse. She demanded to know why sparks were born when she drew her hand across her sheets on a hot summer’s night.” Henry encourages this precociousness, Beatrix schools her in Dutch pragmatism.
Plants are the background to the story of this family, plants are their life, their business, and fill their appreciation every day. As a nine-year old, Alma learns one summer to tell the time by the opening and closing of the flowers. At 7am the dandelions bloom, at 3pm they fold. She must be home with her hands washed when the globeflower closes and the evening primrose begins to open.
Alma is the heart and soul of this novel, a pragmatic and at times challenging woman. Despite this, I quickly warmed to her and her life’s investigation of mosses. Moss, and Alma’s inability to stop asking questions, leads her around the globe in a story that entranced me. I didn’t know where it would lead next.

If you like this, try:-
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx
‘A Sudden Light’ by Garth Stein
‘Summertime’ by Vanessa Lafaye

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#BookReview THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by @GilbertLiz via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-DG

#BookReview ‘A Long Long Way’ by Sebastian Barry #Irishhistory #WW1

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A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry is the story of Willie Dunne, an innocent, who goes away to war not understanding fully what is involved but determined to do his bit. Written in 2005 and nominated for the Booker Prize, it is the tender tale of a young Irish man who volunteers for the British army and ends up in Belgium. Sebastian Barry Set against the background of the Easter Rising, Willie does not fully understand the political implications of what is happening around him. He is born in Dublin, as a baby “he was like the thin upper arm of a beggar with a few meagre bones shot through him, provisional and bare.” Barry’s language throughout is a delight, something I didn’t expect when the book is about the worst of trench warfare. Barry does not spare punches, at times the action and conditions he describes brought me close to tears, but I read on, pulled forwards by Willie’s life force.
He travels to new places, “ravished by the simple joy of seeing new places of the earth.” This joy unravels when arrives at the trenches. “The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man. Bombs not so far off distressed the earth of Belgium, disgorged great heaps of it, and did everything except kill him immediately, as he half-expected them to do.” And all the time he longs from Gretta, his girl at home. “He was in love with Gretta like a poor swan was in love with the Liffey and cannot leave it.”
I will be reading more by Sebastian Barry.

Read my reviews of these books also by Sebastian Barry:
A THOUSAND MOONS
DAYS WITHOUT END
OLD GOD’S TIME
THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS MCNULTY

If you like this, try:-
‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore
‘Life Class’ by Pat Barker
‘Wake’ by Anna Hope

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview A LONG LONG WAY by Sebastian Barry http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Bx via @SandraDanby