Tag Archives: YA fiction

Book review: The Outsiders

Michelle PaverI came to this Michelle Paver series late, years after reading the award-winning ‘Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’ series which starts with the wonderful Wolf Brother. Doubtful that any character could be as admirable as Torak, it was a joy to read about Hylas who, like Torak, is an outsider.

The Outsiders starts at a run from the first page and doesn’t slow up. Hylas has been attacked, his dog is dead, his sister missing and a fellow goatherd killed. And the killers are after him. Adrift at sea, disorientated, Hylas fears he must die. And then there follows a glorious section about dolphins. I won’t give away any more of the plot. The narrative is a shape familiar from Wolf Brother – wild boy in trouble, on the run, not sure who is friend or foe, sets off on a quest where he makes new alliances – but that doesn’t mean this is not an entertaining read with new characters, a new setting, and different myths and gods.

Michelle Paver’s books for children and young adults are set in mystical places but are based on solid research about the way our ancestors lived and survived in wild lands, the animals they hunted, the gods they worshipped and the monsters they feared. The Outsiders is set in the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age.

All the outdoors things inaccessible to today’s children – unsupervised by adults, expected to be self-sufficient at the age of twelve, adventuring to unfamiliar places, making a den, lighting a fire, navigating, foraging, analysing geography, weather and threats. Her child characters have respect for their world, they are brave, adventurous and learn quickly from their mistakes. If they don’t, they will die: these are not gentle stories but they are a preparation for the real world where children must learn for themselves how to survive.

Read here about how Michelle Paver researches her ancient worlds.

If you like ‘The Outsiders’, try these other YA [young adult] series:-
The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness’ series by Michelle Paver
The ‘Harry Potter’ series by JK Rowling
The ‘Swallows and Amazons’ series by Arthur Ransome

‘The Outsiders’ by Michelle Paver, #1Gods & Warriors [UK: Puffin] Buy at Amazon

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
Why are the killers chasing Hylas? THE OUTSIDERS by @MichellePaver #bookreview via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2c5

Book review: The Magician’s Land

Lev GrossmanThrown out of Fillory and back in the non-magical world, Quentin Coldwater retreats to his former magical university in Brooklyn. Brakebills. He becomes a professor where he teaches his discipline, described as ‘mending small things’. Remember this, it will be important later. This is the final book of the trilogy by Lev Grossman and like book two, The Magician King, this final instalment is action-packed.

The story moves between present and past, Fillory and earth, above ground, in the air and underground. Seeking adventure, and money, Quentin meets a new group of underground magicians and accepts a task for payment of $2m. On the team is Plum, who admits she once attended Brakebills too.

In parallel we get the stories of Quentin, Eliot [still in Fillory] and Plum. In order to understand the threat in the present, we have to go back in time to fill in the real story of what happened to the Chatwin children [whose true adventures inspired the novels of Fillory]. And it becomes plain that the Fillory known by Quentin from his childhood love of those novels, is incorrect. The novels were fictional and Fillory is not what it seems.

Depending on them all, is the very existence of Fillory.

A cracking finale.

Click here to read my reviews of the first two books in the trilogy:-
The Magicians #1
The Magician King #2

If you like this, try:-
‘The Queen of the Tearling’ #1 by Erika Johansen
‘The Invasion of the Tearling’ #2 by Erika Johansen
‘The Lost Girl’ by Sangu Mandanna

‘The Magician’s Land’ by Lev Grossman, #3 Magicians Trilogy [UK: Arrow] Buy now

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
THE MAGICIAN’S LAND by @leverus #books via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1rD

Book review: Found

FOUND BY HARLAN COBEN 12-8-14September. A sunny day in Paris and I needed a book to read on the Eurostar train home. I needed a page turner. I searched my Kindle. What was required was Harlan Coben.

I started to read Found, Coben’s latest UK release, which I thought was the new Myron Bolitar story. Except, it isn’t. It is the third in the Mickey Bolitar YA [young adult] series. I didn’t know this series existed. Mickey Bolitar is Myron’s nephew. I guess the two M’s got me confused… oh well.

Found may be a YA novel but that doesn’t stop the story from being gripping, in true Coben fashion this really rattled along. Ideal for a train journey. Mickey is Myron Bolitar’s nephew who, surprise surprise, is a basketball player and amateur detective. This is story three in the series, and I did need to know the back story. But Mr Coben [below] is very efficient at filling that in without stopping the story moving forward.

Two storylines are woven together. On Mickey’s basketball team, one player moves away suddenly, another is dropped from the team for taking steroids. Mickey investigates. Meanwhile, continued from book two in the series, one of Mickey’s friends is in hospital after an adventure when the four friends – Mickey, Spoon, Ema and Rachel – solve a mystery. It appears now though that this mystery is not completely solved.

[photo: Claudio Marinesco]

[photo: Claudio Marinesco]

The quartet combines to track down a missing teen and discover the truth of what happened to Mickey’s father. In true thriller fashion, it starts out with the two stories being completely separate but in the end they overlap. I knew the overlap was coming, but couldn’t see where.

To read my review of Coben’s One False Move, part of the Myron Bolitar series, click here.
For Harlan Coben’s website and details of all his books, click here.
Follow Harlan Coben on Twitter here.
‘Found’ by Harlan Coben [UK: Orion]

Book review: Holes

holes by louis sachar 12-12-13This book has been sitting on my shelf forever but I picked it up this week when I exhausted my Kindle’s battery. How lovely to hold an actual book again. I know this is a book for tweens, but I’d heard such good things about it that I wanted to see for myself. I loved the premise: that Stanley is wrongly found guilty of stealing a pair of trainers and is sent to a juvenile correction camp where the punishment is to dig a hole a day. Five feet deep and five feet wide. Every day. It is supposed to be character-building, but Stanley thinks there is another agenda.

“There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it is just a dry, flat wasteland.”

It is a story about finding out who you are, standing up to bullies and finding your bravery.

“Out on the lake, rattlesnakes and scorpions find shade under rocks and in the holes dug by the campers.”

Woven in with the day-to-day tale of hole-digging is the background to Stanley’s unlucky family; unluckiness blamed on his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather. Stanley is a kind of every-boy, who helps a boy worse off than himself and ends up challenging the system.  And Sachar ties up the loose-ends brilliantly.

Not just for kids.

Click here to hear Louis Sachar talk about the book and how he chose the characters’ names.
Click here to watch the movie trailer, starring Shia LaBeouf as Stanley.
‘Holes’ by Louis Sachar

Book review: Insurgent

Insurgent by Veronica Roth 12-2-14I didn’t read this straight after Divergent, the first of the trilogy, and so felt at a bit of a loss at the beginning of Insurgent. I could have done with a brief recap, a couple of paragraphs would have sufficed. So this made me irritated for the first few pages.

Book two is very action-led and the pace fairly trips along. I’m still trying to get a handle on Tris’s character, she is a complex mixture of two factions: her upbringing in Abnegation [considerate, selfless] and her adopted faction Dauntless [brave, daring, reckless]. It’s a dangerous mixture which gets her into trouble, and that drives the story along. She is confrontational, brave, but often makes questionable decisions. She distrusts Four’s father and believes he is misleading them: “…sometimes, if you want the truth, you have to demand it.” Demand, not ask: this tells me more about Tris than about Four’s father Marcus.

We do see more of Tris’s inner world in book two compared with book one, perhaps because she is maturing into her Divergent personality. “I drift off to sleep, carried by the sound of distant conversations. These days it’s easier for me to fall asleep when there is noise around me. I can focus on the sound instead of whatever thoughts would crawl into my head in silence. Noise and activity are the refuges of the bereaved and guilty.” And she is both.

A major difficulty for me with this book was keeping track of the huge list of characters. I don’t like books with a cast list at the front, but that’s what I needed with Insurgent. Coupled to this is the lack of clarity about the main enemy: who is it? There’s lots of infighting to keep track of too, petty squabbles some of which have carried forward from the first book and which I had forgotten. There is no one single enemy, no Voldemort or President Snow.

Perhaps there should be fewer factions. No wonder Tris is confused: “Sometimes I feel like I am collecting the lessons each faction has to teach me, and storing them in my mind like a guidebook for moving through the world. There is always something to learn, always something that’s important to understand.” She seems to think that there is a cut-off date by which she will have learned everything. But adults carry on learning until they die.

Click here to watch the book trailer for Insurgent.
To watch an interview with Veronica Roth talking about Insurgent and Tris’s “cruel edge”, click here
The first in the trilogy is Divergent, click here to read my review.
My review of the final book of the three, Allegiant, will follow soon.
‘Insurgent’ by Veronica Roth

Book review: Divergent

Divergent by veronica roth - photo veronicarothbooks.blogspot.co.uk 3-12-13I wonder what percentage of Young Adult [YA] fiction currently published features a dystopian world. Are our teens so disenchanted with their own real world that they only 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 for the last six years. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the feistiness of Katniss, though I was not so keen on Bella who was a bit too sulky for me.

So to Divergent, a book that had passed me by until I read online reviews, reviews which prompted my Kindle purchase of the trilogy. The story 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. The film of Divergent is due out in the UK in April 2014 starring Kate Winslet as the leader of the Erudite faction. The film of book two, Insurgent, will follow in 2015.

The key thing I did like about Divergent:-

… 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 there were quite a few things I didn’t like about Divergent:-

… the factions are cliches;

… 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 you if you tried it in real life;

… the characters are under-developed, none of the depth here of The Hunger Games.

… the story is predictable, I’d worked out the ending before I got there.

That said, I bought the trilogy so will read books two and three. Don’t mis-understand me, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy these books but just that they seem superficial in comparison with The Hunger Games, every page of which gives you the sense of the deep back story.
‘Divergent’ by Veronica Roth

Book Review: The Lost Girl

Sangu MandannaI admit to never having heard of this book by Sangu Mandanna until seeing it mentioned in ‘favourite read’ lists on a few blogs. I ordered it purely on that basis and had no idea it was a YA novel. It is a romantic story of love and loss, grief and identity, set in the UK and India, with sinister echoes of Frankenstein.

Eva is an ‘echo’, a non-human ‘woven’ by a mysterious organization called The Loom which makes copies of real people for their family in case the loved one should die. The idea is that the ‘echo’ slips into the dead person’s shoes so minimising the family’s loss. Of course it is not that simple. Mandanna handles a difficult subject well, not avoiding the awkward moral issues which litter the dystopian story premise. The world is disturbingly almost normal, littered with everyday familiar references. Eva, who lives in the Lake District, is the echo for Amarra from Bangalore. I found it quite an emotional read, not just Eva’s situation but her guardians, her familiars, and Amarra’s friends in India. What seems a simple premise at the beginning, done with the best intentions, becomes increasingly dark as the story develops and the true horror of Eva’s situation is explained.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Bear and the Nightingale’ by Katherine Arden
‘The Magicians’ by Lev Grossman
‘The Queen of the Tearling’ by Erika Johansen

‘The Lost Girl’ by Sangu Mandanna [UK: Definitions]

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
THE LOST GIRL by @SanguMandanna #books via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-so

Book Review: ‘The Lost Girl’

the lost girl by sangu madnanna 29-8-13I admit to never having heard of this book until seeing it mentioned in ‘favourite read’ lists on a few blogs. I ordered it purely on that basis and had no idea it was a YA novel. It is a romantic story of love and loss, grief and identity, set in the UK and India, with sinister echoes of Frankenstein. Eva is an ‘echo’, a non-human ‘woven’ by a mysterious organization called The Loom which makes copies of real people for their family in case the loved one should die. The idea is that the ‘echo’ slips into the dead person’s shoes so minimising the family’s loss. Of course it is not that simple. Mandanna handles a difficult subject well, not avoiding the awkward moral issues which litter the dystopian story premise. The world is disturbingly almost normal, littered with everyday familiar references. Eva, who lives in the Lake District, is the echo for Amarra from Bangalore. I found it quite an emotional read, not just Eva’s situation but her guardians, her familiars, and Amarra’s friends in India. What seems a simple premise at the beginning, done with the best intentions, becomes increasingly dark as the story develops and the true horror of Eva’s situation is explained.
‘The Lost Girl’ by Sangu Mandanna