Nananette and the Doldrums by Tania Bramley

Review by The Mole

Nick receives a postcard from Nananette. The problem is two fold the first is that he is five and can't read yet and the second is that he doesn't know anyone called Nananette. Along with Nicky, his sister (yes, parents with no imagination?) they set out to get the trade winds needed to free their new found nanan from the doldrums and so she can get home and they can meet her.

The tale is written in Nicky's voice which at times feels like an adult narrator, although it never patronises the reader but instead adds a little knowledge in a non-lecturing voice. Great fun throughout with colour pictures at the end of each chapter make this suitable for the 8+ reader although the story may be a little young for them. Something I like about this book is that the children don't go off and do non-kid things, in fact they do VERY kid things, things that any child can do (although I would not be encouraging any child to start removing wallpaper from their bedroom no matter how long it's been up!)

With a voice suitable for read aloud, short chapters and enough pictures for sharing this is suitable for bedtime reading.

Publisher - Austin and Macauley
Genre - Children's fiction

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Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer

 review by Maryom



Samuel Galen is in a coma following a car accident and although unable to communicate with anyone can still hear and understand what is happening around him. Slowly he regains the use of some senses but what he sees may make him wish he hadn't...
Meanwhile, in the dissection lab, anatomy students are cutting open cadavers....
Patrick has Asperger's syndrome and, following his father's untimely death, a desire to understand what happens after people die. Following a childhood spent in dissecting every dead mouse or bird he could find, he signs up for a university anatomy course in the hope of finding answers there. As his group work their way through the remains of their subject, cadaver No 19, Patrick begins to find that it's not what happens AFTER death that's so interesting as the circumstances that led to it. How can he hope to solve a possible murder that no one else believes has happened?

I've read Belinda Bauer's first two crime thrillers set on Dartmoor but Rubbernecker is even better. With a main character suffering from Aspergers, there are obvious parallels to be drawn with Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time but the multiple points of view and interlocking stories of the 'supporting cast' also reminded me of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series. A couple of pages in, I was hooked and didn't want to stop reading!

The two focus points of the novel are Patrick and Samuel and for most part the reader is inside the head of one or the other of these two very contrasting characters. Patrick's tightly focussed view of the world means he doesn't understand people's motivations and interactions; the subtleties of facial expressions and body language are lost on him. Samuel understands all these things only too well but cannot act upon what he sees.
The minor characters are well fleshed out too - from Patrick's fellow students to the nurses working on the coma ward - and all of them have their part to play in the scheme of things.

As you might expect from a story set largely in a dissection lab, there's a lot of gore and grissly bits but it was Sam's situation, regaining consciousness but still trapped in an unresponsive body in the coma ward, that I found more terrifying. There's also a lot of dark humour and I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud occasionally.

All in all a wonderful unputdownable crime thriller with twists and turns till the very end.

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Bantam Press
Genre - adult, thriller, crime




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The Blue Files by E M Higgins

Review by The Mole

When crop circles start appearing in local fields the new girl on the block, Margaret, is sent by the local newspaper to do a report. Taking the circles very seriously she starts a chain of events that will lead to Elliot Dayton's murder many years later - a death he expects and almost welcomes. But how many others will die and what is the meaning of the crop circles? The story leads us to secret airbases in the desert and military leaders with no seeming accountability and people with their own agendas working against each other.

Higgins' first book "Remote Control" was a story based on American military experiments from the cold war. This story starts back in the 1930's and it sort of covers the Roswell Incident - but only very loosely. The story feels very original and I would classify it as a sci-fi thriller because while there are aliens and stuff mentioned the emphasis is more on the thriller.

It very quickly grabbed me and kept pulling me along but it was a bumpy journey because the proof reading, sadly, lets it down all too often. Distracting as this was it couldn't keep me away from the story. There were also a couple of times when the writing could have been a little stronger and this took what could have been a truly great thriller down to the ranks of a very good one.

And the ending? A really nice twist - which could lead to a sequel but I'm not sure that's Higgins' style.

A very good book and thoroughly enjoyed!

Genre - Sci-Fi thriller

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Where The Devil Can't Go by Anya Lipska

review by Maryom

When the body of a naked girl is found in the Thames, the only identification is a tattooed heart encircling the names Pawel and Ela. Although her colleagues are prepared to dismiss it as suicide, DC Natalie Kershaw is convinced she has a murder on her hands. Then a second young woman is found dead in a hotel room. Kershaw's investigations lead her to the Polish community of East London where her path crosses that of Janusz Kiszka. Janusz is a man used to sorting out trouble so the natural person for his priest to turn to when a young Polish waitress goes missing, but while Janusz is pursuing his enquiries,  Kershaw is pursuing him, thinking he knows more than he'll admit to about the murders. 


Where the Devil Can't Go is an intriguing, well-plotted thriller with two very different heroes - Natalie Kershaw, a young detective constable struggling to gain respect in the male-dominated world of policing, and Janusz Kiszka, unofficial 'fixer' for his community, with a wife and teenage son in Poland and an on/off stripper girlfriend in London. As Kershaw and Kiszka circle each other warily, so do the two separate plot threads. There are a lot of leads and characters to keep up in the air - and at times I found myself unsure about who should have known which information - but Lipska pulls it off in the end and ties all ends off neatly.
What sets this crime novel apart is the setting of London's Polish community - a mix of long-term residents and younger migrant workers, all with ties of one sort or another back to Poland, where the trail eventually leads.

Maryom's review -  4 stars
Publisher - The Friday Project
Genre - Adult fiction, crime

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Magda by Meike Ziervogel

 review by Maryom

"In this daring portrayal of Magda Goebbels – wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels – Meike Ziervogel unveils an historical tale of abusive mother and daughter relationships that reaches a terrifying conclusion in the last days of Nazi Germany.

Magda is born at the beginning of the 20th century, the illegitimate child of a maidservant who feels burdened with a daughter she does not want. The girl grows up to become an ambitious woman, desperate for love and recognition. When Magda meets Joseph Goebbels, he appears to answer all her needs, and together they have six children. Towards the end of the Second World War, Magda has become physically and emotionally sick. As she takes her children into the Führer’s bunker, her eldest daughter Helga experiences an overwhelming sense of foreboding."

 When I was first offered a review copy of Magda, I was more intrigued by the fact that it was written by the founder of Peirene Press than by its story-line. After all Peirene has become noted for its short, perceptive fiction, so I wondered what and how Meike Ziervogel would write herself, whereas a fictionalised biography of Frau Goebbels didn't seem overly appealing. So did it measure up? Yes!

As I half expected, Magda is a short book - under 120 pages - but one that packs a punch. It's a powerful, emotionally draining novel that takes the reader behind the public façade and gets into the mindset of someone who commits the cruellest of acts in the belief that they are doing a kindness. The author doesn't try to find excuses for Magda's behaviour but to uncover her possible thoughts and motivations, starting with her rather lonely, institutionalised childhood, through finding purpose as a supporter of the rising Nazi party, to the peak of her career as wife of Joseph Goebbels. I didn't know anything of Magda Goebbels before reading this and would probably have dismissed her as a fairly brainless 'trophy' wife. By the time I reached the moving end, I felt that I understood her, even if I didn't approve.
Magda isn't the only character of course. I particularly liked the portrayal of her mother - being questioned by a Russian commissar and trying desperately to distance herself from any involvement in her daughter's acts. Magda's own daughter, Helga, seemed a little too trusting for her years - a combination of innocent yet brain-washed due to her upbringing within Hitler's inner circle.

A disturbing book but one I'd recommend to anyone with interests from psychological profiling to Hitler's Germany.

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Salt Publishing
Genre - Adult fiction, historical fiction

If this has intrigued you, find out more in our Q+A with Meike Ziervogel

Unload Email Overload by Bob O'Hare

Review by The Mole

With the post office carrying less and less mail, the almost disappearance of 'fax' communications and the universal unpopularity of voicemail systems we are all experiencing an increase, almost daily, in the amount of email we receive. And there is a tendency to react to it immediately you find it whether it be business related or private. As an ex-IT manager I know this can lead to nightmares for the administration of such email systems as well as the poor user receiving it who ends up being pulled from pillar to post by it.

This book was written to support workshops that Bob O'Hare runs but equally tries to stand on it's own. The courses are tailored for their individual audience and the book has to try to be more universal to cover the general subject.

I worked in a culture that used email instead of answerphones so you could return to your desk to an email saying 'Please phone your boss as soon as you get back'. It was also a very customer-centric organisation so if you got an email from a customer you immediately assessed what action to take and ensured the ball was in motion. In view of this I started reading in a very negative attitude as it starts talking about only checking your mail a few times a day, but I read on regardless and kept as open a mind as I could. As I read on, the nature of the book became apparent and it started to explain how some of the rules should be 'flexed' by different roles in email usage. It then started to suggest actions I found very controversial, like keeping your inbox empty! Reading on once again and keeping an open mind I started to realise that there was a great deal of sense to what was being said.

I came to the conclusion that there were things that anyone can learn from this book if they have email issues and are prepared to keep an open mind while reading it!

Genre - Non-fiction, Computing

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Dinosaurs In Disguise by Jeanne Willis

Review by The Mole

The second Downtown Dinosaurs adventure starts when Uncle Darwin, a stegosaurus,  has lost his hat and on his hunt for it he sees there is a new carnivorous dinosaur in town. A big one! Bigger than any that he has seen before. Dippy has gone missing and Beastwood is hunting him down. This is not a good time for Darwin to get lost in the primeval forest, but he does and his family go to look for him - disguised as trees!

Zany, engaging and very funny is the quick summary of this book. It won't teach children about dinosaurs (although there is a guide to pronunciation in the back), the pictures (of which there are many and are cartoon like in black and white) don't look like real dinosaurs and dinosaurs didn't really talk English and live in houses. What it will do is entertain young readers and encourage them in their reading and make sure that they enjoy it too. But parents should always be sure about what their children read so why not read it first? I'm sure you will enjoy it too. I did!

Publisher - Piccadilly Press
Genre - Children's 8+, Fiction

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