Wake by Anna Hope

review by Maryom

November 1920 - and the body of an unknown soldier is being transported from the battlefields of France to a state funeral in London that will commemorate Armistice Day and the ending of the Great War. Will this help the nation stop mourning the past and start looking forward to the future, or will it just open barely-healed wounds?

For the five days of the Soldier's journey, we follow the lives of three women of different ages and walks of life - Ada, a middle-aged mother who still hopes against hope that her only son may be alive somewhere, and even believes she's seen him on the streets near her home; Evelyn who's mourning her dead lover, hoping to find a new purpose through work at the Pensions Office helping those wounded in the war; and Hettie, the youngest, a professional dancer at Hammersmith Palais, immersing herself in the world of nightclubs and jazz in the hope of finding someone who will take her away from her humdrum life. All of them have been deeply affected by the War and can see others around them picking up the pieces of their shattered lives and moving on, but can't seem to do it themselves. Through their lives moves a young soldier with a tale to tell of the horrors of the battlefield, linking Evelyn's brother and Ada's son.

Wake is a brilliant debut novel, deeply moving, well-plotted and engrossing, about the aftermath of war and its effects not only the combatants directly involved but a far wider circle. At the heart of it lie the stories of three very different women trying to cope with the emptiness of their lives. Along the way there are 'nods' to a lot of 'issues' - women's wartime munitions work, army discipline, the treatment of injured soldiers, the horrors of the trenches or the desperate measures forced on the inhabitants of the war-ravaged countryside  - not as a churning out of facts and statistics but as part of the backdrop to life, helping to create a feel for the era.
There are four plot lines to keep up in the air and moving, but the author manages the balancing act really well, giving them equal attention and not letting any of them falter. The writing style is sparse, letting the characters speak for themselves through words and actions; at times the dialogue says more then several pages of description could have done.

Wake isn't published till January 2014 but as I had an early review copy, it seemed fitting to read over this last weekend in the run up to Armistice Day - at the time of year when it's set.

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars

Publisher - Doubleday

Genre - adult historical fiction, WW1
 

Blood Sisters by Alessandro Perissinotto

review by Maryom

Anna Pavesi is out in the cold and dark digging - not in her garden, but in a wood on the outskirts of Milan, dreading to find what she expects will be there - a hastily buried body.
A little over a week ago, Anna was approached by businesswoman Benedetta Vitali for help with finding the body of her half-sister, Patrizia. The two sisters had barely met but belatedly hearing of Patrizia's death in a road accident, Benedetta feels the body should be interred in the family vault - but it's disappeared! On a friend's mistaken recommendation she contacts Anna Pavesi who is actually a psychologist but agrees to help out - at first mainly for the money but soon becomes intrigued by the puzzling things she discovers....until she begins to feel threatened herself..


Purely by coincidence I read Blood Sisters straight after The Lost by Claire McGowan - another novel in which the central character is a psychologist-turned-sleuth - but whereas The Lost's heroine, Paula Maguire, works alongside the police, Blood Sister's Anna Pavesi is more of a private eye, snooping around on her own with no one to call for back up when things start to get frightening. 
Whereas the previous crime novels I've read from Hersilia have been translations of older novels set in the 1950s-60s, Blood Sisters brings Italian crime up to date. Anna Pavesi is an independent career woman, separated from her cheating husband and trying to make ends meet on her own - not too successfully, which is why she finds Benedetta's offer so tempting. The story swaps between Anna digging furtively, hoping she'll turn up the final piece of the puzzle, and her attempts to take her mind off the danger she's in, by going over the steps that led her to this place. The plot twists and turns, with unexpected discoveries about Patrizia, her life and relationships along the way - and it's always nice to not be able to predict the ending and for once I couldn't! I wouldn't say it was a total surprise but it wasn't what I was expecting.
One thing that really struck me was the setting.  To many of us Italy is a romantic destination for holidays but the landscape of Blood Sisters isn't one of glorious beaches, quaint medieval towns, or dazzling ski slopes but as gloomy as dull as anywhere closer to home - the scruffy industrialised area around Milan in late winter is damp and dreary, constantly wreathed in fog with endless traffic queues. I suppose it just proves that anywhere can be dull and mundane if you live and work there, rather than visit briefly.

Maryom's review - 4 stars

Publisher - Hersilia Press

Genre - crime, adult fiction, 

 Buy Blood Sisters: An Anna Pavesi Investigation from Amazon

Snail Trail by Jo Saxton

Review by The Mole

Written in rhyme this book follows a snail trail as it winds around modern art - encouraging the reader to look and see and to be creative with any media that comes to hand in their own art. Some pieces may not suit the individual's taste while others are classics loved by all. Aimed at the very young, this book will give much to talk about as the snail passes pictures that are not of him before arriving at the final picture.

Putting that to one side, the rhyming is easy and fun and as early reader material it will be popular for lots of reasons.

The artists and works are not credited on the page - so as to keep the story simple - but a complete list is available at the back which also tells where they can be viewed.

All in all a lovely book for youngsters and parents to share.

Publisher - Frances Lincoln
Genre - Children's poetry, early reader (6+),  poetry, art

Buy Snail Trail: In Search of a Modern Masterpiece from Amazon

The Lost by Claire McGowan

 review by Maryom

Paula Maguire is a forensic psychologist known among the people she works with for too much impulsiveness and a tendency to rush in when police procedures and rules would have her sit quietly in an office. Even so, her ability to get results in missing-persons cases means she's in demand. When two girls go missing within weeks of each other back in Paula's home town of Ballyterrin in Northern Ireland, she's asked to go back there to help out. For a variety of personal reasons, she isn't too keen to return to the place she left 12 years before, but grudgingly goes.
Despite the passage of time, Ballyterrin is a town still smarting from the Troubles - almost everyone seems to have lost a family member during them - but the disappearance of two schoolgirls has shocked the community.
While the police want to follow one line of enquiry, Paula's impulsive streak leads her off on her own, following tenuous links to the Mission, a religious group targeting the town's teenage girls, and trying to find a connection with disappearances back in the 1980s. Her impulsive side also comes out in her personal life - starting a relationship with one of her colleagues and re-igniting one with an old flame!
The Lost is an enjoyable, page-turner of a read - though some of the events are a little predictable, leaving the story less nail-bitingly tense than some crime novels. I'm often opposed to too much personal story-line for the characters, feeling it can get in the way of the crime-solving, but here the progress of the investigation and the revealing of Paula's personal story twist round and complement each other, helping flesh out the characters and giving a nicely balanced read. All of the characters have faults enough to make them real but are still likeable enough for the reader to care about them. Paula's problems seem far from over at the end of the novel and I was certainly left wanting to know what would happen next ...

With a strong female lead and the closeness of the personal and crime sides of the plot, it reminded me of Liza Marklund's thrillers featuring Annika Bengtzon. I hope this is the start of another such great series.


Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult crime

Missing Ellen by Natasha Mac a'Bhaird

review by Maryom

Ellen and Maggie have been friends since their first day at school, always there for each other, sharing everything, as close, if not closer, than sisters. But now Ellen is no longer there and Maggie is trying to make sense of what happened and of her feelings of loss and abandonment. To help her come to terms with them, she starts writing to Ellen, letters that will never be posted, but that help Maggie put into words things that she can't say to her family or friends.

Told alternately through Maggie's letters and a series of flashbacks, Missing Ellen is a story of friendship and loss. Told in the first person, it brings an immediacy to her feelings though for the sake of preserving the mystery of what has happened to Ellen, Maggie doesn't reveal everything at once.
It soon becomes apparent that Maggie and Ellen had been drifting apart for some time - while Maggie wanted to join in the school drama group, helping to make costumes, Ellen's idea of fun was getting drunk with her older boyfriend. And this was my only reservation with the book - that Maggie was a little too 'goodie goodie', Ellen so very, very bad and the moralistic attitude that if you're in the 'bad' category, then worse will befall you.
It's a great story though of friendship and growing up, and the strains that come with it. It's less cutting and not as dark as some 'real life' teen fiction so perhaps suitable for the younger end of the range and even pre-teens.

Maryom's review -  4 stars

Publisher - O'Brien Press
Genre - teen fiction, 
 

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Hot Air by Sandrine Dumas Roy;illustrated by Emmanuelle Houssais

review by Maryom

The ice has been melting too fast and the world hotting up too much, so the animals decide to get to the bottom of the problem. It seems the cows are at fault with, dare we say it?, farting too much. All their gas is upsetting the weather and making the world far too uncomfortable. Can the animals come up with a solution? Maybe that gas could even be put to some use?

As you may have guessed, this book sheds a humorous light on the problems of global warming. There aren't going to be many kids that don't giggle every time the cows' farting problem gets mentioned but it isn't just about grabbing their attention using a 'naughty' word.
The writing is eye-catching with changes of font size, and the illustrations are bright and quirky with lots of weird and wonderful contraptions that the animals use in their investigations. The story gives lots of scope for asking 'what would you do?' and encouraging children to think about global warming and perhaps come up with their own suggestions of how it might be tackled.

Publisher - Phoenix Yard Books
Genre - Children's picture book, Environmental Issues

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Rags and Bones edited by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt

review by Maryom

Subtitled New Twists on Timeless Tales, this collection takes a new look at twelve old and perhaps familiar stories. The editors approached some of their favourite writers, asking them to revisit stories that had inspired or moved them and re-work them from their essential 'rags and bones'. So there are new versions of fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty and Rumplestiltskin, and of classic tales from Spenser's The Faerie Queene to Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire Carmilla and Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King; there's science fiction, dystopian and fantasy, in fact a little of everything.
This book arrived unexpectedly for review but I immediately marked it down as a 'must read' - and it didn't disappoint; in fact, with its mix of literary and genre, it proved to be one of the most compelling collections I've read. You might be drawn in by the big names - Neil Gaiman and Garth Nix - but all the stories are quite wonderful. Anyone who loves fantasy will be drawn in and mesmerised and for anyone who thinks 'genre' isn't their kind of thing, bare in mind that some of these stories are based on ones from literary heavyweights such as Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne and EM Forster and give them a go.

Contributors: Saladin Ahmed, Kelley Armstrong, Holly Black, Neil Gaiman, Kami Garcia, Melissa Marr, Garth Nix, Tim Pratt, Carrie Ryan, Margaret Stohl, Gene Wolfe, Rick Yancey with illustrations by Charles Voss

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult short stories, fantasy, dystopian, sci-fi, literary

Buy Rags & Bones from Amazon