Twerp by Mark Goldblatt ~ A Review

Twerp by Mark Goldblatt

Published: Random House for Young Readers, 28th May 2013

Length: 288 pages (eBook edition)

Where Did I Get It? Kindly received for review from NetGalley

Summary (from Goodreads):

Julian Twerski isn’t a bully. He’s just made a big mistake. So when he returns to school after a weeklong suspension, his English teacher offers him a deal: if he keeps a journal and writes about the terrible incident that got him and his friends suspended, he can get out of writing a report on Shakespeare. Julian jumps at the chance. And so begins his account of life in sixth grade–blowing up homemade fireworks, writing a love letter for his best friend (with disastrous results), and worrying whether he’s still the fastest kid in school. Lurking in the background, though, is the one story he can’t bring himself to tell, the one story his teacher most wants to hear.

Inspired by Mark Goldblatt’s own childhood growing up in 1960s Queens, Twerp shines with humor and heart. This remarkably powerful story will have readers laughing and crying right along with these flawed but unforgettable characters.

Opening Line:

My English teacher, Mr Selkirk, says I have to write something, and it has to be long, on account of the thing that happened over winter recess – which, in my opinion, doesn’t amount to much.

~

My Review:

This is not the type of book that I would usually pick up but I really enjoyed it nonetheless.

A book about taking responsibility for your actions, Twerp is told through the eyes of Julian, a 13 year old boy growing up in 1960s America and is an honest and heart-warming read.

The narrative is very true to the voice of a 13 year old boy – Julian sets off talking about something, then gets distracted by a tangent (usually amusing) before returning to the point he was originally making. It also shows the things that feel the most important when you are that age – whether or not you are the fastest runner in your postcode still and how much you hate Shakespeare, the sudden realisation that girls are somthing other than yucky and how easy it is to get led astray by other people.

The story was fairly simple, the climax wasn’t anything too shocking or even surprising – you sort of know it is coming by Julian’s growing reluctance to write – but it was effective because of the emotions packed in.

The writing is very raw in that Julian holds little back, he is honest about himself and his friends and this adds to the pace of the book. I raced through it, feeling like I was listening to his thoughts rather than reading his diary (which it is of a sort).

I loved the interaction between the characters and you could tell that it is at least loosely based on the author’s own childhood simply because of the vibrancy and roundedness of the characters and locations. It was easy to lose yourself in it and really sense the atmosphere and settings of the story.

It was a quick read and one that I enjoyed as an adult probably as much as I would have if I had read it when I was closer to Julian’s age.

My Rating: 5/5*

Lightning Rider by Jen Greyson ~ A Review

Lightning Rider by Jen Greyson

Published: The Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House, 30th May 2013

Where Did I Get It? eARC received from NetGalley for review

Summary (from Goodreads):

For Evy Rivera, thunderstorms have always caused her physical pain, but she’s never known why. When a record-setting storm arrives on the same night her father finds ancient ancestral documents, Evy is set aglow with mysterious tiny lightnings she can command.

Even worse, she alerts some people in the universe who’ve been looking for her family for a very long time.

Thrown back into ancient Spain and tasked with killing a Spanish legend, she must train alongside Constantine, a sexy yet obstinate Roman warrior. He teaches her how to wield her lightning as a weapon, through more errors than trials. With a relationship as explosive as their late-night training sessions, Evy and Constantine battle their push-pull relationship while trying to ignore the two-thousand-year difference in their birthdates.

Ilif Rotiart, her quasi-mentor, is appalled at Evy’s skill. He would prefer to train her father and keep Evy on the sidelines—where women belong. Evy has a feeling Ilif is keeping something from them, but she must play nice until she uncovers the truth. And if he’s lying, it will be the worst day of his four-hundred-year life.

Penya Sepadas claims she’s Evy’s rightful trainer, and she has the prophecy to prove it. Penya doesn’t share Ilif’s misogynistic attitude, but she does have her own agenda…and her own secrets.

Evy must sort through the lies and find the truth behind her family’s time-traveling past before the wrong history obliterates the future. She’s spent her whole life fighting for her place. Now, as the first female lightning rider, she’ll dedicate her existence to fighting to save the world.

But will Evy learn to manage her lightning and find the truth before it’s too late?

Opening Line:

A storm is coming.

~

My Review:

A fantastic romp through time with a brilliant main character – I really enjoyed Lightning Rider… once I got into it.

If I had written this review after reading the first 25% of the book, I would have slated it for a multitude of reasons – the main character was irritating, the world seemed a bit flat, I didn’t have the slightest clue what was going on and, quite frankly, I didn’t care. Then all of a sudden it became brilliant. It was like the author suddenly found their feet and the characters, the world, the story all jumped to life and I wanted it all and I wanted it now. I couldn’t put it down in contrast to the start where I had to force myself to keep reading.

Evy is a heroine you could relate to – she doesn’t discover that she has crazy lightning powers and immediately be all cool with it and know how to use it as happens in so many books and films. Instead she reacts how a real person would – she tries to ignore it, she plays with it, she hopes it will go away by itself, she gets angry with it, she gets things wrong. She has to learn about her power and the responsibilities it brings and the danger it can be and in learning her character grows, changes and rounds out without ever losing sense of who she was before. She doesn’t have a personality transplant, she just adapts. Her character development is cleverly handled and smooth and her Spanish temperament shines through with amusing results.

The time travel is well thought out and not confusing in a way that is a detriment to the story – it is mind-bending, obviously, but what time travel isn’t? The deception and intrigue layered through the story is subtle and I didn’t work everything out before the twists were revealed or, in some cases, not revealed – leaving you desperate for the next instalment to find out what happens.

There’s plenty of action and danger, horses, motorbikes, swords and arrows, bloodshed and fear but also a hefty dollop of romance in the form of main love interest Constantine, the Roman warrior. At first I wasn’t convinced by him as a romantic option but as his and Evy’s relationship grew and their characters developed, I was sold. There were plenty of JUST KISS HER ALREADY! moments all building up to the inevtiable racy scenes but it wasn’t forced and added yet another dimension to the book.

Overall I loved it and will be keeping an eye out for book two. It is a little slow to start but worth sticking with for sure.

My Rating: 4/5*

 

Diary Of An Ordinary Woman, A Novel by Margaret Forster – A Review

Diary Of An Ordinary Woman, A Novel by Margaret Forster

Published: Chatto and Windus, April 2003

Length: 403 pages (Hardback edition)

Where Did I Get It?: Purchased second-hand after a recommendation.

Summary (from the book cover):

Margaret Forster presents the ‘edited’ diary of a woman, born 1901, died in 1995. From the age of thirteen, on the eve of the Great War, Millicent King keeps her journal in a series of exercise books. With a touching clearsightedness she vividly records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary family toughed by war, tragedy, and money troubles in the early decades of the century. She struggles to become a teacher, but wants more out of life. From bohemian literary London to Rome in the twenties, her story moves on to social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London. She has proposals of marriage and secret lovers, ambition and optimism. But then her life is turned upside down once more by wartime deaths.

Opening Line:

Father said if I want to keep a diary I must begin it on New Years Day.

~

My Review:

I started reading this book in July 2012. I finished it mid-February 2013. This probably tells you a lot about my relationship with it.

In any normal circumstance I would never have picked Diary Of An Ordinary Woman up, I only chose to read it as part of my Day Zero challenge to read 5 books recommended to me by other people. To me, the title sounds dull and there is nothing I enjoy less than reading about people. Real people, I mean, with real lives. They’re insufferably boring, even when what’s going on around them might not be.

That, though, is one of the first triumphs of this novel – the realism of the story. It is a novel, it’s made up, a fantasy based on reality – but an awful lot of people think (or thought) that it is a real-life true story. And I can see why.

I have read a few reviews where people have discovered that it is not a real diary and stopped reading, insulted at the deception cleverly laid out through the book. The ‘Introduction’ where Forster claims she is re-editing the diaries of Millicent King is fictional but very convincing and probably my favourite thing about the book. It is the perfect lie – I was taken in, too, until I properly studied the cover of the book and saw the words ‘A Novel’ printed small on the front. Incredibly clever and masterfully pulled off.

The rest of the novel, the diary itself, is one of the most beautiful things I have seen crafted out of imagination, even though I detested reading it. The very reason I detested it was because of its brilliance – it read like the diary of a real person. A real, boring, obnoxious thirteen year old girl who grows up to be a flighty teenager, a stubborn twenty-something, a survivor of wars etc etc. It was incredibly true to the style of a diary and therefore, to me, incredibly boring, awkward and unpleasant to read.

If I were an avid lover of memoirs and biographies and the like, I would probably have loved it. But I’m not, so instead, I forced myself to read two diary entries every time I wanted to pick up another book to read. Just two. Many of them are only half a page long and still felt like a chore.

I didn’t enjoy the book until just over half way through when the Second World War broke out and everything got more exciting. Millicent was just as ‘ordinary’ as before but the world she was in was more interesting and I found myself reading 20 pages a sitting without noticing. Then the war ended and I got bored again.

As a historical novel it was reasonably interesting and it did make me think about how life was during the Great Wars and through the 1980s but it is simply not something I would read by choice.

I can see why it would be someone else’s favourite book of all time and I acknowledge and appreciate the skill of the writing involved. It just wasn’t for me.

My rating: 3/5*

Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad by Naomi Rabinowitz – A Review

Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad by Naomi Rabinowitz 

Published: Naomi Rabinowitz, 8th October 2012

Length: 278 pages (Kindle edition)

Where Did I Get It?: Purchased on Amazon for 77p

Summary (from Goodreads):

Shy, overweight Melinda Rhodes’ sophomore year of high school isn’t going so well. Her own mother mocks her weight. Her pants split in the middle of school, earning her the nickname, “Moolinda.” She then loses first chair flute in band to Kathy Meadows, her pretty and popular nemesis.

Her luck changes when she catches the eye of Josh Kowalski, a rebellious trumpet prodigy and class clown. Josh has also been hurt by Kathy and asks Melinda to help take Kathy down. Mel figures that she has nothing to lose … and Josh is adorable with gorgeous blue eyes and a winning smile. She agrees to team up with him and looks forward to finally getting back at her rival.

At first, the pair’s pranks are silly, and as they work together, Mel comes out of her shell. Even better, she finds herself falling for Josh and it appears as if he might feel the same way about her.

However, their schemes become more and more dangerous and Mel is surprised to discover her dark side. Just how far will she go to get what she wants — and is Josh really worth the risk?

Opening Line:

A light September breeze swept through Sequoia High, filling the quiet hallways with the scent of cut grass and falling leaves.

~

My Review:

I’m not going to lie, I purchased this book purely on the artistic merit of the cover. I LOVE it and had high hopes for the story itself. I should have listened to the old ‘don’t judge’ chestnut in this case though.

I didn’t come away from Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad feeling inspired or overwhelmed and I’m fairly sure that in three weeks time the only thing I’m going to remember about it is the pretty cover. In fact, I felt like I had read it (and seen it) all before because it contained every element required for a YA High School Romance novel/Teen Romance Movie and not a lot else.

There was the insecure female lead, Melinda, who had issues with her weight and self-confidence, the bouncy popular best friend, Lana, the drop-dead gorgeous but slightly bad love interest, Josh, and the beautiful arch-enemy, Kathy.  She fancies him, they have a mutual enemy, they team up to get revenge, it turns into something more, there’s a teenage drama, they break up, they make up. The End.

For a beach read or an easy read, it is perfect, and if I were fifteen it would probably have been even better because I wouldn’t have read it 400 times before and I’d have still been in that High School world myself which would have made it a thing of daydreams.

There were a few issues though. First, there were the chapter headings – all was going well until chapter ten and then they went all pear-shaped. There were two chapter tens and then the titles suddenly stopped being numbers for a couple of chapters and turned into Roman numerals – this didn’t remove from the reading experience particularly, but seemed very unprofessional, even for a self-published eBook.

Then there were the typos. All the typos. There were speech marks missing all over the place (she’d open them and not close them again, or not open them but close them – that kind of thing), frequent cases of ‘I’ instead of ‘if’ or ‘it’ and the odd ‘urn’ instead of ‘um’. One or two could be forgiven but they were all over the place and all the way through -  it was like it had never been proof read by anything other than Word. I know it’s expensive to get someone professional to look through your work, but most people can find five friends or randoms on-line to read it through and spot things that you miss on all your own read-throughs.

The writing was mostly good, typos aside, although there were a few examples of things that made it read like something written by a fifteen year old instead of something about a fifteen year old. Such as when the characters were drinking – instead of implying that their speech was slurred and they were stuttering and so on, it was all written out phonetically throughout the entire scene. This made it a bit hard to read and pulled you out of the scene a bit because it was, quite frankly, irritating.

Overall, Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad wasn’t a bad book, it was a stereotypically charming YA novel about coming of age and finding your first High School love. There wasn’t much wrong with it but nor was there anything particularly new and exciting about it. I enjoyed it but would have been disappointed if I had spent more than 77p on it.

My rating: 3/5*

Back To Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald – A Review

Back To Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Published: Orion Children’s Books, 7 February 2013

Length: 228 pages (paperback)

Where Did I Get It?: Borrowed Liberty‘s ARC for review, pre-publication

Summary (from Goodreads):

Cosmo’s brother Brian died when he was ten years old. His mum hides her grief by working all the hours God sends and Cosmo lives with his grandparents. They’ve been carefree days as Granddad buys him a horse called John and teaches him all he knows about horses. But the good times have to come to an end and although he doesn’t want to admit it, Cosmo knows his Granddad is losing his mind. So on one of the rare occasions when Granddad seems to recognise him, Cosmo is bemused that he gives him a key to Blackbrick Abbey and urges him to go there. Cosmo shrugs it off, but gradually Blackbrick draws him in…

Cosmo arrives there, scared and lonely, and is dropped off at the crumbling gates of a huge house. As he goes in, the gates close, and when he turns to look, they’re rusty and padlocked as if they haven’t been opened in years. Cosmo finds himself face to face with his grandfather as a young man, and questions begin to form in his mind: can Cosmo change the course of his family’s future?

Opening Line:

My graddad was pretty much the cleverest person I ever met so it was strange in the end to see the way people treated him – as if he was a complete moron.

~

My Review:

Back to Blackbrick is a magnificently clever book that was both heart warming and heart breaking in the same breath, and the cover is beautiful.

Alzheimer’s disease is something that affects an awful lot of people and is difficult for the people around them to deal with and Blackbrick handles this with a sensitive touch and a twist of fantasy.

Cosmo, the narrator of the story, hasn’t had the easiest of starts in life – his brother died when he was ten and his mother has vanished to another country to ‘work’, leaving him to live with his grandparents. The development of his Grandfather’s Alzheimer’s is the final straw and Cosmo refuses to accept it. At first he does what any young teenager would do when faced with a problem he doesn’t know how to fix – he asks the internet and believes every word he reads.

It is touchingly funny as Cosmo does his best to follow the instructions on a ‘Memory Cure’ website and you can’t help but chuckle at the outcomes of his endeavours (such as sticking post-it notes to everything so his Grandfather won’t forget what they are called).

Then the book takes an almost fantastical turn as Cosmo follows a bizarre instruction from his Grandfather – to take an old key and visit Blackbrick Abbey, via the South Gates. Doing as he’s told leads Cosmo into a place he’d never dreamed of – his Grandfather’s childhood.

I loved the magic of this story, the relationship between Cosmo and his young Grandfather in Blackbrick was brilliantly funny as Cosmo struggled to try and shape the future without letting on everything he knew and making himself look like a lunatic.

Sensitively handling everything from Alzheimer’s through to death and childbirth, Back to Blackbrick manages to balance comedy and tragedy perfectly and had me crying and laughing in equal measure.

The only problem I had with this book was that for the first few chapters I managed to convince myself that Cosmo was a girl. I’m not sure what triggered this but I was really confused when I realised I was wrong and it threw me for a few pages. By half way through though I had completely forgotten my previous confusion and it didn’t detract from the story at all.

My rating: 5/5*

Weekend Creation: A Writing Excersise – The Barn

Once you’ve read my post, be sure to click on the button and go look at everyone else’s Weekend Creations!

****

One of my favourite exercises I was ever set at university was this: ‘Describe a barn through the eyes of someone who has just received a letter saying their child has been killed at war overseas.’

It was a challenge – what have barns got to do with grief? How could you possibly get enough emotion into a description of a barn?

I actually wrote more than one response to the exercise but the following one is the piece I feel was most successful.

The Barn

David stood before the empty barn with his toolbox under his arm and a half-empty mug of tea in his hand. One of the huge wooden doors was swinging listlessly on it’s hinges, twisted awkwardly at the bottom where the cows had barged their way through it during the storm that had battered the previous night.

He sighed. Now he was up here he could see that it was more than just the door that needed seeing to – some of the planks in the wall were splintered and bent from the pounding hooves of the spooked cattle, two windows were badly cracked and a third was completely smashed. The splintered glass lay half hidden in and amongst the hay like scattered shrapnel on a battlefield. A stiff breeze, the last remnant of the storm, moaned softly through the barn, shifting the hay and adding an even colder edge to the already crisp morning.

Placing the toolbox on a damp patch of grass and perching his mug on top of it, he walked inside to see if any other damage had been done. With a sigh he picked up a broom from a corner and began the tedious chore of sweeping the hay out into the yard. It had to be done; he couldn’t be doing with some cattle getting ill from trying to eat the glass hidden in the hay. Not on top of everything else.

He was startled from his work by a smashing sound outside. Dropping the brush he ran to the doorway and saw his mug lying broken beside his toolbox. Cold tea was soaking into the ground and a sharp stone protruded through the broken china like a knife. He bent to pick up the pieces, his hands shaking. With a sudden sharp intake of breath he dropped the chunks of pottery and stared silently at his hand. Stared at the bead of blood slowly welling from his sliced finger.

A single tear dropped from his face and hit his hand, the red swirling briefly in the water before running and dropping to join the tea in soaking into the earth.

For the writers among you – why don’t you give this writing exercise a go (and maybe post your piece on your blog then link it in the comments below?). It’s an interesting challenge that  really makes you think about word association and creating an atmosphere.

Writing Workshop: I Was, I Am, I Will Be

It’s time for Josie’s Writing Workshop over at Sleep Is For The Weak again. I really love doing this because it makes me think and I love reading everyone else’s interpretations too because there’s always so many different ways of looking at the same prompt.

This week’s prompt jumped me forward a bit in Lyall and Tahni’s story to a key point in their relationship where Tahni has to face the truth of everything and accept who she is. (If you are new to Lyall and Tahni have a quick peek at the summary here to get the background, it’ll make everything below make more sense! And should you want to read the other short stories about Lyall and Tahni they are all linked under the Fiction and Poetry button at the top of the page.)

I Was, I Am, I Will Be

Revelations -A Tale Of Lyall and Tahni

I shivered and looked up at Lyall who was crouching over me with his head on one side and his eyes on mine.

“Lyall.” My voice was nothing but a broken whisper. “I still don’t understand.”

He whined and touched his nose to my cheek. It was wet but warm and somehow reassuring.

I shivered again and felt cold ripple through me like a wave on a beach, leaving behind it an itch that almost burned, touching every single inch of my body. I wanted to scratch but my arms were aching so fiercely I could barely move them.

I forced myself to move, rolling onto my belly and drawing my knees up under myself. My eyes were squeezed shut in pain and I dropped my head onto my arms breathing heavily to try and ease the hurt.

Then I froze. My arms were warm. In the same way a cat is warm when you rest your face against its fur.

Fur.

I squinted. Swallowed. Closed my eyes again.

I felt Lyall shifting beside me. I could smell something odd, tangy like oranges mixed with something much less sweet. It made me uneasy. It felt like fear.

I could hear a strange whining noise and it was only when I realised it stopped whenever I feverishly gasped in a breath that it was coming from me. I sounded like a dog left out in the rain.

There was a sudden series of crunching and grinding noises and I was aware of Lyall moving away briefly before returning to my side.

“Tahni. It’s going to be okay, just keep breathing deeply.” His voice was rough, as though he really needed a drink or had been crying. “The itching will stop soon. You…your fur is almost through now. Then the ache will fade.”

I wailed involuntarily. He stroked the back of my head.

“It’s okay. Shhh. The first time is always the worst. Next time will be quicker and not so scary. Just try and relax.”

I panicked then. This was not happening. I’m a girl. A normal, fifteen year old girl. Human. All the way through. If you cut me in half it would be written through me like a stick of rock: Homo Sapiens.

I’m not a mythical creature. Mythical creatures are just that. Mythical. Not real.

I forced myself up onto my hands and knees and glared at Lyall. I desperately wanted to shout at him, blame him, ask him why he seemed to know everything. I couldn’t manage anything other than a wonky sort of growling which hurt my throat.

I tried to launch myself at him. Hurt him like I was hurting. I just fell on him instead and he held me. Firmly but gently against his chest, which was naked but still warm despite the cold air. His hands stroked my head slowly and rhythmically and I found myself breathing along with the pattern, letting myself focus on that and nothing else.

“I’m sorry, Tahni. I thought you knew. I didn’t know you never knew your parents and they never told you. I should have told you who you are before…” He paused and stopped stroking. I whimpered until he started again. “At least you aren’t alone.”

I think I blacked out after that. Everything hurt so much the world went white and all I could hear was crackling like fireworks exploding right next to my head.

Then I was quivering on the floor and my entire body felt full of electricity, shivering through me every which way and back again. I opened my eyes and my heart skipped. The world had gone mad. Everything was tinted blue or yellow, as if I were looking through a stained glass window. I whined.

“Weird isn’t it? You’ll get used to it after a while. I think it’s a canine thing, different colour spectrum.” Lyall sounded a bit amused.

I stood, realising as I unfolded myself that it felt strangely normal to have four feet. Concentrating I turned to face Lyall who was sitting cross-legged on the grass totally naked but for his jumper laid across his lap.

“You’re a very beautiful wolf, Tahni. Deep reddish brown, like your hair when you’re human.” He caught my eyes with his and held me with a look so intense I didn’t dare blink. “You’re going to be okay you know? I’ll help you. The pack will let you in. They have to.”

He paused and looked at the floor.

“It’ll all be okay.”

I just stared at him and thought about what he’d said.

I am a wolf.

I will be fine.

I had to believe him. I had no choice.