Our Fiction Book of the Month for July

Our Fiction Book of the Month for July, The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton, is not just a feast for the old peepers. Of course, I was instantly charmed by the intricate vintage-y dollhouse cover art (and surely not just I have been guilty of obtaining a book just for its outer beauty?)... and not just I. Check out this incredible piece of chalk art created by Jess from Waterstones BishopsStortford.

(I totally would try that with our A-board, too, but whenever I do, the creatures in the picture just whimper "Kill meeeee!" But one digresses...)

            


Or this incredible display done by Waterstones Nottingham (yeah, cheers for showing us all up, Notts ;)!)

                            

But this book is nothing short of a beaut on the inside, as well. Read the first few pages of the book here.

See? Told ya.

Burton's little masterpiece has been compared to "Girl with a Pearl Earring", "The Goldfinch" and the writings of Sarah Waters. But regardless whether you like those three, give it a shot. We do heart it.

Charmed,

 

Patty

Our Non-Fiction Book of the Month for July

A contemporary of Queen Victoria, Dowager Empress Cixi has been compared to Lucrezia Borgia in her ruthlessness.

Jung Chang, author of the much beloved "Wild Swans", presents us with a fascinating portrait of a strong but controversial character.

Read the Guardian review here and the Telegraph review here.

There is also a great blog interview with Chang on our website.


P.S. If you enjoy this, or the subject of women in China in general, do not miss this gem: "The Good Women of China", a stunner written by journalist Xinran.

Don't miss our Children's Book of the Month for July!

Review: The Rain by Virginia Bergin

There is little as sinister as the very basis of our lives becoming life-threatening to us. Always having watched apocalyptic movies and reading books on the subject, it wasn't even the idea of something toxic that freaked me out so much, it was the idea that something as basic as air and water could make our very own habitat our enemy.

Rain, probably the epitome of nourishment, becoming poison is just too much for my head. Yeah yeah, Hunger Games, Battle Royale... that mankind can be a source of evil doesn't really come as a surprise anymore. But forces of nature that get us off our high horse of evolutionary advancement – I can't help but equally worship and be terrorised by them.

Years ago I wrote an apocalyptic short story about poison rain. And bang, here is a book that deals with that very subject.

The premise is that a meteor trojan-horses a bacterium from outer space into our atmosphere, which, when in contact with water, multiplies like crazy. And it really loves to feast on people.

The story starts with young Ruby being at a party, making out with a guy in a jacuzzi, when rain clouds gather – and a hysterical parent ushers them inside. Not knowing what is happening, her heart throb sneaks back outside to gather his belongings, only to stumble back in, screaming, scratching his face to shreds. And Miss Ruby suddenly, confused and clueless as to what's going on, other than the scraps of news she hears about “staying out of the rain”, finds herself in a world collapsing. She gets a lift home, only to be quarantined by her parents, and watching the neighbour die a horrible death on her doorstep.

And her mundane life of friends, mobile phones and shopping becomes one of thirst, death and survival, where even tap water is the enemy, or anything contaminated with the new poison rain.

Neighbours become enemies fighting like animals over the last bottles of drinkable fluids.

All in all a pretty nail-biting read.

There is just one gripe I have with it.

I hated Ruby. From the start. She is a spoilt, whiny, sullen teenage princess, whose persistent English version of the valley girl talk (“Oh my gawd, my Dad is such a loser!”) totally, ohmygod, drove me up the fricken wall. There is a key scene when her Dad is asking her to pay attention to some life-saving information he wants to pass on, and she just sits there moping about having left her mobile phone at her friend's house. You just want to slap her around! All she seems to worry about is make-up, fashion, boys, even AFTER THE FRICKEN APOCALYPSE. I mean, that's what SHE LOOTS!

I understand the author wanted to perhaps create 'that' character kids can identify with, but if the general teenage populace is really that airheaded and mopey, I don't want to live on this planet anymore! She is a high school bully who complains that the guy trying to save her life is the pimply nerdy guy.

I give her that, she does develop over the course of the story into someone not as annoying, but the improvement is not great. It is hard to love a story – and don't get me wrong, the book itself is amazing! - where the main character is the shallow brat that one can barely stand to be around for five minutes in real life, much less read about in a book for days.

So here's my verdict. It's a fantastic, gripping tale. Well-written in general, but I had to grit my teeth through Princess Mopey's valley talk and make-up sampling, to give the book credit where credit is due. Part of me wants to think I have just outgrown teenage books, but the truth is, I love them! I have enjoyed the Gone series, The Maze Runner series, The Enemy series, all of which managed to give teens some credit for brains and being able to act like someone not as tedious as Ruby. Teenage literature doesn't necessarily need cliché teenage characters to hit the target market. And creating an unlikeable protagonist is bound to backfire. Luckily this book just had enough other good features to redeem itself.

Yours, infectedly,

Patty 

Mockingjay - The First Trailer

If you haven't seen it yet, here it is!! The first trailer for the third Hunger Games movie "Mockingjay Part 1" is out there, and it's fricken EPIC! I can't add much to what has already been written up on wonderful Nerdist Chris Hardwick's (who this bookseller always fancied a wee bit when he hosted MTV's Singled Out waaaay back in the days, but one digresses) website, but I can only confirm. It's not just the trailer for another teen movie. It is subtle. It is suave. It is CREEPY.

Talk about teaser. We'll still have to wait 'til 21 November. Gaaargh!

Ah well. Might as well go and read the book first. 

We haz it. Just saying. :)

May your local bookshop be forever in your favour.

Toodle pip,

Patty :)

Andrew Solomon's Far From The Tree - Review

Andrew Solomon blew me away a few years ago with his Noonday Demon, a book which was a finalist for but, dammit, should have won the Pulitzer Price. It was unlike any other book I had ever read: a mix of science, psychological and sociological study, autobiography, philosophy, and inadvertently perhaps even a self-help book. It helped me tremendously, and has others. Hard to top, you’d think.

But Solomon’s done it. It is a very personal book to him, having known from an early age that he’s gay and subsequently having struggled in a society that still perceives this as a ‘sickness’. This book took him a long time to write, but every minute he spent, researching, interviewing, exploring the subject was worth it. The result is astounding. Far from the Tree is a well-rounded, all-encompassing study of parents’ relationship with their children, born into or marked by what most would perceive as tragedy at worst, or a challenge at least: children with disability, mental illness, criminal activity, born out of rape, and so forth – and how these relationships, despite hardship, flourished and gained a meaning they might not have under different circumstances. How the people involved even managed to embrace some of those challenges as identity, which turns the idea of disability and illness on its head, suggesting that trying to fix or make certain perceived problems like deafness and homosexuality “go away” causes more damage than it improves.

           This book bears Solomon’s trademark holistic approach, it covers all angles and perspectives and neglects nothing. He looks at the very individual story of each person involved but also places it in its wider societal context, micro- and macro-analysing and this way managing to still any appetite and need for reading this book: be it scientific curiosity, a need to relate and be understood, inspiration on a personal and wider philosophical level, even finding answers, explanations and solutions if one finds oneself involved in a similar subject matter. It is a lesson in tolerance, love, acceptance for the self and others and embracing differences.

When I say this is not an easy read, please do not misunderstand. Solomon’s style reads beautifully and accessibly, but I had to put the book down time and again, just to digest the richness of it, to catch up with my thoughts and how I related to it, to fully grasp what he was talking about. It is not a book made for passive consumption, it is one that, “for best results”, should be chewed and allowed to seep into one’s soul. It is challenging not on a “too hard to understand” level, as the man talks nothing but sense, it is merely the complexity of it that blows you away.

       Solomon has confirmed himself as my hero: he’s an intellectual, but one that is humble, openly flawed but nonetheless enlightened, outrageously warm and humane, a man with a vision as wide and encompassing as the sky. Sorry to gush, but there are very very few people who have managed to do what he has done.

So I beg you, please please read this book. I myself shall be shipping it to friends far and wide, like soul-expanding, mindboggling, brain-blowing and enlightening lollipops. Far from the Tree is a masterpiece that will probably never find its match. Until Solomon writes another one.

Patty :)

Karyn Langhorne Folan's Doomsday Kids and the pros and perils of popular dystopia

Having grown up in the Cold War, I have always had a morbid fascination with anything related to doomsday, but in particular with nuclear holocaust. I’m aware that my reading dystopia now is an obsession born of that fear. It’s been the equivalent of continually prodding a hole in your tooth with your tongue or picking a scab.  Despite it terrifying the living daylights out of me, I couldn't help but returning to the scene of trauma, observing, gathering information, considering possibilities. Maybe in an attempt to rationalise absolute horror or the possibility of not just my own extinction but that of our entire planet. 

         It was a possibility in the 80s, one we got very very close to around ’84, and to this day I can’t decide whether it makes suitable Young Adult fiction. It is too unimaginably awful to be child’s play. Of course, there is the current trend of post-apocalyptic teen fiction, but it’s all set in a fairly far-off dystopia which is safe enough for a young mind to contemplate and play with. Enough interspersed with young romance and heroism that makes those scenarios abstractly symbolic enough to not become gratuitous. But something as real and close to home as nuclear holocaust?

       I have always been in two minds about it. I think kids need to know about certain issues, and shouldn't be left in the dark about them. And we definitely shouldn't talk down to them. But then again, it’s our job to protect them from fear too big to be processed healthily in a young mind, and I think if kids read these kind of books, they need to be talked about with adults and contextualised. It’s not something juvenile cognition can cope with on its own.

       I first read a children’s book about Hiroshima, The Day of the Bomb by Karl Bruckner, the true story of Sadako Sasaki, the girl with the thousand cranes  – ironically a present for International Children’s Day, when I was about 9. Then there was the equally harrowing Raymond Briggs film When the Wind Blows, which some fool had broadcast on a Saturday afternoon, during a children’s matinee. All this in a time where talk of nuclear threat was on the news on a daily basis. Altogether, for me it was a bit much – it gave me nightmares.

      Then, when I was 11, there was a terrifying book called The Last Children by renowned German author Gudrun Pausewang, dealing with an atomic attack on central Germany and the effect on and pitiful demise of a family. It was syllabus material then, and no doubt valuable in a time when every ounce of peace movement was needed. But it’s still one of the most horrific books I have read on the subject. It had everything. Graphic descriptions of a scorched earth. Horrible mutilations. Radiation sickness. The disintegration of civilised society. Deformed newborns. And one particularly powerful scene of a teenage boy whose legs had been torn off by the blast and who only got around by means of a rickety, soiled pram, hanging himself off a tree by a wall on which he had written “Damned parents”: The parents who had stood by and done nothing to stop the nuclear arms race. It was meant to be a cautionary tale, and, justified, Pausewang didn’t hold back.

       The more astounded I was recently when I saw that Louise Lawrence’s Children of the Dust is classed as 9-12. While it is by far not as bleak as Pausewang, and actually has an ending of hope,the first half is still pretty full-on. I have recommended it to parents, but with a word of warning - I don't think it should nor is meant to be read "alone".

       Still, as a grown-up, I can’t help myself but read everything on the subject I can get my hands on. Thus it was inevitable that I picked up Doomsday Kids. And here’s the verdict:

It is doubtlessly well-written. I love the characters, who are mildly cliched (there’s a jock and a princess and a weird girl and the loner type, but then, teenagers tend to fit themselves into one category or another for a sense of belonging, so I think those “classifications” work), but the variety of them makes for some tense, conflict-ridden reading. Imagine those different types locked into a small shelter, having to get along, because the only alternative is a bombed out, radioactive world outside. I like that different ethnic groups and disability were represented (the little sister has Down’s Syndrome): you ended up getting a good cross-section of the population. And none of these characters were static: each one of them grows and develops and becomes deeper and more rounded with every page. None of them end up being fully good or fully evil, no one having a moral high ground. They’re kids suddenly confronted with the end of the world, having to survive without their parents, where they suddenly can no longer trust even those they thought to know well, and adults become a threat more than a source of protection and help. They are kids who have to deal with sickness, injury, hunger, emotional distress. They make good and bad decisions. They are fallible and vulnerable. They’re kids.

The story is carried and paced well, suspense is kept up throughout. It ends on a cliffhanger that made me scream “What? You can’t stop now, man! WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN?” – so in that respect it has done a great job of storytelling. And yes, I am excited that there will be sequels.

      It’s a fairly harrowing tale – again not as extreme as Pausewang, but still pretty gruesome. I can’t decide whether I liked or disliked how amazingly those kids had it together, all circumstances considered. But would a young mind be calmer because it couldn't grasp the true horror...or would it collapse for the same reason? Again, that would probably vary from person to person, but that mental struggle didn't come across as strongly as it could have. Also, I couldn't help but think that the threat of radiation sickness was somewhat underplayed. The actual scope of what nuclear war means is missing, reducing it to the playful horror of a computer game. Maybe it’s intentionally played down in order to protect the young reader, and maybe it's still coming in one of the sequels, but inevitably I worry that it creates a “meh” attitude towards the subject matter. What bothers me is that it seems to treat nuclear war more as a form of entertainment in the wake of the current YA Dystopia trend. 

        The question raised for me again is: Is softening young adult post-apocalyptic literature (especially using scenarios that pose or have posed a real threat) irresponsible? Or should young adults be protected from these subjects by giving them a “light” version? I’m in two minds about it, always aware of the fears I lived with as a child, but now, at the same time, glad I wasn’t patronised by a sugar-coated apocalypse.

I have grown up with these type of books being treated as a warning, being politicised, being catalysts of public debate. I think if we’re dealing with true threats, they shouldn't be used as a mere source of entertainment.

Because, maybe  - MAYBE   -  we’re meant to be scared to death of some things.

Traumatisedly yours,

Patty