Voices of Angels

I’m doing something a little strange this evening. I’m recommending a book my own publishing company has been involved with. Voices of Angels is edited by Debz Hobbs-Wyatt. I actually had very little to do with this book.  I gave one story a light edit. When I read it again I’d forgotten most of it so it was like reading it for the first time. I wasn’t even involved with the proof read this time. The most I did was give it a quick look through to see that the formatting was right.

And it’s sat on my shelf since it came out at the end of last year.

Last week I got round to reading it.

I was entranced. The stories were engaging, gripping and entertaining. All about angels of one sort or another. I wanted to make some extra comments about some of them but another look through the book has convinced me that I couldn’t choose between them; they are all so good.

I’m also convinced that Bridge House produces good books. Phew! What a relief. I’d just read a book published by one of the Big Six and written by a writer I respect. But I enjoyed Voices more. What a revelation!      

£1 from every paperback and a percentage form every Kindle edition sold goes to the Caron Keating Foundation, the charity Gloira Hunniford set up in her daughter’s memory. Gloria Hunniford has written the foreword.     

That Summer by Sarah Dessen

This isn’t quite what I call “Chicklet-lit”. I define Chicklet-lit as being Chick-lit for the next generation down – the generation that the book-publishing and book-selling industries might define as young adult. Chicklet-lit novels are always a fun, easy read yet are just one stroke more serious than what is written for the more mature Chick-lit reader. Personally, I’m not the greatest fan of them. I usually see them as competently written, following a formula that satisfies and just a little unadventurous. But I’ve read Sarah Dessen before and enjoyed her work. I was already familiar with her This Lullaby – which is in fact on my “further reading” list on one of the modules I teach at the University of Salford, UK. So, although the cover suggests Chicklet-lit That Summer is really something a little different.  

The novel totally absorbed me all the way through. Dessen certainly maintains the setting that so frequently houses Chickletlit – comfortable middle American life, girls interested in boys and young women who laugh and cry a lot and suffer all the normal adolescent anxieties. Yet she uses a more lyrical prose than one would normally find in a Chicklet-lit book. Just into the opening paragraph we read “It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it.”  And we can totally identify with main character Haven whom Dessen draws so well. She is rounded, complex and unusual.

My daughter remarked as we looked at the teen section in Waterstone’s “I wish they’d had books like this when I was a teenager.” She is now 30. And had there been books like That Summer available when she was a teenager, I would have gladly bought it for her.