Boys Don’t Cry by Malorie Blackman

I usually enjoy anything by Malorie Blackman. She’s a writer I admire a lot. Her writing is very readable. I’m 100% with her on her diversity agenda. There should be more representation of the diverse elements of the society in which we live yet those parts should not just be represented as issues.      

Boys Don’t Cry delivers in both these ways.  This is yet another well written book by Blackman. We care for the characters who are rounded and believable. The story keeps on giving. There is pace a plenty.

And we have diversity. Dante is a black single father. His brother Adam is gay. Blackman gives us both boys’ stories. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler if I say that we find that, actually, boys do cry.

There is story and not just an issue. An ex-girlfriend arrives with a baby. Dante’s baby. He agrees to look after it. But she doesn’t come back. Adam makes a fantastic uncle but he has problems of his own and can’t always help.

A really good read!    

The Life and Loves of Cherry Bakewell by Rai Jayne Hearse

Okay, I’ll come clean. I have to like this one. Rai Jayne Hearse is a former student of mine from the University of Salford and I first met Cherry Bakewell in a dusty old room in our beautiful red brick Peel building.
 Rai Jayne worked on this novel on my Writing Novels for Young People course. When she tweeted that she had graduated, I replied that I knew- I’d been at the ceremony. She then replied that her novel was being published. I looked up the publisher - saw that it was kosher if a little unusual - and out of curiosity submitted something myself that has now also been published. Usually it’s the other way round: the lecturers introduce the students to publishers.
 I read a lot of young adult literature and indeed just before I read The Life and Loves of Cherry Bakewell I read a similar length novel by an established young adult writer who writes what I describe as chicklet-lit. I’d put Hearse’s book in the same category – except I’d say she does it better. The established writer irritated me a little. Hearse’s writing is fresher and pacier.
Her characters are believable and likeable – even the villains. Cherry changes satisfyingly by the end of the book. There is progression. Short diary entries maintain the pace. Hearse writes with a strong awareness of the young adult reader. She has precisely the right voice for the text.
It seems I am proved right. Every year at the beginning of my module I tell my students they are ideally placed to write for this reader. They have the writing skills, they are precisely the type of people young adults want to become and they are young enough to remember that time clearly. Here’s to many more.   
 
 

The Love of My Life by Louise Douglas

This is definitely one of the books I just did not want to put down. I started reading it as we waited to board a high-speed ferry from Dublin to Holyhead.  I carried on reading it during the crossing and finished it just a couple of days later. It’s the type of book that stays with you until you’ve finished it.

I’d bought it as a young adult book and many of the scenes do depict protagonist Olivia – Liv – as a young adult. However, it’s arguably more “new adult”.

The story starts at the funeral of her husband Luca. He has been tragically killed in a nasty car accident.  She has been widowed at a very young age. The framework for the story is that the hurt has become very bad and she is now staying with her sister who, now that the time is right, has given her a laptop on which to write her story.     

The story soon settles into a rhythm of a scene from the past, taking us to the time of the accident and a scene after the funeral, bringing us forward to the present crisis.

I admire this book for its richly drawn characters and though Liv is no angel and her in-laws do some despicable things it isn’t hard to feel empathy for all of them.

Louise Douglas has also created an effective plot. It is all very believable but totally unpredictable. This, and the conveniently short chapters, make you keep on reading.   

Go, on treat yourself. It’s that time of the year when we need a lot of stories.   

The Haunting of Highdown Hall by Shani Struthers

This is one of those books that I like to read on holiday. In fact, earlier in the week I said I wished I was on holiday so that I would have more time to read it. It’s an easy read and it’s a page-turner.

Psychic Surveys is a company of psychics and sensitives who cleanse places of spirits that have got stuck and not yet passed on to the next world. Ridding Highdown Hall of a troubled spirit proves to be particularly difficult. In this particular story, yes, we have paranormal activity and that may not be what every reader likes. But we also have romance, pace and the type of questions that keep readers engaged in a crime story. Just why won’t Cynthia, a glamorous starlet who died young, make her way into the light? 

Twists and turns in the plot keep us on our toes. At the same time the characters are convincing and we’re engaged with them throughout. Shani Struthers’ writing gives us a filmic picture of the settings.

This is another success for Crooked Cat, a publisher that takes risks, works hard, and quite sensibly uses print-on-demand. Well done everyone!
     

A Medal for Leroy by Michael Morpurgo

Michael Morpurgo writes a lot of books about war. Several of them also include animals. A fair number, too, include those unbelievable coincidences in which our friend Charles Dickens also indulged. War Horse, for example, irritates me as a book, a film and a show, because it ends with a deus ex machina - Joey and Albert ending up in the same place? Come on, now.

We forgive Dickens and Morpurgo. After all, we crave happy endings. The horse delights, anyway, in whichever form we consume the story, and we love the other characters as well.   

A Medal for Leroy also includes war, an animal (several actually – various generations of a Jack Russell called Jasper), a happy ending and characters we grow to love. Yet it does not rely on any strange coincidences. This could have happened to anyone. Leroy, Michael, the two aunties and mum Christine are people to whom the reader can relate. The ending is satisfying and brings closure but is not a rip-roaring “happily ever after” affair. It is all the more believable and satisfying for being thus.  

There are some parallels between Leroy’s life and that of Walter Tull, the first black player at Tottenham Hotspur and the third professional black player in the UK. Normally soldiers had to be “of pure European blood” so both Tull and Leroy were unusual in being allowed to fight in the Great War. Leroy is not Tull, however: he was more for The Arsenal.

This is an ideal crossover book. It is very accessible to fluent, junior school children, may appeal to teens as it has young people in it and will certainly not be too simplistic in content for adults.

Morpurgo is after all a master story-teller.