Time Riders By Alex Scarrow

If you are enthralled by the idea of time travel, envisaging it as a romantic way of experiencing other times and places, The Time Traveller’s Wife will have already disabused you of that idea.;  It is awkward, uncomfortable and embarrassing, often landing you in dangerous scrapes. Alex Scarrow’s YA Time Riders series shows time travel in another light. It can be a huge disaster for the world. One person changing a tiny thing in the past has a ripple effect that could endanger our whole civilization.

The story starts with the recruiting of three very different young people, each  torn from certain death in various catastrophes  to live in a time bubble in New York 2001 and learn how to fix time contaminating events caused by the misuse of time travel. They have to travel in time themselves and clean up the messes created by other time travellers from the future before they bring disaster upon us.

Scarrow’s writing is so gripping, his characters engaging and well-developed that the story steams along at a fast pace, drawing in adult readers just as intensely as the teens it is written for.

While some stretches are quite harrowing, there is plenty of humour and emotion mixed in with the drama, and you even start to care for the support unit, a genetically engineered ‘meat robot’ who is there to protect them on their missions and who starts to develop learned human character traits.

Altogether a great read and the sequel  looks pretty good too.

TimeRiders
TimeRiders: Day of the Predator
Timeriders: The Doomsday Code

The Cherub Series by Robert Muchamore

If you have a just turned teenager, in search of a thrilling read, but not quite ready to dive into regular thrillers (or maybe it’s you not quite ready to expose your fledgling to the sex and violence of so many novels, thriller or not) then the Cherub series is the perfect bridge from children’s fiction to the grown up world.

A wonderfully believable scenario is created here – orphan kids are hand-picked to becomes part of a special espionage group of 11-17 year-olds. A hectically full-on training worthy of the SAS prepares them for their missions in the real world, infiltrating terrorist groups or drugs organisations or whatever modern criminal world is the current mission.

The best thing for me reading them as an adult is that the characters are fully drawn and real. Despite being highly trained and skilled in martial arts and so on, these kids are dealing with all the usual teenage traumas and rites of passage. James, the main character has a volatile relationship with Kerry, his first girlfriend, so that you have to read the books in order, to keep in touch with whether they are going out with each other or are no longer speaking and going out with someone else in the group of friends.

Just be warned that these books really are meant for teens not for younger kids. There is a lot of violence – not too graphic but violence none the less, and snogging in the early books when James is 12 or 13 does progress in the later books to the 16 yr olds sleeping together, again not graphic. The language is free of the f-word but a fairly realistic cleaned up representation of tough kids talk.

All in all the twelve books in the series are a great read, very compelling and have been passed around the adults in this family as soon as the 13 yr old was done with them.

The Recruit (Cherub #1)
Class A (Cherub #2)
Maximum Security (Cherub #3)

The Book Book

After a long lull in posting activity here I've been invited to join The Book Book, moonrat's community book blog.

I've just posted my review of Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram there, so do go visit if you'd like. I've not abandoned Great Books Reviewed altogether though and plan on reviewing more often in the future..it's a hectic world, this blogosphere!

Exodus by Julie Bertagna

Exodus

This Whitbread award children’s book is so powerful, it had me absorbed and helpless for days. Definitely for teenagers and adults rather than younger children, it is an exploration of a future, when sea levels have risen dramatically. Mara is a fifteen year old girl with vision and determination, living a subsistence level life on one of the few remaining islands in the North. Storms rage all winter and blistering hot summers send the sea level rising every year. Technology is long defunct in her community, but she has a relic from the past that she uses to explore the ruins of an old-world virtual reality internet equivalent, The Weave. Her discovery of some New World cities built out of the sea bed into the sky, gives her an idea to save her community.

When the refugee convoy reach the New World city they find that humanity has split into two groups, the intellectual elite live lives totally cut off from the Earth and reality in their techno world, while the outcasts and refugees eke out an existence in the netherworld, among the drowned ruins of the old world city. To save her people Mara has to work an even more daring plan, infiltrate the New World city, cope with its sophisticated technology and find someone she can trust.

Bravery, self doubt, trust, love, and care for humanity are all powerful emotions that drive this engrossing story. It is too near the possible truth to dismiss as mere futuristic fantasy, so is not a cosy read, but faith in the ultimate good nature and noble spirit of the few gives hope for mankind’s eventual survival. Read this for a great story, but not if you’re feeling fragile, this is no escapist read.

Amazon.com Exodus
Amazon.co.uk Exodus

December's Books

The whole month of December slipped by without a single post here, not because I haven’t been reading (I have still been escaping into the pages of alternate reality most evenings) but because the flurry of preparations for Christmas left me without a spare brain cell to evaluate, summarise and review anything coherently. Here is a brief selection of the books I have been devouring uncritically recently.

Jodi Picoult Vanishing Acts

A rescue worker and mother finds that her whole life she has lived a fictional identity, after her father is arrested for abducting her from her mother at the age of four. Jodi Picoult’s excellent handling of character, plot development, moral dilemmas and legal procedure kept me immersed till the end.

Vanishing Acts from Amazon.com Vanishing Acts from Amazon.co.uk

Erica James Love and Devotion

Not one for the over imaginative parent. Harriet is left with the upbringing of her sister’s two children after their parents are killed in a car crash. The story of how she and the rest of their family rebuild their lives and she has to adjust from being a fast track career woman to an instant mother replacement, is well written and enjoyable.

Love and Devotion from Amazon.com Love and Devotion from Amazon.co.uk

Anne Perry The One Thing More

Set in the troubled and desperate times of the French Revolution, a conspiracy to rescue the King from his imminent execution at the guillotine is threatened when the main mind orchestrating it is murdered. Anne Perry is great at bringing to life the lives of ordinary people in the midst of history unfolding, the domestic details, the food shortages and suspicion, households divided but still a sense of hope shining out from the fog.

The One Thing More from Amazon.com The One Thing More from Amazon.co.uk

Elisabeth Luard Family Life

An autobiographical account of her life bringing up her four children between London and Andalusia in the Sixties and Seventies. Passionate about food she weaves family and local recipes into her stories. This is my third or fourth time of reading – I love her pragmatic approach and resourcefulness, acquiring a donkey transport when they can’t afford a car in Spain, deciding to spend a year in France so the children will be trilingual before returning to English schools and finishing with the poignant story of one daughter’s early death in her twenties. I admire her both as a food writer and indomitable mother.

Family Life from Amazon.com Family Life from Amazon.co.uk

Iris and Ruby by Rosie Thomas

Iris and Ruby

This is the third book by Rosie Thomas that I’ve read now. Initially I was a little condescending, assigning them a library book rating – fine to get out of the library for a bit of light escapism but not ones to buy for myself. Now I’m persuaded to reconsider.

Iris and Ruby relates the interlocking but distant relationships of three women: Iris, an old woman living a solitary life in an old stone house in Cairo, trying to hold on to her precious memories of her great love in wartime Egypt; Leslie her daughter, a conventional wife and mother, who has suffered from feelings of rejection by her mother all her life; Ruby, her daughter, a troubled but feisty eighteen year old, rebellious and dyslexic, trying to find direction in her life.

Ruby runs away to stay with her unknown grandmother in Cairo. Iris is initially unwelcoming, unwilling to have her peace and memories disturbed, but Ruby’s persistance catches her interest and the two strong-willed women make a connection. Ruby is determined to help her grandmother record the memories which seem to be slipping from her grasp. Iris’ stories of her time in Cairo during the Second World War, the frenetic life of work and partying to forget the war, that lent intensity to relationships that could be cut short any day, weave in and out of Ruby’s present day exploration of Cairo and the development of her relationship with Iris. Leslie is left out of the equation, frustrated both in her intense love for her daughter and her need for her mother’s love that she feels she has never won.

Rosie Thomas strength is her story-telling. I wasn’t drawn in to identify with the characters, though they are well-defined, my interest was kept by the gradual unfolding of the story and the eventual dawning of understanding and acceptance in the troubled mother-daughter relationships. The background of the war being fought in the desert added another layer of period detail to absorb and add to my historical knowledge base.

If you enjoy tales of strong-willed individual women with a war-time setting, do get this one. It is well written and crafted and I ended up liking the characters, even though I didn’t lose myself in them. To quote the reader's review on Amazon "an easy but intelligent read".

When I looked this book up on the Amazons it was only available from the UK..perhaps Rosie Thomas hasn't crossed the Atlantic yet? To see details at Amazon.co.uk on Iris and Ruby click on this title link.

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

The Hundred Secret Senses

I really enjoyed Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, so on my next visit to the library I made a beeline for the T’s and found The Hundred Secret Senses. Diving into it on my return home, initially I thought –‘nice but the same characters rehashed’. Delving further into the book revealed the differences. The same over all theme of old world China meets modern day America prevails: the disparity of a rural culture with hundreds of superstitions and beliefs and urban San Francisco that has dispensed with all that long ago creates the narrative tension around which the protagonists reluctantly dance.

Olivia is a photographer whose marriage has just fallen apart. She is half Chinese, half American and since she was five her Chinese half sister Kwan has both fascinated and irritated her with her stories of ghosts that she sees with her Yin eyes and her memories of her past life that she seems to remember in all its details. As an adult Olivia feels a guilty resentment towards Kwan, who has always loved her devotedly, but oppressively, however rude or offhand Olivia is to her. One of the main rocks that her marriage to Simon foundered on, was the ever-intrusive memory of his previous girlfriend who had died tragically, before Olivia met him. Kwan is determined to help repair Olivia’s marriage and a trip to China working on a travel article seems to be the ideal opportunity to bring them back together.

Amy Tan’s characters are brilliantly three dimensional. You start off sharing Olivia’s irritation with Kwan’s endless talk of spirits and past lives, but by the end, as Olivia’s understanding grows, you are brought to see that Kwan actually was the one who could see the truth beneath life’s facade after all. The emotional and spiritual depth of Amy Tan’s writing is always there but applied with a light hand and liberal doses of poignant humour.

These are books I want to buy, to keep on my shelf to dip into for refreshment. I don’t want to have to give them back to the library and lose this delightful well of quirky humour and idiosyncratic prose.

Click on this title for details on The Hundred Secret Senses from Amazon.com.

Click here to see what Amazon.co.uk have to say about The Hundred Secret Senses.

Plain Truth by Jodi Picault

Plain Truth

I had this on my list of recent new favourites to review before the recent tragedy in the Amish community, made it suddenly sadly topical. If anyone wants to gain understanding of the Amish culture and way of life this novel is an excellent introduction.

Hardened city attorney, Ellie Hathaway, who never loses a case even when her clients might well be guilty, is reaching breakdown point with her life and relationship. She retreats to her aunt in a small town on the fringes of the Amish community. Before she knows what has hit her, she has become drawn in to the unprecedented case of an Amish girl, Katie Fisher, accused of smothering her new born baby to conceal its existence. To keep her unwilling client from awaiting her trial in jail, Ellie agrees to act as her warden, which means she has to spend the next few months living the Amish life with her client’s family.

Jodi Picault uses the legal processes as a mere framework to the human drama . The gradual unfolding of the characters and the secrets of Katie’s past, intertwined with her dissociative state around the birth of her baby, accompanies Ellie’s quest for the truth, which constantly eludes her and keeps a tantalising element of uncertainty right till the end of the story. Through observing the simple Amish way of life and their philosophy of forgiveness, Ellie gradually comes to terms with the unresolved issues that caused her near breakdown and reshapes her life.

I was totally absorbed by this book. Knowing nothing of the Amish culture previously I was able to see it as a real, meaningful way of living rather than an anachronism. The simplicity of the Amish way of life contrasts dramatically with the complexities of the individuals living it. The feeling with which the characters were portrayed inexorably drew me in to become involved with the resolution of the case. I can’t wait to get my hands on another of Jodi Picault’s books, but the only other one we have here, My Sister's Keeper, my sister-in-law refuses to let me read, as it portrays quite a heart-wrenching dilemma, regarding a child with leukemia, which as a parent might be too traumatic for comfortable reading.

To see what Amazon.com says about Plain Truth click on the title here.

To see Amazon.co.uk details on Plain Truth click on this link.

The Bonesetter's Daughter

The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan

Two worlds meet: pre-Communist China and modern day San Francisco. As ghost-writer, Ruth struggles to find her way at a crisis point in her life, she gradually untangles the truth of her mother, Lu-ling’s story and learns about her grandmother, the three generations of women linked by courage and the instinct for survival.

The story carries you between Lu-ling’s childhood in Immortal Heart, a remote mountain village in China with all its ancient traditions and superstitions and Ruth’s very different growing up as an only child of a widowed mother in poor areas of San Francisco, carrying the burden of interpreting this strange western world to her mother.

From the back cover:”...The Bonesetter’s Daughter is an extraordinary and inspiring excavation of the human spirit. With great warmth and humour, Amy Tan gives us a mesmerising story of a mother and daughter discovering together that what they share in their bones through history and heredity is priceless beyond measure.”

Amy Tan writes with great understanding and flair, unfolding the characters a little at a time and turning them around so that by the end you see them from a new perspective with their life story told. They leap from the page into life, flawed but human and compelling.

This was my second time of reading and I found it just as absorbing as the first. I loved the contrast between the high pressured modern writer producing to deadlines on a computer and the traditional Chinese methods of mixing your own ink from a fine quality inkstick to produce the most exquisite calligraphy:
“when you push an inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step to cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is in my heart that matches my mind”.
The complexities of mother/daughter relationships and the need for resolution and forgiveness were beautifully explored too.

Click here to order The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan from Amazon or find out more.