Horse, by Geraldine Brooks.

 

            Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks has excelled herself yet again with ‘Horse’, her novelised true story of America’s greatest racing stallion Lexington, illustrious sire of future generations of champions, and an essential and integral ancestor almost lost to history.  Were it not for the efforts of determined academics who were relentless in their detective work following up the clues leading from the forgotten equine skeleton labelled ‘horse’ in the attic of the Smithsonian, one of America’s finest museums, and researching the provenance of several obscure equine paintings found in unlikely places, Lexington would have remained unsung and unheralded still, and his marvellous genetic history lost, not to mention the turbulent historical significance of the times in which he lived and flourished, the 1850”s and 60’s.

            Ms Brook has reimagined that time with her usual skill:  from the time Lexington was foaled in Kentucky in 1850 he was personally cared for by Warfield’s Jarret, a young slave whose father was Doctor Warfield’s chief trainer, so essential that Dr. Warfield allowed him to buy his freedom and currently, Jarret’s father is saving to buy Jarret’s freedom, too.  The ugly face of slavery is not so evident on Warfield’s farm if one is a successful trainer of thoroughbreds and his son is following reliably in his father’s footsteps, but when the brilliant new colt is eventually sold, Jarret is sold along with him, and he and Lexington have some bitter experiences – and some great adventures, for Lexington proves his brilliance time and again:  both have such a bond that they are inseparable until one of them dies:  it is up to the modern researchers, Theo, a Nigerian Art Historian and Jess, an Australian scientist working at the Smithsonian, to join the clues and reconstruct the history, especially of the shattering impact of the Civil War and the emancipation of all those enslaved and Sold South.  Tragically for Theo and Jess, it is patently clear that racism is still alive, well and flourishing one hundred and fifty years later:  racism, overt or otherwise will never go away.

            Ms Brooks has written a fitting and loving tribute to equine beauty and genetic brilliance, and a bald and frightenly factual recitation of the tragedy of racism, inbred and otherwise.  FIVE STARS.

                   

 

 

The Running Grave, by Robert Galbraith.

         

 
         As  we all know, Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling.  This is the seventh novel she has produced under this name featuring Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott who, thanks to various fearless exploits in previous books, run a very successful Private Detective Agency. 

                Galbraith’s series also has a romantic undertone in each book:  will Robin and Strike finally acknowledge the feelings they have for each other and stop messing about with other, lesser characters?

                Sadly, the answer is a resounding NO.  And it takes Galbraith nearly 1000 pages to do it!  You have to have strong wrists and lots of patience to navigate the progress of the labyrinthine plot and a photographic memory to keep track of the myriad characters required to flesh out the latest reason for which Strike and Robin have been hired:  a prominent businessman has engaged them to find out the whereabouts of his rebellious son Will, who has disappeared (willingly) into the clutches of the Universal Humanitarian Church, a relatively new quasi-religious group operating out of various U.K. cities.  It has the requisite charismatic leader, handsome Jonathan Wace, known as Papa J., and lots of adoring followers, all living in religious freedom and bliss on a big Norfolk Farm which presumably is self-supporting.  The members donate lots of money to various charities – and to Papa J., and the best way to find out just how above-board (and safe) everyone is, is for Robin to go Undercover as a prosperous new recruit.

            And what she finds chills her to the marrow, not to mention putting her in terrible physical danger:  all is obviously not well at the Farm, and God is nowhere to be seen.  Cruelty is everywhere.  She manages to escape with Strike’s help, but what about the other ‘recruits’?  Who’s going to save them?

            There are parts of this book that are heart-in-the-mouth exciting, and others that just amble and jog along, reintroducing characters that, because of the length of the story the reader has forgotten about and has to retrace plot steps, which is a shame.  Galbraith is too good a writer to indulge in so many superfluous characters, and too good to get lost in his/her own plot.  FOUR STARS.

 

Dirty Thirty, by Janet Evanovich.

 

      

    Fast food writing:  tasty but vitamin-free.  Fills the gap but no nutritional value.

            Janet Evanovich, the Queen of Fast-food writing, has now produced her 30^th novel starring Stephanie Plum, ‘Jersey girl, successful underachiever working for Vincent Plum (her cousin) Bail Bonds as a recovery agent, hunting down losers who’ve skipped out on their bond.’  The plots of each story vary very little, but what makes them compulsively readable are the reliability of the characters to charm and entertain the reader every time. Who could resist Lula, former Ho and more than generously proportioned bestie of Stephanie – she rides shotgun on various pick-ups of miscreants, always dressed in unforgettable combinations of outrageously undersized skirts, tops (?) and spike heels.  She also has a gun in her bag which she will use at the slightest opportunity, even though she is the lousiest shot in Trenton.

            And Stephanie’s grandma Mazur:  she likes to attend viewings at local funeral parlours;  in fact the last one she went to was a triumph of the undertaker’s art, the corpse being so healthy-looking that Grandma would swear that he was ready to rise up out of his casket and ask her to dinner!  Grandma has a gun too, she’s always packin’ and hoping that she will get an opportunity to fill someone fulla lead some day.  Stephanie’s mum, Grandma’s daughter, manages to keep the household together without having a nervous breakdown – for the most part;  when situations finally get too trigger-happy with various family members, she has been known to start knitting very long scarves and calling on the assistance of Jim Beam.

            And let us not forget Stephanie’s love interests – not just one but two, yes TWO hotter than hot males:  Joe Morelli, Trenton detective, and Ranger, ex-special forces member and owner of a very prosperous security firm.  They both vie in their different hot ways for Stephanie’s attention, each having different advantages in that Joe, like Stephanie was brought up in the neighbourhood – and he has Bob the dog, another singular character, especially when Stephanie has to dogsit him for two weeks.  Ranger is Cuban and makes every female heart skip a beat – even the reader’s, and Bob likes

him too – what treachery!  He’s supposed to be a one-man dog!

            Which all goes to show that I can rabbit on loftily about Fast-food writing as much as I like, but no-one does it better, or more entertainingly than Janet Evanovich:  roll on Book Thirty-one!  FOUR STARS.            

                

 

The Night House, by Jo Nesbo.

 

      

      Internationally acclaimed Swedish crime novelist Jo Nesbo has embarked on a different literary journey this time around:  his classic burnt-out detective Harry Hole is nowhere to be seen as Nesbo decides to take an apparent trip into the supernatural where there are no rules, and no end to the horrific ways that people can die.  He also offers us plot alternatives:

1.      Richard Elauved is 14 years old and has just lost both his parents in a fire that engulfed their apartment.  He has been sent to the country to live with his uncle and aunt, his only relatives.  He hates himself, his life, and his new classmates, and bullies them relentlessly – until he sees one of his victims devoured by a telephone (hey, I’m only the messenger!), then another classmate is turned into a ‘magicicada’ with brilliant red eyes and the wings to escape him when he tries to crush it – in short, he was the last person to see these missing kids alive so the authorities place him in a special ‘school’ to see if he will confess to anything he hasn’t yet told them.  His escape from the school is more unbelievable than cannibalistic phones, but ends on a hopeful note, so that the reader can handle Alternative Two, which is:

2.     Richard Hansen, successful teen fiction writer is invited to a school reunion fifteen years after the above events;  it transpires that we were reading above the plot of his first smash hit and at the subsequent celebrations he is touchingly modest about his literary achievements to his adoring classmates, none of whom  have reached such fame.  It’s great to be the centre of such respectful attention and, in a rare moment of remorse for his 14 year-old behaviour, he apologises for being a bully – only to realise as the evening progresses, that the whole night has been organised by all his ‘fans’ to pay him back for the terrible hurt he caused them all to suffer.  Do they succeed?  Alternative Three reveals that:

3.     It’s time for Richard to wake up – wake up from ElectroConvulsive Therapy applied to him as an experimental treatment to help him forget the terrible memories that have trapped him in a hospital known as the Night House for the last fifteen years, and to take his first tentative steps back to a normal life.

 

Jo Nesbo has again taken his readers on a wild ride to the dark side and back – is there nothing he cannot do to stop us devouring every page?  Even kid-eating telephones get past our BS meter!  He’s the best.  FIVE STARS.

 

 

Until the Road Ends, by Phil Earle.                  Junior Fiction.

 

 

         Beau is a stray barely existing on the mean streets of London in 1939;  life is haphazard at best, cruel for the rest of the time – until he is rescued from death by Peggy, His Girl, His Saviour, and brought back to her home in Balham to live safely with her family.  Who put up some half-hearted objections which she dispenses with in seconds:  her younger brother Wilf has Mabel, Queen of the Couch, a cat far too full of her own self-importance, so Peggy is entitled to have her very own pet, too.  Who could deny the fairness of that arrangement?  Only Queen Mabel, who loathes Beau on sight and wastes no time in telling him so in the most scathing of tones, but he doesn’t care, because someone, Peggy, loves him!  It is a wonderful, heady feeling and Beau hopes it will never end.

            But.  In the way of all Happily-ever-afters, nothing remains the same:  Hitler and his planes eventually start bombing London, and it is decided that London’s children should be evacuated to ‘the country’ where they will be safe – oh, and people should ‘put their pets down’ because food will be rationed and there will be none to spare for cats and dogs. 

            Peggy and Wilf are devastated.  They don’t want to leave their darling mum and dad, but they will do so only if mum and dad promise to keep looking after Beau and Mabel;  they couldn’t bear it if they were to come home at the end of all the conflict to find that their most-loved pets in the entire world had been killed because they needed to be fed.  Their parents, being honourable people, agreed, and the children were sent off to the coast 100 miles away, to live with Aunty Sylvia, Dad’s sister, who didn’t know one end of a child from another.  But what could be done?  Needs must.

            And Beau went out nightly with Peggy’s Dad who was an air-raid warden, a job Beau became famous for, because Beau could smell people buried under the rubble;  in fact he was so good at it that no-one dare say he should be put down- until the terrible night when a huge bomb destroyed their lives forever, and Beau – and Mabel – are on their own.

            But not quite.  Their next-door neighbour Bomber, a carrier pigeon fully trained in delivering military messages convinces them to try to reach their much-loved Peggy and Wilf:  If it can be done, it WILL be done!  And Beau and Mabel’s adventures begin in earnest.

            This is a beautiful story, predictably heart-breaking and fraught with suspense – but also based on fact:  there really was a dog trained to find people under the rubble;  he sniffed out more than 100 people buried alive beneath their homes.  His name was Rip and he was a Hero.  As so many were at that terrible time.  FIVE STARS.  For readers 11+.  

 

 

Iron Flame, by Rebecca Yarros.

 

     
     Well, here I went again (nothing wrong with my grammar!), into the amazing fantasy of the Empyrean, Ms Yarros’s five-book series about Dragonkind and the Riders they choose to bond with them.  To be honest, I didn’t think she could keep up the same level of suspense, horror and mile-a-minute adventure plotting, but what do I know:  Yarros has done so with ease and one hand tied behind her back – the other is driving her characters relentlessly along to the next twist in the tale, and there are many of them.

            Frail, tiny Violet Sorrengail has survived her first year at Basgiath War College, bonded with not one dragon like other riders, but two:  Tairn, one of the largest and most fearsome, and Andarna, a half-grown ‘adolescent’ who also decided that Violet was her darling;  between the three of them they make a formidable team, especially when Violet’s signet or special gift, manifests itself:  she finds that she can throw lightning bolts – if only she can ever learn to aim them!

            She is also in a sizzling-hot romance with impossibly handsome Xaden Riorson, erstwhile revolutionary and lover extraordinaire – of her, no-one else.  Violet has her own allure, and emerging gifts of leadership and compassion which wins her devotion from all the other students, so much so that they follow her when she finds out that all their teachers have been lying to them:  evil magical forces are poised to strike their continent, and their leaders – including Violet’s mother the General – are downplaying attacks on outlying towns and subsequent terrible fatalities, saying that all is under control, when it obviously isn’t;  well, it’s time to rebel, to go off and train properly to fight these new, terrible foes and to do so, they must unite with Gryphon fliers, traditional enemies (according to their former teachers) but devoted to their country as the Dragonkind are.

            Ms Yarros has woven a complicated, very detailed plot;  this reader had to go back every now and then to get the finer points down, but she doesn’t falter for a second:  all the I’s are dotted and t’s crossed, as they should be.  There are many great secondary characters, especially amongst Violet’s classmates, and their funny, smart-alicky dialogue is a huge relief from the breakneck pace as we are dragged yet again to a cliff-hanger that I never saw coming until the very last page.

            And I still want a dragon (or two) for Christmas:  I am small and frail, just like Violet – surely I’m eligible?  FIVE STARS.  

 

 

 

Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros.

           

       

     My nails are totally wrecked, and it’s all HER fault, that Rebecca Yarros!  Her Fantasy novel fairly crackles with suspense, menace, romance (naturally!) and dragons, lots of them.  Dragons are my favourite fantasy creatures, and Ms Yarros has created some truly majestic beasts, as befitting their vital importance to the welfare and protection of their riders, chosen by each dragon from students at Basgiath War College, who all hope to become Dragon Riders, protecting their country from enemies, both territorial and magical.

            Violet Sorrengail is 20 years old and expecting to go to the same college as a Scribe, a recorder of all history and battles fought now and in the future;  her mother is a powerful general in the military and her sister Mira is a Dragon Rider;  her brother Brennan was a Healer but lost his life to Insurrectionists. Because of her small stature and frailty, Violet is happy to have a sedentary but peaceful life as a recorder of her country’s achievements – and failures.

            Until mother suddenly changes her mind:  Violet is to audition as a first-year dragon rider, an audition so cruel and beyond her abilities that Violet knows now beyond a shadow of a doubt that she’s definitely not her mother’s favourite child.  Well, OK, she’ll give it her all:  she’ll show Mother Dear that she went to her death courageously, and the appearance of her sister Mira to give her last-minute private advice and secret notes from her late brother spurs her on to miraculous success:  at the end of the day she’s still here – not dead yet!

            Sadly, her success also releases a dog-eat-dog survival-of-the-fittest attitude from the other first-years.  They see her as a weak link, someone to be disposed of so that choosy dragons will pick them instead – why, she’s too small to even climb on a dragon’s back, much less fight and kill from that position:  better get rid of her by fair means or the other kind.  No self-respecting dragon would choose her anyway:  she’s goneburger.

            But she’s not:  as we all know, love and hate are both sides of one coin;  Xaden Riorson, leader of Fourth Wing, Violet’s first-year group and son of a notorious Insurrectionist (Xaden was forced to watch his father’s execution) has overcome his initial loathing and is now firmly in her corner – because their dragons are mated!  In fact, Violet has TWO dragons who chose her, not one, so that when the showdown comes at the end of Book One, she has twice the power against their enemies.  Well done, Ms Yarros;  you didn’t let me go until the very last sentence, and that will lead me straight into Book Two.  And I want a dragon for Christmas!  FIVE STARS.