The Bone Tree, by Airana Ngarewa.

 

            I was glad to finish this book.  Not because it was a rubbish read, poorly written – just the opposite:  it is a towering, brutal story of the sadness and violence endured by children of poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand;  the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness engendered by their terrible vulnerability – and the remedies some of them will employ in order to survive. 

            This is NOT an easy read for any New Zealand European as it delves mercilessly into our doubtful colonial history, different versions of which have been taught in schools for more than a century;  only in the last decades has the Maori language been recognised as the second official language of our country, and Te Reo is now being used extensively in everyday speech, to the joy of Tangata Whenua:  the language is alive and well!

            Sadly, teenager Kauri (or Cody, as his Irish dad and the welfare organisation reps call him) knows his father will not live much longer;  Kauri nurses him faithfully but doesn’t actually care if he dies;  he has been the victim of many vicious beatings when his dad came home drunk and raging against Kauri’s Maori mother ‘who woke up dead one day’ from a wrongly diagnosed illness.  Nah, good riddance to the old bastard - even though Kauri looks after him to the best of his ability, he certainly won’t be missing him.

            But Kauri’s main worry is his little brother Black – who is anything but, being as pale as milk and a stranger to schooling of any kind, making him a perfect target for the pakeha welfare guys who have been sniffing around too much lately;  Kauri has seen what happens to kids who get ‘uplifted’ by the Welfare – they turn out broken, and he can’t have that for his beloved little bro.  When the old man dies, Kauri will go on a quest to find his relatives –there must be some family left out there who will help them find their place in life, their ancestry, their place of belonging, their turangawaewae.

            And Kauri’s search leads him to the nearest city, and family to which he would never have dreamed of associating – a whole church full of them, not to mention a fallen sinner who introduced Kauri to all these Holier-than-Thous – every one of them pious to a fault, but never acknowledging their family connections.  In his efforts to find his family, Kauri also learns some very big life lessons about those who want to be found, and those who don’t.

            It was hard going reading this story.  It made me deeply ashamed of our country’s bloody history and the glossing-over of terrible mistakes made by the early colonial powers that are now finally being acknowledged.  Thank you, Airana Ngarewa, for this great and timely story.  SIX STARS. 

                 

 

A Better Place by Stephen Daisley.

 

            This is the third of Stephen Daisley’s novels that I have read and once again, I am in awe of his seemingly effortless talent to evoke myriad emotions from the reader as they journey through his characters’ lives, completely involved and living each experience, good or bad, with them – and there are so many searing, tragic experiences, for Stephen Daisley writes about war, and he doesn’t pretty it up for the reader:  in spare, short sentences he tells the story of twin brothers from New Plymouth in New Zealand’s North Island who, at the age of twenty enlist in the Army at the beginning of the Second World War.

            Roy and Tony Mitchell are jacks-of-all-trades.  They are identical twins, but Tony is an idealist and artistic.  Roy is relentlessly practical:  what you see is what you get.

They have had a rough start to life:  their father was given land by the government when he came back from the First World War but he also came back broken and turned to the drink.  Their mother left them to fend for themselves without a backward glance when they were fourteen.  She’d had enough.  After working for keep and learning stock handling, fencing and all the other backbreaking toil associated with hard-scrabble farming, the twins decide it’s time for a change:  might as well go to war!

            So they do, and end up at Maleme on the island of Crete with their Battalion, retreating from a huge German Offensive in which Tony the Introvert is believed lost.  Bloody good Joker Roy is understandably shattered, but he feels even worse because he ran away like a coward, leaving his brother behind, and when he returned, could only find Tony’s leg, shattered and shredded at the listening post where he left him.

            The fate of both brothers is masterfully revealed;  Roy is shipped to Italy with his regiment, and Tony becomes a Prisoner of War.  He is shown  compassion by his captors, while Roy sees the worst side of the enemy:  a whole village annihilated as the Allied troops came to liberate them:  the feelings of the hapless reader (me!) are trampled into the ground;  this is how it was, and this powerful, terrible story should – but won’t – act as a terrible, sickening example of what war does to the world, how long it takes for nations to recover, and the tragic fact, as evidenced by the Ukraine and Gaza, that nobody learns War’s lessons.  SIX STARS.    

 

Kala, by Colin Walsh.

 

            Colin Walsh has already made his reputation as a prize-winning short-story writer:  this is his first novel and he may cover all the bases of a competent thriller, but it takes an extraordinary talent to elevate efficiency to brilliance, and Colin Walsh has it in spades.

            The reader is spared no mercy as we are subjected to every good, bad and ugly emotion throughout this story of solid teenage friendship that has disintegrated into reluctant acquaintance fifteen years after the disappearance of Kala Lanann, the heart and soul of the little group.  Her boyfriend Joe is now a famous rock star;  her best friend Helen has returned to Ireland from Canada to attend her father’s forthcoming wedding to Pauline Lyons, mother of Aidan, Joe’s mate and drummer in their little rock band, and Mush – Mush is Aidan’s cousin, horribly scarred and doomed to be his Mam’s assistant in their Cafe in the tourist town of Kinlough till death do them part.  Kala’s staunch-to-the-death friends haven’t survived well without her, and no-one – NO-ONE, wants to revisit the last time they saw her:  each of them know that they could have behaved differently.  Kala was in trouble;  she needed them, and they let her down.

            But her body has never been found, so that should surely mean something, especially to her poor, wheelchair-bound  grandmother with whom she lived – until her bones are discovered on a local building site in a gym bag.  Her badly broken skull is on top of the bag, with a photo of two young girls positioned beneath.  Are they the next targets?  And why was Kala, a vital, fearless, talented 15 year-old murdered?  What did she know or discover to cause her horrible death, and could her friends have prevented it?

            The nature of friendship casual or deep is relentlessly explored in this searing exposé of the corrupt underbelly of a seemingly prosperous and scenic Irish seaside town:  the police control law and order – but who controls the police?  To their consternation, the broken, wounded adult versions of Kala’s much-loved friends discover that everything has its price and for some, it is too high to pay.

            With this outstanding debut novel, Colin Walsh proves that he can carry on admirably the great literary tradition of Irish storytelling:  it’s all wonderful craic and I can’t wait for the next example of his brilliance. Will he make me laugh and cry again, and recoil in horror at the cruelty his characters visit upon each other?  I shall be waiting because I must, but I hope he doesn’t go on his holidays!  SIX STARS.

 

    

             

 

All the Broken Places, by John Boyne.

 

            This superb sequel to ‘The Boy in Striped Pyjamas’ examines the nature and essence of guilt:  how much one can feel, and how much one can block out and hide away so that one can carry on living in this sorry world.  Widowed Gretel Fernsby has become an expert over her long life at doing just that;  now in her 90s, she is highly proficient at guarding her terrible secrets, among the worst being that she was the 12 year old daughter of the notorious Kommandant of a concentration camp:  he was hanged for his heinous crimes after the Second World War, but Gretel and her mother escaped to France, there to hide until their disguises and false papers were exposed by furious and vengeful neighbours, with predictable results.

            Gretel’s life journey has veered down several blind alleys and wrong paths during her youth but, thanks to the love, kindness and stability of her marriage to Historian Edgar Fernsby, her awful secrets have slept like the dead for many years;  she is financially secure and lives in an apartment block in London’s Mayfair where property values rise daily;  she is within walking distance of theatres, Fortnum’s and Harrods, and her only son whom she loves but considers to be a bit of a no-hoper in his personal life (he has been married three times, gearing up for a fourth!) visits her regularly – to ask for money.

Life could be worse and has been, but all is serene at the moment, even regarding her younger friend and upstairs neighbour, who is succumbing to early onset dementia – until the downstairs flat is sold to a powerful film producer, his beautiful actress wife and their 9 year old son.  The age of Gretel’s brother when he died:  the brother whose name she cannot say:  the brother whose fate was her fault. HER fault.

            Well, she’ll have to make the best of things and have as little to do with them as possible – which is easier said than done, especially when it becomes painfully clear that the little boy and his mother are being bullied and beaten by their husband and father, bringing back searing childhood memories for Gretel and a crisis of concience:  should she ignore what is plainly happening in the flat below, or report his cruelty thus ruining his reputation - and stirring up a rats’ nest which could lead all the way to her door and the terrible secrets behind it.

            Mr Boyne has created a marvellous protagonist in Gretel;  as broken as the places in which she once sought refuge, she still ennobles herself by a final selfless act which permits her, at last, to say her brother’s name.  SIX STARS.     

 

Fairy Tale, by Stephen King.

 

 

           Master of the macabre Stephen King‘s ‘Fairy Tale’ is yet another fitting tribute to his seemingly bottomless well of imagination, in which he weaves the fear and vulnerability of today’s world with the awful desperation and magic of another:  ‘Fairy Tale’ is an amalgam of everything that went bump in the night and scared us silly when we were little – leavened with rewards:  the promise of huge pots of goblin gold, and the hand in marriage of a fair princess – but only if we could complete certain tasks, usually involving giants and witches.

            It goes without saying that Mr King has stamped his own royal seal on this story, classic in its way:  his hero is Charlie Reade, 17 years old and an athletic, strapping (6ft 4”) high school student.  Charlie has had a rough few years – his mother died in a tragic accident when he was a child, and his much-loved father spent some years cosying up to the bottle.  Life was bleak until quite by accident (really?) Charlie one day hears a dog’s frantic howling coming from the Psycho House – so called because it looked exactly like Norman Bates’s creepy home in the movie – and when he investigated, found the reclusive owner, Mr Bowditch, lying on the back porch with a badly broken leg.  He’d been trying to climb a ladder and had fallen.  Charlie’s efforts to get him to hospital and later kindnesses (fixing his fence, looking after his old dog Radar while he was hospitalised, and running various errands – including biking to a nearby town to sell 4lbs of gold pellets (whaaaat!!) – to a shady jeweller) become the foundation of an unusual but firm friendship, finally culminating in a bizarre message from Mr Bowditch as he succumbs to a heart attack:  the locked wooden shed at the back of the property contains a staircase to a well.  It is the portal to another world, and if he decides to journey there, he may not return, because it contains unspeakable horrors  - and riches beyond imagining.  Risk and Reward.

            What to do?  Well.  Easy- Peasy!  Except that gold doesn’t hold the usual attraction for Charlie – he has fallen for Radar, Best Dog in the World, and there may be a way to make her young again:  if that’s a possibility, then tarry not!  And they don’t, entering a world controlled by magic, but still peopled by those whose lust for power is very similar to Charlie’s own messed-up modern existence.

            There are juicily documented monsters galore, and enough pace, tension and excitement after the ambling scene-setting to make anyone burn the midnight oil.  Stephen King is STILL the king!  SIX STARS.       

 

Greta and Valdin, by Rebecca K. Reilly.

 

 

           Children of a Russian refugee and his Maori wife, Greta and Valdin Vladisavljevic (try saying that in a hurry!) are gay siblings, sharing Valdin’s apartment in central Auckland.  Valdin spent eight years studying to be a physicist before he decided he hated it and is now the presenter of a TV show.  Greta studies Russian and comparative literature at Auckland University, and makes minuscule wages tutoring as well:  on the face of things, they should be reasonably satisfied with life, but as we all know, life, especially when connected to love, never cooperates – pitfalls, potholes and pratfalls abound to trip us all up when we least expect it.

            Valdin has recently broken up with the love of his life Xabi, who is the formerly straight brother of Giuseppe, married to Valdin’s uncle.  (Got that? Fortunately, there is a very helpful list of characters and their relationship to each other.  I consulted it often.)  Valdin is often inclined to tears;  he’s feeling mentally fragile and worries endlessly and needlessly about nothing at all;  Greta is made of sterner stuff, but she yearns after Holly who is one of those cruel witches who Lead People On.   Holly tutors at the University too, but relies a lot on Greta to take over her tutorial work when she wants to go on holiday – eventually with someone else!  So – life is rather less than satisfactory at the moment, but how to change things so that the road ahead is clear, with not a pothole in sight?

            Ms Reilly has enormous fun plotting the course of the siblings’ romantic adventures, and so does the reader – I don’t know how many times I laughed out loud at Greta’s wit and Valdin’s haplessness;  they take turns at narrating the chapters, endearing themselves effortlessly to us with their humour and honesty.  Their convoluted family history – not to mention the dysfunctional but charmingly singular family to which they belong made me wish that my family background could have been similarly exotic, such is the power and persuasiveness of Ms Reilly’s characterisations.  There’s not a single dud among them and we all are tremendously relieved that her great story has a happy ending – as it should:  characters like that deserve happiness.  I certainly felt happy while I was reading ‘Greta and Valdin’, not least because Auckland, that great messed-up metropolis, is the setting and my old home (yep, I’m a Jafa!), but even better still:  the book has made the Fiction prize short list for the Ockham Book Awards.  Watch this space!  SIX STARS. 

 

Winter Counts, by David Heska Wanbli Weiden.

 

            This is Lakota Author Weiden’s debut novel. It is a worthy addition to the Thriller genre, but there is so much more to read between the lines, and the lines themselves can be brutally honest about the Land of the Free, especially in South Dakota on the Rosebud Indian Reservation – the Rez.

            Virgil Wounded Horse is the local Fixer:  because the tribal police are paper tigers and the Federal authorities are not interested in prosecuting rapes, child abuse, domestics and all the usual ‘minor’ crimes, he is seen as the Last Resort, the real law, the rough justice who, because of his superior size, speed and nous, always gets a fitting revenge for his clients.  Money well spent, and if the cause is particularly close to his heart (like child abuse), he’ll rearrange his quarry’s features (and future) for free.

            When he is hired by an ambitious tribal councilman to find the source of new sales of heroin entering the Rez, he regards this latest job as strictly business – until his 14 year-old nephew nearly dies of an overdose.  Now, it is frighteningly personal:  whichever sumbitch started this ball rolling will wish he had never been born – as he dies a horrible death.

            Virgil’s detective-work eventually leads him to Denver where he discovers that the Mexican cartels are interested in flooding northern Reservations with heroin, aided by local criminal Rick Crow, a Lakota who bullied Virgil mercilessly at school for being a ‘half-breed’.  Yes, there is very old bad blood here, but new problems arise:  the FBI, famous for their lack of interest in anything connected with Rez crime unless – unless – it’s connected to murders and drugs, want Virgil’s nephew (his only family member still alive!) to wear a wire, and buy black tar heroin on the high school grounds from Rick Crow and his gang. Then they can make an arrest.  It’s almost more than Virgil can bear to think about and, if it weren’t for his nephew’s agreement to go along with the FBI’s plan, he’d send that boy off to Mars, rather than consent to such a scheme.

            As always, things go horribly wrong;  there is a mighty twist to the tale that I never saw coming, and Virgil learns yet again how power and ambition can banish the finest dreams – BUT.  What also comes through loud and clear is the struggle to build a decent existence for the first inhabitants of their beautiful land, and the enormous difficulty in retaining their precious native identity, essence, ageless customs and spirituality in the face of The American Dream.  A dream that is broken.  Weiden and Virgil, telling it like it really is.  FIVE STARS.   

              

 

Love after Love, by Ingrid Persaud.

 

            ‘What is Love?’  A question that has been baffling famous figures of history – and mere mortals such as we – for millennia.  I think the question should be not what it is, but why does it change (especially to its opposite) as time passes.

            Ingrid Persaud’s debut novel explores the nature and degrees of loving each other, commencing with Betty and Sunil Ramdin, Trinidadian descendants of the Indian canecutters imported five generations ago.  They have one little boy, Solo, whose birthday it is when Sunil takes a tumble down the back stairs and doesn’t survive the trip:  Betty now has to raise Solo herself – fortunately, she has a good admin job at a high school and they manage to make the best of their new life, which becomes even better with the advent of Mr. Chetan, the maths teacher, who asks to rent a room from her.  He is with them for several years, becomes a much-loved father figure to Solo, and a better-than-best-friend to Betty, to the point that one night, they share secrets.  Betty reveals that Sunil didn’t fall down the stairs:  he was pushed.  By her.  For Sunil was a drinker, and became a different, monstrous person when he was drunk – as her numerous hospital visits and injuries showed.  She didn’t expect him to die;  she just wanted him to experience broken bones, cuts and bruises, the same he had inflicted on her, but the worst happened.

            Mr Chetan’s secret is his homosexuality, worse than a crime in Trinidad  - it can get you killed!  His own family had banished him from their lives after he and his schoolfriend Mani were discovered in an embrace;  Mani’s family eventually saw sense and accept and love him as he is, but Chetan’s family have not:  he is dead to them.  And Trinidadian attitudes to LGBTQ people are biblical in their condemnation:  all ‘Bullers’ are fair game!

            Sadly, teenage Solo overhears some of these revelations and his love for his Mammy turns to hatred.  He leaves for New York to seek out his father’s family in the hope that he will find a better kind of familial love than that from which he flees – and finds a very different life from what he expected.

            Ms Persaud has filled her story with exuberant, wonderfully engaging characters, all the while demonstrating with almost careless ease the many and various necessary connections we need to have a life of some meaning:  maternal love, familial love, romantic and sexual love, and the love of friends:  have I covered all the bases?  FIVE STARS.  

 

Katipo Joe series, by Brian Falkner.  Junior Fiction

Book One, Blitzkrieg

Book Two, Spycraft.

 

            Brian Falkner’s wonderful wartime adventure series opens in Berlin in 1938:  Hitler is massing his troops and Germany is preparing for the Thousand-Year Reich and a pure Aryan race.  Joseph St. George is 12 years old and living in Berlin, the son of British Diplomats.  He has lots of friends at school and is envious of them because they are all joining the HitlerJugend, the Hitler Youth – why can’t he?

            His parents explain to him very succinctly why he can’t, especially after Kristallnacht, The Night of the Broken Glass, when Jews and their property were beaten and smashed:  on the surface Deutschland sparkles; behind the glitter are horrible undercurrents which culminate in a midnight visit to their home from the Gestapo, who drag Joe’s father off for questioning.  Joe finally realises that his idyllic childhood in Germany is over, especially when he and his mother are forced to flee to a series of Safe Houses on their way to Switzerland and eventual safety in Britain – where his mother immediately sends him home to her brother in New Zealand because he will be safe there.  Outrageous!

            Joe doesn’t believe he can survive without his mother.  He still doesn’t know what happened to his father, and he has no idea what kind of work she does in Whitehall, but he is determined to get back to her whichever way he can – and after three years he does, stowing away on a cargo ship, nearly drowning when a U boat torpedo strikes, but he does make it back to London – just in time for the Blitz, and to find that his Mother is spying for Churchill.

            Brian Falkner keeps up a cracking pace throughout Book One;  his research is top-notch and he provides a glossary and relevant photos as Joe is eventually recruited by Whitehall to train as a Junior Spy;  he is tall and fair, the perfect Aryan specimen, and his language skills are exemplary.  After the right training he will be sent back to Berlin – as an assassin:  no-one would ever suspect a tall, handsome Aryan Hitler youth as a murderer of one of their own.

            Spycraft, Book Two, is set in Bavaria in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s planning and social centre:  once again Joe has been parachuted into Germany to replace a HitlerJugend lad who mysteriously disappears from the train that Joe must take to join other young girls and boys who are the cream of the Hitler Youth.  They are to appear in a movie by acclaimed film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, a propaganda film to show the German public – and the world – the perfection of German Aryan youth under the Third Reich and, as with Book One, there is more to Joe’s mission (and more life-and-death risk) than he could possibly imagine;  the suspense and excitement never falters, and Falkner’s portrayal of all the monsters of history is first-rate.  At this stage of the series, Book Two should be classed as Young Adult as themes and the story change, but the only criticism I have so far is the lack of Book Three.  I need to know what happens!  SIX STARS!!

 

The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn.

   

         Best-selling American author Kate Quinn tries her hand here at a very British story:  the Bletchley Park code-breakers of the Second World War, that  dedicated band of talented and special people who saved countless lives with their skill at cracking ciphers and codes and by so doing, shortened the race to victory by at least two years.

            Ms Quinn stumbles occasionally over everyday idiom – the British drive Motor cars, not automobiles; regardless, she still recreates very skilfully the everyday stress and fear that all had to endure daily, especially when the bombing started:  there is no respite from the terrible and ruinous tragedies suffered by Ms Quinn's excellent characters, all based on real people.

            At the war’s beginning, three young women are recruited to work at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.  They all have different reasons for working there:  Osla is a wealthy Canadian debutante who, thanks to her finishing school education, has an excellent command of the German language;  Mab (short for Mabel, but she doesn’t want anyone to know that; she wants to forget her East End origins) is nearly six feet tall and has nimble fingers.  She will be an excellent operator of the huge Bombe machines that spit out unintelligible data to be broken down by Enigma machines, used by the brilliant code-breakers, one of whom is a girl they recruited themselves – their overbearing landlady’s daughter, mousy, bullied Beth.  Beth has never been encouraged to believe that she will have any other kind of life except as her mother’s ‘little helper’.  Bletchley Park is her salvation, not least because of her genius for unravelling codes that she sees as rose petals, intricately layered until they are peeled back the right way.

            A further complication arises in Osla’s life:  she is in love with Philip, Prince of Greece, but is informed by MI5 that because of his German connections (his beloved sisters are married to German nobility) and the oath of secrecy she has signed, she must cease contact.  Which she does, and it breaks her heart, especially when his engagement to Princess Elizabeth is eventually announced.  Mab meets the love of her life, only to lose him again in a bombing raid, and Beth is horribly betrayed by a traitor and incarcerated in an asylum.  Ms Quinn ramps up the pace to heart-stopping suspense here, dragging us by the nose through Mab’s tragedy and Beth’s efforts to escape her fate.  The three friends must depend entirely on each other to survive.

            Ms Quinn’s exhaustively researched novel  expertly recreates the life and times of those heroes who stopped the German War Machine without leaving Bletchley Park.  It is a fitting tribute to their dedication.  FOUR STARS.         

 

THE BEST OF THE BEST, THE CRÈME DE LA CRÈME 

THE FIRST FOURTEEN OF THE GREATEST READS OF THE YEAR 2020, FOR ALL GREAT READERS!

1.    The Testaments, byMargaret Atwood.

2.    The Butterfly Girl, by Rene Denfeld.

3.    The Overstory, byRichard Powers.

4.    American Dirt, by JeanineCummins.

5.    Saving Missy, byBeth Morrey.

6.    The Mirror and theLight, by Hilary Mantel.

7.    Broken, by Don Winslow.

8.    The Dickens Boy, byTom Keneally.

9.    The Last Crossing,by Brian McGilloway

10.          Call Your Daughter Home, by Deb Spera

11.          The Pull of the Stars, by Emma Donohue

12.          The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman

13.          Like a House on Fire, by Caroline Hulse

14.          The Sound of Stars (YA), by Alechia Dow

 I thank you all for your interest throughout the year - isn't it great to have great stories at our fingertips.  In spite of Covid and its attendant worries, we are still able to enjoy the best escapism of all.  Season's greetings everyone, and let us hope that 2021 will be a vast improvement on crappy old 2020 - we all should have a refund on this year!  Lots of love to all.  

Broken, by Don Winslow.

            What an absolute pleasure it is to read this latest  by Don Winslow, because the quality of his writing is so reliable.  The reader knows that there’ll be no slacking off because the author is bored with his characters or fed up with the plot – in these five short stories, the opposite is true as Mr Winslow thrills, charms and horrifies us with the richness and humour of his prose and the harsh and terrible reality of criminal greed and corruption, especially among those who paint themselves whiter than us all.

            ‘Broken’ is first, telling the story of a Police family:  Mum Eva operates the department switchboard, her husband has recently retired from the police and she has two sons who have taken his place;  son Andy is a high-flying Drug Squad detective, and younger brother Danny is a patrolman.  Danny is ‘The Nice One’.  The sensitive one.  And he is the one who is kidnapped from his patrol car, tortured and murdered because brother Andy sent the wrong message to a drug dealer.  Eva and her family want – need revenge, and she instructs Andy accordingly.  Danny is avenged, but nobody feels better for it:  as she knows all too well, 'it don’t matter how you come into the world, you leave it broken'.

            The next three stories are gems, comparatively gore-free and full of sly or laugh-out-loud humour;  with continuing characters,  con-men and thieves of varying intelligence, but the story that will stay with me permanently is ‘The Last Ride’, the story of Good Ole Texan Boy Cal Strickland, not much motivated to do anything except his job as a Border Guard – until he becomes incensed at the new law that came in via the new President (Hell, Cal voted for him!) that separates asylum-seeker refugees from their children, resulting in parents being deported, and their children permanently lost in ‘the system’.  This doesn’t sit at all well with Cal, particularly when he comes across a little 6 year-old Honduran girl in a cage:  WHAT IS HAPPENING TO HIS COUNTRY??!!

            And Cal is so horrified by her circumstances that he, a law-abiding (former) Trump supporter, decides to take the law into his own hands, and attempt to return the little girl to her deported Mum – knowing that should he be successful, his life as he knows it will be over, for no-one humiliates Washington and gets away with it.

            Mr Winslow is an enormously powerful writer and he demonstrates with every new novel that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.  This is a mighty book.  SIX STARS.

. 

             

      

A Heart so Fierce and Broken, by Brigid Kemmerer.  Young Adults

            This is the sequel to ‘A Curse so Dark and Lonely’, Ms Kemmerer’s epic retelling of the Sleeping Beauty legend (search drop box), but with a great contemporary twist – that of introducing protagonists from our modern world into the parallel kingdom of Emberfall, there to break the curse set by evil enchantress Lilith that turns Crown Prince Rhen into a murdering monster:  well, in  the best of fairytale traditions, true love in the shape of Harper rescues him from the curse, his kingdom is freed, and everyone should live happily ever after.  Except that they don’t.

            Rhen has inherited a kingdom in ruins after constant warfare;  his subjects are starving, and there are rumours that he is not the rightful Heir:  there is an older half-brother whose mother could practice magic, and no matter how hard Rhen’s troops try to quell the gossip it still persists.  The only high point in his life is his love for Harper, so-called Princess of Disi, who has supposedly promised thousands of troops from her country:  Washington, DC?  If his subjects find out about that, it will be the end of his reign – and of him.

            Enter Commander Grey, formerly his most loyal and trusted servant:  Grey has discovered that he and Prince Rhen are indeed brothers, but he decides the best thing to do is to leave Emberfall and take up another identity;  he doesn’t want the crown under any circumstances and the less people know about him, the better.  Naturally, life is not like that, particularly in fairy tales:  he is captured, cruelly flogged by Rhen’s men, eventually escapes thanks to trusted friends, but is forced into an alliance with Karis Luran, queen of Syhl Shallow, Rhen’s sworn enemy:  she will back him with troops and weapons, everything he needs for military success, if he will vanquish Rhen’s army with his nascent magical powers – powers he wasn’t aware that he had until he was flogged by Rhen’s order.  Grey is in between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.  And to complicate life even further, he begins to fall in love with Lia Mara, Karis Luran’s daughter, a girl as good as her mother is evil:  his life is starting to slip beyond his famous discipline and control.

            Ms Kemmerer has us all by the scruff of the neck, and won’t let go:  I was turning pages at a furious rate, and was even more frustrated when I reached the end and found that an arch-villain, thought dead, is still stirring up lethal trouble.  It’s going to take aaaaages for the next instalment to appear, and in Trump’s  America, anything could happen in that time.  I hope it doesn’t!  FIVE STARS.

             

A Curse so Dark and Lonely, by Brigid Kemmerer.  Young Adults

            Seventeen-year-old Cerebral Palsy sufferer Harper and her older brother Jake are in trouble in Washington DC:  their father has abandoned the family with huge debts;  their mother is a terminal cancer patient, and the people from whom their dad borrowed want their money back yesterday – with interest, the interest being Jake as enforcer and standover man to extort money out of other unfortunate debtors.  Harper is Jake’s reluctant look-out when he works as a heavy, until one night she sees a woman being attacked by a man not far from where she is hiding.  Without thinking she grabs an old tire-iron and gives the attacker a good swipe – and finds herself hoisted up and dragged away, away into an alarming parallel world that bears no relation to her own in real life, for she is transported by her abductor Commander Grey to a fairy-tale castle inhabited by a handsome prince, and no, she wasn’t dropped on her head on the way:  she is now a captive in the realm of Emberfall, and is part of a curse that lays upon the land, a curse so dark and lonely that it seems no-one can break it.

The curse has been imposed by an enchantress called Lilith, and can only be broken by true love (truly!  Sound familiar?) between the handsome Prince Rhen and whichever young woman Commander Grey manages to purloin from the other side:  so far, results have been very sketchy, especially as Rhen turns into a monster every month and lays waste to anything that moves, including most of his subjects and all of the castle inhabitants, including the royal family.  Commander Grey is still alive because he’s a fast mover.  Believe it or not.

 And, needless to say, the arrival of Harper with her palsied leg does not inspire Prince Rhen toward any affectionate feelings – until Harper (after she has accepted her impossible circumstances) shows an aptitude for strategy, planning and tactics that are an unexpected and refreshing change from the norm:  handicapped Harper from DC becomes Princess Harper of Disi, a powerful and entirely fictitious ally of Emberfall, and there to promise Disi’s thousands of fictional troops to save the country’s inhabitants from a hostile Queen’s border attacks, the evil enchantress, and the monster, who is scheduled to make his dreaded appearance soon.

This is a great blend of fantasy, fairy tale and hard lessons in the Big City, and Ms Kemmerer leaves so many questions hanging that she must have Book Two underway.  Well, I hope so:  - what about Commander Grey, eh?  What’s happening with him?!  FOUR STARS.  

           

               

Vox, by Christina Dalcher

            In Christina Dalcher’s debut novel, it has been less than two years since ultra-conservative President Dyer has taken up occupancy in the White House, and Jean McLellan marvels at the swiftness of the change in her circumstances:  prior to President Dyer’s election she was a respected Doctor of Neurolinguistics, juggling career, marriage and children with varying degrees of success, the same as most women;  now it has been decreed by Dyer’s new religious advisor that she stay at home 24/7, attending to the needs of her family ‘as all women should’.  Her computer and passport are gone, locked in her husband’s study;  he also has the key to the mailbox – not that she receives any mail;  all letters are addressed to him.  TV coverage is sparse;  cooking programs rule, as do ‘family friendly’ sitcoms, though these are sometimes interrupted by ‘public shamings’ of individuals who have broken the new laws against adultery and fornication:  women are the only sinners here and are sent off, heads shaved, to parts unknown for a life of slavery.  Those unfortunate enough to be exposed as homosexual share the same fate.

            But the worst thing, the most shameful  thing, is the bracelet.  The bracelet is a thin band that all women must wear around their left wrist.  It counts the words that are said:  if a woman utters more than 100 words a day she receives an electric shock so severe that it burns.  If she starts ranting against the injustice of it all, the bracelet is capable of incinerating her hand.  Even the president’s wife, a former model, (sound familiar?) is not immune:  Jean watches her on TV, silently attending a function, remote and beautiful as always, bracelet exactly matching her outfit.  Her eyes are dead.

            Until … until the president’s elder brother and chief adviser sustains a major brain injury in a ski accident.  Prior to the new laws giving all women’s jobs (except the menial ones) to men, Jean and her team were involved in an exciting new experiment to repair aphasia in stroke and injury victims, restoring speech and lucidity – which the president’s brother now lacks:  suddenly Jean’s former scientific expertise is vital.  For the duration of ‘the cure’ her bracelet will be removed and she has freedom of movement. 

            But she also has a lover.  And she is pregnant.  Two secrets that could send her into slavery in a heartbeat, not to mention another one she has discovered:  a resistance movement that could get them all killed.

            This powerful story has echoes of ‘1984’ and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’;  it is an intelligent, chillingly real portrait of what could happen in a society where fear and hatred have an unassailable hold on people’s hearts and minds.  Great stuff.  FIVE STARS.