The Ballroom, Anna Hope

Anna Hope’s second novel is set inside an asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire moors in 1911. Amidst the drudge of daily life, where men and women are kept apart and food is subscribed like the fistfuls of pills, there is a ballroom that, once a week, offers a small but wonderful breath of fresh air. When John and Ella meet on the dance floor their worlds shift and collide irrevocably.

This is a love story void of cliché. It’s simply about two people who crave affection as much as the freedom outside of their hospital walls, and find solace in each other despite the barriers. At the same time it is a very real and critical study of the historical treatment of mental disorders that serves to amplify the social stigma we still battle with today.

Hope is skilled in the art of writing historical novels which ring so seamlessly true to a contemporary readership, that through the course of reading one forgets the time period in which the story it is set. She writes in a way that you can’t help but come away feeling as though you have learned something. As with Wake, The Ballroom is a novel simply about humans: human emotion, human touch, human identity; love and loss.

My Name is Leon, Kit de Waal

My Name is Leon is the heartbreaking and hilarious story about a nine-year old boy with a troubled mother and a brother he adores.

When their mother is no longer fit to look after them, and his brother is adopted, Leon sets about on a mission to save Jake from the clutches of the strange family who took him away – a mission he embarks upon with the blind determination only truly conceivable in a child.

De Waal touches on, though does not dwell on, the wider cultural issues of race and social mobility so prevalent of Britain in the early eighties, and it’s this context that forms the fascinating backdrop of the novel.

A child’s perspective is a difficult voice to get right, and de Waal succeeds with absolute precision. Although the storyline is a heart-wrenching one, the narrative is speckled with Leon’s small victories and delights like delving his hands deep in soil, Maureen’s fuzzy red hair and curly wurlys, and it’s these simple pleasures that keep Leon’s character so fiercely real throughout.

Quite truthfully, from beginning to end, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry – this is a book I will continue to recommend with absolute conviction.

All the Rage, Courtney Summers

In her powerful new novel, Courtney Summers articulately addresses the ever- prevalent issue of rape culture and the devastating impact of turning a blind eye to it.

Kellan Turner, the Sheriff’s son is not the golden boy everyone thinks he is as Romy Grey knows all too well. But no one wants to believe a girl from the wrong side of town with a drunk for a father, and Romy is bullied by her peers for being a liar and mistrusted by almost everyone around her.

There is a heartbreaking apathy about Romy; a silent acceptance of her situation. When an old friend goes missing at a party though, and it becomes clear that other girls are at risk, Romy is forced to consider the cost of her silence.

Romy wears her lipstick like armour and this serves as an important symbolism. Whilst she seems passive, she refuses to be a victim, and her makeup is not only self-preservation, but also a symbol of defiance.

With ‘All the Rage’ Summers has not only created an entertaining crossover read, she has opened up an important dialogue about the shame and silence inflicted on young women and men in today’s society. It is the sort of book we could all learn something from, regardless of gender or age.

LoveReadingUK

According to Yes, Dawn French

According to Yes is the latest release from bestselling author and critically acclaimed comedian Dawn French. This is a novel about what happens when you start to say yes after a lifetime of saying no.

Eccentric 38-year-old primary school teacher Rosie Kitto bounces into the impeccably dressed and faultlessly demure world of Manhattan’s upper-class, blissfully unaware of the scrupulous, unspoken rule book: no unruly behaviour, no emotional displays and definitely no fun.

Rosie enters the Wilder-Bingham family as a nanny and injects fun and noise into their life – unwelcome only to head of the household, Glenn, who measures her happiness by tangible success rather than any kind of actual enjoyment. Rosie collides with this pristine world bearing an extraordinary capacity for fun and an oversized bow to match.

The Wilder-Bingham family isn’t quite as together as it first seems though, and as the threads begin to unravel, Rosie leads them down a path that, one-by-one, transforms their outlook on life. At the same time Rosie harbours a secret grief of her own and is forced to embark on a journey of emotional and in the end, life-changing self-discovery.

French covers the big issues of love, betrayal, grief and heartbreak in this witty ode to family life in the 21st century. The novel itself isn’t that short but it really took no time at all to get through. It is an easy read but doesn’t fall short on sustenance – it’s not purely light and airy but fun and poignant with some hilariously perceptive observations of family life. According to Yes has a wacky storyline that is hard to believe but equally I was so convinced by Rosie’s character that it seemed feasible that she would find herself in such a ridiculous situation. French embraces the imperfections of human action and captivates the capacity for absolute absurdity in our lives.

It is an enlightening and feel-good read offering a fresh look at life and how to embrace it. The premise is certainly verging on the unbelievable, but it is funny and enjoyable to the end.

We Love This Book

What We Left Behind, Robin Talley

What We Left Behind is the latest novel by the critically acclaimed author of Lies We Tell Ourselves, Robin Talley. It is a deeply emotive story that explores important gender and sexuality issues.

Toni and Gretchen fall helplessly in love at first sight and have no doubt that they’ve got what it takes to combat any obstacles in their way – even a long distance relationship. But as they settle into their new lives in college they are forced to face some serious issues about how they fit into each other’s lives. Toni finds a new and empowering sense of belonging with a group of transgender upperclassmen and worries that she will never find this level of understanding in Gretchen, and Gretchen begins to wonder where she fits in Toni’s new life, if at all. They are forced to consider if love alone is enough to keep them together, or if the bumps in the road are just too great to overcome.

What We Left Behind is a complex teen love story that exposes the challenges that arise within a lesbian and transgender relationship while challenging society’s conceptions of gender binaries and gendered language. The transition of language, namely the use of pronouns, throughout the narrative is as hard to follow as Toni’s evolving feelings and powerfully emulates the complexity of Toni’s search for a sense of self. At the same time it is a story about a classically volatile adolescent relationship – the stupendous highs, the dramatic lows and all the confusion in between. It is a unique premise for a YA novel but at the same time Talley stays true to those all-important YA themes of love, sex, friendship and identity.

What Toni discovers is that sometimes it is okay not to know exactly what’s going to happen and as a reader you feel as though you embark on this journey as well. Just like Toni at first I found myself trying to form a detailed picture of the characters; defining them by their gender, appearance and sexuality, but by the end of the book I realised it made no difference to their characters and that none of the labels were necessary.

It was a fascinating read that left me feeling enlightened about a topic we just don’t talk about enough. With novels like Lies We Tell Ourselves and What We Left Behind, Talley is transforming the taboo into the discussed and the accepted.

We Love This Book

According to Yes, Dawn French

According to Yes is the latest release from bestselling author and critically acclaimed comedian Dawn French. This is a novel about what happens when you start to say yes after a lifetime of saying no.

Eccentric 38-year-old primary school teacher Rosie Kitto bounces into the impeccably dressed and faultlessly demure world of Manhattan’s upper-class, blissfully unaware of the scrupulous, unspoken rule book: no unruly behaviour, no emotional displays and definitely no fun.

Rosie enters the Wilder-Bingham family as a nanny and injects fun and noise into their life – unwelcome only to head of the household, Glenn, who measures her happiness by tangible success rather than any kind of actual enjoyment. Rosie collides with this pristine world bearing an extraordinary capacity for fun and an oversized bow to match.

The Wilder-Bingham family isn’t quite as together as it first seems though, and as the threads begin to unravel, Rosie leads them down a path that, one-by-one, transforms their outlook on life. At the same time Rosie harbours a secret grief of her own and is forced to embark on a journey of emotional and in the end, life-changing self-discovery.

French covers the big issues of love, betrayal, grief and heartbreak in this witty ode to family life in the 21st century. The novel itself isn’t that short but it really took no time at all to get through. It is an easy read but doesn’t fall short on sustenance – it’s not purely light and airy but fun and poignant with some hilariously perceptive observations of family life. According to Yes has a wacky storyline that is hard to believe but equally I was so convinced by Rosie’s character that it seemed feasible that she would find herself in such a ridiculous situation. French embraces the imperfections of human action and captivates the capacity for absolute absurdity in our lives.

It is an enlightening and feel-good read offering a fresh look at life and how to embrace it. The premise is certainly verging on the unbelievable, but it is funny and enjoyable to the end.

We Love This Book

The Juliet Stories, Carrie Snyder

Juliet Friesen is just ten years old when her peace-activist family moves to post-revolutionary war Nicaragua in 1985 to protest American involvement. They set up a dysfunctional and extraordinary life living amongst the political conflict. Amid this turmoil, Juliet’s younger brother is diagnosed with cancer and the family are forced to return to Canada, only to find that their lives beyond Nicaragua have become the real war zone. At the centre of it all Juliet desperately tries to piece together the separate components of her life and to understand the confusing world around her, including the thing that will kill her brother.

Back in their homeland, the Friesens find themselves drifting away from one another, to form new and very different lives. Juliet grows into womanhood; ever striving for the free life she had in Nicaragua while at the same time desperate to create a stability for her own children that she herself never experienced.

It is a coming-of-age tale about the painful and wonderful experiences of motherhood and, amid the context of political turmoil and an extensive family tree, there are the traits typical of a bildungsroman; friendship, love, sex and heartbreak.

The multiple stories add an interesting dimension to the narrative structure, overlapping and folding into one another so seamlessly that it is impossible to differentiate each story; just as it is to separate the different parts of Juliet’s life.

This is a compelling novel told in the most beautifully crafted way, and the frequent lapse into disjointed stream of consciousness renders the style close to that of Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Snyder’s storytelling is powerful to the point of creating an all-encompassing reality, so that I was left feeling as though I had flown to Nicaragua and dropped right into the Friesen’s complicated network, within the space of these 300 pages. It is a wonderful rarity when a book leaves you so profoundly affected.

We Love This Book

The Boy in the Mirror, Tom Preston

Aged 21 Tom Preston was diagnosed with stage four lymphoma and given around a 40% chance of survival. This short, autobiographical work tells his battle story.

Written unusually in the second person – you, the reader, are the protagonist. This does two things. It firstly makes you feel the frustration, embarrassment, jealousy and sadness as though it really is happening to you, but secondly, it actually depersonalises Tom’s experiences. By using the generic you’ pronoun, Preston demonstrates that this could be you – it could be any one of us – that cancer isn’t biased.

The bitesize length makes it feel almost like a unique cancer pamphlet – only this one forces you in to the patient’s shoes. This should become the go-to recommended reading for the friends and families of a cancer sufferer. It is a difficult read at times but only because it is exposing the truth of the illness. I’ve never read a book quite like it.

Preston opens the hospital curtains and allows us to look in, to show us the devastating impact of cancer, not so much on those around you, but on your own body – the shedding skin, the endless toilet trips, the masturbating into a plastic cup to NHS-approved porn and the sheer indignity of it all. What came through overwhelmingly was the gradual loss of self, the devastating reality that cancer takes everything and leaves you a stranger in the mirror.

With this short book, Tom Preston sticks two fingers up at the romanticised view of cancer often portrayed in fiction and the media.

We Love This Book 

Zeroes, Scott Westerfeld Margo Lanagan and Beborah Biancotti

Zeroes is a YA book with a real difference. This is the opening instalment of a thrilling new series about five ordinary teens with extraordinary stories and a collaboration of bestselling author Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti. It’s the Famous Five on steroids with a sprinkling of superpowers.

This unlikely group of friends give themselves the tongue-in-cheek nickname of “Zeroes” because of their unusual superpowers that land them in trouble more often than they do good. Scam’s power is his voice that articulates his wants and desires and smooth talks his way out of difficult situations. Its a bit too honest though and often gets him in trouble and even loses him his friends. Crash has an all-consuming desire to bring all technology down, Flicker can see through other peoples’ eyes but not her own, and Anon is not exactly invisible, but entirely forgettable. Then there’s Bellwether, the “glorious leader” of the group who has the ability to draw all zeroes together and focus the group’s energy on one goal.

Ethan, aptly named Scam, finds himself in serious trouble when the voice lies to save his skin amid a bank robbery and he is forced to call upon his former group of friends that vowed never to speak to him again after the voice insulted them all and exposed some hurtful truths. Scam’s latest mess ends up uniting them all again in a whirlwind adventure filled with action, criminals, emotion and personal traumas. At the centre of this chaos, this dysfunctional group find a new zero in Kelsey who has the power to control an entire crowd to create something wonderful – or entirely destructive.

This is a really gripping read and I was pulled into the adventures of the Zeroes and found myself rooting for their success. With an enthralling storyline and a marketing campaign to match this is set to be an extraordinary adventure series.

We Love This Book

How To Be Brave, Louise Beech

When 9-year old Rose is diagnosed with a life-threatening and life-restricting illness, her mother struggles to get her to concede to the daily injections and fears she is losing her daughter. To distract her, Natalie begins talking about the familiar ghostly man in a brown suit who has visited them both in their dreams.

Rose is enchanted by the story and through the magic of storytelling, Natalie and her daughter are transported to the Atlantic Ocean in 1943, to a lifeboat, where an ancestor survived for fifty days before being rescued.

Louise Beech seamlessly entwines Rose’s struggles with diabetes with her great-grandfather’s fight for survival in the Second World War. The two stories are sewn together amid the delicate tapestry of a mother and daughter’s relationship and when the threads of it begin to fray, the man in the brown suit provides an escape. Parallel experiences of Colin and Rose like the unbearable, unquenchable thirst they both have to endure draws the two centuries together and allows Rose to relate to a relative she has never met.

Although I found the beginning slow, I became absolutely hooked on Colin’s story, and just like Rose who counted the minutes to storytime, I sped through the outer narrative just to get to tale of the lost man at sea. Alongside Natalie and Rose the reader learns the true power of storytelling. It is a brilliantly creative work of fiction, and a beautiful thank you letter to the magic of stories and storytelling.

We Love This Book