BOOK MARKS
HOW do children survive the atrocity of war with their humanity intact? Ten-year-old Ana seems to gaze unblinkingly as the Balkan war invades her childhood and family life collapses around her, but her story is so beautifully written it lifts the reader from one page to the next, with every so often a particularly expressive phrase that needs to be re-read and savoured.
Escaping to the US, where people are uncomfortable hearing the details about her past, Ana gradually sanitises the facts and eventually lies in an attempt to fit in.
Even as you ache for the child Ana who didn’t indulge in self-pity but stoically got on with life, there is a sense that she is buoyed by the love of her close-knit family and friends from her formative years. She is a survivor.
– Linda Curling FOR Toby and the other inhabitants of The Death House, their greatest fear is the moment they too will be wheeled into the lift to make the one-way trip to the Sanatorium. Over the past few weeks, sickly children have been taken away in the night, never to return. They try not to think of their lives before they were brought to the house, all that concerns them now is what will happen when it’s their turn to get sick.
Despite a smattering of flashbacks to the day Toby was taken, this intriguing tale plays out in and around the old house. Each dorm fends for itself, but a couple of new arrivals threaten to disturb the status quo. It’s an absorbing story, but I was left craving a few more hints as to what led to the children being quarantined in the first place.
– Terri Dunbar-Curran DAY FOUR Sarah Lotz Hodder & Stoughton NOT exactly a sequel to her gripping novel The Three, Day Four feeds off the same terror that arises when the things we rely on fail. In The Three, it was aeroplanes, this time round it’s a cruise ship.
Lotz always creates wellrounded characters; some you grow to like and root for, others you love to hate. Either way, each has an important role to play as the story unfolds.
Day four on board the Beautiful Dreamer sees a small fire disable the ship, and it isn’t long before the mild discomfort of already demanding passengers escalates to near mutiny. The toilets stop working, food begins to run out, norovirus threatens to down both guest and crew, and a young woman’s body is discovered in one of the cabins. And then there’s the ageing celebrity medium on board…
– Terri Dunbar-Curran NO BETTER FRIEND Robert Weintraub
John Murray THIS is a love story with a difference; the love many servicemen in the Pacific theatre inWorld War II felt for a pointer called Judy, and a special bond shared by one man and this one dog.
Weintraub records magnificently not only this story of the only official canine of that war – and the only one in an internment camp – but those of other war dogs, and relates an unforgettable tale of the courage and spirit of survival.
Judy and Frank Williams kept each other going in insufferable circumstances in internment, and Judy spread her devotion further by intervening where other men were being beaten. They may have taken their long walks independently and, having saved each other from suicide, they were finally freed and spent the rest of their lives together.
– Shirley de Kock Gueller THIS is the perfect airport book. It is written in short sentences for those with short attention spans. And the chapters are short. Each episode is short. They are also usually violent and sometimes confusing. The confusion arises because there are a number of storylines being carried at the same time. The characters are described in Hollywood branddropping detail. All the fancy areas of LA are visited – only one episode takes place in Las Vegas. Everyone lives happily ever after… Despite this, the book does end on a bit of a cliffhanger (and the first three pages of the next book are given to us).
James Patterson has written 150 books and sold over 300 million copies – 58 of these are thrillers of some kind, written with co-authors. He has clearly found a winning formula.
– Sue Townsend RILEY MACPHERSON is going home. Back to the house she grew up, back to where her troubled brother lives in a trailer park that belongs to the estate of her late father.
She is there to pack up the house and sell it, to carry on with her life. But Riley is going to find out that the tragic death of her much older sister Lisa might not have been what she was told it was.
There are people who are hostile to her, and is shocked to discover her father was involved with a woman she didn’t know about. But there are greater fault lines in her family history than seem possible.
What really happened to Lisa the night she vanished? Told in two voices, this is a good read. A little implausible at times, but the author manages to keep her plot straight and her characters believable.
– Jennifer Crocker