The Bone Dragon, by Alexia Casale

It takes Evie four years to find a way to tell her adoptive parents about her ribs; the pain, the grating; another part of her that remains broken by her past. They’re not an easy fix, but at least it’s something that can be fixed. And when she returns home from the hospital with a piece of rib in a pot, maybe she can use it to find a way toward fixing the other broken parts. She carves the rib into a tiny, sinuous, winding dragon, a talisman of strength and fire to hold onto; a light at the end of the tunnel. But when the dragon comes alive at night, where will he lead her?

The Bone Dragon is simultaneously strange and beautiful, a winding story that leaves as many questions unanswered as answered. What exactly happened to Evie before she met her parents? Are the dragon dreams real, or just what Evie tells herself they are – dreams? Does Evie really believe they are only dreams, or is this simply another way of coming to terms with both her past and her current actions? Alexia Casale weaves together a series of perfectly everyday storylines into something surreal and with an ambiguous ending that left me feeling extremely uncomfortable, itchy in my own skin for what it might mean for Evie, who she is and who she might become as a result of it.

Aside from her dragon dreams, today Evie is leading a relatively normal life. She has good friends, a family who loves her deeply, an insightful teacher. But there are other threads here too: her adoptive family suffered terrible loss in the past, her friends don’t know the truth of her past, a bully at school takes up a large part of Evie’s thoughts. Sometimes the past comes rushing in, taking over the present and it’s hard to remember what is and isn’t real, what’s now and what was then – yet there are gaps, blank spaces, questions over how she got from A to B, what happened between A and C. These glimpses of what must surely be some form of PTSD are emotionally charged and heart-rending, and I fear for Evie and how much she is suppressing.

And then Evie starts to overhear hushed conversations between her father, Paul, and uncle, Ben. What are they up to? Is it what she hopes? She yearns for revenge for what was done to her, but does taking revenge change who you are and make you more like the person you hate? This is the last thing she wants for Paul and Ben, yet when the truth of their secretive activity is revealed the disappointment is instinctual. What if she was to take revenge herself? She’s already been changed, but is revenge the same as healing?

I never studied Hamlet in school, but Evie is and it’s a play that she reacts strongly to. Looking up the themes for Hamlet, revenge is foremost, much like it is in Evie’s mind, but there’s also “appearance and reality”, “deception”, “madness”, “family”, and “moral corruption”, all of which feel pertinent to Evie’s story. Casale’s blending of each The Bone Dragon demonstrates her exceptional writing ability and, as uncomfortable as I may have been left feeling by the end, it cannot be denied that I was firmly hooked into the story. The surreality and darkness of The Bone Dragon may be acutely uncomfortable, but it is extremely well done.

Other reviews I’ve read for The Bone Dragon are all massively praiseworthy, calling it wonderful, captivating, magical, hypnotic. And it is certainly all of these things, but also extremely unsettling – and this is the predominant feeling I’ve been left with. Darkness overlays everything else within, no matter how beautifully constructed it might be. Doubtless this is the author’s intention and perhaps this makes it the most real look at the mind of an abused person – the pain may be buried as deep as Evie can get it, yet it still resonates through every pore of her body and crevice of her mind, changed forever.

Tread lightly, readers.



(Linda Buckley-Archer gives much more precise input in The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/19/bone-dragon-alexia-casale-review)

If You Find Me, by Emily Murdoch

What if the person you thought you were no longer exists? What if your history turned out to be a lie? What if the person you were supposed to trust brought terrible things into your world? What if the place you thought you were safe is the least safe of all?

When she was little, Carey’s mum saved her from her dad. They ran away to hide in the woods – the Hundred Acre Woods, as Carey dubs it – and there they’ve lived ever since. Her mum goes on trips to town, for supplies, to fuel her meth habit, and sometimes she’ll be gone for weeks. So Carey and her little sister Jenessa are used to fending for themselves, hunting and foraging, eating beans from tin cans, wearing second or third hand clothes, lighting fires for warmth. But their mum’s been gone even longer than usual this time, and now the two strangers have arrived: a social worker and Carey’s dad, and they’ve got a letter from Carey’s mum saying she can’t look after them anymore.

Carey cares for one person more than anything else in the world: Jenessa. So when her dad comes, she’s sure that going back with him is the best thing for Jenessa. He seems kind, but she can’t help being afraid, not after what her mum told her. Firstly, though, leaving the woods means a house, a bed, a step-sister and step-mother, school and a 21st century lifestyle that neither of them are used to. Jenessa has never seen television before, ever stood underneath a shower. Carey doesn’t know what a cell-phone is, an iPod, or what the word ‘gross’ means. She misses the woods terribly, but more than anything she’s haunted by the white-star night - the secret that presses down on her shoulders, that scared Jenessa so much she stopped talking, and that Carey knows she can’t hide from forever but will change everything – again – when it’s revealed.

As Carey is forced to question and confront her past, she has to find a way to reconcile the girl from the woods with the girl of today. It’s truly excellent, her voice leaping off the page right from the first paragraph, drawing you in and nudging you forward all the time. At first I assumed that Jenessa would be the one who would have the greatest difficulty adjusting to the new circumstances, but it soon becomes apparent that things will be harder for Carey in the long term, that the differences between her and her peers are more pronounced, that her old worldview and her new worldview will have greater clashes, that finding her new balance will more of a trick than second nature.

Utterly gripping and full of dark secrets, If You Find Me is sad and wonderful, terrible and uplifting, finished and unfinished, Emily Murdoch creating the exact emotional catharsis needed whilst leaving the story open-ended – leaving Carey space to find her way from old girl to new girl, but the readers wondering exactly how the events of the white-star night will be solved. Carey gives us hints – snippets here and there – of the horrible bits of her past, enough to guess as to what the white-star night might contain, but it’s not fully revealed until the end, when she finally finds a way to trust her father and her new life. There are some really difficult subjects in here, but Emily Murdoch tackles them and writes them with real sensitivity and care.

This is my favourite book in the teen category of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2014 shortlist – it does everything it needs to without even blinking and is really an excellent read; I’m looking forward to seeing what else Emily Murdoch has to offer.

Rooftoppers, by Katherine Rundell

Shipwrecked in the English Channel when she was just one year old, Sophie has been looked after ever since by her kindly guardian Charles. She is sure her mother must still be alive somewhere, though, and she is adamant that she remembers her: a flash of red hair, a glimpse of worn, black trousers, cello music on the breeze. But how can she convince Charles that she’s right? Charles always tells Sophie, “Never ignore a possible”, so when she finally discovers a clue to who her mother is/was, he agrees to take her to Paris and investigate.

Rooftoppers is a timeless sort of a story, set before motorcars and mobile phones, but I’m not sure exactly when. And when Sophie and Charles reach Paris, they are stone-walled by the authorities, so it’s up to Sophie to follow the clues on her own – unless her new friend, homeless rooftopper Matteo, will help her. All she has to do is show him she can run across the roofs of the city as fast and far as he can. “It’s wilder than you think,” she says, as they run and jump, the city spread out below them, bejeweled in the twilight. As their friendship grows, they feed birds whilst standing on a homemade tightrope, and dive for coins in the river Seine, following the clues and the sound of cello music. Will they find Sophie’s mum, the mysterious Vivienne Vert?

Katherine Rundell has penned a lovely, gentle story that rolls with the undulation of the rooftops that her characters patter across. There are moments of calm and wonder, moments of terror and tension – just reading about Matteo and Sophie crossing a street between two rooftops by tightrope was enough to give me vertigo. And then there’s the moment when he dangles her from the roof of a the police headquarters so she can peer in the window of the records office, or when the cross into the territory of the gariers, who defend their part of the rooftop domain by tooth and nail. It’s equally exciting and nail-biting.

But will they have a happy ending? Will the possibility of Sophie’s mother become a reality? Plenty of people are going to stand in Sophie’s way, but she’s a determined little girl who does not take “no” for an answer. I enjoyed Rooftoppers, but have one single criticism: it ended so very abruptly! I would like to have know what happened next – what happened to Sophie’s new friends? To Charles? What did the authorities do next? Gah!

Overall, though, Rooftoppers is a charming story about never giving up no matter how hopeless a quest might seem – and about believing in yourself even when others are telling you it’s silly. It would fit particularly well, I think, for readers who enjoy Eva Ibbotson or Noel Streatfeild, or last years Waterstones Children’s Book Prize shortlisted novel, The Wolf Princess.

Out of the Easy, by Ruta Sepetys

Out of the Easy was a real surprise of a book. A wonderful surprise.

This is 1950s New Orleans, the French Quarter. Jo’s life is a messy tangle she’s desperate to escape. She dreams of college, high society and of walking down the street unrecognized as the daughter of a local brothel, um, “servicer”. She’s separated herself from her mother as much as she can by living and working in a local second-hand bookshop, but when a visiting businessman is murdered Jo gets dragged deeper and deeper into the Quarter’s underworld, caught up in a web of secrets and lies and with the mob’s black hand on her door.

‘The Easy’ of the title refers to the Quarter and Ruta Sepetys conjures this world so effortlessly and evocatively that I could hear the music in the background, feel the history of the streets, and found myself reading in a southern accent. Then there’s the plethora of characters, all of whom are as gritty and vibrant and life-size as the city itself. There’re Patrick and Charlie who own the bookshop and who took Jo in when she needed to escape; Jo’s new friend Charlotte who takes Jo for who she is, no questions asked; the handsome Thierry boy; Cokie, Jo’s oldest and staunchest ally; Mother and the repulsive, scheming, untrustworthy Cincinatti; and, of course, Willie. It clearly pays to be on Willie’s good side and she seems to have Jo’s wellbeing at heart, but how trustworthy is she at the end of the day? If Jo has to cross her, what will happen then? What happens if Willie decides you owe her?

There is little that I can say without giving the storyline away, which weaves tighter and tighter, keeping readers right on the edge of their seats. Jo does her best to keep on the edge of things here in the Quarter – she maybe knows more than some people, but there’s plenty she’s managed to avoid over the years. But as the lies begin to pile up on her shoulders, she begins to wonder how on earth she’ll ever manage to crawl out from beneath them – in order to escape, will she have to sacrifice the one thing she swore she’d never do?

Out of the Easy was immensely enjoyable and so very different from much of what is on the shelves in the teenage section, focusing on Jo, the people and the city around her, her dreams and making it a book that is very much character driven but with a stonking great plot to boot. This does make it hard to categorise, though – I love that it doesn’t fall into ‘dystopia’ or ‘fantasy’ or ‘John Green’ or ‘issues’ or ‘love story’, that it is label-free, but that makes it hard to describe to potential readers! And I think perhaps the publishers stumbled on this problem too as neither the cover design nor the blurb on the back of the book come anywhere close to giving an accurate picture of the book’s fabulous content (in fact, it didn’t capture my interest at all – I only read it in the first place because it’s being shortlisted for the 2014 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize).

If anything, I’d have to say that Out of the Easy most closely reminded me of The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson. This is a very odd comparison because they are two very different books – different countries, different time, totally different storylines (there is definitely no supernatural activity in Out of the Easy) – yet somehow they left me feeling in a similar way. Perhaps a similar style of writing? I honestly don’t know. But, either way, I fully recommend Out of the Easy – if ever there was a dark horse of a book, it’s this one.

The Crocodile Who Didn't Like Water, by Gemma Merino

It’s true that our eponymous crocodile doesn’t like the water. He’s not afraid of it, really, he just. Does. Not. Like it. He wishes he did, because he’d really like to join his brothers and sisters in swim club, so he comes up with a plan to get himself in the water. It’s a good plan, but he’s still not terribly happy about being in the water, no matter how hard he tries to like it. But maybe there’s a reason why he doesn’t like the water… maybe he’s not a crocodile at all…

The Crocodile Who Didn't Like Water is a lovely story that says it’s good to try and overcome your fears, but ultimately it’s ok to be different. That it’s more than fine to say, ‘you know what, this thing and me just don’t mix’ - and this usually this means I can do different things instead. Which is exactly what the little crocodile in this story figures out.

Gemma Merino’s illustrations are very endearing – you just want to give the crocodile a hug and tell him everything will be ok – and the twist in the story is so wonderfully unexpected I laughed out loud the first time I read it. Of all the books on the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2014 shortlist, I think this is my favourite.

Penguin in Peril, by Helen Hancocks

Three hungry cats have hatched a cunning plan to make themselves a fishy feast. Step one: capture a penguin. Step two: recapture the penguin. But finding a runaway penguin on the city streets is easier said than done… Especially when he blends in so well with nuns and policeman and waiters.

To be honest, I am far from taken by Penguin in Peril. I’m not really sure what the author was trying to do (other than be clever) or what the point of the story was (other than the fact that the cats wind up in jail, so get a kind of comeuppance). It was all rather pointless; there's no real sense of characterisation, the drawings aren’t terribly interesting or appealing, and we're never actually let in on the cats’ cunning plan. What exactly were they going to do with the penguin once they caught him? Just get him to catch fish for them? It would have made a lot more sense for them to just spend their money on food in the first place.

Harold Finds A Voice, by Courtney Dicmas

Harold is an excellent imitator, copying and repeating all the sounds he hears in the apartment where he lives, from the bleep of the alarm clock to the whooshing of the washing machine. But there are only so many sounds to be heard in one small apartment, and he can’t help wondering what other beautiful and interesting noises exist out in the world. So when the window is left open one morning, he decides to find out…

Harold is not disappointed by all the wonderful sounds he finds, but it opens up a new question: does he have his own voice that’s his and his alone? How can he find it? What will it sound like?

Bright and colourful, Harold Finds A Voice is great fun to read – there are so many different noises to make and imitate – and even when his voice isn’t quite what he expected, finding it brings all sorts of lovely new things into his life: other parrots like him! Courtney Dicmas has taken a basic idea – the importance of being yourself – and put it across simply and beautifully.

Open Very Carefully, by Nick Bromley & Nicola O'Byrne

You should do as the title of this book suggests: open very carefully, because what you find inside might surprise you – a crocodile! What is he doing there?

Wait a minute… Oh, no! He’s eating the letters of the story! This is no good; we can’t be having this. It’s a book for goodness’ sake! What can we do to stop him? Rock the book to see if we can make him fall asleep… Shake the book to see if he’ll fall out… Oh, gosh, now he’s going to try and eat his way out. Yikes!

Open Very Carefully is certainly an original idea, with lovely, bold illustrations, but I’m a little worried about where the crocodile has gone to now he’s escaped the book – what if he’s hiding under my bed?

I hope small children won’t find this book scary. I particularly like the interactive nature of the story – with the shaking and rocking of the book to help the crocodile on it’s way – and it’s a fun, fresh idea. I just hope that something a little friendlier will be able to sneak in through the hole the crocodile’s made – a fluffy bunny perhaps?

Time for Bed, Fred, by Yasmeen Ismail

You know how difficult it can sometimes be to get young children to go to bed? Well, dogs too. On hearing those three innocent little words, “Time for bed!” Fred’s anti-bed instincts kick in. Where can he hide so that he won’t have to go to bed? Among the flowers? Up a tree? What about under the rug? With any luck all this crazy running about will tire young Fred out…

Fred seems like a really nice dog, with shaggy ears that are just asking to be tickled, and a playful, mischievous character that shines through Yasmeen Ismail's colourful illustrations. The pictures are full of movement and activity, and the story is so simple and fun it’s impossible not to enjoy it and appreciate the not-so-subtle metaphor. Time for Bed, Fred is sure to be one of those books you’ll get asked for again and again – especially, perhaps, at bedtime.

Weasels, by Elys Dolan

The weasels are planning to take over the world and today is the big day. But just as everything is ready to go, disaster strikes. “Machine status: It’s Broken”. What’s wrong with their world domination machine? Can they fix it? They’ve got a few ideas, like adding a clothes hanger, installing batteries, or buying a new machine. Perhaps the best solution is the simplest one?

Weasels is a lot of fun to read as an adult – Elys Dolan’s illustrations fill every page and are packed full of little details, quirky asides and tongue-in-cheek references – like the chief weasel villain overseeing his lab weasels with a pet white mouse curled up on his lap, the coffee debate going on in the background, and a quick pause to make sure everything is health and safety compliant. How much of this would small children appreciate, though? Perhaps little, perhaps more than I would give them credit for.

Either way, Weasels is an amusing tale with tonnes to look at and a nicely ambiguous ending – what will happen once the weasels manage to fix the problem? They’re not really likely to let a little technical difficulty get in their way. They are weasels, after all.