Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan

Enter stage left: Craig and Harry. Ex-boyfriends, current best friends. Their friend Tariq follows.

Stage right: established couple Peter and Neil; new friends Avery and Ryan; lone wolf Cooper.

Eight teenaged boys; 48 hours. 48 hours in which worlds will be made and worlds will be torn apart.

Following the lives of this handful of young men over the course of just one weekend, the centre of Two Boys Kissing revolves around Craig and Harry, who are attempting to break the world record for the longest kiss, and creating quite a storm in the process. Some people are outraged that these two boys should be allowed to do such a thing in public, in front of the high school, but soon enough, they’ve also generated millions of followers on the internet and drawn supporters from all around the world.

Are Craig and Harry the centre? Or is the centre actually the narrator – or narrators? This story is not being told by the boys themselves, but by a group of watchers: the ghosts of the past. They tell the boys’ stories while telling us, quietly and poignantly, their own. At first I found this a bit strange – it took me a few chapters to get used to the juxtaposition of voices and characters, but once I did it made so much sense. Because this way, as the ghostly chorus places their pain against the relative freedoms of LGBT people today, David Levithan reminds me that the rights the LGBT community has today are absolutely brand new.

Things are a long way from being plain sailing, though. Harry’s parents are the ideal: supportive, loving, there. Craig’s parents don’t know anything – what will happen when they find out that he’s kissing a boy in front of everyone? Avery’s parents are true to him, and Peter’s too; Neil’s pretty sure his parents know he’s gay, but they can’t bring themselves to say it out loud, while Tariq is recovering from a brutal, homophobic, physical attack, and Cooper is alone, so alone and lost and ashamed.

These different boys, they are not shaped or controlled or defined by their sexual orientation; each of them is an individual, each has their own temperament and cares and concerns and interests and responses to the world and the people about them. But the way that some people respond to them shuts all of these other things out – Cooper’s father, yahoos on the street, even the radio broadcaster who launches a call-in about Craig and Harry’s record attempt. Is this really the 21st century? I don’t want to believe that there are people who still think like that, and yet I can believe it.

The chorus of voices past enables Levithan to cut away from the individual stories of our eight characters, to look upon the world from a distance, to sum up the pain and the love, to glance at the boys in love, the boys who are alone, the boys are just meeting, the boys whose parents care, and the boys whose parents hate – and then zoom in, down onto the earth and look closely, look inside our selected characters. It’s odd to think of a time when it wasn’t perfectly normal for people to be openly gay. I had forgotten (shamefully) about AIDS and about the terrible struggle that it took to get the disease recognized. And it seems completely crazy to me that it is basically only within my lifetime that any form of gay rights has been acknowledged and – even more crazy – that it’s only within the last couple of years that gay marriage has become legal.

A good friend introduced me to a technique for determining whether I was being sexually discriminated against: ask myself, would this thing have happened, or would this thing have been said if I was a guy? I think the same principal can be applied to all forms of bigotry, LGBT rights included. There is a certain amount of disgust voiced at Craig and Harry as they make their attempt for the longest kiss record – but if it was a man and woman doing it, would the response be the same? We would say it’s sweet; it’s romantic. Just because it’s two boys who are kissing doesn’t change that.

Two Boys Kissing. Yes, this is a book about being gay. The ghostly chorus, the themes, the events that take place all point toward this. But really – really – this is a book about love. Because love is the same. Love is the same whether it’s between a girl and a boy, two boys, two girls. It still feels the same. It still has the power to create and the power to destroy. Love is love, and it cannot be denied.

The Alex Crow by Andrew Smith

In the days after I finish reading The Alex Crow, my friends begin to get a little annoyed with me. I can’t help sniggering at what are, really, perfectly ordinary, innocent things they are saying. But in The Alex Crow there is a boy, Max, who has an imagination and a way with words that is so extraordinary, he can make practically any sentence into a metaphor for jerking off. It’s really quite astounding. So now, almost anything anyone says to me can be, well, er, "reinterpreted". And it's this, along with all the other remarkable things that take place in this story, that really makes me wonder what might be discovered should author Andrew Smith ever decide to donate his brain to science.

Four stories intertwine to make up The Alex Crow. Ariel and his adopted brother Max are at an all-boys American summer camp designed, ostensibly, as a place “Where boys rediscover the fun of boyhood!” which seems mostly to mean no electricity, cold, leaky cabins, and a series of wilderness inspired activities that Max, Ariel and their new friend Coby do their damndest to subvert as far as possible. Alongside this, Ariel tells us his backstory: a serious and heart-tearing tale of survival in a country torn apart by civil war.

But there is also the melting man: Leonard. His brain has been tampered with, causing a series of auditory and visual hallucinations that are somehow simultaneously terrifying and hilarious to read about. Lenny is driving a hideous U-haul across America looking for the mysterious Beaver King, who he plans to blow up using the atomic bomb he’s built in the back of the van. And there is a series of journal entries from the doctor of The Alex Crow, a failed Arctic expedition in 1880 which has become lodged in ice.

All of this lies against the strange and weird backdrop of the Merrie-Seymour Research Group, which runs the camp the boys are attending, and at which their father works. But what connects them to Leonard and The Alex Crow, and how did Ariel wind up in their midst? Much like Smith’s previous book, Grasshopper Jungle, the jigsaw pieces are gradually and inexorably pulled together into one shocking picture that makes you question, well, everything that Smith has told you up to that point: is Ariel really who he thinks he is? Are all of the melting man’s hallucinations really hallucinations? And is the summer camp really just a summer camp?

There are some pretty crazy things and some extremely serious things in this book, but I think what probably stands out strongest are the characters and their trueness – well, the adults are all exceedingly messed up, but the three boys are the ones on whom all of our emotions go. Andrew Smith surely writes about teenage boys in the truest way possible, from Ariel and his quiet, internal struggles to Max, who lives as loudly as he can. It’s a fucked up world that Smith’s characters are growing up in, but somehow, scarily, the crazy science that supports it feels like it could perfectly easily and unsurprisingly be real - the fucked up part are the people who chose to make these things a reality.

And then there's the part where Smith narrates with such detail and close attention it’s impossible to miss a thing – all intentions are laid out for the reader and yet the story remains intriguing, surprising, and clever. Themes of language and reality, manipulation and control, survival and extinction pulse across the pages and while it is not quite as ‘blow your mind’ as Grasshopper Jungle (how, after all, is one supposed to follow a book like that?), it undoubtedly has that intense, fucked-up feel to it’s world and it’s words. As everything begins to come together, the denouement approaches ever faster in flash of horrible realization.

Just, please, Mr. Smith, if one day you do donate your brain to science, make sure it’s not the Merrie-Seymour Research Group or any of their affiliates…

Mine! by Jerome Keane and Susana de Bois

Exactly how artists – and writers – are able to create so much personality from such simple ideas, I really don’t know. Horse and Fox, the stars of our story, are brightly coloured, fairly blocky-looking creatures and yet the way they roll their eyes and the way they stand just tells you everything you need to know about them. In this case, they are bored. Very bored. But then something happens. Actually, something falls from the sky. But who saw it first, and who should get to play with it first?

Picture books to promote the concept of sharing are certainly nothing new, but Mine! is so bright and funny and just says it all, really! Horse and Fox ooze personality practically off the page and you can tell just where their shenanigans are headed – but this doesn’t matter one bit, because you are waiting… waiting… to see it happen.

I loved it; it’s quirky and bright and funny, and doesn’t mess around. I can’t imagine this book losing it’s edge, even over multiple readings – like Jon Klassen's  I Want My Hat Back, I think it’ll probably make you smile every time.

Hattie Peck by Emma Levey

Hattie Peck is an extraordinarily adventurous hen with a one-track mind: Eggs. She loves eggs. She loves eggs so much that she decides she will go wherever she can to get hold of some. And so her travels begin: all around the world, searching high and low for eggs. But when she brings them all home, what will happen?

The front cover of Hattie Peck is very appealing, the illustrations just the sort that appeal to me. And this is a very nicely put together book, the drawings fun and creative, working well with the words and the storyline. But Hattie herself is rather two-dimensional, and... she is a MASSIVE thief! Taking all these eggs without a by-your-leave and stealing them away for herself. She doesn’t seem to realize what it is she’s done, and I felt terribly worried for the families who have lost their offspring. And there are no consequences! Ok, Hattie might have a rather unusual collection of “children” at the end of the story – but she seems perfectly content with her lot.

I wondered at first if I was being a bit too picky about this, but have decided I’m not. I wouldn’t want my child to think that they can go out and take whatever they want from other people, just because they really like it. So, look at this book for the pictures and the adventures of a selfish hen – but then make up your own ending?

The Queen's Hat by Steve Anthony

The Queen (accompanied by loyal Corgi) is off to visit someone very special, but as she steps out of Buckingham Palace, the wind does a great swoosh and blows the Queen’s hat off her head! Can she catch it, or will she have to chase it across London?

I love the idea of the Queen breaking protocol, running through the streets of London to try and catch her hat. Not only the Queen, though: the Queen’s Guard, normally so stiff and erect in their red jackets and furry black bearskin hats, are determined to chase the Queen’s hat down as well. We see them clambering over a lion’s statue in Trafalgar Square, in a mele of animals in London Zoo, racing across Tower Bridge – hundreds of them in tiny detail – scaling Big Ben, and then floating back to the ground with black umbrellas a la Mary Poppins.

There’s clearly a very British feel to The Queen’s Hat – not just in the images of classic London sights, but in the bright red jackets of the Queen’s Guard as they make their way across the city, enhanced by Steve Anthony’s colouring of the images in predominantly muted blue-grey tones (which matches the greys of the buildings of course). I also enjoyed the changes in perspective in the images, from close-ups with just three or four soldiers in the frame, then sweeping out for a distance view of the London Eye or Tower Bridge. The Corgi can be seen in every image, of course – and someone else too…

The text and voice of this story is quite basic, more action orientated than character orientated, so all of the characterization comes from the pictures. But what the voice does do is introduce a great variety of different descriptive words for where the hat goes and what it does as Queenie chases after it: soared, whoosed, through, along, around, across, over, which is great fun to read and then follow through in the illustrations.

This book is fun for those who both do and don’t live in London, and there’s something solid and identifiable in the fact that the London sites we see in the story belong to me as much as the next person, even though I live way out in the countryside. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside – especially when we find out at the end who the special person is that the Queen has gone to visit!

[This book has now been shortlisted for the 2015 Waterstones Children's Book Prize!]

A Possum's Tail by Gabby Dawnay and Alex Barrow

Young Samuel Drew is off for a walk, accompanied by his little wheeled dog, and we follow him as he heads down the street, past the sights and sounds of London, and into London Zoo. Wending his way around all the different animals, he makes his way to see the little possums. They’re sleeping – but as he turns to leave they awaken, drop from their perch and, seeing Samuel’s little dog’s string tail, grab on tight. So, as Samuel heads back the way he came, he’s unknowingly followed along by this little collection of furry creatures. But what will happen when he gets home and discovers them?

I’m not really sure what to think of A Possum’s Tail – it starts off as one sort of book and then becomes something else! It has quite a traditional sort of feel, with it’s careful rhyming, illustrations that conjure a time just gone by, and straightforward layout, picture above, words underneath. I suspect that much of the content in the pictures are real places, but not being from London I’m only able to recognize the obvious ones. It feels lovely and circular to read – but then, when Samuel Drew gets home and discovers his possummy trail, the tone changes, and the perspective changes, and it suddenly wasn’t quite so comfortable a story anymore. Nothing untoward happens, not in the least, but it just felt a little bit silly after that, after such a lovely beginning. I’m sure, though, that this is probably an adult perspective, and that young children reading the story would most likely give a different response.

The book is a lovely package, and something just a little bit different perhaps from your average picture book. Give it a try and I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

She Is Not Invisible, by Marcus Sedgwick

Laureth’s dad has an obsession: coincidences. He’s been trying to write a novel about coincidences for years, but has gotten stuck in the research phase, bogged down by the questions of whether coincidences really exist, and what they might or might not mean. He’s away in Europe on one of his research trips when Laureth gets a strange email, an email that sends a shiver down her spine: her father’s notebook – full of his irreplaceable research – has been found by someone in New York. If her dad is supposed to be in Europe, what’s his notebook doing in New York? Why isn’t he answering his phone when she tries to call him? And why isn’t her mum more worried?

Anxious that something seriously bad has happened to her dad, Laureth “acquires” her mother’s credit card and heads to New York to track him down. Can she and her little brother get through security and onto the plane without anyone stopping them? Where will they begin when they get to New York? And what will happen when her mother finds out what Laureth has done?

I absolutely loved She Is Not Invisible. I’ve never really read anything by Marcus Sedgwick before, but now I want to read pretty much everything this brilliant British author has written. It’s really quite a remarkable book that at once meets and subverts typical YA criteria: we have a girl and a quest, but nothing works out quite the way you expect it to. Laureth is such a complete character that right from her opening sentence I wanted to know more about her, while her little brother Benjamin has his own very special set of quirks, and I really did not know what the ending would be or how all the threads would come together.

The extra element in the story is Laureth’s physical handicap: she is blind. But She Is Not Invisible is not a story about a blind girl – Laureth, as she herself says, does not (and does not want to) fall into blind superhero cliché. It is a story about coincidences in which the protagonist is a girl who happens to be blind. Nevertheless, this makes for a special kind of storytelling because, by her very nature, Laureth sees and experiences the world around her in a different way. The person that Laureth is – and how Sedgwick’s writing makes her and her world real – raises as many interesting questions and thoughts as the actual storyline:

There are the ways people around her respond to Laureth, and how their responses change once they become aware of her disability. There is the fact that nothing is ever given a physical description, and yet we still get just as strong an idea about surroundings and people and events – perhaps even more so – than we would with a sighted description. And there is the part where Laureth doesn’t make judgments about things in the same way as a person with sight does. Perhaps most striking in this is she doesn’t see colour, and so colour – especially in people – is meaningless to her (which is, of course, exactly how it should be for everyone). And the irony in all this is that it enables her to actually see more than another person might.

One thing: when you learn what she deals with, you might love the blind girl who knows that it’s never been her sight that she needs - that it’s trust, love, and faith also. Laureth is not flawless, though; she still makes judgments, it’s just that those judgments are, in large part, based on different criteria; she makes mistakes and assumptions, and perhaps puts more faith in her father’s notebook than she should.

I recently met Marcus Sedgwick at YALC and he told me that he left one deliberate coincidence in the book. I’ll be honest and say that I’m not sure exactly which coincidence it is that he means. It’s not that this is a book that is peppered with coincidences, but there a series of apparent coincidences within it, most of which I assumed were engineered – but perhaps one of them wasn’t. One question is, which one? Although another question is, does it matter? Like both Marcus and his characters say, coincidences are weird and striking to those whom they happen to, but for everyone else they tend to just bounce off without much impact.

And he plays with this in the story too: several events that you – or Laureth – think are going to be terribly important and meaningful just bounce away without having the effect you thought they were going to have. And in this way, perhaps Marcus Sedgwick has actually done what he thought wasn’t really possible: written a book about coincidence. There is also a boy who short circuits anything electrical, a raven named Stan, a rather creepy hotel, a brief scattered history of the study of coincidence, and a pair of men who I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to meet down a darkened alley at night. And there is also a number: 354. Laureth’s dad has been followed around by this number his whole life (or perhaps it is the other way around: he has followed the number), and it’s a number that crops up in the book here and there, and there again, not just in the story, but from the page count to the paragraph breaks, adding a beautiful little twist.

So, do you believe in coincidence? Do you believe that weird coincidences really just are coincidences, just chance happenings? If you don’t believe in coincidences, is this because you know the mathematical probability of a particular ‘coincidence’ means it isn’t by chance – or that the chance of this event is higher than you might at first think? Or is it because you believe that ‘coincidences’ means something? That they’re guided by fate or some greater force, some greater mystery? Will reading She Is Not Invisible change your position?

And at the end of our story, as Laureth exits stage right, she issues her readers with a final challenge. Is this challenge the result of the ‘true’ coincidence Sedgwick alluded to? I’m still not sure, and I’m going to tell you what it is either; you’ll have to read the book to find out. And yes, I did take Laureth up on it.

Bellman & Black, by Diane Setterfield

William Bellman is a smart young man, who’s worked hard, taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves, and built himself a good life. But William Bellman is also a man who easily falls prey to obsession; he can use this to turn a penny or two in business, to dedicate himself to nursing his sick children to health, or to identifying the strange man, dressed all in black, who hovers in the background of every funeral William Bellman has ever attended. And when tragedy strikes, William Bellman’s life is torn asunder, not only by his losses, but by the ensuing conversation he has with a man in a graveyard, a man named – or so Bellman believes – Black.

Who is Black? Was he following William? Will he come back? And what will he want if – when – he does? If only William could remember the finer details of the bargain he is sure that they struck: that Black would save William’s daughter in exchange for William embarking on a new business: the business of death. And as he waits and wonders and frets and worries, Bellman turns his obsession to the realization of the seed that Black has placed in William’s mind: the construction of Bellman & Black, the Mourning Emporium. This, surely this, will be enough to appease Black. But what if it isn’t? What if Bellman & Black isn’t what Black wanted at all?

Diane Setterfield has followed up her extraordinary first novel, the gothic and mysterious The Thirteenth Tale, with quite a strange tale that leaves the reader wondering. She begins her tale with the recounting of a repressed memory from William's childhood: how, whilst demonstrating his prowess with a slingshot, hits and kills a rook in a tree fifty yards yonder across a field. He is repulsed by the act: it was never really his intention to kill the bird; he didn’t think he’d ever actually hit it. So he goes home and outs the memory aside. The rooks, however, we are told, don’t forget so easily. Thus, as we watch William grow into a man, become a husband, a father, an entrepreneur, the rooks are watching him too.

I enjoyed reading Bellman & Black, but I’m just not sure what exactly to make of it. Essentially, it’s the story of a man’s life, the changes, the tragedies and the hope that wend their ways through it, and how a particular event bounces him off onto a different path. As William becomes consumed by his new business, to all intents and purposes shutting out the one thing he loves most – the one for whom he bargained – I couldn’t help but wonder where the Bellman we knew before had gone. But the chapters following Bellman’s life are intersected with snippets from the rooks and ravens: so are the choices Bellman makes his own, or are they influenced by something other? Is Black a rook? Or death itself? Or are the rooks somehow a representation of death? It’s easy, after all, to associate corvids with graveyards.

Rather than fretting over how it all links up, perhaps I shouldn’t try to read too much into it. We make our choices and we live by them. And we die by them. What begins as a tale of a smart and eager young man making good on his meagre beginnings becomes one of tragedy as obsession and loss take their toll. Like I said, it’s a strange book, but no less interesting and no less readable for all that. It’s definitely an interesting choice, especially for readers who are looking for something with gothic undertones, or for something to leave them questioning.

The One and Only Ivan

Ivan is a Silverback Gorilla whose domain is a small glass, metal and cement cage in the Big Top Mall just off the I-95. He has been there for a long time.

Ivan is kept company in the Big Top Mall by an elephant named Stella, a handful of humans (some nice, some not so), Bob the stray dog, and some other animals he doesn’t talk to so much. The Silverback’s job in the wild is to protect his family, but Ivan hasn’t had a proper family to protect for a long time. Until Ruby arrives. And then he makes a promise, a promise that is going to prove very hard to keep: a promise to protect Ruby and to make sure she doesn’t spend her life where he has.

The One and Only Ivan is really wonderful. It’s fantastically written and has a really beautiful character at its heart who is at once strong, brave and caring. Ivan likes art, not that many of the humans can understand what he is drawing; he likes bananas and sleeping, and throwing me-balls; he has a quiet heart and uses his words carefully, but when he finds someone to protect, his natural instincts are called to the surface and he must find a way to get people’s attention.

Despite winning America's Newbery Medal in 2013, the only reason I came across this book was thanks to a passing comment by the author’s husband, and so it feels like a really special discovery, and a book that I’m really eager to share with everyone. I read it in 24 hours because I just did not want to put it down. The writing has an almost sparse, careful quality, and some of the turns of phrase are quite magical, like when Ruby hits out at the brutality of her keeper:

“It is the beautiful mad I have ever heard,” Ivan tells us. 

And when it comes to denouement, Ivan is pretty scared. Things are changing and they are changing fast, but if he wants to save Ruby, he has to show her the way. Is it the right choice? Can he take those important, final steps? Does he have the courage to follow her?

Katherine Applegate was inspired to write the story by a real gorilla, also named Ivan, who spent 27 years in solitary captivity before animal welfare groups secured his transfer to Zoo Atlanta, but as she began to think about Ivan, another story emerged – thus most of the other characters are fictional, but the story still feels impeccably true. A perfect book for anyone aged 9 to 90.

Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? by Liz Kessler

Jess doesn’t have the best attention span in the world, especially when it comes to geography class, but when she nods off in the middle of the lesson one afternoon, she never would have dreamt what happens next… According to her best friend Izzy, Jess’s arm starts to disappear. What? It can’t be true, can it?

Except it is. As Jess discovers her new secret power and figures out how to control it, she uncovers the sort of conspiracy you wouldn’t normally expect in a small town like hers. Like the fact that she’s not the only one who’s experiencing strange things, and her and her friends are not the only people who know about it either. What will happen if the wrong people get their hands on this secret? And on the special serum that’s made it all possible?

Liz Kessler has a particular talent for writing books not only with a vein of the supernatural running through them, but with veins of adventure, mystery, discovery, bravery and – arguably the most important thing of all – friendship. Easy going, friendly, fun and with a snarky touch of sarcasm to her sense of humour, Jess has always been a loyal friend, but she’s about to discover what true friendship really means, that the assumptions we make about people aren’t always true, and that when you get to know someone a bit better they can surprise you.

Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? Is fun, funny, and little bit different. With strong male and female characters, and a bunch of superpowers for the taking, don’t let boys be put off by the pink sneakers on the front cover. Plus it’s an adventure story that keeps you guessing, with something new around every corner. And I really like the quirky chapter headings – illustrated by Emily Twomey they bring together all the different things that will feature in each stage of the story and are just itching to be coloured in.

Jessica Jenkins might feel like the power of invisibility makes her ‘slightly superhero’, but maybe she’s always had what it takes to be a hero, superpower or no superpower…