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Life: An Exploded Diagram

3.65 of 5 stars 3.65 · rating details · 752 ratings · 233 reviews

Carnegie Medalist Mal Peet ignites an epic tale of young love against the dramatic backdrop of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Can love survive a lifetime? When working-class Clem Ackroyd falls for Frankie Mortimer, the gorgeous daughter of a wealthy local landowner, he has no hope that it can. After all, the world teeters on the brink of war, and bombs could rai...more

Hardcover, 416 pages

Published October 11th 2011 by Candlewick Press (first published June 2nd 2011)

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Mock Printz 2012

19th out of 51 books — 220 voters

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

Battle of the Kids' Books 2012

9th out of 22 books — 17 voters

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Jul 20, 2011 Jo rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: hometown-glories-uk, history-smishtory, e, hometown-ya

This book sounded fascinating and I thought the idea was interesting and innovative and something I have never read in a YA novel.
But then… eh.
I’ll start with the things I liked. As Clem told the story of his grandma, his mother and father and then himself, the narration was dripping with delightful colloquialisms, humorous anecdotes and was, all in all, quintessentially British. In these sections Clem was a great narrator, telling his story of growing up with hindsight and peppering it with nu...more

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Jan 18, 2012 Maree rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012-read, romance, thought-provoking, wishlist, favourites-2012, ya-historical-fiction, uk

Before I begin I must first quote Clem and ask you to “bear with me while I describe it. Or try to describe it. My hobbling and pigeon-toed prose can’t do it justice, I know that.”

Now, to the review:

Norfolk, 1962. It’s a hot summer during the Cold War.
Clem, a working-class boy from a council estate, and Frankie, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, are conducting a furtive and high-risk relationship.
Meanwhile, the world’s superpowers are moving towards nuclear confrontation.
With the Cuban Mi...more

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Apr 21, 2013 ❤Rosa❤ rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: wide-reading-logs-2013

I decided to read this book because my Mum had been bugging me to read it for about a million years. I was on holiday, I was bored and I desperately wanted something to read.
I had tried to open the book and begin to read a couple of times, but was always distracted or found I had something else to do. I thought for some strange reason this book would be boring (maybe it was the cover?) I was so, so wrong.
The category this book completes is "a book recommended by a member of your family." I am...more I decided to read this book because my Mum had been bugging me to read it for about a million years. I was on holiday, I was bored and I desperately wanted something to read.
I had tried to open the book and begin to read a couple of times, but was always distracted or found I had something else to do. I thought for some strange reason this book would be boring (maybe it was the cover?) I was so, so wrong.
The category this book completes is "a book recommended by a member of your family." I am so glad my mum recommended this book to me, because it is a historical novel but also a teenage coming of age story.
I.Love.Historical.Novels. I love them so much. If I could chose one type of book to read for the rest of the year, it would be historical fiction. Or perhaps I would read dystopian books (I have been reading a lot of these lately), but probably historical fiction. This one did not disappoint, and combined a time in history I knew barely anything about with a love story and a beautiful writing style that fitted the narrative perfectly. I didn't want to put it down, ever.
The category "a book recommended by a member of your family" was very interesting to me. It was great to get a recommendation by one of my parents, because it let me know the sort of books they enjoy. I thought I would be recommended some horrible, boring thing about, say, the economics of the world, when actually it turns out my mum reads pretty interesting books! And even better, the book was in one of my favourite genres!

The character I found most interesting was Clem, the narrator. I loved how he was so honest, and he was a typical teenager growing up. The story is twofold: on one level it is really about a teenager growing up and finding himself, but on another it is a historical account of a time and place – the Cold War, England, early Sixties. Clem is growing up in a time when the future looks bleak and people are constantly worrying about nuclear war. This leads to some interesting outcomes for Clem and his girlfriend Frankie who are both consequently in a hurry to experience all life has to offer before it is too late and the whole world is blown to smithereens!
The story really highlights the tensions of the Cold War but it also illustrates the way our world is always at war in one way or another and that tensions are always stirring. Clem’s whole family in this story have grown up in war: Clem’s Grandmother in the First World War, his mother and father in the Second, and Clem himself growing up in the Cold War. Today we live with the War on Terror and its consequences and interestingly this story ends dramatically with the attack on the Twin Towers - the beginning of this latest war. The story is broad and filled with fascinating historical and political detail and kept me turning the pages to the end.

My favourite quote from this book would be:
“Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.”
I love this quote for its brilliant use of language. The metaphor about the bloody teeth and the dentist is very vivid, and if you don’t like dentists and teeth gross you out, (like me), it really brings home the point and stays in your mind. The point being, that we often look at the past through very rose-tinted glasses, and on closer examination, the past is not always as pleasant or quaint as we thought it was.
I learnt a lot of history and a lot about the politics of the Cold War, (a part of history I have never really know much about at all), from this book. I loved how the politics were presented in a descriptive and engaging way in scenes in this book because of course it wasn’t boring.
I would definitely recommend this book!(less)

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Feb 05, 2012 Kristin rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: family, historical-fiction, humor, read-in-2012, reader-s-advisory, ya, ya-for-adults-club

Check this review out and others on my blog: Get Real.

This one started off interestingly enough but rapidly disintegrated during the second half in a trajectory not unlike the nuclear fallout feared by the characters in this book. Good historical fiction focuses on the human condition (whether universally or within the context of the time discussed), using a particular time or event as a backdrop (See Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt). Bad historical fiction reads like a surreal text book, dry and i...more Check this review out and others on my blog: Get Real.

This one started off interestingly enough but rapidly disintegrated during the second half in a trajectory not unlike the nuclear fallout feared by the characters in this book. Good historical fiction focuses on the human condition (whether universally or within the context of the time discussed), using a particular time or event as a backdrop (See Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt). Bad historical fiction reads like a surreal text book, dry and inaccurate. This book is among the latter. The tone alternated between glib, a desire to be seen as profound and also something akin to a shoulder shrug. Does near-obliteration merit an "Oh, well?"

The book started off as a pretty cool family history set between the latter days of World War II and the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a teen novel, the story actually started to fall off the rails just as you happened upon the teen in question.

Clem's family lives a pretty typical blue collar, lower-middle class kind of life in rural England. It's almost a bit too typical. He doesn't fit in at the school he attends on scholarship, the big evil rich guy who owns half the town is cramping his style, etc. I liked Clem actually, but his character wasn't developed enough. And when you come across his girlfriend (daughter of said big evil rich guy), it's hard to get a handle on her too. I liked her personality. She had guts and acted like a girl you wanted to know at school during that time. All the same though, I still didn't feel like I knew her. There also wasn't enough time spent on the relationship between these two characters. It was hard for me to understand why they were in love.

The flow of this story was mostly alright through the first half. It was third person omniscient, which was occasionally interrupted by present-day Clem's first-person voice. I didn't like that, but it didn't overly bother me. That became more pronounced later, and the story also was interspersed more and more with an annoying, semi-guessed-at summation of how the major players during the Cuban Missile Crisis went through the whole thing. It felt like some kind of snotty history lesson that wasn't actually history. It detracted from the story at hand, and I'm sorry, but the Cuban Missile Crisis was not the story at hand here.

The winding up of events during the present day might have been the worst thing about this book. It was all just too coincidental and too easy. And I didn't buy the connection the author wanted to make between the early events of this story and the concluding events.

This book had some chuckles occasionally, and I liked the pissy tone here and there. This just isn't a book that's going to stay with me.(less)

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Jan 25, 2013 Champaign Public Library rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: staff-recommends

An outstanding coming-of-age/retrospective story set in post WWII England and framed by the Cold War, specifically the Cuban Missile Crisis. The novel spans over 60 years and shows the myriad implications of war, though the main plot takes place in the early 1960s. Clem, the artistic and intelligent son of working-class parents falls for Frankie, the daughter of a wealthy landowner. Granted, this in itself is nothing that hasn’t been covered again and again, but this novel is so much more than s...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Grace rated it 4 of 5 stars

“Life: An Exploded Diagram” by Mal Peet is a well-written, educational novel about many different people and there lives. What I love about this book is how each person’s life goes along with different events in history. For example the books opens up with a Nazi plane flying so close to a house it causes Ruth to go into labor early and give birth to Clem. The book then describes Ruth’s life and how she met her husband George. We then get taken back even further to Ruth’s mother, Win’s life. We...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Ben Adams rated it 4 of 5 stars

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes a little bit of everything in a novel. Every chapter, it felt like I was reading a different book, going from a romance to an argument between world leaders to a description of just how crazy people can be when supposedly the end of the world is near. I think this book would appeal to a variety of audiences. Another interesting element of how the story progressed was how long, drawn out, and essential to the story rising action was. It got harder a...more

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Oct 15, 2012 Elizabeth added it

Shelves: the-waste-land

Breaking my Book Review Silence to say that I love this book, and also that it has made me sob a lot during the last 20 pages, making a change from making me laugh a lot for the greater part of the book.

I love this book for many ridiculous and possibly wrong reasons, thusly:

Mal Peet and I share the distinction of having our books Life: An Exploded Diagram and Code Name Verity named as the two Boston Globe - Horn Book Award Honor Books in the fiction category this year (the overall award winner...more

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Oct 12, 2012 Ernie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: young-adult-book

Mal Peet’s humorous narration is sharp in intent but always entertaining as he adopts the character of Clem, born in 1945, named after Clement Attlee, the Labour Party Prime Minister, after his mum was terrified into labour by a maniac Nazi flying a kamikaze mission against the nearby Norfolk air base. As Peet confesses later, in an author’s note, this memoir-like account is ‘reality through the twisted lens of fiction’.
Clem’s father, George was one of those lads from the nine thatched houses in...more Mal Peet’s humorous narration is sharp in intent but always entertaining as he adopts the character of Clem, born in 1945, named after Clement Attlee, the Labour Party Prime Minister, after his mum was terrified into labour by a maniac Nazi flying a kamikaze mission against the nearby Norfolk air base. As Peet confesses later, in an author’s note, this memoir-like account is ‘reality through the twisted lens of fiction’.
Clem’s father, George was one of those lads from the nine thatched houses in the village who, finding no work in 1932, joined the army engineers and survived Dunkirk, unlike his father in World War I who died in a French field in his ‘manure coloured uniform’. George returns as a complete surprise to his wife Ruth who is living with his flinty mother, Win in the same house in the traditional farming village. George works as a mechanic on the new farm machines that are transforming the landscape, gets a new council house and is appalled that Win assumes that she will also live there and even more appalled when Ruth cannot face preventing her.
Peet distances the narration by placing Clem in New York many years later. The details of the traditional farming life and the changes that came after the war, the flinty Norfolk accent and Win’s Norfolk peasant tough attitude give the narration authenticity and strength. Woven into the back stories of the parents and grandparents in chapters that vary, rather than alternate is Clem’s story. He takes the eleven plus exam in 1956 and to his and the family’s horror, he and his best friend Goz win scholarships to the ancient, stuffed shirt, tie and stupid cap Newgate College where they are guaranteed to ‘get some stick’ from both the college seniors Gestapo and the local boys from the estate. However, Peet as Clem declares, ‘I am not going to bang on about teen novel “My School Hell” and he succeeds, the key moment being provided by Goz, who responds to the seniors’ description of them as either maggots or worms with splendid, if over-optimistic repartee, ‘Piss off, you great poofter.’
The focus shifts into the wider world of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 with satirical comparison between the madness of the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) policies on nuclear warfare, his first love affair with sophisticated Frankie who will not die a virgin and Ruth’s conversion to the Brethren, ‘1950’s Taliban’ who shave their heads, put on their white gowns for the rapture of the end of the world and scandalise the town. This delicious blend of tragedy and farce produces a most enjoyable climax. However, the denouement taking the story of the lovers further into the future is, in Peet’s own words, ‘a little too neat’ for the ending of this unreliable memoir.
Recommendation: Use this very accessible and engaging black comedy in years 10 or 11 to contrast with other war fiction, biography or Peet’s own dramatic account of World War II Holland in his earlier novel ‘Tamar’ or as part of an author study. The sexual references, including occasional ‘phallicism’ are mediated with typical humour and the few coarse language usages as seen above, do not have any of the four lettered variety. I’d liaise with the history teachers and teach with this novel as the students study World War II and there would be a prize for those who find the occasional historical error. Wide reading links: historical fiction, love stories, satire, war stories, children in war, families, generations, choices, other countries, rural life, a question of gender, narrative forms.
(less)

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Oct 10, 2012 Trickey rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-adult-fiction

The front flap says this is Mal Peet's most ambitious project yet, and it's true, this book is ambitious. It covers over 100 years of history, attempts to clarify one of the more confusing experiences of the Cold War, mixes in some misplaced religious ecstasy, shoots us forward to the defining moment of this century so far, all the while focused on two kids who just want to have sex.

If you can stick with it, it's worth it. I get that this is classified as a young adult novel, but it's one of the...more

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Aug 24, 2012 Bryn rated it 3 of 5 stars

Where to begin on this little gem. Let's say it was a pacing problem. Or a "the blurb did not accurately reflect what most of this story focuses on" problem. So I liked the interweaving history and the large scale events interspersed with intimate personal moments. The two pieces were fantastically and richly weaved without feeling too contrived. Except that I felt the history sections went on forever and had the feel of a well written and engaging, but nevertheless still too educational, textbo...more

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Jun 25, 2012 Yvonne Powderly rated it 3 of 5 stars

Life : an exploded diagram
By Mal Peet

Forbidden love
Class barriers
Politics
War
Environmentalism
Some major explosions, both literal and not.

This book has them all. A story that spans generations set against a backdrop of war and global politics. It describes minute facets of the characters lives in intimate, colorful and satisfying detail. Clem came, a “wartime mishap,” whose birth was brought on by a German air raid over rural England is smart and has a gift for drawing. He attends school on schola...more

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Apr 19, 2012 Charlou Lunsford rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction, romance, ya

Sometimes it may feel like the events of the world are conspiring against you and in the case of Clem and Frankie, it may actually be true. If the relationship of Clem, poor working class, and Frankie, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, gets out, their world may explode. The rest of the world waits on the result of a standoff between Russia and the United States which could start a larger explosion. The transitions between the times of Clem's past are confusing at times and the story of impend...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Katie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recap:
- Several generations of loveless (or at least romance-less) marriages
- Star-crossed young lovers
- The Cuban Missile Crisis
- Our world on the brink of destruction
- A look at the role both politics and religion play in the end of the world
- Some pretty life-changing explosions

Review:
Oh, what to say about Life: An Exploded Diagram...
It has received all kinds of glowing reviews.
It bested Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls in the first round of the BOB.
Author Mal Peet excelled in revealing a very...more

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Mar 10, 2012 Afton Nelson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: young-adult

It had the kind of writing I loved to savor. The story was deep and layered and quietly explosive. Coupling a love story with the Cuban Missile Crisis was the sort of ballsy genius few could pull off. bringing together these opposites, forbidden young love and a potential world annihilation, seems thoroughly random. But then Peet beautifully, simply and astonishingly draws the parallels that, once revealed, are so obvious, you wonder how you never made the connection before.

To be frank, this sto...more

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Feb 23, 2012 Maggie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There are good story tellers, there are eloquent writers and sometimes there are those few who have the talent to deliver both. Mal Peet has the ability to grasp the most complex concepts and distil them into a form that is immediately understood but not dismissed. Peet’s turn of phrase and descriptive narrative is to be savoured and the unfolding story he tells is thought provoking and full of so many unexpected twists and turns that the reader is constantly wondering what is going to be around...more

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Feb 02, 2012 Kendra rated it 5 of 5 stars

I absolutely loved this book and was sad to be finished with it last night. The writing is really amazing, and I found myself rereading sections just to appreciate the words and ideas over again.

Although I loved it completely, it may not be for everyone. I think the main problem younger readers might have with this is the British dialect. The story begins during WW2 in an English village, and when the characters converse, it's with a heavy local dialect. I could almost always discern what they w...more

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Jan 13, 2012 Maree Kimberley rated it 5 of 5 stars

I absolutely loved this book. It's smart, funny, has great dialogue & I learnt stuff about history I never knew before. I had wondered before what the Cuban missile crisis in the early 60s was all about - now I know! Though I'm sure most of Peet's imagined conversations between the superpower leaders & their staff were highly inaccurate, they were also highly entertaining.

Everything about this book was pitch perfect - the characters, setting, dialogue, descriptions, I loved it all. It ma...more

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Dec 27, 2011 Courtney Johnston rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: big-ideas-made-accessible, fiction, history, own

Our small, intimate, precisely-known and closely-bounded lives play out against the massive sweep of history - that filtering of the everyday that pulls some events and personalities into a narrative that gets passed onwards.

Every so often, we feel our little lives play out against, intersect with, even shape, that narrative. We might be involved in the events; we may even be those personalities. Sometimes, we suddenly notice history happening: we can't rip our eyes away from the tv screen as a...more Our small, intimate, precisely-known and closely-bounded lives play out against the massive sweep of history - that filtering of the everyday that pulls some events and personalities into a narrative that gets passed onwards.

Every so often, we feel our little lives play out against, intersect with, even shape, that narrative. We might be involved in the events; we may even be those personalities. Sometimes, we suddenly notice history happening: we can't rip our eyes away from the tv screen as a man jog-steps a little awkwardly and places a booted foot on the Moon, or as toy-like figures seem to float down from a burning tower. And every so often, we notice the momentous events in our own lives playing out against the momentous events of the world.

It was like this when I met my husband. We came together over a tumultuous, unexpected, poorly planned few weeks which overlapped with the March-April 2003 invasion of Iraq. I can remember looking at the papers at the time and thinking 'One day, this will be history, but what I'm going to remember is what's happening right now, right here, to me. That's so deep.' [I was 23 at the time, you'll have to forgive me.]

Mal Peet captures exactly this feeling of the miniature and the massive intersecting. In 'Life: An Exploded Diagram' Clem and Frankie experience the throes of first love against the backdrop of the great who'll-blink-first moment of the Cuban missile crisis: the teenagers race towards sex as the Russians and the Americans race towards war.

Peet's story has all sorts of cliches. Clem is a working class boy, Frankie (Francoise) is the only daughter of the wealthy land-owners who employ Clem's father. There are nasty boarding schools, a wizened granny, Nazis, and the familiar ingredients of the family saga novel: three generations, two wars, one hundred years of changing social expectations and sexual mores.

To explain how Peet takes this material and fashions it into something utterly fresh, something that just wraps you up and drags you along, is to risk taking the charm and tension and humour out of the book. Though it deals with undeniably YA material (a forbidden relationship, the terrors of losing your virginity, high school misery, unseeing and distant parents) Peet innovates wildly.

First, there's the voice: we switch numerous times between the viewpoints of an omniscient narrator, teenaged Clem, teenaged Frankie, and present day Clem, aged somewhere towards his 60s. One of the most playful and true-to-life displays of this switching is as we moved between blue-balled Clem, desperately desirous and desperately unsure, and Frankie, who has been educated by one of her friends into how to drive boys wild by making them think they're making bold and seductive progress when really they're being slowly lead through a series of strategically dropped barriers.

Then there's the insight into the adult generations. As Clem and Frankie bathe in hormones, we learn how his grandmother Win sought to pass her distrust of men and loathing of sex on to her daughter, Ruth, and achieved some success: despite George and Ruth's wartime passion (a brief interlude that resulted in Clem), their marriage is mutually, but silently, sexless. We track George as he tries to make something of himself, without getting Above Himself (a cardinal sin in their tiny Norfolk village). We watch as the little Christian sect Win has joined (after the Methodists proved themselves too frivolous for her) prepares for the end of days. Usually, adults in YA books are handy plot-props: here, any one character could have been the lead figure.

Finally, there's the great trump card. Just when this could be any other, very well told, saga, Peet pulls out into a vertiginously wide-angle view, and drops us into JFK's war room as the Hawks and the Doves counsel and bully him over the Russian arms build-up in Cuba. It sounds implausible - how do you bind that in here? - but perhaps that's because a person of my generation can have no idea of what the Cold War was actually like; a very real sense that the world might very well end, and that the advice to take shelter under a desk and cover any bare skin by pulling your jersey over your face and hiding your hands between your thighs is probably going to be useless. The potential end of the world (and a side-helping of Andrew Marvell's To his Coy Mistress) give Clem and Frankie every reason to break all the rules and Go All The Way.

As affecting as Clem and Frankie's story is, it's actually Peet's retelling of the days in October 1962 when JFK and Khrushchev drew close to a third world war that gripped me. It's not a period of history that I know much about at all, and Peet's description of the events is marvellous. He draws the figures cleanly and quickly and powerfully - JFK is getting by on a cocktail of drugs, plagued by wind, sex-mad, loathed and taunted by his military advisors; Khrushchev might come across at first as a peasant-fool, but is "as hard as a drill-bit and as cunning as a lavatory rat". He walks us through the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the "mathematics of annihilation": how much more powerful they had become between 1945 and 1962. He interweaves conversations recorded in JFK's war room with his narrative, making you blood-chillingly aware of how much this moment hinged on a bunch of men who neither liked nor trusted each other arguing their way to some kind of sane agreement (and that was just on the American side).

Like one of my other most favourite YA-but-not books, David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Peet's story is at least semi-autobiographical, without ever seeming to be so, and reminds me how we're all part of history, even if we don't make it into the textbooks. Highly recommended.(less)

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Nov 25, 2011 LH Johnson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: perfect, young-adult

Life : an Exploded Diagram is transcendent. It is beyond. It is a book that should not be shelved under YA fiction, it is not a book that should be read solely by one demographic. In a very quiet way, this book is one of the best I've read this year.

But it's not easy. It is reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited and Flambards and When the Wind Blows, with a plot that sprawls cinematically through a good few years, countries and perspectives and because of that self-aware scope, it's not easy to ge...more

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Oct 29, 2011 Bridget rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

I liked Tamar by the same author well enough, but Life: An Exploded Diagram read like a very bad The Book Thief. It's too bad, because the premise - young love during the Cuban Missile Crisis - is quite good. But I didn't care about any of the characters. They were oddly drawn and underdeveloped and did not inspire sympathy. The story was dull and cloudy and muted, like I was trying to read it underwater.

Plus, I am so tired of books (YA ones, especially) reaching outside of their purview to incl...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Alexandra Logan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Firstly, the reason I chose this book wasn't the reason I thought it was... twice. I had misread the cover thinking that the author was Anthony McGowan (there is a review quote by McGowan on the cover of my edition). So I chose it thinking that it was written by McGowan. I thought that I had read another book by McGowan which I had quite enjoyed. Turns out that "the other book by McGowan" was actually by Andrew McGahan (Wonders of a Godless World). So my reasons for choosing this book were doubl...more

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Aug 20, 2011 Caren rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ya

Although the author doesn't overtly say that this novel is at least semi-autobiographical, he alludes to that fact in his 'Author's Note' at the end of the book. This coming of age story follows Clem Ackroyd's life from the way in which his parents met during World War II, his childhood and youth in Norfolk, England after the war, his teen years during the Cuban missile crisis, up to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. It is , then, a Boomer's life, albeit...more

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Jul 20, 2011 Clare rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, philosophical-fiction, war

First of all I love the cover for some reason that escapes me. The blurb made me laugh (it actually reminded me of Tempocalypse from Black Books: that book about the 29yo temp who can't get a boyfriend ('oh, God') and has twelve hours to stop nuclear war with China). I thought it was most likely going to have a bit of snark to it, and I wasn't wrong.

I really enjoyed the book. It's got a strange structure. It requires the reader to be able to fit it all together. I imagine if you put it down for...more

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Sep 18, 2012 Randy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sept12, realistic-fiction, historical-fiction

This is a story of a young man and his coming of age in the post war period in a working class community in England. Clem's father was at war when he was born, and that distance never seems to disappear even when his father comes home expecting more than their small community is willing to offer. Growing up in this closed environment, Clem's natural gifts help him to get out of the working class mindset, and on the road to a higher education. His world is shaken when he meets and falls in love w...more

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Aug 31, 2012 Melbourne on my mind rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, young-adult

Plot summary: Clem Ackroyd was born in the dying stages of World War II, and grows up living in Norfolk with his parents and grandmother. At the age of seventeen, Clem meets Frankie, the daughter of a rich farmer, and his life becomes full of love and pain. Set against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile crisis, Clem and Frankie's relationship will involve more explosions than either of them expected.

Thoughts: Look, it's beautifully written. Peet really knows how to craft a sentence. But I'm hone...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: ya, war, historical-fiction, adult-fiction

Clem, a working-class boy, and Frankie, the daughter of an aristocrat family, step outside the boundaries of the English class system and the expectations of their conservative society to pursue love in a world that is seemingly set to be consumed by nuclear war.

The arc that is taken to reach this narrative is long, beginning first in the final days of WWII with several detours which explore the early lives of Clem’s parents and grandparents; considerable attention is also devoted to explore th...more

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Jul 23, 2012 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult, ya, life, not-graphic, historical

Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

At first we're not quite sure what this book is about or where it's going, but we know we're being taken there by an engaging storyteller and masterful writer. It skips about in chronology, voice, and even scale, but we're not put off because each piece of the puzzle interests and entertains, and a focus begins to emerge. By the book's second half, we have...more

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May 06, 2012 Victoria Whipple rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction, romance, world-cultures

I decided to read this book after seeing it go several rounds in SLJ's Battle of the Kids Books. Judging from the other books in the running, I thought it would be more of a "kids" book, but this one is definitely YA...and I'd say older YA at that. Still, and excellent book, just out of my usual age range. The reader meets Clem Akroyd as a baby, as well as learning the circumstances of his conception, birth and family history. Clem was born towards the end of WWII, which has him coming of age in...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Fay rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: romance, historical-fiction, long-winded, disappointment

I wanted to like this - the blurb made the book seem amazing. The harsh reality - it wasn't. The main, and possibly only, reason for this was because it was so long-winded and so much written in the story was irrelevant. The reader doesn't need to know about the whole lives of Clem's ancestors in so much detail. The first 150 pages could have been completely scrapped, and it was 100 more pages until the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis was even mentioned. Part 1 includes the background story. T...more

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About Mal Peet

Mal Peet grew up in North Norfolk, and studied English and American Studies at the University of Warwick. Later he moved to southwest England and worked at a variety of jobs before turning full-time to writing and illustrating in the early 1990s. With his wife, Elspeth Graham, he has written and illustrated many educational picture books for young children, and his cartoons have appeared in a numb...more

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Quotes from Life: An Exploded Diagram

“History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.” — 4 people liked it

“Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.” — 2 people liked it

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Life: An Exploded Diagram

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