Reading things: some book recommendations
One of the great joys of waving goodbye to my old life and setting out on a great adventure in a camper van has been that I’ve had lots of time to read. This seemingly small thing has been extraordinarily exciting, like falling in love over and over, with something of the intensity and wild joy books inspired in me when I was a child. I can’t list every wonderful book I’ve read over the past couple of years but here are a few I’ve read and loved recently.
I bought Nigel McDowell’s first book, Tall Tales from Pitch End, because I loved the title and the cover. Then I read it and loved it even more – an isolated rural micro-tyranny, a mysterious book of folk tales that may in fact be a history of Pitch End, a rebellious and dogged young hero, sinister clockwork cats… It’s a glorious feast of invention that, like all the best fantasy, asks big questions that resonate in our real world.
I preordered The Black North long before its release earlier this month and started reading as soon as it arrived. Like Tall Tales from Pitch End, it has a wonderfully evocative cover and page after page of McDowell magic within. Where Tall Tales from Pitch End is set in a tiny, cut-off corner of the world, The Black North is a perilous journey into an unknown full of terrors and wonders as Oona and her shapeshifting jackdaw companion Merrigutt search for Oona’s stolen brother. Here you’ll find bog-soldiers, Briar-Witches, a sinister creeping blight, Ponderous Giants, and a magical stone ‘the size of a plum, and not far off the same colour’. Oona is as fierce, bold, stubborn, resourceful and loyal as you could wish for in a heroine and at the end… let’s just say that I wanted to go with her.
Nigel McDowell is one of the most exciting and original YA fantasy authors around. Strongly recommended for readers aged 10 to 110.
Another, very different MG/YA novel that I’ve read and loved recently is Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery by Robin Stevens. This is a super book – a proper old-fashioned murder mystery (and by ‘old-fashioned’, I don’t mean in a fuddy-duddy way but in its commitment to great storytelling). Set in a boarding school in 1934, 13 year olds Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong – the founders and only members of the Wells and Wong Detective Society – set out to discover who murdered Miss Bell in the gym. They soon find themselves caught up in a web of secrets, intrigues and denials. Funny, pacy, charming, packed with boarding school lore, this is a clever, twisty and delightful start to the Wells and Wong Mystery series. I read it on a hot, crowded train and was mercifully transported to the 1930s world of Deepdean for the duration of my journey – so much so that I nearly missed my stop.
Finally – Janni Howker. Janni Howker! Somehow until a couple of weeks ago, I’d never heard of her or read any of her books. I’m not sure how this oversight happened but there it is. Then Gordon Askew mentioned her book The Nature of the Beast in his very generous review of Bone Jack on his blog Magic Fiction Since Potter. And so I read The Nature of the Beast, then I read Martin Farrell, and now I’m reading Badger on the Barge and Other Stories. Bleakly beautiful, raw, local yet with a universality and timelessness that comes from their intense humanity and the folklore that runs through them like a river – just go read them, if you haven’t already.
