Tag Archives: do like

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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Life after Life cover imageLife After Life by Kate Atkinson, Random House NZ, RRP $36.99, ISBN 9780385618687, Available now.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

11 February 1910, a baby girl is born dead with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, the doctor stuck in snow.

11 February 1910, a baby girl is born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, the doctor has made it through the snow to ensure she breaths her first. And so we meet Ursula (“little bear”), whose life after life we will follow. Ursula is a soul afloat in life, beholden to the dangers of one small choice, one small change that can spell her end. She is born dead, she drowns, she falls out a window, she gets influenza – there are a myriad ways to die but each time she does it’s 11 February 1910 again and it’s snowing.

Oh, how I loved this book! At first thought the premise didn’t seem like one I would enjoy but Kate Atkinson handles it so incredibly deftly that I found myself completely drawn in to Ursula’s lives, shocked each time she died, waiting to see how she would get through the next life, the choice she would make that would see her navigate the danger.

Atkinson is also a master of characters, hers are so beautifully drawn. She makes sure her characters are human, likeable, dislikeable and capable of so many emotions.

“To war? You are going to war?” she had shouted at him when he enlisted and it struck her that she had never shouted at him before. Perhaps she should have.

If there was to be a war, Hugh explained to her, he didn’t want to look back and know that he had missed it, that others had stepped forward for their country’s honour and he had not. “It may be the only adventure I ever have,” he said.

“Adventure?” she echoed in disbelief. “What about your children, what about your wife?”

“But it’s for you that I am doing this,” he said, looking exquisitely pained, a misunderstood Theseus. Sylvie disliked him intensely in that moment.

There’s also a generous amount of humour throughout Life After Life. Ursula struggles through the Influenza epidemic following WW1, dying several times before she finally finds a way to avoid contagion, and it becomes almost slapstick.

Darkness, and so on.

Then Atkinson hits you between the eyes with a moment so touching, so human you just thinking about weeping.

“We cannot turn away,” Miss Woolf told her, “we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.” What did that mean, Ursula wondered. “It means,” Miss Woolf said, “that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.”

“And if we are killed?”

“Then others must remember us.”

Such a tour de force.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Never Let Me Go cover imageOh, oh Kazuo. Other than being a great line in a musical about Booker Prize winners, this is what goes through my head when I read Ishiguro. I know I go on about him, but he’s just SO DAMN GOOD.

Never Let Me Go is literature with a dystopic/sci-fi bent, emotional torture told in the calmest voice you’ve heard. Our narrator, Kathy, is a carer. She cares for her fellow donors – people cloned and raised to be a source of life-extending medical procedures. (Yes, that was a spoiler. This book was released in 2005, if you haven’t read it by now I don’t have the least bit of sympathy for you.) Kathy takes us through her life as a young “student” at Hailsham, where donors are brought up as if they are attending a privileged boarding school, as if they are “normal” children, as if they have souls and as if they have a life ahead of them that doesn’t involve enduring medical procedures until they “complete”.

Never Let Me Go is the kind of book that forces the use of a lot of quote marks. To complete is to die. The reality Kathy and her friends variously face, and don’t face, is that, in the end, they are nothing more than artificially created organ storage, no matter that they have brains and feelings and possibly even souls.

Don’t be fooled, however. This isn’t your typical futureshock warning tale. Ishiguro asks the question “What if?” and then answers it in his quietly devastating style. He takes us on a journey with Kathy, and her closest companions Ruth and Tommy, and then he leaves us broken at the end of it. The rest of humanity is playing God in this world and maybe Ishiguro is showing us why God lets bad things happen to good people. Humans made up the idea of having a soul, after all, not God.

I’m always worried about recommending Ishiguro because I’m so protective of the books. I worship him and don’t want to hear otherwise.

On an unrelated but somehow strongly related note:

BookieMonster’s Picks of 2012

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2012, we hardly knew ye. As the year draws to a close, I confess I’m looking forward rather than backward. 2012 is a year I’m more than happy to consign to history.

2013, you will be mine!

However, it seems obligatory to do some sort of year wrap-up, so here’s a few of my favourite things (apart from whiskers on kittens):

My Favourite New Books of 2012

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Bloody brilliant. Mantel is SUCH a good writer particularly with voices and small details. She doesn’t drown you in historical guff, she just adds flavour here and there so you BELIEVE.

Mansfield with monsters cover

Mansfield with Monsters by Katherine Mansfield, Debbie and Matt Cowens

I’ve told everyone I can that Steampress are the kiwi publishers to watch now. They’re putting out fiction that is better and more original than anything the big boys are doing. Mansfield with Monsters was a perfectly done literary mash-up. One did not know where Mansfield ended and Monsters began, and one loved it.

The Dinosaur That Pooped Christmas by Tom Fletcher and Dougie Poynter

I mean, really.

The Dinosaur That Pooped Christmas cover

The Prince of Soul and the Lighthouse by Fredrik Brouneus

Steampress again, those sneaks. This title was up there with the best in YA fiction, one that I hope gets a wider audience this year because it was SO GOOD.

Best New New Zealand Publishers

Clearly, the aforementioned Steampress. But also Book Island, a lovely little Kapiti Coast publisher bringing gorgeous European children’s books to NZ (in english translation). In both cases it’s wonderful to see innovative and creative people taking a punt and doing it so well. Publishing is not easy work, so please do support them when you can.

Most Fun Review to Write

Well, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, of course. I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

So, there’s a few thoughts from yours truly. Of course I’d like to hear your thoughts too – comment away! Or go outside and enjoy the sunshine, your choice. :D

Book Review: Sammy and the Skyscraper Sandwich by Lorraine Francis and Pieter Gaudesaboos

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Sammy and the Skyscraper Sandwich cover

Sammy and the Skyscraper Sandwich by Lorraine Francis and Pieter Gaudesaboo, Book Island, RRP $24.99, ISBN9780987669605, Available now.

Sammy is very hungry. So hungry, he could eat the biggest sandwich in the world. So he goes to the kitchen and gets to work!

Sammy and the Skyscraper Sandwich is one of a trio of gorgeous new books from Book Island, a new publisher bringing European children’s books to New Zealand (in English translations).

The format of Sammy is a large board book, so it’s perfect for reading aloud and perfect for little kids to spend time looking over – the illustrations are large and colourful, and full of lively detail that will catch the eye. The story is very cute and the perfect length for little kids.

All this is just accentuated by the excellent production values. The book is substantial, bright and glossy.

A beautiful gift and a fantastic addition to kids’ books in New Zealand.

Book Review: The Dinosaur That Pooped Christmas by Tom Fletcher and Dougie Poynter

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The Dinosaur That Pooped Christmas cover

The Dinosaur That Pooped Christmas by Tom Fletcher and Dougie Poynter, Random House, RRP $18.99, ISBN9781849417792, Available now.

Never has a book had a more descriptive title. Fletcher and Poynter do not muck around, so if you don’t want to read about dinosaur poo combined with Christmas, do not read this book.

If, on the other hand, you have the sense of humour of a five year old or you ARE a five year old, you will laugh like a drain.

Personally I think the word “poo” is one of the best in the English language, funny to read, funny to say and about a funny subject.

Danny is a little boy who wants everything for Christmas, even though he’s got quite a lot already. So instead of leaving him another present, Santa Claus leaves him an egg. An egg that hatches into a very hungry dinosaur. A dinosaur who, as it turns out, has a very fast and efficient digestive system…

Last, but not least, and never forgotten

Granny popped out of the dinosaur’s bottom.

The Dinosaur That Pooped Christmas is brilliant, hilariously written, perfect for reading out loud (with a similar cadence to The Night Before Christmas) and it has vibrantly large illustrations. I suspect little children everywhere will want this one read to them every night for months.

Book Review: Jade’s Summer of Horses by Amy Brown

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Jade's Summer of HorsesJade’s Summer of Horses by Amy Brown, Harper Collins,  RRP $19.99, ISBN 9781869509224, Available now.

The pony books I read as an impressionable youth starred rich girls in a parallel universe of jodhpurs and gymkhanas. Jade’s Summer of Horses is still a fantasy, but a much more relatable one. (The exception to the problem of unrelatable pony stories is The Pony Problem, a classic I must have read ten times.)

Both the setting of Jade’s Summer of Horses – small-town New Zealand – and the characters – Jade’s single-parent dad, a very prickly aunt, and a pretty-much homeless neighbour – are different to what I remember in horse books. The plot’s a little different too: Jade has to sell her lovely old horse, Pip. Luckily, she finds the perfect buyer in her friend’s very prickly aunt, who happens to own a riding school, and would love to have Jade and her friend stay for a Summer of Horses. Jade makes friends with the aunt, the horses, and the next door neighbour who lives in a shipping crate and brings about the book’s – spoiler – happy ending.

There’s an awful lot about horses in this book. Jade goes riding around the paddock, in the sea, along the beach, and in the forest. It sounds rather exhausting, but she seems to enjoy it, as presumably, does our young reader. There’s instructions in the back of the book on How to Mount and Hold the Reins, which rather suggests that the audience isn’t the type of child who takes riding lessons, but the type of child who would very much like to.

It’s easy to dismiss horse books as nonsense written for girls, but Jade’s Summer of Horses takes care to introduce a variety of characters, in between loving descriptions of horse riding. Brown doesn’t speak down to the reader: there are lovely long words scattered about, and the more interesting characters are described perfectly matter-of-factly.

I especially enjoyed the loving descriptions of the food. In true Famous Five fashion, the characters eat regularly, and with great gusto. There’s pipis, fish pie, pancakes, toasted marshmellows, and “steaming hot, aromatic bread, on which the butter melted deliciously.” It’s great that the book is set locally – it’s always nice to see the place we live reflected, and especially as the beach is far more accessible than Platform 9 and 3/4s.

The only thing better than a good horse book is a series of good horse books. This is the 4th book in the Pony Tales series, all of which star Jade.

All in all, Jade’s Summer of Horses is a very solid pony book. Highly recommended for the pony-crazed young reader in your life.