Book Review Saturday – ‘The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August’

This strange, remarkable book is written by a ‘debut’ author (or, at least, it’s the first book to be written under the name ‘Claire North’), but the mind behind The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is a writing veteran. She has written under the name Kate Griffin, but I first encountered her as the extraordinary children’s author Catherine Webb. Harry August is far from being a children’s novel, though; it is a science-fictiony, literary fictiony, philosophical ramble through the history of the twentieth century, told through the lens of one man’s unusual, and well-lived, life.

Image: harryaugust.net

Harry August is an ouroboran, or a kalachakra, a person who is reborn every time they die. Not reborn as someone else, however – as themselves. Every time Harry dies, he is reborn in 1919, just as he was the first time, and he lives as the same person, born to the same parents, in the same place, with the same family. The only difference is: he remembers being here before, and he knows he is not ‘normal’. His first life proceeds in the standard fashion, but in his second life he kills himself before he is ten, convinced he is insane – but this is a common problem with kalachakrans. As soon as he is born again, his memories of his first two lives intact, Harry begins to realise what is happening – and so begins his tale. Harry’s memory, it turns out, is unusual; he’s also a ‘mnemonic’, or a person with perfect recall of all their lives. Not all ouroborans are like this: most of them start to forget things after a few lives have passed, but not Harry. This, of course, makes him both powerful and vulnerable as the book goes on.

The most interesting thing about Harry’s lives is that even though they all begin the same way, and they all have similar aspects (he usually dies of the same disease, if he lives long enough; he is not really a fan of marriage, taking only one wife he truly loves in all his lives, though he does marry once more for convenience and another time out of respectful affection; he makes a lot of money through gambling, as he knows who will win every major race in every major sporting event), everything else about them is different. He meets different people, goes to different places, takes up different professions. This is a time travel novel, in many respects, and it deals with the complexities and paradoxes of the genre (the dangers of messing with the future, primarily), but somehow it is different, too. We’re not explicitly told what happens to the ‘worlds’ or timelines Harry lives in every time he ‘dies’; when he is reborn, does his previous life snuff out of existence, like someone has pressed Reset, for everyone but Harry himself? Does it continue in an alternate universe? We never really know, and truthfully it’s not really that important. I loved the concept behind the book, that of living one’s life over and over (it also turns up in a classic SF novel from the 1980s, Replay by Ken Grimwood), but it’s the setting, and the dialogue, and the espionage, and the thoroughness with which every possible imaginable consequence of this sort of existence is explored, which sets this book apart. Also, the research, and the lightness of touch which means we move effortlessly from 1930s England to 1950s China to a research base in the wastes of Siberia, and it all seems real enough to leap off the page.

It’s hard to give an idea of the story, because – being honest – I’m not entirely clear on all Harry’s ‘timelines.’ I can only imagine the size of the crib-sheets the author must have had to prepare in order to keep all the versions of Harry straight as she wrote this book. I can’t remember in which life he first meets his friend and nemesis, Victor. I can’t remember which life he’s in when he meets Virginia, the woman who is part of the Cronus Club, which is an organisation of fellow ouroborans designed to take care of and nurture those who are new to the lifestyle and who, understandably, find it a little overwhelming. Harry is far from being the only ouroboran in existence, but they keep themselves to themselves, amassing great wealth and leaving it in trust for future generations. They are able to pass messages up and down the timeline, though these can take generations to reach their destination, and it is in Harry’s eleventh life, when he is on his deathbed again, that a seven-year-old ouroboran girl comes into his hospital room and tells him a message which has been passed down through the lifetimes from a thousand years in the future: the world is ending. Not only that, but it’s starting to get closer and closer. Ouroborans are being hunted, wiped out by forces unknown either by being forced to forget their past lives or by being murdered in utero, and the clock is ticking.

So, in Harry’s next life, he determines to get to the bottom of this mystery, while also evading capture and destruction.

There’s a lot of interiority in this book; we spend most of its 400 pages inside Harry’s mind. I love reading dialogue, and there’s not a lot of it in this book, by my standards, and what there is seems a little formal and ‘samey’; it can be hard to tell who is speaking, for instance, during Harry and Victor’s discussions about philosophy, science, and the nature of reality. This, though, is because they are both academics at Cambridge in the 1940s, and it’s true to this setting and era. The relationship between Harry and Victor is the most significant one in the novel, and I loved how it was managed; in lifetime after lifetime, they meet and influence one another in so many different ways, until one betrays the other. But it is this very act of betrayal which might be the key to solving everything.

This book was no easy read. It is not action-packed, and it is somewhat slow in places, but when a novel is dealing with such huge concepts, this is no surprise. I was left floored by North’s imagination and technical ability, but I’ve read some of the books she wrote under another name, which were written while she was still in her teens, and they showed exactly the same precision of language and depth of imagery as this book does. Learning that Catherine Webb and Claire North were one and the same came as no surprise to me; I could see the same skills she displayed in her earlier work coming to the fore again here, and it was a very pleasing thing. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that Claire North isn’t an ouroboran herself; it seems unlikely, to me, that one young woman (not yet thirty, I believe) could be so accomplished, had she not had centuries of living already behind her.

Hmm. Something to ponder…

Book Review Saturday – ‘A Wrinkle in Time’

Okay, so. Yes, I’m aware this book is now over fifty years old. I’m aware that, probably, everyone in the world has read it. I’m aware it’s a deserved classic.

Image: en.wikipedia.org

I’m aware – you may not be aware of this, though – that I own no fewer than three different editions of this book, such is the overwhelming love I have for it.

So, the question you’re no doubt asking is: Why, o Why, are you doing a review of this book today?

Well, this is the reason.

I learned during the week that this book has been turned into a graphic novel – an award-winning graphic novel, at that – and my book antennae immediately twinged into action. Another volume to track down and add to my collection (or assimilate into my book-Borg, if you like), and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since. So, this week it is on the review hotseat, for which I make no apologies. I’d like to think that someone, somewhere – perhaps even a reader of this very blog! – has never come across this book, and maybe my words will convince them of their folly.

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ tells the story of Meg Murry, a girl who is the child of gifted scientists but who feels, in her own heart, that she is inadequate. She is the oldest in her family, and the only girl – her twin brothers (Sandy and Dennys) are athletic and confident and her adored ‘baby’ brother (Charles Wallace) is supremely gifted, but appears ‘weird’ to the rest of the world because he speaks in full sentences, like an adult. Meg, however, knows that he can read her mind, and they have a deep and inexplicable connection – and, also, the most moving and believable love I’ve ever read between siblings, which becomes the driving narrative in the novel. One ‘dark and stormy night’ (the clichéd opening line is deliberate) Meg discovers Charles Wallace having milk and bread-and-jam with Mrs Whatsit, a strange old lady who is, she says, their new neighbour. In the course of conversation, she says: There is such a thing as a tesseract.

Mrs. Murry, the children’s mother, immediately starts to worry. Her husband has disappeared as the story opens, and the last thing he was working on before he vanished was – the tesseract. A complex scientific/mathematical concept (and one I fully admit I didn’t understand at all as a child reader, not that it mattered in the slightest), the tesseract is used in this book to mean something which allowed people to move through space and time, much as one can fold several layers of cloth over one another and pass a needle through them all simultaneously. Mr. Murry was employed by the government to do research into the tesseract, and has not been seen since.

Meg, Charles Wallace and Meg’s schoolfriend Calvin O’Keefe then set off on a quest to find Meg’s father. They enlist the help of Mrs Whatsit, and her two mysterious ‘friends’, Mrs Who and Mrs Which. In the course of their quest they are transported to other planets (including the home planet of the three ‘Mrs W’s’, where they meet them in their natural shape, and not the human forms they take while on earth), and they are shown a huge, universe-devouring blackness, which is threatening the future of the earth and all the other worlds.

They end up on Camazotz, a planet which has many earthlike features, but which has fallen completely under the power of this nihilistic darkness, and is ruled by a gigantic disembodied brain known as IT. This brain pulses to a particular beat, and the entire planet operates to this same beat – people’s footsteps, the rhythm with which children throw balls during playtime, the opening and closing of doors – and, as a child, the concept terrified me. It’s a clever way of using the ‘unheimlich’ – that which is familiar, and yet unfamiliar, and hence terrifying – to excellent effect. Mr Murry is being held captive on this planet, and Charles Wallace – due to his brilliance, and his telepathic abilities – is able to find him, but by doing so he puts himself at enormous risk. Mr Murry tries to tesser away from the planet with Meg, Calvin and Charles Wallace – but Charles Wallace gets left behind. The only person who can go back to save him is Meg, because she has the one thing IT does not have, the one weapon which can overpower it and reclaim her brother, and so she sets off alone to bring him home.

Image: garrettsbookblog.wordpress.com

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ fascinated me as a child. I loved the familial connections, the bravery of Calvin O’Keefe, the complex portrayal of Meg’s parents, particularly her father – it was the first time I’d ever read about a parent who ‘fails’, and who doesn’t know the answers to everything – and, of course, I loved Meg herself, a girl who puts her brother above everything else. I loved the three Mrs Ws, and their clear, easy ways of explaining huge concepts, and the horror of the world-ending nothingness that threatened the existence of the universe was extremely real, to me. That concept has also been used in ‘The Never-Ending Story,’ of course, but I think it’s even more emotive in this story than in that other towering classic of children’s literature.

Madeleine l’Engle went on to write four other books in this same fictive universe, featuring the Murry and O’Keefe families, and I have also read those – but, sadly, not with the same pure and unsullied love as I have for ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ The later books grow a little too obsessed with religion and morality – there are tones of this in ‘Wrinkle’, too, but they are so quietly present that they’re hard to spot – and I found the sequels overly preachy and not at all in the same league as the earlier book. However, ‘Wrinkle’ stands alone as a prime example of everything that is brilliant in literature, let alone children’s literature, and should be read by all people, everywhere.

It’s just that good.

If you haven’t read it, sort it out. If you have, re-read it. I know I’m about to.

Friday Flash

Well, golly.

Today’s a whirlwind of activity for me – you may or may not have noticed that I’m, oh, three hours late with the blog post, so if you’ve been inconvenienced let me heartily apologise – and I must dash now, too. The wind is howling outside, I feel like I’m wearing ice-block socks and I am in dire (dire!) need of a cup of coffee.

So, without further ado, I present today’s Flash! Friday entry. This week, contestants were asked to include a telephone call as part of the story, and the prompt image follows (apologies for the poor quality – but you can always visit Flash! Friday’s blog if you’d like to see it more clearly. Nudge nudge, wink wink, why don’t you enter a story this week? Anyway):

Image: zazzle.com

Overdue Justice

‘Jen? Pete. Look, uh –‘

‘Pete? It’s four a.m.! Couldn’t this have waited?’

‘Nah. Listen. Jen, I found our boy.’

‘You what?’

‘Chrissakes, Jen! Arlon! I swear it’s him.’

‘I’m – I can’t be hearing this. Arlon? The chronofugitive? The murderer?’

‘Nothin’ wrong with this telephone line. Arlon Nash, big as life.’

‘But – when? He’s been in the vortex so long –‘

‘Got careless, I guess. All I know is, I’m lookin’ at an image, 1920, 21, and it’s him. Laughin’, standin’ near a car wreck. Jen, he’s smirkin’ like he knows somethin’ we don’t.’

‘Pete. Listen, I’m coming over.’

‘God. If we found him, after all these years?’

‘Don’t get your hopes up. And don’t Slip without me, okay?’

‘Sure thing.’

Pete hung up and stepped straight into the Slip, leaving the photograph on his screen.

Jen arrived within minutes. The first thing she saw was Pete’s broken face behind the wheel of the car. Arlon was long, long gone.

**

I really enjoyed writing this story; I loved the apparent mismatch between the prompt image and the prompt element of the telephone call. However, one thing that writing this story taught me is this: titles are important. I apologise for the title of this one. I went through several options, including ‘Timehunters’, ‘Chronokiller’ and ‘Justice, Overdue,’ and – in a fit of desperation – settled on the one you see above. It’s not great, I know. But it’s what you got. Sometimes life is cruel like that.

Happy reading, and happy writing! Why don’t you get involved in a writing challenge, enter a competition, or even just create something that only you will see? It’s the best way I know to put those grey cells to work. Speed-the-pen.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

 

 

Some Friday Flash

It’s Friday.

Thank goodness. I feel like this:

Image: bighugeminds.com

Perhaps it’s a consequence of it being the first full week back into the ‘norm’; the routine of early (pitch-dark) mornings, running around like a fly with an azure behind all day, and falling into a grateful stupor at night – well, once I’m finished reading ‘just another chapter!’ of course.

Or maybe I’m just getting old. That could be it, too.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad to see Friday’s smiling face. I’m also glad to have completed another ‘Flash! Friday’ challenge – I’ve posted my story below, just in case you’d like to throw your eye over it. It’s not the best piece of flash fiction in the world, nor the most original, but I don’t know. There’s something about it that I like. I have a soft spot for time travel stories at the best of times, and I could think of worse places to be stuck than early twentieth-century America, so in a way I’m a little jealous of my characters.

And, when you think about it, isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?

So – here’s how it works. Every week, the lovely people at Flash! Friday select a prompt image, and also a prompt word, or words. This week the prompt words were ‘Time Travel’, and the image was this:

Image: commons.wikimedia.org

And here’s my wee story:

End of the Road

‘Wait. I don’t …’ The handheld panel illuminated Palmer’s frowning face. ‘Just a second.’

‘Haven’t got a second,’ I said, assessing our new surroundings. Vehicle, of sorts; windows grubby, warped. Unfiltered sunshine. Early twentieth? Maybe? How could we be so far off, again? As Palmer scanned her screen, I glanced behind. Wow. A tunnel carved through a giant tree spanned the road – it must have been our vector. Huh. Organic, again… The jalopy groaned and shuddered, knocking me out of my thoughts. I turned back around, trying to focus.

‘C’mon, Palmer,’ I muttered. ‘Quickly, before we’re seen.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Hang on.’ Palmer swiped the screen, decisively. She pressed ‘Engage.’

Nothing.

‘What’s wrong?’ I side-mouthed, trying to stay calm.

‘No way,’ she breathed. ‘Of course. Organic vectors. Missing targets by centuries…’

‘What?’

‘It’s the Network. The Timeshift itself.’ She swallowed, hard. ‘It’s collapsing.’

‘What?’ The car swerved.

‘How’s your twentieth-century patois?’ she grinned, sadly. ‘We’re going to be here a while.’

**

And, with that, I wish you a happy Friday and a peaceful, restful weekend. Read lots, write lots, and laugh as often as you can.

 

Book Review Saturday – ‘The Shining Girls’

I can’t quite believe, after so many months of wanting to get my hands on ‘The Shining Girls’, that I’ve finally read it. It’s been experienced. I can never experience it again. Time’s sort of funny like that, isn’t it? It only goes one way.

Unless you’re Harper Curtis, that is.

Image: forbiddenplanet.co.uk

‘The Shining Girls’ has one of the best central ideas I’ve ever heard of – a serial killer who can travel through time, meaning that his crimes are pretty much impossible to connect to one another. In other words, he is untraceable, unstoppable and terrifying. Harper Curtis is this serial killer, a man who has been psychopathic from childhood (a chapter detailing his role in an accident involving his older brother, a truck and an unpulled handbrake was, to me, one of the most chilling episodes in the entire novel – and Harper was only eleven at that time.)

Early in the book, we see him gain access to a mysterious House, one with eerie capability; he comes across the key to this House through committing an act of violence, and that same violence powers the House. At various junctures in the book, when characters peer in the windows, the House looks like a rundown flophouse, ransacked and ramshackle and unfit for human habitation. But when Curtis enters (along with several other characters, who seem to be able to ‘see’ the House properly), it becomes a well-appointed, attractive place with fixtures and fittings from Chicago in the 1930s. When he opens the front door again, Curtis steps out into an entirely different reality, years in the future. The time-travel has sensible limits on it; Curtis is always in Chicago, and he cannot seem to travel to any point earlier than 1929 or later than 1993, but he always has one thing on his mind – the destruction of the Shining Girls.

And who are the Shining Girls? They are young women who burn and sparkle with potential. They are dancers, performers, scientists, journalists, architects, welders, wives, widows, maidens, mothers… all manner of womanhood is here. For reasons we are never truly privy to, these girls must die, and their potential – their shine – must be quenched.

Curtis has been murdering women since the 1930s, taking a token from each woman and leaving it on the body of another victim. When he first arrived in the House, he saw a list of names scrawled on a wall, in his own handwriting, and he knew what he was going to do – in a way, because he had already done it. His actions were inevitable. We encounter him first in 1974, when he meets the six-year-old Kirby Mazrachi, who we know is one of the Shining Girls. The darkness within Curtis as he interacts with the innocent Kirby is like a miasma around him, like a stench emanating from him. I’ve never been so repulsed by a character, and I mean that as a compliment to Lauren Beukes’ writing. We see him give Kirby a plastic horse, a toy which becomes vital to her story at the end of the book, and we know he will be back at some point in her future.

Kirby meets Curtis again in 1989, when he attempts to murder her. Out of all his victims, she is the only one to survive – and, at that, only by pure chance. For a long time Curtis thinks he has been successful in killing her, but when he realises that she survived, he becomes determined to finish what he started.

I wanted to love this novel. It’s exactly the kind of thing I enjoy – time travel, compelling characters (particularly compelling female characters), an excellent core concept, a bit of mystery, psychological intrigue, crime – but I can’t say that I did. I really, really liked it, and I would recommend it, but… I’m not sure. There was something missing, for me, at the end, perhaps as a consequence of having spent so many months looking forward to reading it. Some readers were disappointed by the fact that a lot of the mystery at the core of Curtis’ time travelling ability is left unexplained, but that didn’t bother me at all. I was perfectly willing to accept that this House (it deserves the initial capital, believe me) was able to transport its occupants to any point in its own timeline, and I was perfectly willing to accept that it would draw a man like Harper Curtis to itself in order to carry out the murders it felt were necessary. I loved the concept of the ‘shine’, the potential for greatness that existed within each of the victims, even though they were divided by time, race, sexuality, ability and age; I loved every character (from the point of view of how well they were created, that is, not an actual ‘love’ of their personalities.) I can see why some readers would find it hard to suspend their disbelief, but it didn’t cause any issues for me. I loved how Beukes handled her time-travel. Still, having said all that, something about the ending felt flat.

I don’t want to say too much for fear of giving away pertinent details, because this is the sort of book you really don’t want to spoil for other readers. I will say this much: I read it all in one sitting, I found it hard to put to one side, and Lauren Beukes is a massively talented writer. The story is gripping, though a little hard to keep straight in your head due to the shifting, hopping timelines, and the crime sections are gruesome but extremely compelling. The investigation Kirby launches against the man who almost murdered her is a bit so-so, but the reader has to remember that this part of the book is set in the early 1990s when investigation techniques were not what they are now (I’ve read several reviews of this book which slam her weak investigation into her attacker – but it was a pre-internet age, we can’t forget), and I really enjoyed reading about the lives of the Shining Girls, each of them interesting enough for a novel in their own right.

The book is gory, with scenes of extreme and misogynistic violence, and I do think readers need to be aware of that. It’s not an easy book to read, but it’s a powerful and important book, and as such I would recommend it. The statement Beukes is making – that the world itself conspires, at times, to snuff out the light of its Shining Girls – is one that needs to be heard and heeded.

Happy weekend, y’all. Happy reading!

Friday Fun

If my life is going to plan, as you read this post I should either be in my mother’s kitchen drinking tea, or in my friend’s kitchen drinking tea and watching her flock of ducklings pootle around her front yard. Either of these scenarios will do just fine.

You lookin’ at me? You lookin’ at me? I don’ see no other duck aroun’ here…
Image: polkaperson.tripod.com

Where I won’t be is at my desk tapping away at a keyboard wondering when I’m ever going to finish Draft 4 of ‘Tider’; this is, of course, because I have finished Draft 4 of ‘Tider’.

In two-and-a-half months, I have managed to rewrite this beast of a book and bring it to its fourth draft. I think that’s the work of a derange… I mean, brilliant mind. I think I have spotted all the major plot gaps and loopholes, and I think I’ve worked through most of the complications inherent in working with a story that involves a sort of time travel (word to the wise: do not write about time travel, ever); I think my protagonist shows the expected growth and development in her character between page 1 and page 263, and as far as I know, justice and righteousness prevail, and all is good with the world, tra-la.

Note the use of the word I think, or some derivative thereof.

Image: myenglishclub.com

I think I’ve done all this, but it may yet turn out that I am flawed in my thinking. I’m sure there are things I’ve missed, and I hope when I print the book and start doing a hard-copy edit, that these things will become evident. I hope that I won’t uncover a major error with far-reaching consequences, which will rend the delicate fabric of my carefully constructed world in twain. All I can say is: if it happens, it happens. Worrying about it now won’t change anything.

So, this brings us back to the tea and the ducks. I’m going home (i.e. to The Place of my Illustrious Birth) for the weekend, mostly to spend time with family, attend a wedding celebration and forget entirely about the world of ‘Tider’ and the travails of Maraika, my plucky heroine; I shall, all going well, be back at the coalface come Monday morning, bright and early.

I hope you all have wonderful weekends, and that they involve tea, relaxation, and herding small, waddling feathered creatures.

Or, at least, tea and relaxation.

Image: pbh2.com

Book Review Saturday – ‘King of Shadows’

There are some of you who will know that ‘King of Shadows’ is a Susan Cooper novel, and of you’re aware of this author and her work, you will probably also know that there is no such thing as a bad Susan Cooper novel. You might also be wondering why I’m reviewing a book which was first published in 1999; I hate to admit this, because I’m a huge fan of the author, but ‘King of Shadows’ is a new book, to me. I really wish I hadn’t left it so long to read it.

Image: boomerangbooks.com.au

I am going through a ‘time travel’ phase with my reading at the moment. As well as ‘King of Shadows’, I’ve also read ‘Hagwitch’ by Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick in the last few weeks and I’m currently reading the (utterly marvellous) ‘To Say Nothing of the Dog’ by Connie Willis. This is largely because ‘Tider’, my own little book, features time-travel, of a sort; becoming familiar with the norms of the genre is important to me. I love books which use the idea of ‘time-slip’, where there are two interlinked stories being told side by side, one which takes place in ‘the present’ (whenever that is) and the other which takes place in the past, or the future; ‘Hagwitch’ is a book like this. ‘King of Shadows’ has some time-slip features, but it’s largely a book about a boy going back in time, for a very specific and important reason.

The book opens in a rehearsal room. A group of young actors are preparing themselves for a special performance of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, to be staged in the refurbished Globe Theatre in London; all the players are American, and to them, it’s the trip of a lifetime. They are a specially assembled troupe, all male, designed to mimic the original staging conditions of Shakespeare’s play – because, of course, in Shakespeare’s time women could not act on stage – and they have all been hand-picked for their particular acting talents. Among these wonderful young actors is a boy named Nathan Field, who, as well as being a marvellously talented actor, is dealing with the painful loss of his father and mother. The dynamics between the boys in the acting troupe – the inevitable bullying, friendship-forging, and competitiveness – is really well handled, and Cooper skilfully brings us into the heart of the group.

When the boys arrive in London, Nathan (or ‘Nat’) barely has time to acclimatise before he falls ill. After dinner one evening, he becomes extremely sick, and is rushed to hospital; he slips into unconsciousness, but not before having a vision of himself being taken out of the world, and flying over the surface of the earth like he was floating in space…

When he wakes, he finds himself in a strange place – a smelly, loud, overwhelming place, where people speak with strange accents. The strangest thing of all, though is this: everyone seems to know Nat. They know his name, they know who he is, and in this new and disorienting setting, Nat is still an actor with a dramatic troupe. He is engaged in rehearsals for a play – a new, exciting play called ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – and gradually, Nat realises he has travelled back in time. He has, for some reason, wound up in 1599, and even more astoundingly, he is one of Shakespeare’s own players, and part of the play’s original production.

Image: shakespeare.mit.edu

Susan Cooper is an author whose writing leaves me breathless. She never fails to reduce me to tears at least once during the reading of her novels, and this one is no different. The relationship which develops between Nat and Shakespeare is almost unbearably beautiful; Nat has lost his parents in a life-rending tragedy, and Shakespeare has just lost his son, Hamnet. The two bond, in a deep and loving way, over their shared grief, and Cooper explores this in a way which is never mawkish, but which is simply touching and true. As an actor, Nat knows how lucky he is to have ended up as part of this group of actors, and he makes the most of every second, never knowing where (or when) he will be when he wakes up or whether he’ll be wrenched out of this world at any moment. His initial disorientation and discomfort at Elizabethan life soon turn into deep attachment, both to the era and the people he meets, and every moment he spends there is filled with urgency and the poignancy of imminent loss. Every tiny detail of his life and of the Elizabethan world is described with such skill that the reader feels they are living in sixteenth-century London as they read; I felt, at all times, that I was part of the book I was reading.

Eventually, of course, things have to return to normal. The book’s ending is a little exposition-heavy, but I hardly even noticed: I was so busy enjoying the explanation for Nat’s adventure, and the connections between him and the past, that I was happy to ignore the slightly unrealistic way in which Nat’s announcement that he has met the real Shakespeare is accepted, eventually, by his friends. I found myself moved to tears by the story, and by the sensitive way Susan Cooper handled her material, but also because I loved Nat so much. As a character, he is marvellous. The burden he has to bear is one which would crush even the strongest of adults, but he has held on to his passion for acting throughout everything he has suffered, and the reader knows he is going to have a wonderful and beautiful life. He is exquisitely described, as one would expect of Susan Cooper, and the interplay between the modern and Elizabethan world is thrilling.

Of Susan Cooper’s books, nothing will ever replace ‘The Dark is Rising’ sequence in my list of favourites. ‘Victory’ was my next favourite, after those, but it has now been knocked off that spot by ‘King of Shadows’. I loved this book. If you haven’t read it already, then read it now. If you’ve read it before, read it again.

Whatever you do, just read.

Happy weekend!

Mixed-Up, Muddled-Up

It’s Friday! So, that’s good news. In other good news, one of my best friends is coming to visit over the weekend, and I can’t wait to see her. In some further good news, I had my hair cut yesterday for the first time in three years (ahem), and it worked out rather well.

While I’m pleased with the end result, I now have two swingy-bangy bits of hair down either side of my face which are causing me a bit of consternation; I keep forgetting they’re there, so when they suddenly sweep down out of nowhere and waft into my line of vision, I tend to get a bit of a fright.

There you have it. A woman who is frightened of her own hair. What has the world come to?

Moving swiftly on. Today, I would like to talk about a book I recently read which seems to have caused very little in the way of a ‘splash’ in book-reviewing and book-blogging circles, which I think is a shame. It’s ‘Sorrowline’, written by Niel Bushnell. I believe it’s his first book, which makes the achievement all the greater.

Image: bookdepository.co.uk

I came across this book a few months ago when I googled the word ‘Timesmith’, which I was hoping to use in one of my own stories. I was hoping I’d be clever enough to have coined the term, but – of course – someone had got there before me! Niel Bushnell’s ‘Sorrowline’ is the first book in his ‘Timesmith Chronicles’, and it’s a really enjoyable read. It has only just been published – I’d been waiting for it for several months by the time I finally managed to buy it a couple of weeks ago – and it was worth the anticipation.

The central idea behind the book is that each person’s gravestone is connected to the day of their death by a ‘Sorrowline’ – a mysterious link made up of grief and memories, and in some cases the person’s fear and anger and pain at the time of their death – and a talented person can use this connection to travel back in time. Jack Morrow is our hero, and he finds himself being attacked by terrifying creatures in a London graveyard one night several years after his mother’s death. A strange man appears, claiming to be his grandfather. The man urges Jack to travel back to 1940, to meet him there as a teenager, and that together they’ll work out how to keep Jack safe. Jack doesn’t really have a choice but to obey, and so he does as he’s told – and it works, much to his shock. He’s a ‘Yard boy’, or someone with the power to travel through time from graveyard to graveyard.

When Jack travels back through time and meets up with Davey, his teenaged grandfather, I loved how Bushnell handled their relationship. Of course, Davey has no idea who Jack is and thinks the whole thing is an elaborate ruse – he even tries to make a bit of money by selling Jack out. Jack, despite being at a total disadvantage, uses his intelligence and strength of character to stand up for himself, work things out for himself and escape from the many tight corners he finds himself in. He’s no helpless 21st-century fool – he uses his knowledge of history to work out where he is and what’s happening, and he’s a resourceful, resilient young man. The gradual building of trust between the two boys is so cleverly handled that it makes the book’s conclusion all the more wrenching – but I’m not going to give away the twist, of course.

A further layer of loveliness is created by the author’s use of folklore. There is an object in the story, a precious object which is being sought by the terrible ‘baddie’ Rouland, called the Rose of Annwn. This set my mind spinning off through the legends surrounding Annwn, the Welsh otherworld, and the ballad which tells of the legions of men who went to claim it, of whom only seven returned. I really loved what Bushnell did with his Rose, and what it turns out to be. Rouland’s guard is a band of fierce undead warriors called the Paladin (another nod to the medieval, which is great), all of whom are female – that was a refreshing turn. I liked the character of Eloise, a rogue Paladin who commits herself to defending Jack and Davey no matter what the cost to herself. She’s a great creation, though occasionally her special powers and abilities (as a result of being an undead warrior) seem a bit too convenient. But that’s a tiny quibble.

Jack’s abilities to travel through time naturally lead him to think about his mother, and whether there’s anything he can do to keep her from dying. This is his primary motivation, and not finding the Rose of Annwn, even though he knows it’s also important to keep that huge treasure out of the clutches of Rouland. I really enjoyed the conclusion of this story, and how several plotlines were wrapped up while leaving enough to entice a reader back for Book 2. I often find myself confused and disappointed with time-travel stories, but not with this one. It all seemed to make sense and slot together, which made me admire Bushnell’s skill as a storyteller as well as his ability to create a beautiful character in Jack.

Overall, I thought this book was fantastic. It’s a book for children, of course, but there’s enough in it to please any audience. I recommend you give it a try, and spread the word!

Anyway, my fabulous hair and I are off to clean the house and get it ready for ‘comp’ny’. Hopefully I’ll get a bit of writing time, too.

Have wonderful weekends, y’all!