2014/36: All the Truth that's In Me -- Julie Berry

What do I care if it’s shocking? I am shocking. What was done to me was shocking. I am outside the boundaries for ever, no longer decent. I will leave grapes for you in your own home.

This is a novel for young adults (it was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal) set in Puritan revolutionary America, somewhere in New England. Four years ago, two girls went missing from the small town of Roswell Station: two years ago, Judith Finch stumbled home, unable to speak of what had happened to her. Half her tongue had been cut out.

Judith, the narrator of this novel, is forced to silence, but she observes those around her with a keen eye. The townsfolk eye her askance: they believe that she was abducted and abused by a stranger, and they punish her for her perceived impurity. There's no pity here. “You’re only alive because you’ve got no tongue,” he says. “Otherwise you’d be punished for adultery." Judith alone knows the truth of what happened to her, and to Lottie Pratt whose naked body washed up in the river. And she's unable to tell anyone: unwilling, too, to recount her story, even if she could.

The novel is effectively a love letter to Lucas Whiting, the boy who Judith loved before she – before. Though much of the narrative is first-person, we never lose sight of the 'you' to whom it's addressed. Lucas isn't as suspicious of Judith as most of the townsfolk are: her own mother regards her as a nuisance, a disturbance, and never shows any warmth. (She seems to blame Judith for her father's death, which occurred while Judith was missing.) Judith's brother Darrel, though initially falling in with their mother's opinion, grows up over the course of the novel, and begins to share his books with her. Judith is especially taken with the story of Joan of Arc: 'There’s a lesson in it for would-be heroes. The people you save won’t celebrate you. They’ll gather the wood and cheer while you burn.' Another ally is Maria, Lucas' fiancee, who befriends Judith and helps her to reclaim her voice.

Which would be a novel in itself: silenced women, female friendship, unrequited love. But there's more. When Roswell Station is attacked, Judith realises that there is only one man who can help defend the town: her captor, who lives in a hidden cave in the woods …

Often poetic and sometimes very moving -- especially when Judith speaks out to the assembled townsfolk -- All the Truth That's In Me is a complex story told in an unusual voice, with excellent pacing and just enough information to keep the reader guessing about what might have happened to Judith.

2014/35: Silt -- Robert Macfarlane

I subdued the alarm my brain was raising at the idea of walking out to sea fully clothed, as only suicides do.

Silt, sold as a 'Penguin Special' for under a pound, is a single chapter from Macfarlane's The Old Ways, illustrated with photographs taken on the Broomway by David Quentin. I bought this on a whim whilst sitting on a beach about three miles from where the Broomway (an ancient track that leads across estuarial mudflats from Wakering to Foulness Island) begins: I read it while savouring the light and space of that corner of coast. Unlike many of the Broomway's victims over the years -- it can only be traversed when low tide and daylight align -- I grew up knowing that the tide comes in over those sands faster than a man can run, and that the weird light and silence can disorient even an experienced mud-walker.

Quentin is also a lawyer and in his afterword, he discusses the legal quagmires that surround ancient pathways such as the Broomway. "Just as Rob is fascinated by the historic and topographic characteristics of ways in the real world and in the world of the human soul, I am fascinated by the jurisprudential characteristics of ways as they subsist only in the legal overlay; the characteristics of your ongoing status as non-trespasser as you pass and repass lawfully over what would otherwise be private land." I hadn't known that there is no public right-of-way on the foreshore (the bit between high tide and low tide) … except where there is a public highway, such as the Broomway. Over the years, there have been various attempts to modify this law: does a 'public highway' have to lead somewhere, or can it be (as the Broomway effectively is, public access to Foulness Island being restricted by the Ministry of Defence) a dead end?

A quick, evocative read: now I must dig out and read The Old Ways in full.

2014/34: Numb -- Sean Ferrell

She said, “I never want to see you again.” She said it without any edge or tone. It was the most perfect thing anyone had ever said to me. I remained surrounded by strangers who couldn’t get enough of me, and intimate friends who couldn’t stand the sight of me.

The nameless, amnesiac protagonist of this novel is nicknamed 'Numb' because he doesn't feel pain. This, and the happenstance of his encounter with Mr Tilly's Circus one scorching day in Texas, provides him with a new career: a circus performer who pounds nails through his own flesh, becomes a human dartboard, and wrestles with an elderly lion.

It's the lion (weary and sick) that makes him leave: he runs away from the circus, heading for New York City in search of his past. He's accompanied by Mal, a fellow circus artiste: but Mal quickly becomes peripheral to Numb's new life, and jealous of the success –- a beautiful girlfriend, a swift ascent to celebrity on the media carousel, intriguing leads that might reveal his past life –- and ends up pushing his own limits further than is wise.

There's a point at which Numb wonders whether his knowing Mal is bad for his girlfriend Hiko. I'd go one step further and say that knowing Numb is bad for everyone. He's immune to pain, but he's also apparently immune to human emotion. Oh, he gradually realises that he needs pain, needs to be able to feel, that being numb is no kind of life at all: but that's too late for most of the people who've become close to him.

There were some interesting ideas in this novel, but on the whole I can't say I enjoyed it, or that I liked any of the characters.

2014/33: The Secret Place -- Tana French

...they barely know he’s there. They feel someone, the green fizz and force of him, the same way they feel hot patches of it pulsing all across the Field; but if you closed their eyes and asked them who it was, none of them would be able to name Chris. He has six months, three weeks and a day left to live.

It's a year since Chris Harper's body was discovered in the grounds of St Kilda's, an elite girls' school. He was sixteen when he was killed: a pupil at Colm's, the neighbouring boys' school: well-liked, popular, good-looking, average. His murderer has never been identified.

Holly Mackey, daughter of Detective Frank Mackey (who's featured in previous Tana French novels), pays a visit to her father's colleague Stephen Moran, with new evidence. St Kilda's has a 'Secret Place', a board where girls can pin anonymous confessions and thoughts. Last night, someone put up a photo of Chris Harper with 'I know who killed him' pasted across it.

Moran is desperate to get into the Murder Squad, so ingratiates himself with Antoinette Conway, the prickly and unpartnered detective in charge of the case. Both from working-class backgrounds, the two are oddly vulnerable to, easily wrongfooted by the privilege and elitism they encounter at St Kilda's. Over the course of a single day, though, they untangle a very knotted web of deceit and motivation to reveal who wielded the murder weapon.

Alternating with their investigations are chapters covering the last months of Chris Harper's life, though -- as in the excerpt quoted above -- he's not a protagonist. Holly and her three close friends (Selena, Julia and Becca) navigate the peaks and troughs of teenage life in the claustrophobic, mercurial atmosphere of the school. Their nemeses, Joanne Heffernan, and her three cronies, discover that Holly's group like to sneak out at night and visit a cypress grove in the grounds. (Another 'secret place': and of course there's the girls' own bodies, suddenly becoming attractive to the opposite sex.) Blackmail, viciousness and rumour proliferate. It doesn't help that Holly & co have sworn off relationships after Julia is targetted by a boy she turned down. In the eyes of their classmates, they have committed the cardinal sin of not being Normal. From there to accusations of murder and witchcraft is a small step for a teenage drama queen.

Tana French captures the loving friendship -- and its converse, the spiteful animosity -- of teenage girls. Their sense of outrage as they discover the 'mix of roaring rage and a shame that stains every cell, this crawling understanding that now their bodies belong to other people’s eyes and hands, not to them'; the feeling that, as a young woman, you should be scared of and worried about every aspect of your life; the ecstatic intimacy of a shared secret – all sharply and crisply conveyed. God, I'm glad my teenage years are far and firmly in my past.

So, 'who wielded the murder weapon'? Because this is a Tana French novel, I've phrased that very deliberately. As in French's previous novels, there are strange things happening -- most of them unknown to Moran and Conway, and only revealed in the alternating chapters that focus on Holly and her friends -- and, again as in previous novels, much is left unexplained. If you read The Secret Place as a straightforward murder mystery, I suspect it'll be a beautifully-written disappointment*. If, like me, your mind pricks up when someone mentions the hyacinths left on Chris Harper's body (and if, like me, you suspect that naming your daughter 'Selena' is asking for trouble) then you'll find this a fascinating and chilling account of the mythic colliding with mundane life.

*a quick glance at reviews on Amazon confirms this. Though some people didn't like the prose either.

2014/32: The Islands of Chaldea – Diana Wynne Jones with Ursula Jones

The Lady Loma seemed to cast a shadow across the beasts as they came near her, and that shadow showed another shadow inside each donkey, a shadow bent and skinny, with only two legs. I was pretty sure those donkeys had once been men and women. And I was very frightened indeed. I just hoped my aunt would be a bit more polite when she saw the shadows too. But Aunt Beck didn’t seem to notice.

Diana's last novel features many of the themes familiar from her earlier work: young women with self-esteem issues, ancient secrets, apparently mundane companions who aren't what they seem, animals with attitude, and a lot of humour.

Aileen, like all the women of her family – the Wise Women of Skarr, who marry off their male children outside the family -- went to the Place when she turned twelve. Unlike her relatives, she didn't have a vision: her only surviving female relative, Aunt Beck, will just have to carry on being the Wise Woman. Aileen's mother is dead and her father is lost. He may be on one of the other Islands -- Bernica, or Gallis, or Logra – though Logra has been unreachable for the last decade due to murky sorcery. This means, too, that the magical Guardian of the East has become separated from the other Guardians, which does not bode well for anybody.

Aileen ends up accompanying her aunt, and a motley collection of followers, on a mission to rescue the kidnapped High Prince from Logra. It quickly becomes apparent that their pre-mission briefing was somewhat incomplete: why else would the money-bag be full of stones, the ship's captain over-keen to maroon them on a deserted island, and the evil stepmother's attempt to poison Aileen's cousin, young Ivar …

Aileen's true powers, and the fate of her father (not to mention the natures of several of her travelling companions) are revealed gradually, and the ending of the novel is satisfying unless you are rooting for the other side.

I couldn't spot the joins where Ursula Jones, Diana's sister, had picked up her unfinished draft: I did wonder if the climax was a little more abrupt that DWJ would have written it, but then I remembered plenty of counter-examples. The Islands of Chaldea isn't in my top five DWJ novels*, but there is stiff competition and it's by no means the least appealing of her works.

*If you're interested: Eight Days of Luke, Dogsbody, Hexwood, Howl's Moving Castle, Fire and Hemlock.

2014/31: Rose Under Fire - Elizabeth Wein

I WILL TELL THE WORLD. I say that so fiercely. I say it with such conviction, such determined anger. But I couldn't even tell Mother, could I? A few pages ago I vowed I wouldn't tell Mother. How can I possibly tell the world?

I enjoyed Code Name Verity immensely, despite the grimness of Julie's story: on visiting an airshow this summer and seeing Spitfires and a Lancaster, I was reminded that I had an e-copy of Elizabeth Wein's second novel about women in WW2.

It is considerably more harrowing than Code Name Verity, being set largely in a concentration camp (I'm not sure I would have started reading if I'd known / remembered this!): but it is also unexpectedly hopeful, with themes of redemption and atonement and compassionate humanity to counter the bleak cruelty of the camp. Again, the main characters are all young women: Rose, an American pilot; Ró?a, a camp inmate; and Anna, a guard at the camp. The story's told from Rose's point of view, and is punctuated by poetry, very much in the style of Edna St Vincent Millay (whose works are also quoted). It takes her from the wedding of her friend Maddie (who featured in Code Name Verity) to the Nuremberg Trials. But really, it begins with the funeral of Celia, another ATA pilot who died trying to take down a V-1 flying bomb with her wingtip.

The memory of that lingers in Rose's mind: she attempts to emulate it (and succeeds), which leads to her own downfall. And later, in a German factory, she finds herself unable to work on the assembly line, making fuses for those bombs.

The scenes in the Ravensbruck camp are appalling: they are based on survivors' accounts. In her afterword, Elizabeth Wein writes 'My book is fiction, but it is based on the real memories of other people. In the end, like Rose, I am doing what I can to carry out the last instruction of the true witnesses - those who went to their death crying out: Tell the world.' In such a situation even the smallest acts of humanity, whether from the guards or other prisoners, are treasured. And despite the horrors of the regime, love and selflessness are not wholly absent. Hence Rose's survival.

The descriptions of flying are as evocative and magical as in Code Name Verity, and I was fascinated by the glimpses of everyday life during wartime: London buses without their windows ('they take the glass out on purpose - people would rather sit in the wind than risk windows exploding in their faces'), small boys hunting for souvenirs at crash sites, buzzing the Eiffel Tower on VE Day. And the darker side of war, too: Wein does not gloss over brutality. It's apparently intended for young adults, but I'd hesitate to recommend it to a younger teen. The moral landscape is far from monochrome: Anna, in particular, is certainly not a caricature. And perhaps it would have been easier to end on Rose's departure from Ravensbruck: but there is so much more after that.

Made me cry, beautifully written, brought home just how grim the prison camps were. (My previous mental pictures were drawn largely from war films such as The Great Escape.) Rose Under Fire also made me want to research the internment camps in France in WW2: my grandmother and father were interned in one, and I don't even know which.