Angel of Grasmere

Tom Palmer keeps them coming; the wonderful stories from WWII and after, some of them set in the Lake District. Angel of Grasmere is the latest, beginning in 1940, soon after Dunkirk.

Tarn and her friends roam the fells, partly looking for invading Nazis, but also because it’s what children did. Tarn’s older brother was lost in the retreat from Dunkirk, and her family no longer feels complete.

But Tarn has her friend Peter and their new pal Eric, an evacuee from Manchester. Their story is a good way of learning what life during the war might have been like, and it’s shocking how close the was came, to somewhere that feels quite distant both from Europe and the south of England.

There seems to be an angel in the neighbourhood, someone who carries out acts of kindness in various ways. It makes people feel better, thinking someone is looking out for them.

In a way their lives are quite ordinary, and yet not at all. This is a lowkey kind of war story, making you feel good about seeing the actions of this angel, as well as seeing how grown up these 11-year-olds could be. Because they had to.

And the setting is lovely, between Grasmere village and up towards Easedale Tarn.

Too Nice

I have always loved Sally Nicholls’s writing, and here is another book for Barrington Stoke on an important subject. It’s about stepparents. They can be horrible (can’t we all?). And they can be nice. Too nice.

That is Abby’s problem. She was happy with her life and all of a sudden she needs to accommodate a woman who is very nice, very kind, who tries very hard. When what most of us want is to continue being comfortable in our own homes; not having to be polite to a stranger.

Step families are probably more common than I tend to think, so lots of readers will want to know how to deal with any such situation.

Abby’s father is a little naïve, I think. Abby’s maternal grandparents are quite interesting…

As you were.

Find Finn

Found it!

I went looking for my rather ancient, and quite small, copy of Huckleberry Finn. It wasn’t there. OK, I thought, it was old. I was given it as a school prize in 1968.

But then the little grey cells kicked in. I thought that I have more than one place for books. And I consider Huck Finn to be a children’s book. So I’d have put it with children’s books, not with adult fiction. Dead simple. And there it was.

I have been reading about Percival Everett who has written a retelling – James – seen through Jim’s eyes. It sounds like the kind of thing I’d like to read. I think so, anyway. But 1968 was a long time ago, and I had already read the book when it was presented to me, in English. Presumably because I had been studious and did well at English. Still looked daunting, and it was only my second book in English, after the Ladybird book I bought two years earlier.

Because I did know the story, I was never tempted to try it in a foreign language. It’s just been sitting there for 55 years. It looks it, too, with its yellowing pages and brown spots.

I’m guessing it was chosen as a sequel to the likelier Tom Sawyer – which I’d also read – and as one of very few books available in English, for children, in the local bookshop. The price is still there, in pencil. Five kronor 40 öre.

Having come across more than one reference to Huck recently, I’ve felt guilty because I can only remember snatches of the plot. And I know it’s [been] considered very important in the US. Percival Everett is the same age as me. But it seems he only read an abridged version as a child, followed by the full book in his teens.

Perhaps I don’t need to feel any shame over my lack of recall. My copy of Huck is 370 pages, so I hope it’s not abridged. I think I might reread it. Then James.

The Boy, The Witch & The Queen of Scots

How could I resist? A witch, and Stirling. Barbara Henderson’s new book was clearly meant for me. And it is as with her other historical novels; I learned so much. It’s almost like going to school, except a lot more fun.

It’s 1561. Alexander is a trainee falconer and new to Edinburgh, when he just happens to be in Leith when Mary Queen of Scots arrives from France. The Earl of Huntly, for whom he used to work, has instructed him to spy on the Queen. He desperately wants to avoid this, but how?

Based on real events, in a way this is similar to some of the other Mary Queen of Scots books I have come across. This is good, because that way you learn by repetition, and then you can concentrate on what is special about this story.

The birds, and the need to spy on his Queen. Alexander’s friendship with Lizzie who is the Queen’s seamstress.

Mary travels a lot, now that she has arrived in Scotland, and there are many opportunities for bad things to happen. She has long struck me as an interesting young woman, and this was a great way of meeting up with Mary again.

I almost wish I was twelve, coming fresh to fun history. But being old is almost as good.

Drowning in my Bedroom

Poverty and disability, environmental disasters and their cause; it’s all here in Steve Cole’s new book for Barrington Stoke. Set in the Philippines, we meet Junjun and Gayla.

Junjun is so poor that he has to beg, and his family live under a bridge. Gayla has Cerebral Palsy and is trying to learn how to use an electric wheelchair while staying in a centre for children with disabilities. However, when the two meet, they are both pleased not to be like the other.

But when circumstances cause them to come together, as flood waters rise, they are forced to look at life through the other person’s eyes. And they have to cooperate. Well, strictly speaking, Junjun could have left Gayla behind, but he doesn’t.

So this is more than a friendship across the divides story. It shows the reader quite how bad things can get, and how it’s often worst ‘somewhere else.’ In Manila, not in the UK or Europe. The sharp illustrations by Oriol Vidal bring home what life elsewhere looks like.

Drowning in my Bedroom delivers on so many fronts and you learn much more than you thought you needed to. I hadn’t understood that some people don’t know what medicines are; how you get them and what they do, and what they don’t do.

Pirates and Sea Monsters

Living the dream. It’s what we all hope for, and in this new story for Barrington Stoke, Gill Lewis introduces us to Tia and her vet mum.

When life in the city gets too much, they are able to escape to a small island a long way away, where there is a need for a vet. And maybe Tia can even have her own cat?

What I especially like is how natural it is for there to be just the two of them, mother and daughter. And they are so close. This is of necessity a short novel, but you can tell that Gill knows about animals, about being a vet. It’s what makes the story feel true.

I have great hopes for Tia’s future, and may there be many more pets to look after.

(Illustrations by Irina Avgustinovich)

Return to my roots

I loved Brinn mig en sol, by Christoffer Carlsson. If you recall, he’s the crime writer from my past, only thirty years after me. This is his second novel set in our shared home town, and it is so much better for that, rather than a great crime novel set anywhere else. Or do I think so because I can see just about every place where there is a dead body, where they work(ed), and I know the two police stations involved, and so on and so forth? I got to walk around somewhere familiar, with people behaving in a way I would expect them to behave.

(I gather there is already a translation into English; Blaze Me a Sun. I agree with one UK online reviewer that it comes across as very American. The US readers seem to have loved the book.)

The narrator is a person very much like Christoffer who, having moved back home, starts digging into what happened the night the prime minister was murdered, when there was also a murder in the woods outside Halmstad. Why does he do this?

Police officer Sven Jörgensson ends up dedicating the rest of his life to solving the several deaths, and his son Vidar trains to be a policeman too, and he also continues to dig. It takes well over thirty years to find the answer.

It feels very true to real life Sweden/Halmstad. I would have enjoyed the plot and the characters anywhere, but it’s the fact that they brought me ‘home’ that is so special. There is not enough fiction set in my past world, but until I read Christoffer’s first Halmstad novel I didn’t know how much I needed them. The title is a quote from a poem by Elsa Grave, who even features in the book. Just a page, but it rings true, because I also have Elsa knowledge.

As people say about momentous dates, I remember precisely what I was doing on March 1st 1986. I woke up with a migraine. And many years before that, I picked bilberries at the scene of the crime.

The Three Graces

This, the latest novel by Amanda Craig, has been sheer pleasure. About three 80-year-old women in Italy, The Three Graces is the first book by Amanda I’ve read. I don’t expect it to be the last, especially now that I know that she recycles her characters, and I can find some of her people in past books.

Just this thing of finding three older women is such an unusual occurrence. I’m not quite 80 yet, but I share so much with them. Not their money, nor their grandchildren, but thoughts about life. Although it begins when middle aged Enzo shoots someone, and this continues to worry and puzzle him. His opinions on foreigners and migrants are not the best, nor is he alone in how he thinks of people who are not from Tuscany.

Ruth’s grandson Olly is getting married, and with his intended bride vlogging all the wedding preparations, the whole world is watching. Children and grandchildren descend on Santorno. It – sort of – builds up to a Mamma Mia moment. You can see what must happen, but not necessarily how.

There are dogs. One of our ladies still has a husband, whom she’d quite like to kill off. Refugees are flowing into Italy, and there is no avoiding the effects of Covid or the war in Ukraine. Both are well done; for the characters as well as for us, but not too much.

Happy and sad, this is both an amusing tale, as well as offering up many pertinent thoughts on life in general, and especially on growing old, while not being too gracious about it. Amanda is doing that thing I approve of, which is to write about what you know. In this case there is Africa, Italy, Hampstead. You feel you are in good hands.

Deadline

First published in 1957, Deadline by Bill Knox which has just been reissued by Zertex/J D Kirk/Barry Hutchison shows what you can do when you happen to run a small publishing business. When he discovered his first second hand Knox, Barry was so excited, and when he’d been excited enough, he realised he could actually publish these books anew. So that’s what he’s doing. Deadline came in January, and two days ago the second Knox novel – Death Department – hit the world.

Just as the time travelling reader from the past might be a little shocked by the profanities and the violence and the sex in our current crime novels, so the reader travelling back to the 1950s is stunned by how polite they are, how much the police care about crime and about being fair. I was mostly taken aback by how much staff time they have at their disposal, and also how sensibly proactive even quite junior detectives are.

The reader knows from the start who the killer is and why (and I have come to the conclusion that I don’t much like that format of storytelling), and you are left to discover how the police will work out who killed their colleague, and no effort is spared.

It’s fascinating. I came to like, not to mention trust, Thane and Moss, a well functioning duo who will not tolerate a ‘cop killer’ in their midst. This is Glasgow, so not much cosiness among the landladies, wives and demanding girlfriends.

We’re still in the capital punishment era, so you worry that the slightest mistake will mean the end for the wrong suspect. But Thane is not easily fooled, and he is very fair. Did I already mention that?

Anyway, there will be a new title monthly.

A Song for Summer

Let’s get romantic!

I don’t often say this, but it is Valentine’s Day after all.

Wasn’t altogether sure about reviewing [one of] Eva Ibbotson’s adult romantic novels, because what can you say? Do we know at the outset that the couple will end up happily ever after? Well, I’m not telling you.

This is another of Eva’s stories set in Austria, and Britain, before and during WWII, but written in the 1990s. She does it so well, knowing her Austria, and her London among the better educated. Except here we have Ellen who prefers to cook and grow a garden. Her mother and her aunts are horrified. When she could have a proper education!

The reader will be happy when Ellen sets off to work in a school in Austria, where she will work her magic on pupils and adults alike, and she does much cleaning and cooking. There is a man, of course. There are several, but one special one, even if they sometimes have to fight over who gets Ellen.

It’s a lovely period piece, if somewhat rosy. Except, the war does make itself known and it has effects, and I especially resented the death of Xxxx. And Ellen is terribly dutiful and will do what seems best, and isn’t necessarily what she herself wants, or the reader.

I loved it.