A few thoughts on books I've been enjoying when I don't get time to blog:
Theodore Boone
by John Grisham is the ever popular US author's first foray into YA fiction. It is a legal thriller with a pre-teen aspiring lawyer at its heart. This was very readable though by no means as gripping as his adult thrillers, but then I'm not the target audience. It has been very unfairly reviewed on sites like Amazon where many of his regular readers are marking this down for its simpler plot, for example, without getting that it is not an adults' book! I liked Theo, I liked the plot and the level of involvement of Theo in the law was believable. It had many of Grisham's traits (whole family full of lawyers, social justice, small town setting) but the family and small town atmosphere worked well with the smaller scope of the legal side. My favourite bit is Theo doing his homework in a glorified broom-cupboard at the back of his parents' offices whilst kids with legal questions knock on his window for advice. As I say, I thoroughly enjoyed it but I would love to know what a real lawyer or a real 12 year old thought of it. Grisham has used child protagonists before, notably in The Client
(a good place for an adult to start reading Grisham actually), but that is rather too scary a premise for the audience intended with Theodore Boone. Grisham writes well about children and I was impressed by his foray into writing for them.
I've been wanting to read Sophie Hannah for a while. I finally got my paws on two of her thrillers: Little Face
, which I quite liked) and The Point of Rescue
(which I really, really liked). Unlike Grisham Hannah's prose is of unarguable quality so, though a 'lighter' read thematically, both books are still a pleasure throughout. Both books have female victims and I liked the fact that both victims act on their own behalf, and neither wait for the usual male rescue, though with mixed success. Hannah's weak point is plot. Both books are page turning and quite scary in places but the twists in the end don't always work (I was more convinced by The Point of Rescue than Little Face) and in order to make them plausible at the last minute there are some rather weird bits of characterisation thrown in. I very much like her police officers: Simon and Charlie are great creations both a bit brilliant, both a bit dysfunctional, but with personal failings rather different from the hackneyed "dysfunctional cop" that is so often trotted out. I will be reading the rest of her thrillers but do wonder if straight forward literary fiction might be more Sophie Hannah's thing than struggling with surprise plot endings for thrillers.
The Bat Tattoo
by Russell Hoban was one I had great hopes for but it just didn't quite work for me. I liked the tattoo imagery, the main characters and many of the themes but was left cold by the recurring crash dummy motif, which was more than could be said for some of the characters who got rather involved with it. The dummy is part of the themes of loss, separation, sudden endings, but as you'd exect from a crash dummy, this really is not subtle. So, I liked the non-dummy parts, but don't think the whole thing worked. This doesn't always matter (like in Tales of Protection) but it did here.
Harry Potter series. This was a re-read for me and great pleasure it was too. It confirmed for me though that number three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
is by far and a way the best stand-alone book of the series. Harry's character seems more whole here, he actually learns rather than stalks about (as in the first books) or sulks (as in the next two books). The plot was tight and not nearing the 'baggy monster' status of the final volumes. This is not to take away from the enormous plotting achievement of the whole series, or to say that she can write like Philip Pullman, but in the Prisoner of Azkaban she comes her closest.
I have also been reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
(love Salander and Blomkvist but don't understand why a novel with such a feminist take on sexual violence is quite as graphic as this is), the wonderful The Stranger House
by Reginald Hill (I've raved about him before so I won't go on here except to say that this is a lovely stand-alone mystery set in the Lake Distict and comes highly recommended from me) and The Red House Mystery
by A. A. Milne which I picked up after reading Stuck-in-Book's views on Milne for grown-ups (its not the tightest mystery in the world but a good piece of classic amateur sleuthdom and I enjoyed it very much).
And my current read is Harbour
by John Ajvide Lindqvist which I am thoroughly enjoying. It is a really measured, character-led thriller, not too violent (not yet, at least) but very imaginative and understated. I think it is even better than Let the Right One in
(cinematically Let Me In is doing the rounds at the moment) which I also enjoyed. Lindqvist writes beautifully about adolescents.
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