The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt

Book. Bird. Cushion. Bird.

Right, I’m going to get this out the way right now. A disclaimer if you will, a confession early on that hopefully leads to an understanding (*stares hard at Theo Decker* – am I right fellow readers? nudge nudge).

I didn’t read all this book with my eyes, I used my ears for quite a chunk of it.

I’d like to state my case for indulging in audiobook activity: I was reading this alongside CatrionaRoseann and BooksellerEmma, both of whom were streaking ahead of me. I didn’t want them hanging about at the finish line waiting for me, so in an attempt to catch up, I swapped the usual podcasts I listen to at work for this. I only did it twice M’Lord…..then those few times I did the washing up….and that time I put it on in bed….and once when I was in the bath.

ITS SO LONG THOUGH!

So with this is mind, can I officially tick this off my reading challenge list as the book with more than 500 pages?

I know for a lot of people this is downright cheating and for them I can never, hand on heart, say I have READ this book. However, others have told me it totally counts so long as the audiobook was unabridged (which mine was). So, arguments in the comments please, I’m genuinely interested in this.

Anyway, with that out the way, let’s get to it.

The Blurb:

Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

I read The Secret History last year and was so dumbstruck by it that I wasn’t able to string enough sentences together to make a post. I found it brilliant and bewildering and was dazed for a week. Now, I may not be able to say exactly that about The Goldfinch, but it’s not far off.

I don’t really know where to begin with the themes; Tartt touches on nearly everything that has the potential to bruise and heal the human soul – from art to loss to unrequited love, to friendship and hope and courage and pain, from what makes people rich and poor to what makes them give up or get going, what obsesses them, inspires them and crushes them.

In Theo Decker we have a narrator who has to deal with the world and his wife conspiring against him (you think you’ve had a bad day?) and Tartt ensures we feel every colour of the spectrum for him.  For me he was the perfect narrator –  flawed, fleshy and a challenge. One minute you feel bereft for him, in fact you spend most of the first part of the book feeling your bones filling up with sorrow for the boy. Then he becomes a teenager and you begin to find him a little bit of a shit and you struggle to remember why you felt for him in the first place. Then, faced with the questions: “well how would you have reacted to all this crap? What would you have done? the world has been brutal to you, but  look at these beautiful things, make your soul hurt don’t they, enough to snap you into action? Would you fight for art if art is all you have?” I can’t wholeheartedly say that in his shoes I would have behaved any better than he did during some of this book, nor that I would develop any potential for redemption. I thought he was a brilliant character and I shall miss rooting for him inspite of myself.

What did irk me about this book is how long it is (I know I know! I listened to some of it!!). But even this has me in a quandary – it felt like hours would go by without anything having happened, but when I stroppily put the book down (pressed pause) to make a cup of tea muttering “come on Tartt, get ON with it”, I’d be standing at the kettle and through the steam would dawn this realisation “Hey! I seem to know more about the deepest recesses of the human soul than I did before! Fancy that!”

And that’s the thing, this book is crammed to the gunnels. Its like one of those massive paintings that you have to stand way back from in the gallery in order to take it all in. But step in closer and you get a turn of phrase here that stops you in your tracks, up in this corner is something that will make you think about life afresh, down here is a titbit about the importance of art, here’s how you relate to your family, that bit is what you take for granted, this is the bit where they didn’t love you back. It just goes on. I could write and write and write about it all, but that wouldn’t be appropriate for a lighthearted blog arena and you should just read the book instead.

The last pages are so awe inspiringly beautiful they will stay with me for a long time, along with the image of that resilient bird chained to the wall alone and lost. If he can keep singing, we all can.

So yeah, I liked it.

As I listened to some of it I feel I should do a mini review of the audiobook: All good, though sometimes David Pittu’s accents became a little to pantomime and over the top – all his women sounded like bad drag queens – though it’s probably very unfair to criticize a man for not being able to do an array of believable, nuanced and pitch perfect female voices.

Next challenge – A book you can finish in a day

Book Info:

• ISBN: 9781408704950
• Little, Brown 2013
• Borrowed a copy got audiobook from Audible.com

Us – David Nicholls

The Blurb:

Douglas Petersen understands his wife’s need to ‘rediscover herself’ now that their son is leaving home. He just thought they’d be doing their rediscovering together. So when Connie announces that she will be leaving, too, he resolves to make their last family holiday into the trip of a lifetime: one that will draw the three of them closer, and win the respect of his son. One that will make Connie fall in love with him all over again. The hotels are booked, the tickets bought, the itinerary planned and printed. What could possibly go wrong?

Its difficult to write about Us without mentioning One Day. I challenged myself to write this blog post without bringing it up, but here we are. Not even the first sentence over and it happened. So instead of trying to dance around it I’ll get it over with:

I loved One Day. I loved everything about it – the story, the characters (even when they were are their shittiest) the settings, the tone, Nicholls’ effortless writing. All those gut punches. I mostly loved that it was a complete surprise. I hadn’t read any Nicholls before, I don’t really know why, he seems to write about stuff that interests me, but I always overlooked him. In fact, before I picked Us up, One Day remained the only Nicholls I’d partaken in (I’m not counting watching Starter For Ten), I was still healing from Emma and Dexter and didn’t want other stories to crowd them out.

But when a proof of Us (resplendently designed I must say) made its way into our house I made time for it as soon as I could. It was nudgingly implied Us could almost be a reacquaintance with Emma and Dexter, in different skin with different fates, but it was so much more than that and you should leave those initial star-crossed friends in Edinburgh where you found them and enjoy Us as something else.

For me, the Petersen’s were a whole new kettle of fish. A couple with over 20 years behind them, Connie and Douglas seem to have made it a long way with considerable odds stacked against them. When they meet at a dinner hosted by Douglas’ sister Connie is an arty, popular party girl on the cusp of, perhaps, giving both things up. Douglas is a rather stuffy, ordered Scientist, currently obsessed with his fruit fly study and who may as well have come from another planet. They seem to find something in the other that promised a balance and over time set up home together.

But when Connie’s paint brushes seem to have been put aside for good and when tragedy comes to shroud them both, it is Douglas’ simple, structured way of living that seems to takeover. Possibly jaded by years of Douglas “sucking the joy out of everything” and a renewed energy for creativity that she sees blossoming in her son, Connie decides it is time to part ways.

We find them planning a European holiday, a trip Connie views as a final, happy farewell to the family unit and a way to introduce her son to the world’s greatest artists. Douglas hopes the trip will help bond and build bridges, one last roll of the dice. Of course, only one can get the outcome they want, and with their son along for the ride, the possibility for collateral damage is threatened from the minute they leave London.

Their relationship unfolds through flashbacks that intersperse the trip, and it is here, in the minutiae of love, friendship, heartache and missed communication that Nicholls’ excels. He draws you in so keenly, over dining tables and across beds that you wish wholeheartedly that you were able to somehow pick up your phone and fire off urgent texts:

“He didn’t mean it that way!”

“Why would you say that to her?! Any idiot can see that was entirely WRONG!”

I challenge you not to feel helpless as these two, ultimately decent, people flail and fail in front of you.

But perhaps the most painful relationship is that between Douglas and his 17 year old son Albie. Albie is Connie’s son through and through – a Starbucks hipster taking moody shots of the backs of people’s heads, your archetypal teen, trying to find himself in the forms of others. Douglas, whose own teenage experiences were narrow and apparently, happily so, (“The most illicit act of my teenage years was to sometimes watch ITV“) struggles to understand his son and as a result bumbles spectacularly through their relationship. Some of their interactions are so skin-tighteningly awkward you can feel yourself turning inside out.

You will feel for both men in this situation, constantly knocking into one another, missing the implications of their actions and words. But it is Albie who I felt for the most. Yeah he’s a bit of a pretentious wind-bag, but then he’s allowed to be, he’s the child. He has time to be a brat, to still be embarrassed and let down by his parents. His father’s constant, if well-meant, putdowns are causing more damage than either of them seem to realise and as a reader you watch and wait, wincing against the give that is unrelentingly impending.

I loved this book, perhaps a notch less than One Day, but I’d probably still be in a coma if it had possibly been better. This novel takes you through so many emotions and you become almost instantly invested in the future of these three people. It is superbly touching and often very funny and as an art lover I couldn’t get enough of the descriptions of some of the grand masters that had me desperate to partake on a similar (but less emotionally harrowing) trip.

Just get it, its great.

Book info:

• ISBN: 9780340896990
• Published by Hodder & Stoughton, out now
• Borrowed proof copy

Judge a Cover Thursday! – Penguin’s new Charlie and The Chocolate Factory design

As Twitter melted a bit yesterday over a cover reveal, I have decided to bring Judge a Cover forward a day!

On Wednesday, Penguin Books released an image for a new book in thier Modern Classics range. Grey strips censored the title and author and Penguin invited  followers to guess what the book could be.

The image showed a shockingly made-up pre-adolescent girl, a mane of gold hair backcombed into a rage. Almost offensively candy shades of orange and pink popped out at you. This hyperbolic image of girliness seemed to be chomping at the bit, teeth gritted against a too glossy mouth.  A featureless, but similarly bedecked, mother figure seemed to turn her face away from the girl with detached uninterest.

Penguin sat back and watched as, what I can only assume, were the answers they expected rolled in (well, from those like me that totally missed the “golden ticket” bit); Valley of The Dolls and Lolita being people’s best bets.

When it was revealed that the cover was for Roald Dahl’s classic, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, I applauded their chutzpah! Here we have a primped and clearly spoilt child, body straining at her Betty Draper-esque mother’s hip, eyes almost shooting out her head towards whatever new acquisition she has her sights on. Her eyes, though tranced, seem to betray the practiced focus of a child used to getting her own way, here are the flickers of self-centredness that will be her undoing.

I thought the cover was brilliant, perfectly pitched for the adult readership of Penguin Modern Classics. It sets the dark, unsettling tone of Dahl’s work that Penguin clearly hope will appeal to adults, a kind of “time to read this another way” incentive.

I told Twitter I thought it was “magnificent”.

It was only then that Lizzi from These Little Words informed me that I was the only one on her timeline who liked it!

I was surprised, my feed had been all for it, if a little taken aback to begin with. So I looked through some more comments and saw that, yes indeed, some people hated it! Some decried it for not depicting the hero of the piece (“Where’s Charlie? Where’s the chocolate?!“), while others seemed to find the Lolita-like qualities a bit inappropriate and a whole lot creepy (I’m not sure if this means they would like the design had it been created for Nabokov’s classic instead).

I can see where these people are coming from, it gives me the cold creeps too to see young girls made up to the nines, but vacousness and its gifting to children by adults, clearly gave Dahl the creeps too. You are meant to find it creepy.

I’ll admit it has been a LONG time since this was read to me at school, but I am assuming we are meant to see this girl as a representation of Veruca Salt, the fur coat wearing monster product of her parents’ grotesque wealth and believed entitlement. This image shows her writ large, as gargoylic and horrible as she is meant to be.

I can see how the image has put people’s teeth on edge, but I find it a fascinating decision, and as someone on Twitter suggested, it would be great to see a serious of adult Dahl covers, all with similar images of parents partly banished to the sidelines, leaving just the horrible (or divine) cartoon rendering of their offspring. This, for me, would be a fantastic start to such a series – a bone chilling picture of what could happen to children of adult readers should they give in too many times…

A Bum Book Bonanza! (well, it is Saturday…)

As a children’s bookseller there was one thing you could be sure of: Give a kid a book about bums, poo or farting and you will have a snorting, giggling friend for life.

Possibly not the always the first choice of the older relative who has companioned them, who was perhaps hoping to leave the shop with something a little more “educational”, or “traditional”. But definitely the sort of thing that immediately catches delighted little eyes!

Sure, there’s room in this world for The Velveteen Rabbit AND bum books- but each has their time and place, and the time and place for bum books is ALWAYS and EVERYWHERE.

My little eyes were delighted then, when three books from the wonderful Claudia Rowe plopped through my letter box.

The Very Hungry Bum, Where the Wild Bums Are and Bum Magic are three hysterical parodies of well-known children’s picture books, which you have probably guessed, are all about rumps, derrieres, posteriors and whoopie cakes.

Irreverent and bonkers, I love these books! They are full of all the silliness and daft nonsense that makes being a kid such fun. But, you don’t have to be a kid to crease up over these, I was sniggering throughout each one and will definitely be keeping them for endless rereads!

It would be easy for kid’s books of this nature to become crass, and parodies can sometimes seem like tacky imposters, but Rowe’s illustrations are subtly wonderful and playful and pay loving respect to the originals. I can easily see these books standing up as must-reads in thier own right. The humour is spot on, just enough without being rude for the sake of it (genius considering its out and out bummage from page one!).

I can see these books being a great tool in teaching kids that bums, poos and farts are nature’s comedy tools and something to be laughed at rather than be ashamed of. Though, teaching your kids to fart expressively and persistantly in class probably isn’t the goal here.

Right, I’m off to download a free copy of The Hungry Bum Yoga Book to complete my collection and see if I can catch a bummerfly, in the meantime, take a look at the trailer for Where The Wild Bums Are…it’s the definition of adorable!

Book infos:

The Very Hungry Bum:

• ISBN: 9780646578347
• Published by Atlas Jones & Co, 2013
• Sent copy by author

Where The Wild Things Are:

• ISBN: 9782646595818
• Published by Atlas Jones & Co, 2013
• Sent copy by author

Bum Magic:

• ISBN: 9780646583068
• Published by Atlas Jones & Co, 2012
• Sent copy by author

 

 

Judge a Cover Friday – The First World War – Hew Strachan

This year marks the 100 year anniversary of the start of the First World War. In an effort to come to some tiny slither of understanding about this nightmare time, I have been pulling out some of my history books.

I was as struck by the cover of Hew Strachan’s The First World War on its resurfacing just as much as I was when I first bought it.  The cover uses imagery from a Canadian First World War recruitment poster:

Your Chums Are Fighting, Why Aren’t You? “Those who were not eager to fight in the First World War had their loyalty, character and masculinity put into question. Recruiting posters such as this one played upon negative attitudes that Canadians held for those who did not answer the battle call.” – Library and Archives Canada

The artist is stated in the book as being C.J. Patterson, but after a cursory look around the internet this poster is the only trace of Patterson I can find. In fact the Imperial War Museum states the artist as “unknown”. The poster is listed by IWM as being produced by Central Recruiting Committee, No.2 Division, Toronto in 1914 (other sources state 1917).

Many moons ago I worked at IWM, and it was here that my interest in war propaganda started. There is something truly chilling about the First World War posters especially. These posters are full of false promises and gut-wrenching emotional blackmail. And this Canadian poster is one of the most blatant guilt flinging calls to arms I have seen, and because of that, it also one of the most effective. There is no escaping that punch of red and the bold white text demanding your response. The silhouetted soldier could almost be a cut-out, waiting for you to fill the form.

A hundred books could be written in a hundred volumes and we will never be able to understand how conflicts of this grotesque scale are able to happen. The First World War is an informative and readable entry point for anyone wanting to expand their knowledge of this era.

Book info:

• ISBN: 9780743239615
• Simon & Schuster, 2006
• Bought

It’s not all about keeping calm and carrying on – some more striking Canadian recruitment and WW1 posters.

 

Smart – Kim Slater

‘I found Jean’s friend dead in the river. His name was Colin Kirk. He was a homeless man, but he still wanted to live.’

“There are a million and one ways to die in this life. It’s best not to think about it.”

The blurb:

“There’s been a murder, but the police don’t care. It was only a homeless old man after all. Kieran cares. He’s made a promise, and when you say something out loud, that means you’re going to do it, for real. He’s going to find out what really happened. To Colin. And to his grandma, who just stopped coming round one day. It’s a good job Kieran’s a master of observation, and knows all the detective tricks of the trade.”

I enjoyed every moment of this book! I can see the inevitable comparisons to The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night Time and the plot reminded me of Colin Fischer, but without all the “meh”. There are a growing number of books that share Kieran’s voice and I can only think this is a good thing. There can never be enough books with diverse voices, so as long as they are as well written, thought-provoking and as moving as this one, I will keep reading them.

Kieran is an outcast – rejected at school, by all but his teaching assistant, and bullied and abused at home. When he finds himself slap bang in the mystery of Colin Kirk’s death, he must rely on all the social skills he has learnt and his copious artist talent. In his determination to find out the truth, he must overcome and outthink all those around him who try to belittle and demean him.

Kieran’s story could well be a bleak and harrowing one (and it is) but he is so clearly a hero from the very first page, a little fighter who is in a constant battle with the everyday, but who is a pro at picking himself up.  Kieran is an exceptionally gifted artist, a talent which he uses to brilliant effect whilst hunting down Colin’s possible killer. I was almost moved to tears when he recalls how art almost bought him and his step-brother together, and how adult violence, fear and the abused loyalty of children boarded this opportunity up for good.

This novel celebrates the love of knowledge and borderline obsession that children can feel about subjects and holds this vibrant world up starkly against the fed-up, colourless, sorry world of the adults. The plot is enthralling and kept my attention pinned and I was impressed by the range of issues Slater covered within it. This book is brutal in parts and doesn’t shy away from bullying, domestic abuse, animal neglect, drugs and societies attitude to the homeless and the elderly. But it touches on these issues without ever sounding worthy or preachy and you come away from this book totally uplifted – an amazing feat by Slater.

As an art fan I loved the references to Lowry and Kieran’s unashamed idolising of him. I hope that young readers will be inspired to seek out his work and to never feel embarrassed at school about their own talents and interests.

“When I look at Lowry’s An Island, it makes my tummy go funny…Even though it is a house and not a person, it still looks sad and lost. When I look at this painting, it feels like something is pressing down on my chest…That’s what Lowry can do to you without saying a single word.”

A review of this book isn’t complete without mentioning the cover, a fantastically eye-catching design from the Macmillian Children’s team and, more importantly, illustrator Helen Crawford-White. Crawford-White’s work will have  been encountered by book fans previously and will no doubt feature in Judge a Cover Friday!  With a cover like this, I would urge you to buy the actual physical copy and I will be jealous of you all!

I would also like to point readers and writers to Slater’s website which contains tips and insight into the publishing journey. Definitely worth a browse.

Smart was a quick read, I could have easily read it in one sitting. Kieran is such a wonderfully written character and I was thrilled to be in his company. I could happily have had a few  more chapters to learn more about him and his mum. This is one of those great crossover books, that though aimed at a YA audience, I can see Smart being enjoyed by adult readers too.

Smart is a superb debut novel which I am sure will be gracing the YA awards lists next year!

Book info:

• ISBN: 9781447254096
• Macmillan Children’s Books out 5th June 2014
• Sent proof copy by publisher through Netgalley, many thanks!