Help! I'm An Alien by Jo Franklin, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

Ten year old Daniel, 'Oddbod' to his family, gets told by his mean big sister that he is an alien, who was adopted into the family as a baby ... and that revelation makes absolute sense.  The evidence is there! So starts this first person account of Daniel trying to get 'back' to planet Keppler 22b, helped by a geeky friend and a gross friend who themselves are also oddbods.

This is a wonderful, fast-paced, romp of slapstick humour, ideal in its short chapters and text breaks for lists and illustrations for less patient Junior School age readers.  But there's more to the story than the laughs.  Under that surface story is a truly moving one about what it is like to feel the odd one out.  I suspect that most children at some point flirt with the idea that they don't belong in their family, and maybe have been adopted.  And of course some truly are.  Those questions are explored within the safety of daftness, but are developed and resolved very pleasingly all the same.

Every KS 2 classroom or library should have this book on offer to its child book choosers.  (And there are two more stories about Daniel to come ...!)

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SALVAGE by Keren David; reviewed by Gillian Philip

Salvage comes with an alarming tagline: Not everything that’s broken can be mended. Maybe that’s what gave me a mounting sense of dread as the paths of Cass and Aidan and their bewilderingly extended families converged. Not that the tagline is the only arresting thing on the very striking cover: there’s the tattoo on the back of Aidan’s neck, the single word Hope. It’s an ineradicable symbol that begins, at one point in the story, to look like a terrible joke.

Cass and Aidan are sister and brother, separated not at birth but when they were four and six respectively. She has no memory of her birth family; he remembers too much. They’ve had upbringings as different from one another as it’s possible to imagine: she’s now the high-achieving, Oxford-bound daughter of an MP, he’s the product of a care system that has failed him – and a product is what he seems to feel like, as much as the damaged goods on sale at the salvage shop where he works. By a chance of fate and Facebook the siblings find one another, twelve years after they were separated, and arrange a meeting that will have desperately frightening consequences for them and everyone around them.

Two voices tell the story, and they’re masterfully done. Aidan is one of those characters who could so easily lose the reader’s sympathy, but Keren David has previous when it comes to damaged young men (see When I Was Joe and its sequels) and she unfolds Aidan’s complex, terrible story with subtlety and grace. She has said in this interview that she found Cass harder to write, because the girl has so little self-awareness. Is there anything more frustrating than a character so pathologically self-contained she won’t even talk to her author? (I speak from some experience, *cough*.) Well, however David managed it in the end, it works beautifully. Cass might do her damnedest to alienate the reader, but in the end she’s too human to succeed. By the halfway point I wanted the best of everything for them both, and there are no guarantees they’ll get it.

It’s not unknown for nuanced main characters to be let down by a touch of cardboard in the supporting cast. No worries here. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book where I can picture the characters so clearly, and hear their voices. For me that doesn’t come with physical description, but by that mystical process where they’re just there, suddenly, in the movie in your head. I’d single out Will and Ben as particular delights; Will’s relationship with Cass is lovely. (Cass’s father, by the way, looks like Rupert Graves. Take my word for it.) I confess, I had a tremor of doubt in the opening pages, which bring us a situation that’s almost a cliche of our times. Uh-oh, I thought: plot thread, please don’t play out like I fear you will … Oh, silly me. I shouldn’t have worried. Of course Keren David doesn’t develop a cliched situation in a cliched way.

Not everything that’s broken can be mended. True. But I’m not going to give the slightest spoilers about what does and doesn’t get fixed in this story. If you want to know – and you will – go on, read it. 

SALVAGE by Keren David: published by Atom Books

www.gillianphilip.com

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BLOOD FAMILY by Anne Fine Reviewed by Adèle Geras

WRITTEN ON AUGUST 28th.

I realize, reading through the review below that I might be taken to be saying: stay away from this book because it's too much in all kinds of ways. It wasn't my intention to say any such thing and indeed it ought to be required reading for anyone who has dealings with adoption services or who wants to understand the difficulties faced by many children. The picture of adoption that comes out of the book is a wonderful one, I think and very sensitively done. What I meant by 'hard to take' is that the book is written so well and at such a finely tuned emotional pitch that it will leave you thinking about it for a long time afterwards and you are not likely to forget it as you are many more trivial works where bloodletting and all kinds of horror are rife. Children who read it will see they are not alone and don't have to be...there are ways of surviving and being helped. Adults who read it will learn much that could prove most useful in their dealings with difficult adolescents....In short, a smashing book and one you should seek out!

Anne Fine has been writing books for children of all ages and for adults for a good many years and her work for readers of every age is marked by its elegance, its humour and its honesty. She also does a good line in spooky, as witness her book of last year, to which this novel is a companion piece, THE DEVIL WALKS. She is also, I have to confess, an old and good friend of mine. Quite a number of my best friends are writers and I'm afraid I can't help it if they're the kind of writer whose books I want to shout about. Am I biased? Well, maybe, but I have no qualms at all in promoting novels I think are good and which many people will enjoy.

"Enjoy" is not perhaps the word to use in the case of this book. It's very hard-hitting and readers of a delicate and easily-upset disposition would be well advised to steer clear of it. Parts of it are difficult to read. Parts of it are so eye-wateringly appalling that I can well imagine the odd person putting the book aside thinking: this is too much for me.

Eddie, four years old, lives with his mother and an abusive man and it's only thanks to the intervention of a nosy and kind neighbour that he is rescued and eventually both fostered and adopted. His foster and adoptive parents are lovely, but by then much damage has been done to Eddie and his mother has been so badly beaten that she can barely talk, much less relate to her son. Eddie, however, as he grows up, has problems of his own. He comes to think that maybe the abusive man who brutalised his mother is his own father and that maybe, as they say, blood is thicker than water and he is in danger of turning into the Beast he so fears and loathes. What he does is take to drink and Fine provides a clear and depressing picture of exactly what this can lead to.

The novel is told in the voices of its protagonists and everyone has a part in the narrative patchwork. This allows Fine to vary the tone and the inflection, and makes the book easier to read as well as moving it along at a cracking pace. You won't be able to put it down, once you begin it. The only person who is never heard is Eddie's mother and that's because she's been beaten to such degree that she can no longer speak or think in any coherent way. Her silence is the saddest thing in the whole novel.

Many people help Eddie along the way and Fine is very good at finding silver linings in the most impenetrable of clouds. There is a happy ending, but prepare to be soundly harrowed on the way there. Teenagers should read this book and so should their parents and carers. When real-life children like Eddie are not as fortunate as he is, our newspapers fill up with tragic stories like that of Daniel Pelka.

Perhaps not a book to recommend as an easy beach read, but one which will stay with you for a long time after you've closed it.

Published by: Doubleday Books in hardback Price: £12.99 ISBN: 9870857532404

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'Being Billy' by Phil Earle - reviewed by Rosalie Warren

Billy is a lifer - not in prison but in a care home. He has just turned fifteen and he's angry - oh boy, is he angry. His fury blazes out from every page.

Billy is not easy to like, or not at first, anyway. Not if you are a middle-aged woman like me, brought up in the 1960s in a family who gave you all the love and security you ever needed. After the first few pages, I wondered whether Billy and I were going to get on.

But slowly, Phil Earle led me into Billy's world and I started to get glimpses of why Billy is the way he is. Nine years of institutional living, for a start. An attempt at being fostered by a family with an eye to adopting him, which all went disastrously wrong. Before that, an alcoholic mother with a partner who physically abused Billy. This young man has many reasons for being the way he is.

Billy's redeeming feature is that he loves his younger brother and sister, the ten-year-old twins, Louie and Lizzie. He will do anything to protect them and keep them from harm. He'll beat up anyone who tries to hurt them. He stands guard outside the bathroom-without-a-lock while Lizzie is inside, reads them bedtime stories and tucks their duvets round their feet at night to keep them warm.

Care home worker Ronnie is on Billy's side or wants to be, if only Billy would let him. Ronnie goes to great lengths to help Billy sort out his life, but Billy's having none of it. It's not till he meets Daisy, a girl from a similar background to his own, that he begins to thaw out, just a little bit.

There's talk of the twins moving back home to live with their mother, leaving Billy behind in the care home. He hates this idea, both for their sake and his own, though with Daisy and Ron's help he finally starts to come to terms with it. But that's only the beginning of further trouble. Billy will have to dig deep to find what he needs to help his brother and sister now.

Books don't often make me cry these days, but my eyes were wet at a couple of points in the reading of this one. Phil Earle knows what he's talking about. The introduction says he worked in a children's home and moved on to train as a drama therapist and worked in a community in London caring for traumatized adoloscents. All that experience shines through the novel. And Phil understands Ronnie as well as Billy, that's very clear.

Young readers may well identify more quickly with Billy than I did. When I finally 'got' him, I was ashamed it had taken me so long. From the outside, I would have dismissed him, for sure, as yet another troublesome and violent young lad. I'm sorry, Billy. I understand you a bit better now and I see how I could easily have been you or Daisy if I'd experienced the kind of things you did.

Well done, Phil Earle. I see you have a new book out, called Saving Daisy. I hope it's the troubled Daisy, Billy's friend from the first book. I'll be reading it very soon, anyway, and I'll be recommending Billy to everyone who crosses my path.

Title: Being Billy
Author: Phil Earle
Publisher: Puffin (6 Jan 2011)
ISBN-10: 0141331356
ISBN-13: 978-0141331355



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