by Gudrun Bowers | 23, Jul 2021
A nail-bitingly thrilling survival drama for readers of 8-12 years by the author of ‘The Boy in the Tower’.
Rule Number 1: Always be Prepared…. Billy’s mum isn’t like the other mums. She’s a scientist, for starters, and takes Billy out of school to train him in the Rules of Survival. But after her obsession goes too far, Billy is sent to Bristol, to live with a dad he barely knows.
Billy settles in well and even makes his first ever friends, but his new, life is rudely interrupted by a strange and terrifying phenomenon … is it a virus? An alien shape-shifting life form? People are turning into strange, scary grey creatures and chaos is breaking out. Billy, his dad, and his new friends have to flee the city. Billy realises that THIS is what his mum was preparing him for. Can Billy reach his mum’s ‘Safe Haven’ in time, and will she even be there? Can he reunite his family … and where are his friends?
Exciting, powerful and emotional; a perfect book for fans of Ross Welford.
by my_admin | 18, May 2020
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. Bloomsbury 8.99
‘Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was? I asked my sister. We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch House in the broad daylight of early summer.’
Living in their beloved “Dutch House” a lavishly decorated folly of a mansion so named because of the original owners, Danny and his brilliantly acerbic and protective sister Maeve are thrown together when their mother walks out leaving them with their “impenetrable mystery” of a father. The bond is cemented when a “wicked stepmother” arrives and the pair are eventually ousted from the house. Twisting back and forth across five decades the novel paints an intimate, poignant and sometime humorous portrait of a family and its complex relationships, focussing on the two siblings who have found a precarious sanctuary in each other when they are failed by the adults who were supposed to nurture them.
“ The Dutch House brilliantly captures how time undoes all certainties.” The Guardian
