It??s been a great year for fiction for older kids and Young Adult, writes Vicky Allan, but of recent publications one stands out ?? Marcus Sedgwick??s The Ghosts Of Heaven (Indigo, £10.99).
It??s been a great year for fiction for older kids and Young Adult, writes Vicky Allan, but of recent publications one stands out ?? Marcus Sedgwick??s The Ghosts Of Heaven (Indigo, £10.99).
A magnificently imaginative meditation on human longing and its relation to the symbol that adorns its cover ?? the spiral ?? it is a book of four parts. Sedgwick??s only slightly interlinked stories span time, from a young woman driven to make cave paintings (written in a hypnotic free verse), through the horrors of a pre-Enlightenment witch hunt, to a 1920s mental asylum, and finally on to the future and a spaceship hunting out a new Earth.
Sedgwick has said he was inspired by Stanley Kubrick??s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he matches the film??s scope and mystery. He has suggested the stories can be read in any order. You can decide for yourself which turn of the spiral you take but, whichever way you read it, this makes for a spellbinding tumble into the unknown.
The Last Of The Spirits by Chris Priestley (Bloomsbury, £10.99) is a new version of A Christmas Carol, probably pitched at slightly younger kids, but nevertheless a stirring and haunting rewriting of the original Dickens.
One would think there was not much new you could do with the classic, which has seen so many film versions, stage-productions and spin offs, but by making its central characters two starving children ?? based on the allegorical Ignorance and Want of the original ?? Priestley brings a fresh take on the struggles of children in poverty, both then and now.
One feels that Sam and his sister Lizzie don??t have a hope. When the spirit shows what lies ahead for them, Sam is in Newgate prison and has a hangman??s noose around his neck. Here Scrooge isn??t really so much the key point; rather it??s the seemingly irresistible pathway from childhood want to hangman??s noose, and society??s inability to give the poor a chance.
As a teen I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, so when I saw that Anthony Horowitz had penned his second Holmes novel, Moriarty (Orion, £19.99), and that it revolved around the detective??s arch-foe, I was intrigued.
But the tale, set post Reichenbach Falls, isn??t really Holmes book at all. Instead of Watson, we have as narrator Pinkerton agent Frederick Chase, who is lured into investigating the whole Reichenbach story as part of an attempt to track down a sadistic American crime leader. It??s also bloody and brutal in a way that Holmes stories never were, like Conan Doyle under the influence of Ripper Street and Peaky Blinders. Still, Holmes fans will love the theorising and super-smart twists in this deft and showy work of fandom.
The YA market is not, however, all blood and hardship, and for girls who wanna have fun, the surefire hit of the season is Zoe Sugg??s Girl Online (Penguin, £12.99). The superstar beauty vlogger Zoella has penned a tale of teenage anxiety, boys, spots and panic attacks, and for all it is sometimes saccharine, the book is kept buoyant by a sharp edge of wit and occasional smart cultural referencing.
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