michaelcattigan's reviews
469 reviews

Oh, this is an extraordinary book!

There are very few books that make me feel genuinely emotional and (a very little bit) teary but this was one. There is something about in simplicity of the prose, the inevitability of the ending, the unflinching acceptance of extraordinary and unavoidable pain, the wonderful mythic nature of the eponymous monster... It is simply deeply powerfully moving.

The story revolves around Conor O'Malley, a school boy whose mother is painfully and fatally ill. Although its not spelled out - and one of the delights here is that Ness is respectful enough of his audiences that he doesn't feel the need to spell everything out - it is clear that she is suffering from cancer. As the story is based in an idea Siobhan Dowd had as she faced and lost her battle with cancer there is a potent autobiographical parallel here.

As Conor is awoken by the sound of his name one evening he sees "the great yew tree that rose from the centre of the graveyard" as it's branches "gathered themselves into a great and terrible face, shimmering into anything and nose and even eyes peering back at him." The yew tree becomes "the spine that the mountains hang upon... The tears that the rivers cry ... The lungs that breathe the wind ... The wolf that kills the stag, the hawk that kills the mouse, the spider that kills the fly... The stag, the mouse, the fly that are eaten... The snake of the world devouring its tail... Everything untamed and untameable". This language is so lyrical, so primal, so mythic that the creature itself is a towering literary creation.

It reminds me of The Iron Man in its sheer alienness and inhumanity.

Stories are at the heart of this book. The Monster - like Dickens' ghosts - has three stories to tell and asks for (expects, demands) a fourth rom Conor.

Half way through the novel, Conor discovers that his mother's most recent chemotherapy treatment is derived from the yew tree. We witness him from inside the novel try to force the narrative into a fairy tale on which he has summoned the monster in order to heal his mother. Ness, however, refuses to allow the narrative to become quite so trite: it is genuinely heartbreaking when the Monster tells him "I did not come to heal her. I came to heal you". In fact we the reader share Conor's experience: the conclusion is utterly inevitable; we all know what will happen; but we all hope for and deceive ourselves into looking for an illusory happy ending.

Parallel to the Monster, Ness offers us snapshots of Conor at school. These chapters offer a contrast to the myth of the Monster but complement it beautifully. The strained friendship between him and Lily is beautifully judged and again Ness avoids the temptation to be trite and wrap up the trauma with his mother in a jarring sugar coated romance. Understated, quiet and moving, the friendship, their alienation and reconciliation is - as with the whole novel - simply beautifully judged.

This is as close to perfection as I could ask for in a novel. Simply stunning. I challenge anyone not to be moved to (near) tears by it. These are characters who will live with you and hang you beyond the end of the novel. Beautiful.

Just finished My Name Is Mina. Good book, interesting but I don't think it's a winner. It tells the story of Mina from Skellig, essentially recording her thoughts in a journal over the winter / spring before she met Michael. I have a memory of her being quite mysterious and enigmatically in Skellig and was looking forward to hearing her voice.

I have mixed feelings about it: it doesn't feel to me like it is a prequel, more of an extended prologue to Skellig. There was something powerful in her dogged desire to be true to herself and not straitjacketed into a niche in society. There are also moments of genuine pathos... But I didn't find her voice as compelling as I'd hoped. I also felt I'd have liked to see more of her mum: having lost her father and husband, fiercely protected her daughter, taken on her home schooling and nurtured Mina, I felt HER story would have been interesting. The moment when she is called into THE HEAD TEACHER's office after the triumphantly disastrous SATs could have been brilliant but seemed anti climactic to me!

There are some interesting things here about education and children and creativity, all of which I personally support. I'm also glad that the anti-education system philosophy was tempered by an understanding that the teachers weren't all bad too! The Blake references were all there as would be expected; interesting ideas about the power and playfulness of words. But for a book that purports to champion the 'weird', I felt it wasn't quite weird enough...

Anyway, my next book is due and I will probably retread Skellig whilst waiting.

This is a very powerful book: all the more powerful and painful as it is based on historical fact and first-hand accounts.

Lina is a fifteen year old Lithuanian school girl, a talented artist, a member of a loving family. In 1941, caught between Hitler's fascism to the west and Stalin's communism to the East, Lithuania was invaded and annexed by Russia and Stalin ordered the deportation of thousands of people to prisons, slavery and work camps. Lina and her family become one of them.

The book opens with the NKVD assaulting Lina's home and taking her in the middle of the night. The novel then moves in three sections: the horror of the train carriage in which they are imprisoned to travel weeks across Russia; their time in a Siberian beet farm; and finally their further deportation into the arctic circle.

Be careful before choosing to read this book: the horrors and deprivations faced by Lina are not shied away from here. There are moments of violence, brutality, horror and abuse. That said, there are also images of hope: Lina's drawings, the stone that Andrius finds and gives Lina, moments of generosity from people who have nothing; characters who show dignity in the worst situations; characters whose basic goodness comes out in the painfully few times they can show it.

A hugely powerful book and shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. I do question whether it is really appropriate for a Young Adult / Secondary School readership? I'd be careful advising anyone under KS4 to read this!

A fabulous book! At its most literal level!

Reading the blurb of this, the fate of Romany children in Eastern Europe during World War II was an appealing on. Then it mentioned that they come across animals in a zoo which talk to them.

Talking animals have never appealed to me: Mrs Frisbee, Beatrix Potter, Disney... Anthropomorphised, twee, patronising ... Oddly I do like magic realism but the idea of talking animals curdles the blood.

This, however, works. And works brilliantly.

Andrej and Tomas are fleeing Nazi persecution having witnessed their family and friends gathered and led into the forest bearing shovels. It is implicit that they are being executed. Told to flee by their mother, they do so and end up in a ruined razed village. There, Night (who almost acts in the same way as Death in The Book Thief) spots them as they slip into the only building standing: the zoo. After being knocked out by a bomb raid, Andrej and Tomas hear the animals talking. It is not clear whether the remainder of the novel is Andrej's delusion or genuine. In fact the boundaries between narrative truth, history, fiction, dream, story and fantasy are not clear throughout the book.

The animals tell their stories to the children and whether we truly believe them - for example, the lioness appeared to have ended up in the zoo after she mauled the bride of the hunter who had stolen her - in my opinion, becomes irrelevant. Because the stories have power. A truth that exists beyond pedantic accuracy.

I can see many people reacting to this novel negatively and seeing only superficial meanings: zoos are bad; wars are horrible. The heart of the book, however, is deeper than that: it is in the beautiful lyricism of the prose (some of the sentences are truly stunning!) and in the power and value of story telling.

This book has been nominated for the Carnegie Medal 2012. As has Patrick Ness' A Monster Calls in which the eponymous Monster tells Conor, the main character, three stories in exchange for a story back from Conor. Hartnett's tale shows the power of story to overcome the horrors of war; Ness' shows the power of story to overcome the horrors of a parent's illness. Both books are stunning!

So now I've finished, did this novel improve?

Unfortunately no!

It is entirely the fault of the narrator I think and just shows how hugely important the narrative voice is in a first person narrative. Here it is the voice of a thirteen year old boy and he just annoyed the hell out of me (and as a parent and teacher, I have quite a high threshold for teenage annoyance!)!

The episode where he stole a ute and drove into a stampede of cattle in order to save his camel left me speechless for all the wrong reasons! He needed a good slap for endangering himself, the cattle and the car. And if he told me once more that being allowed to do something adult made him feel "taller" I may have put the book on the fire!

The descriptions did improve from page 91: the descriptions of the cows being burned - reminiscent of foot-and-mouth pyres - were gruelling. But the language was almost completely bereft of adjectives or figurative language. I do accept that the choice of a down-to-earth home-educated teenage boy narrator limits the literariness of the writing but, even so!

And the obvious device of using the rain to conclude the book felt clumsy.

I also had a problem with the language here: there are many Australian slang terms littering the book but they didn't strike me as authentic, more as if they had been shoehorned in to give a veneer of authenticity (to mix my own metaphors!). Cliche was also a difficulty here: Danny's father seemed to speak in them which Lewis then highlighted by putting them in italics!. The rain at the end of the book, the pathetic fallacy of the deepening drought that reflects the deepening rifts within the family all struck me as cliched.

I feel I'm being unfair! This is not a bad book. I just did not gel with it. Two more on the Carnegie list to go!
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Ok, I'll be honest, I'm not thrilled with this book. It's set in the Australian desert in a family run cattle station, not dissimilar to that shown in Baz Luhrman's film Australia.

It is narrated through a first person voice of Danny, the middle son who is struggling to come to terms with his older brother Johnny's death (apparently by falling off a roof, memories of The Archers' Nigel Pargetter spring unbidden to mind) and his sister's pregnancy.

Actually, that seems unfair: save for a couple of conversations and references the death and pregnancy have been hardly dealt with at all. Perhaps this is because 13 year olds do deal with things by ignoring them - mine does - but it means that the book seems to do no more than recount the day to day minutiae of ranch life... and it's really rather dull!

And descriptions seem to be lacking. The butchering of the killer could have been described in detail but is instead only obliquely referred to. Again perhaps this reflects the matter-of-fact nature of death on a cattle station. Perhaps it is a nod to the sensibilities of a young adult audience (who have a stronger stomach than this book may assume).

Perhaps I am being unfair: I am only 91 pages into it. But I'm not gripped by the narrator or the writing ...

I am in two minds over this book. And I think that reflects the fact that the book itself is trying to be two things at once.

On the one hand this is a gritty realistic depiction of the most poor in a down trodden society. It is based on the trash piles that Mulligan witnessed in Manila, being combed over by children scavenging anything that could be useful, traded or sold. It is a genuine contemporary problem and the descriptions of the trash piles, of the slum town of Behala are effective and chilling for a young adult book. There is a strength in Mulligan's writing when describing these through the eyes of Raphael, Gardo and Rat, his three protagonists and principal narrators.

Having stumbled onto a bag in their scavenging, Raphael discovers a moderate fortune, photographs of a dead man and his daughter and a key. It soon transpires that the police are also after the contents of this bag and offer 10,000 pesos for its recovery and another 1,000 pesos to every family. It is here that the narrative falters for me: the brutality with which the police persecute Raphael was convincing and chilling; but the speed with he rejects the offer of the money stretched my suspension of disbelief too far.

As a fable (and one that I felt was explicitly Christian) I understand that Raphael had to reject the temptation of the money; but set in an otherwise realistic convincing environment it jarred.

As did the literacy of the boys. Again I understand it is written in retrospect and possibly with the benefit of a later education and I can accept their narrative voices. What struck me, though, was the picture of them sitting around reading newspapers and the Internet. Again a small, jarring detail.

In fact I felt the life of these boys was just slightly romanticised. They meet other street boys in the course of the novel; they sneak their way into the train station boys' territory, night sweepers share a cigarette with Raphael, they are hidden in a gang of youths... They almost seem like the Baker Street Irregulars or Robin Hood's Merry Men. Again, in itself, this is no bad thing; in a contemporary gritty setting, it didn't quite work for me.

As a teacher, however, I see much to recommend this book: the characters are vivid and well created and their voices are convincing. I particularly liked the voices of the more minor characters who took over the narration from time to time. I think a lot of boys will read this very much as an adventure story and it does appeal to the powerful idea of the underdog rising up to combat and succeed in a small but significant way against a corrupt political system.