28. Alphabet House by Jussi Adler-Olsen

So I’ve been a bit slack lately. I read this story and returned the book to the library (to avoid any more hefty fines which this challenge has given me) before I went on holiday and I haven’t got round to writing it up until now. I’ve also been a bit slack about taking up this challenge again as I haven’t had time to go to the library and pick up some books, which is the main reason why I haven’t ploughed through as many as books as I thought I would. I’ve now started re-reading some books on my bookshelf and am thorougly enjoying them but then I feel like I’m neglecting this challenge. So fear not, dear reader, I shall journey back to the library soon. In the meantime, please sit back and enjoy this review (If I haven’t already lost you because I haven’t blogged in a long time).

Anyway, this book was surprisingly good. I say surprisingly, as it looked like a typical action book, which it was, but set in an unusual location. Well, you can’t really judge a book by its cover, maybe only a little bit. The story begins in World War 2, with two English pilots, James and Bryan, who get shot down during a reconnaissance mission in Germany. They narrowly escape capture by boarding a German train carrying injured Nazis and take on the identity of two Nazis. As the train is taking them further into Germany, they realise that they can’t have the family of the real Nazis meeting them, so they feign insanity. They end up in an asylum which is called the Alphabet House. They endure electric shocks and dubious drugs and find out that there are other inpatients who are pretending to be insane. Don’t worry, I haven’t given much away, as this is only the beginning. I am however, going to have to say what happens next as there is more, so… I can’t believe I’m going to write this, but…. SPOILER ALERT!!  Turn away now if you don’t want to know… well I warned you. Bryan manages to escape but can’t take James with him. Years pass and Bryan is haunted by the idea of abandoning James so he goes to Germany to find him. And that’s it, I’m not going to say any more about the plot. The main story is set in later day when Bryan goes back to Germany so that’s why I had to reveal that part of the story.

The bit that I really liked was when James and Bryan are in disguise and how they try to maintain their cover. The tension is palpable, coupled with the unpredictable actions in the asylum, which had me on the edge of my seat at times. The internal struggles of the characters seem authentic and rounded which made me care about them. Adler-Olsen gives the reader a good insight into the characters’ internal thoughts and emotions. He also paints a very realistic picture of the infirmary train and the aslyum, and how the Nazis try to wheedle out any people trying to fake madness to get out of the war. The latter part, which is set in the 1970s, is also gripping as you are willing Bryan to find James. However, it didn’t hold my attention as it did with the former part in the Alphabet House. The story is much more of a straight-forward action story which is all very well and good but it lacked the suspense that there was when the men were trying to not to be found out. All in all, though, it was an enjoyable read.

27. Between the assassinations by Aravind Adiga

 For Ramin Bahrani

When I saw this book and whom it was written by, I was quite excited to read it as I enjoyed his other book, The White Tiger. At the beginning, I wasn’t disappointed – Adiga’s vivid portrayal of characters and setting were great. However, the story then changed and I thought ‘Okay, new characters and story, no problem, perhaps these stories will interlink somehow’. However, I cottoned on that this wasn’t going to happen and that these were short stories. I was disappointed as I don’t like short stories. I haven’t really thought about why I don’t like short stories before and I think it is because I feel as if I get nothing back after investing my time into caring about the characters and the plot. A short story just cuts it… well, short, and it doesn’t satisfy me. I like to immerse myself in a book and be transported to another world for a time. Although short stories can do this to a point, it’s just not long enough for me to spend in that world. However, being the professional that I am, I stoicly read on to the end. Putting my dislike of short stories aside, Adiga pulls it out of the bag. The stories are all set in a coastal town called Kittur, a ficitional place. The beginning of the book has a Contents page which looks like a page from another book. The stories are labelled by either a morning, afternoon or evening and split over 7 days, suggestive of a travel itinerary. Each story begins with a description of a part of a town, again like a travel book. By setting the book in this way, the author makes the reader feel like a tourist which, in some way, you are. The short stories are about the corruption, the injustice and the hypocracy in India. They look at the caste system and the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. They also look at the complacency and the hypocracy of the middle classes. As reader, you ultimately are a tourist, dipping into this world, being shown how terrible it is and then you dip out back to real life.

As with a collection of short stories, some are more poignant than others. The stories are sad and none of them have a happy ending. The collection is vivid and heart-breaking and tries to expose the poverty and hardships in India and how people will tread on one another to survive. However, as I got nearer the end, I became tired of reading the same story repeatedly, which made me wonder if I am heartless or a product of the world we live in? Perhaps Adiga is trying to shake the complacency of my comfortable life and to galvanise me to take action?  If this is the case, is he also a hypocrite for making money out of these miseries or a hero for bringing these cases to light? Or maybe, like his characters in the book, we humans are not that black and white.

26. A walk across the sun by Corban Addison

For the uncountable number of souls held captive in the sex trade. And for the heroic men and women across the globe wroking tirelessly to win their freedom

When I go to the library for this reading challenge, I always pick up books in pairs and the coincidental pairing is always interesting. This book couldn’t get any further from the previous one and yet they both say something about being a female. As you can tell from the dedication (which by the way, is the most admirable yet), this book is about the sex trade and the exploitation of vulnerable women and girls. The story is set in India and it is about two sisters: Ahalya aged 17 and Sita aged 15. Their family and their home are ripped apart by a tsumani and they try to reach their covent school for safety. On their way, they are kidnapped and sold to brothel owners. The story intercuts with another – this one is set in Washington and a lawyer named Thomas Clarke is trying to cope after the death of his infant daughter and his wife leaving him. After a major case he is working on collapses, he decides to take a sabbatical to India and work for an anti-trafficking charity. Whilst at the charity, Thomas hears of Ahalya and Sita’s case and goes on a mission to rescue them. This brings him to various places whilst Sita is sold to various gangs across the world. It is a very harrowing story and contrasts starkly with the fluffiness of the previous book.What makes it more poignant is that you know that even though this story is fiction, similar things are happening around the world. At the end of the story, the author mentions that the fictional charity that he uses in the book is simliar to the International Justice Mission.

What Addison does really well is conveying characters and their clear motivations for them to do what they do. He is very good at creating suspense and kept me on the edge of my seat. He is unforgiving in what he lets happen to these girls but he does it without sensationalising. He was very careful to make it authentic as he says that modern slavery is horrifying enough. This is a very good book, telling a story that needs to be told.

 

25. It had to be you by Ellie Adams

To Dad,

for sponsoring the arts

Well the inscription is ironic. This book is about as far as away as it can be from ‘the arts’. This is another chick-lit and you may have noticed by now that I do not like this genre. I have asked myself why I don’t like these kinds of books as I like the silliness of female caricatures on screen (like Clueless or Drop dead diva). I’ve been racking my brains trying to work out why books are different and I think it’s because it feels like the author is preaching to me, as if they are telling me how to be a woman. In films or TV, I can laugh at the over-the-top characters whilst sympathising with them. However, in books, the author comes out with ridiculous statements of how to be a woman or how to be a man. In this book, the author implies that there must be something wrong with men who drink Smirnoff Ice (FFS!) and uses popular cultures as similies. She refers to someone having an undercut ten years before Miley Cyrus (and by the way, the undercut existed many years before then) and referring to someone who shouts in the same way as Len Goodman shouting ‘seven’ (if you don’t know who Len Goodman is, you’re not missing much). It is a serious crime against English Literature. The worst thing about this book and other Chick-Lit books is that they undermine women – they always write about women with vacuous jobs (PR, fashion) who experience a man leaving them (in various ways, eg. death, dumping, divorce) and how they cope (or don’t) until another man comes into their life (usually a friend or someone they hate until they realise their true feelings) and then live happily ever after. Why can’t a woman be single and happy or why can’t female protagonists be more interesting.

The weird thing is, is that as I read it, I slowly got into it. Without my consent, this book had somehow made me like it. I still felt irritated by detailed descriptions of what a character was wearing which had no bearing on the story, and that the author might think I like that sort of thing, what with being a girl and all… I’m still baffled about what I liked about this book. Maybe it was the characters? Maybe because the protagonist had already got her man halfway through the book and the story didn’t end there, or maybe (and most probably the most accurate option) is that I was so horrified by the beginning by the crimes against literature, that my expectations couldn’t get any lower. The saccharin ending was like an awful rom com film that completely over-killed the happily ever after idiom. However, I still enjoyed it and that is most worring indeed.

 

24. The Eden Legacy by Will Adams

To Robert, Eleanor and Grace

Fortunately, I managed to read the books in the correct order. This is the sequel to the Lost Labyrinth. Without giving too much away, the main protagonist, Daniel Knox is now living under a new identity. He works as an underwater archeologist for a British firm, searching for ruins of a Chinese shipwreck in Madagascar. Looking for revenge, Daniel spends his time researching the Nergazedes on the internet which leads them to him. Unbeknownst to him, they send a hitman to kill him whilst he tries to find a missing friend and her father who disappeared from a boat.

Rebecca Kirkpatrick flies back home to find her missing sister and father. She meets Daniel and they both try to find her missing family. Meanwhile, the hitman and his accomplice try to find Daniel. In true action story fashion, it builds to a climax near the end. I’ll stop talking about the plot so as not to give anything away. It was an entertaining read and it made a nice change to read a story set in Madagascar. There isn’t really much more to say about this book, unfortunately. There wasn’t anything awful or particularly amazing about it. It was just an easy read which unfortunately means that I haven’t got much to say about it.

23. The Lost Labyrinth by Will Adams

To Robert, Eleanor and Grace

When I choose an image for a book, I always try and get the same front cover as I the one on the copy I read. As you can see from this cover, it said ‘If you like Dan Brown, then you’ll love Will Adams’. My heart sank when I read this. However, I was pleasantly wrong.  The idea of an ancient myth being possibly real is a great concept and this is where the similarity to Dan Brown ends. It is very different to Dan Brown, in that it is well written, Adams has a firm grasp on grammar and the clues aren’t from Scoobie Doo.

The main character, an archeologist called Daniel Knox, becomes embroiled in a Georgian mafia’s scheme to find the golden fleece after encountering a long-lost archeologist dying in his friend’s hotel room in Greece. The head of the mafia, Ilya Nergadze sends his psychopathic grandson, Mikhail to find the Golden Fleece to bolster his popularity during the elections (a bit far-fetched, I know). Mikhail is a nasty piece of work and there are torture scenes in this book which seem a bit gratuitous. It did, however, make me want Mikhail to get what he deserved.

It also seems a bit far-fetched that an archeologist can escape and outwit hired professional members of the mafia but again, it is fiction so I’m willing to contort my suspension of disbelief. The plot in the beginning and in the middle is entertaining and keeps the reader on their toes. The ending is a bit of a cop-out in a way, although tempting readers about the Golden Fleece and not delivering would be disappointing, but the ending isn’t very well thought-out.

There aren’t many clever writing devices here, but overall, it is just an entertaining book. You don’t have to think about it and you can easily get into it after a hard day’s work. This is great for commuting.

22. Watership Down by Richard Adams

To Juliet and Rosamond, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon

Ah Watership Down. Finally, I’ve come across a classic. I’ve read it before but had sort of forgotten it, although there were one or two sections of the book that I remembered. I had seen the cartoon too and also vaguely remembered it. I was very surprised at how good the book is.

The story begins with Fiver, a small rabbit who has an awful vision that he can’t interpret but he knows that the rabbits must leave their warren immediately to avoid a tragedy. No one believes him apart from his brother, Hazel and they manage to convince a small number of rabbits, including one Bigwig, to join them and set off on a journey. A journey always makes a good story, in which the journey taken is not just the physical one. It’s the perfect tool for character change. As we all know, being out in the open away from the warren can be a very dangerous place indeed for rabbits, so this story is about how the rabbits try to find a suitable place to live, whilst traversing all the dangers they encounter, then finding female rabbits to reproduce with. The book culminates in Bigwig, one of the protagonists, trying to liberate female rabbits by infiltrating a prison-like warren dictated by a ruthless leader called General Woundwort. As the name suggests, the General organises his warren like a prison guarded by regiments and there is a clear hierarchy of power. Each rabbit is bitten and depending on where he is bitten, he is allocated into a Mark, a group of rabbits who are guarded by officers and sentries who are overlooked by a Captain. Above the Captain are the Council rabbits who look after an area in the warren, e.g. one is responsible for feeding, one for breeding etc. Similar to a dictatorship in real life, the ordinary rabbits suffer whilst the ones in power have privileges, which makes ordinary rabbits aspire to become an officer, which self-perpetuates the whole system. This book is about survival and it makes for great reading.

Adams clearly did his research about rabbits and he credits the book The Private Life of the Rabbit written by, and very respectfully referred to as Mr R M Lockley. What was good about this book was that not only did I believe that these were actually rabbits I was imagining, but Adams managed to make me care and sympathise with these rabbits as if they were human characters. It is a very clever device as I was totally consumed by the action and willed the rabbits to succeed in sticky situations. The way Adams did this was by using the usual character devices: insight into characters’ feelings and motivations, distinctive character traits and idiosyncratic ways of speaking. Even the peripheral characters have one or two sentences about them that sum up who they are which is emphasised by their actions. What made the rabbits comparable to humans was that Adams gives them a language and a belief system. Like other writers who try to create a different world, Adams copies Tolkien by giving the rabbits their own language so that we humans, have to be told what each lupine term means. He does this by using footnotes to tell us how to pronounce words and their definition. The rabbits also tell each other stories of El-ahrairah, a cheeky and mischievous rabbit who was the prince of the rabbits. Like a naughty child, he tries to avoid and outwit Frith, the creator of the world. El-ahrairah reminds me of the Monkey King (the cheeky monkey in the 70’s cult classic Monkey Magic or for the more literary, the cheeky monkey in the Journey to the West, one of the four great classical novels in Chinese literature) as he is naughty but ultimately a good rabbit. The myths inspire the rabbits in their plans to help them ro rescue female rabbits from General Woundwort. At one particularly tense fight in which Bigwig is blocking the entrance to his warren against General Woundwort, Bigwig’s friend, Bluebell is telling a story about El-ahrairah talking to a fox to calm the does. It is a vicious fight and when General Woundwort is winning, he tries to get Bigwig to join his side. This is when Adams mixes the dialogue between General Woundwort and Bigwig with El-ahrairah and the fox. This is the only time in the book when the myths and the main story collide. It creates drama and suspense and works very well. He also uses other stories to reflect the action in the main story – every chapter begins with a quote from other writers such as Shakespeare and Yeats.

I could go on (and I clearly have) but I realise that this may bore some readers so I’ll cut it short. Adams’ sense of drama and how he manipulates the story and its format is very clever. The urgency of life and death and how one desperate plan relies on another and how each intersperes one with another, makes for a gripping read. So much so, that I missed my stop on the train and had to get off the next station. I also ran the risk of walking into lamposts by trying to read whilst walking to work. For me, this is clearly a sign of a great book.

 

 

 

21. The Clown Service by Guy Adams

To Agents “Loorbins” and “Drudles”, for their consistent support in the fireld. Mission accomplished.

Well, what an interesting book. This is about a secret agent called Toby who gets relegated to Section 37, an intelligence service specialising in the paranormal. Now hold on, don’t go away just yet. This is an enjoyable book. It is set in London for one, and so differs from the usual American paranormal government story. There is a character called August Shining, who is effectively the British Mulder, and his bolshy sister; Jamie, who has to get out of his face to travel to astral planes; an ex-wrestler who has built a kind of travel machine; and where would a good spy book be without a crazy Russian man bent on world destruction?

It is written by the same author whose book I read previously. Like the previous book, it uses classic devices such as prophetic statement to arouse the reader’s interest. The book switches from 1960s to present day and between various locations. To help the reader orientate where she is, Adams states location and date before each section. Adams also plays with perspective, changing it from 3rd to 1st and back to 3rd again. He keeps up the pace by switching from story to story and each section ends on a cliff-hanger leaving the reader wanting more – Dickens would be pleased.

As the action picked up the pace, so did the structure of the novel. Adams made each section shorter so they became more like scenes in a film. I really enjoyed this book and whizzed through it. Like a film, there was a suggestion of a sequel, I hope there is.

20. Hands of the ripper by Guy Adams

Hmmm… No tribute. I realise that when I flick through the first few pages of a book, expecting to find a tribute and not finding one, I double-check just to make sure and then feel a little disappointed that there isn’t one. It’s as if I’m feeling sorry for the people in the author’s life who are left untributed. It’s very strange and I really need to get out more.

Anyway, back to the book. This is part of the Hammer series published by Random House. It is a reworking of a Hammer horror film from the 70’s. It is about an elderly psychologist named John whose wife is recently deceased. Her spirit haunts him and he visits a medium, recommended on by one of his students, Shaun (you find out why this is important later). He sees Aida Golding performing as a spiritualist and is taken by a young woman whom Aida transmits messages to from her dead child. John is intrigued by her and frequently visits Aida’s show, even though he has suspicions that Aida is a fake and that the young woman is a plant. He is invited to a private seance with a select few, including the young woman. During the seance, a man gets killed after the spirit of a mass murderer nicknamed the Ripper gets evoked.

I don’t want to give the story away, but it is a gripping book. Like the previous book, it isn’t a masterpiece – it is just an entertaining read. It doesn’t make any apology for the fact that there is no insight into why the Ripper is a murderer, nor for the way the current murderer’s mental illness is portrayed as stereotypical and simplistic. What worked well is how Aida’s thoughts are portrayed and the way she manages to manipulate people. Also, one of the few devices that the author uses is to interrupt the story with a glimpse into Shaun’s sad life and to show his part in the story. There are also subplots that are vividly portrayed and alluded to by other characters. There is the typical climatic ending that had me turning the pages.

This is a classic horror book with ghosts, seances, murder and mystery. What more could you possibly want?

Oh and by the way, I found some very interesting images when I searched online for this book (including the author’s name). Go on, I dare you.

19. The stepmother by Carrie Adams

For Roxana, Ruby Ann and Reva.

Light, love and strength regained.

Well, I was surprised at this one. Like everyone, I judged a book by its cover – its pink, pink cover. The colour and the picture of a woman striking a pose in her heels didn’t inspire much confidence that this was going to be a good book; this was a typical chick-lit book through and through. Since the last chick-lit book I read didn’t inspire me, but just made me angry, I thought this would happen again. Like the last chick-lit book, I tried to hide the cover on public transport as it was embarrassing to be seen reading this kind of book. After I got over the embarassment of the cover, this book surprised me – I actually enjoyed it. I think the reason was because it wasn’t the usual fluff about a single woman who can’t get a man but somehow does in the end.

This book tells of a single mum who has three daughters. She wants to get back together with her ex but he has another girlfriend who becomes his fiance. This book is told in two voices, one being the single mum, the other the ex’s fiance. It details the difficulties from both sides, each thinking the other is perfect, and how the children react to the new situation. What makes this book more gritty than the run-of-the-mill family dramas, is that the mother turns to alcohol to cope. Undoubtedly, the situation gets out of hand and the eldest daughter bears the brunt of her mother’s alcoholism. What worked well was that the reader saw the mother’s denial from her perspective and how easy it is not to see the effect of her actions on her daughters. Both women are well-rounded so they are believable and the interplay between them and the children is also well-portrayed. There are no clever literary devices used, it was a very easy read and I sped through it. There are some saccharin moments in this book which were quite unbelievable at times but I was willing to forgive these as, on the whole, this book was enjoyable to read. It won’t make you see the world in a different light, but it will make your commute more tolerable.