the ocean at the end of the lane - neil gaiman

i totally read a book! i've either been reading things that wouldn't really interest anyone or not reading at all for a few months so i'm very happy to be writing a book review for a change. happy might not be quite the right word though...

it's kind of appropriate that i've just posted my lanark vlog because (don't get me wrong - the ocean at the end of the lane is nothing like lanark) the ocean at the end of the lane is a lot like lanark.  i mean it's not like i read a story, its like i read a feeling.  the whole book is completely infused with pretty much one feeling, which should make it boring, but it doesn't, it makes it completely beautiful. i knew before i read it that neil gaiman kind of wrote this for his wife, amanda palmer (an amazing musician and fascinating human being, please check her out), so i was kind of expecting an unconventional love letter of a book.  and that's not there at all, not a whiff of romance or anything like it, which left me wondering. and it's really only as i've sat down to write this and express it that i realise it works not like a story, but a song.

sorry, i'm writing this in completely the wrong order, first i'm supposed to tell you about the plot: the narrator revisits the place where he grew up, and his mysterious old neighbours, the hempstocks.  as in all good books, this revisiting unlocks a door in his memory, and we discover what happened to him at the age of seven.  which was that his parents took in lodgers, and one of them killed his beloved cat.  then he and his father find the lodger dead in his father's car, and he is taken under the wing of young lettie hempstock, a child like himself, except she isn't. strange, alarming things begin to happen around him, and through his friendship with lettie he is drawn deeper and deeper into a reality that becomes a dream, a myth that becomes a reality, a pond that becomes an ocean. for fuck's sake, it's bad enough as an adult when totally unfair horrible things happen to you, when you are seven you don't even have words for how shit that is. our narrator is so terrifyingly powerless in his own world and the world which invades his own, that a happy ending begins to be unimaginable.

if you asked me to remember being seven, i could recollect only a couple of things. i have a friend from that age, and a school project book. i remember it as basically a happy time. and yet this book is kind of all the terrible, terrible things about being seven, or rather, feeling seven. when adults are unfathomably powerful. when siblings are unnecessarily cruel. when your simple understanding of the world in black and white begins to take on shades of grey, which can be the scariest thing of all.  suddenly in reading i was seven, and utterly miserable. it takes such a special kind of talent for a writer to do all that and make you want to keep reading.

i heard gaiman give a talk about this book when it was first published, so i knew maybe more than i was supposed to.  he talked about why his book coraline, featuring a girl of more or less the same age encountering similarly mythical evil and whooping its ass, is a children's book, and this is not - because children's books need to have hope, he said. so you can draw your own conclusions from that. but if you want a sweet, funny, dark fairytale, go read stardust.  if you want a thrilling, scary kid's adventure, read coraline. if you want an epic modern myth, read american gods. if you want strange, beautiful sadness, read this.

code name verity - elizabeth wein

so i've been working on a review of a book i read recently for this blog but it was hard because while i liked it there was a lot wrong with it and i was trying to explain that with as few spoilers as possible, which is sort of tricky when that was one of the things wrong with the book.  and in the meantime i've been reading code name verity which is sooooo gooooooooood i have to rave about it right now. 

synopsis from waterstones.com: only in wartime could a stalwart lass from manchester rub shoulders with a scottish aristocrat. but then a vital mission goes wrong, and one of the friends has to bail out of a faulty plane over france. she is captured by the gestapo and becomes a prisoner of war. the story begins in "verity"'s own words, as she writes her account for her captors. truth or lies? honour or betrayal? everything they've ever believed in is put to the test...a gripping thriller, code name verity blends a work of fiction into 20th century history with spine-tingling results. this is a book for young adults like no other.

just wow.  this is also going to be hard to write without spoilers, but i am determined not to spoil because everyone should read it.  where to start?  'verity' is such a fabulous narrator, you get so swept up in her story you forget everything she tells you about her skills as a spy and manipulator.  you utterly sympathise with her even though you know she is collaborating with the nazis, because you are sure she is going to get the better of them in the end.  and by contrast, her friend maddie, is also so utterly convincing and three-dimensional, an extraordinarily brave pilot who is scared of pretty much everything else.  i loved both of them and felt they were my friends too.  probably because of this i found it really easy to put myself in their shoes, and experience wartime britain and occupied france the way they must have done.  i've read other novels about the soe but i think this brought it to life brilliantly.  and basically, what i really loved, is that by the end of the book, both maddie and verity make katniss everdene look like a wimp.  this is a proper 'women doing stuff' novel, real stuff, stuff that matters.  and it isn't in some extremely violent fictional dystopia, this is based on actual events and actual things real people did.  it blew me away.

but the 'book for young adults like no other' did make me think about what exactly makes it a young adult book.  is there really a distinction these days?  rather than the content being amended for a young audience (code name verity can be hard hitting and brutal), it seems to really mean 'about young people' or maybe more cynically 'marketed at young people'.  because this is a fantastic book that ought to be on every bookshelf.  really, read it.  read it now.

two boys kissing by david levithan

i actually finished reading this before 'looking for jj' but didn't get chance to blog at the time.  actually thinking about it, this is another ya book that's not that fluffy either but it is an excellent read.  it's the story of several different, unconnected gay teenage boys, all watched over by a chorus of men who died of aids.  (can you say aids victims?  you wouldn't say cancer victim, would you?)  i really liked this part of the book, i suppose i'd never really thought about how it must have felt for those men, and you probably wouldn't get teenagers to read a novel about what it would have been like to live through it in the 80s and 90s, so its quite a good way of sneaking the subject into the novel.  it could get a bit abstract and over-poetic at times, but i thought it was a cool idea.

but the main action of the novel centres around the two boys kissing, craig and harry, attempting the world record for longest kiss.  all the action takes place from the night before the record attempt to the conclusion of the kiss, and it drives through a story which otherwise might feel quite bitty.  i was there with them, cheering them on but also experiencing the tiredness, the aches and pains, the bladder discomfort... alongside their stories we also meet avery and ryan, from their first glance across the room to their second date; committed, comfortable couple neil and peter; tariq, friend of the would-be longest kissers and victim of homophobic violence; and isolated, desperate cooper who needs a way out.  what's striking is that there is something for every single teenager to relate to, gay or straight or bi or whatever.  I wanted to race to the end of the novel because i wanted craig and harry to be able to take a break and sleep, but also i didn't want to leave the characters, i wanted to find out what happened to everyone else afterwards - not just in the immediate future but what kinds of adults they turned out be.  the only negative thing i can say about it is that, unsurprisingly given the subject matter, it was really male-centric, to the point of excluding women and girls, and i keep asking myself whether this exclusion was justified - a question i haven't been able to answer yet. but this is one of those books that you think everyone in the world should read, it would be a better place if they did.

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