Running Like A Girl by Alexandra Heminsley

I must begin this review with a confession - I am really, really biased. I think Alexandra Heminsley is great. Not in a creepy stalkerish way, I hasten to add. I follow her on Twitter and I love her warm book recommendations and funny style. So when she started tweeting about a book she'd written about running, I knew I'd want to read it.

Running Like A Girl is that book. As a person who has completed some 10ks before (not a runner, I don't think, really), the subject matter was obviously interesting for me. The first thing I'll say is that I really wish I'd had this book before I did my first ever run, which was a horrific experience I undertook with a hangover the day after my 21st birthday out of some vague impulse towards purging myself. I purged myself so much I had to sit down on a park bench after five minutes to stop myself from throwing up everywhere. Had I read Running Like A Girl,  I definitely wouldn't have gone out with a hangover and I wouldn't have expected an unrealistically zen experience from my first run.

This book is perfect for the novice runner. Alexandra's warm, chatty and funny voice eases you through your worries and reassures you that these worries are both normal and nothing to worry about in reality. The second half of the book contains very useful practical tips about running and about buying kit which again I would have loved to have read before starting to run. It would have saved my toenails for a start which, like Alexandra's,  fell off because my first pair of running shoes were far too small.

The first half or so of the book is almost like a running autobiography.  Alexandra tells the story of her own path to becoming a runner, from the first painful run to her marathon highs and lows. It's like hearing your best friend tell you their story - her voice is a reassuring guide through the challenges of running and its rewards. It seemed like she wanted everyone to know that running isn't easy,  but it's achievable. And it'll make you feel better about yourself.

I found the first hald of the book particularly moving. Alexandra begins with the story of an emotionally draining half marathon and then takes us through her journey to achieving success as a runner. In that journey she learns so much about herself, her family and her friends. It isn't easy - there are challenges and setbacks on the way, but she keeps going. In fact, as she says, she learns that the secret to surviving a run, as well as lots of the things life throws at you, is to just keep going.

The test of the power of this book is that it made me feel simultaneously guilty that I hadn't been running in ages and keen to get my trainers out again. It's a well-informed, personal guide to running that is also a funny and inspiring true story.  I'd recommend it to all runners, novice and experienced.

Running Like A Girl is published on 4 April. I received a review copy of this book via Net Galley. 

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6

The Quickening by Julie Myerson

Rachel and Dan have just got married. Expecting their first child, they set off for an impromptu luxury honeymoon in Antigua, leaving behind them the wife of Dan's best friend Rufus, recently killed in a car crash. As soon as they set foot on Antigua,  however, things start to go awry.
Rachel begins to see a mysterious figure on the fringes of their idyllic resort: a shambling, bedraggled man whose presence she alone registers and whose thoughts begin to merge with her own. As soon as she is alone, he appears to her, lying at the bottom of their swimming pool or trailing across the beach as she sunbathes.  Her relationship with Dan begins to deteriorate too; she no longer trusts her new husband, and retreats into an inner world where the movement of her unborn baby (the "quickening" of the title) is the only thing that can bring her comfort.

This is the latest in a series of supernatural novellas published under the Hammer imprint by Random House. (Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat and Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate have previously been published - thanks to Fanny Blake on Twitter for pointing this out to me). And like its forebears, The Quickening is a genuinely creepy tale from a very skilled author. The notes to the book mention Julie Myerson's fondness for ghost stories and, as a ghost story obsessive,  I could see the spirit of MR James hanging over this disturbing and occasionally violent chiller. The presentation of the mysterious figure recalls "Lost Hearts" in its grotesqueness, and the abrupt and shocking ending has hints of "O Whistle And I'll Come To You".

I joined in an interesting conversation with the great Sophie Hannah on twitter recently about ambiguity in modern ghost stories. She questioned whether it's become a cliché in modern ghost stories for ambiguity about the presence of the ghost or otherwise to signify a questionmark over the central character's sanity. Is it real, or is he/she simply disturbed? Lots of readers agreed that this has become a bit overdone and wished for the return of straightforwardly malevolent spirits (the prime modern example of which is, of course Susan Hill's terrifying Jennet Humfrye). Rachel's haunter in The Quickening is ambiguous in a more complex way than those which Hannah describes; whilst it's certainly true that he is real, where he ends and Rachel begins is not always clear. Has her obsession with him taken her over, or is he controlling her in a different way? (Sophie Hannah's The Orphan Choir is the next to be published under the Hammer imprint,  and I am eagerly anticipating it.)

Like all good supernatural tales, The Quickening has the right balance between a growing sense of unease for the reader and the characters and some shocking moments. The ending, too, seems both inevitable and awful at the same time. And the title combines both the beginnings of life in the baby Rachel is carrying and the stirrings of something horrible in a seemingly perfect paradise.

A review copy of  this novel was provided via Net Galley. The Quickening is published by Random House on 28 March.

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6

Just What Kind Of Mother Are You? by Paula Daly

What's your worst nightmare? Lisa Kallisto is living one of hers.

Lisa tries hard. Very, very hard. Running her family and staying on top of her job is hard work,  though , and leaves her permanently frazzled. Her best friend Kate, however, seems to have it all. She lives in a beautiful house with an attentive husband and is the kind of mother Lisa dreams of being. Kate manages everything perfectly, from washing to school fêtes; she's the centre of her children's world.

Which only makes Lisa feel even more wretched when Kate's daughter Lucinda goes missing. Lucinda is supposed to be staying with Lisa's daughter, Sally,  after school. But Sally doesn't go to school that day and Lisa, permanently frazzled as she is, simply forgets that Lucinda is supposed to be at her house. So when Lucinda doesn't arrive at school the next day, she's already been missing for hours. To make matters even worse, another local girl recently went missing and turned up traumatised and half naked. 

Lisa determines that she will save Lucinda. But it's not easy. Her family and Kate's family come under extreme pressure and threaten to burst apart at the seams.

This pacy thriller stems from this simple but brilliant question: what if it was your fault that your best friend's child was abducted? How could you live with the guilt? Anyone reading the opening chapters, parent or not, will feel their stomach lurch with Lisa's as her nightmare unfolds.

Daly also explores modern families and the desperate striving for a Cath-Kidston esque domestic perfection that drives many women to run themselves ragged. In the compelling opening chapter,  Lisa complains about feeling overwhelmed,  but realises that her life looks perfect from the outside.  And as the story develops she finds out a lot more about what it takes to keep Kate's supposedly perfect life on track. Daly is good, too, on the jealousy lurking in friendships. Lisa can't help but envy Kate's lifestyle and Kate herself.

I finished this book in a day and would have finished it even more quickly if I hadn't had  to go to work! It's pacy and twisty, with a real shock at the end. Thriller fans will love it, and so will fans of psychological crime fiction written by the likes of Sophie Hannah or Nicci French. A very promising debut indeed.

I must thank Alison Barrow at Transworld, who kindly provided me with a review copy. Just What Kind Of Mother Are You will be published in April 2013.

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6

Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach

How do you know who you're talking to online? Who lurks behind that desktop,  laptop, tablet or phone screen? When you tweet, or update your status on Facebook,  or even write a blog post, how do you know who's reading it?

All these chilling questions are at the heart of Lottie Moggach's debut novel. It's the first book I've read to truly get to the heart of these unsettling issues and ask its reader to query the trust we now place in the internet, and social networking in particular.

Tess wants out. Out of her life, out of her family, out of the world. To help her slip away, Leila agrees to take on her identity online after Tess has taken her own life. Leila takes this project on at the request of Adrian,  a philosophical guru she has met on a discussion forum. For Leila is nearly housebound, cut off from normal life by years of caring for her mother,  an MS sufferer.

So that she can "be" Tess online, Leila embarks on an exhaustive trawl through Tess' s virtual past. With Tess's cooperation,  Leila sits at her computer and reconstructs Tess's life. She reads her emails, her Facebook updates, her entire digital backstory in her quest to become Tess. And of course she is quickly in too deep. Beautiful, flirtatious,  confident Tess is everything that Leila is not. Soon "being" Tess is more attractive than being Leila.

The premise is original but this is more than just a concept-driven novel. Leila is a captivating narrator. Personally,  I pitied her and wanted to protect her from the harm. However,  Leila is of course doing harm through her actions - even though she cannot see this herself. I've already enjoyed discussing Leila's actions and can see lots of bookgroups having a great chat about this very issue.

The novel really made me think about the idea of a digital footprint. So many people now rely upon the internet for communication,  and so many of us now meet people online. But why do we trust our screens? After reading Kiss Me First I've found myself thinking twice before updating my status and filling in my "friends" about my trip to the gym. Who knows who's reading it?

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclefani

Thea Atwell, fifteen,  precocious and handsome, has been sent away from her Florida home for committing a shameful sin that has destroyed her family. Her father, desperate to put some distance between Thea and her family in Florida, enrols her in the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls,  in the mountains of North Carolina, where Thea will meet the daughters of the wealthiest families in the South, who travel to Yonahlossee to become young ladies. Thea's time at Yonahlossee will change her forever...

At camp Thea meets Sissy,  a charming girl with a wardrobe to die for who quickly becomes her best friend, Leona, the prodigiously talented rider whose aloofness hides the financial difficulties her family are in, and the intoxicating Mr Holmes,  headteacher of Yonahlossee and father of three beautiful daughters. Thea quickly becomes entangled in the Holmes family's life,  teaching the three girls to ride during an enforced break from her own riding training, and developing an all-consuming crush on their father.

This fabulous coming of age novel by Anton DiSclefani follows Thea's journey to adulthood high in the mountains of North Carolina. By the time Thea comes to leave the camp, she is an entirely different girl from the naive teenager who arrived at Yonahlossee. Fans of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep will eat this up - Thea has Lee Fiora's self-awareness, which makes her an excellent narrator.

This book has plenty more to enjoy.  Yonahlossee itself is a seductive paradise,  far from the concerns of depression-era America. The girls wear white uniforms and sleep in cabins between hazy days of formal education, baths outside, dances in the cabin and, of course, horse-riding lessons. The camp is set in beautiful mountains, perfect for night rides and days dreaming while staring out of the window. DiSclefani creates an enchanting bubble in the camp; it's so lovely you wonder how any of the girls can bear to leave it. Perhaps it's a symbol for the fleeting beauty of adolescence itself, an intoxicating time that once left can never be recaptured.

DiSclefani captures perfectly the relationship between teenage girls, a mixture of jealousy, closeness and distance which each girl must negotiate. Thea helps Sissy meet her boyfriend at night in the woods, breaking the camp's rules for her friend, but feels jealous as she does and seems to half wish that Sissy will be caught.

The boarding school novel is a classic for a reason: adolescence, a closed environment and a rigid sense of time passing all mean that these novels, from Mallory Towers to Harry Potter to Prep  have an enduring appeal. Yonahlossee is a new addition to this canon and destined to become a classic of the genre.

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclefani will be published on 6 June by Tinder Press. I must thank Helena Towers at Tinder Press who provided me with a review copy of this novel. 

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Kirby should be dead. Attacked by a vicious murderer as a child, she somehow survived and grew up. Now she is an intern at a Chicago newspaper, trawling through crime records to trace her killer. Kirby is convinced she was the victim of a serial killer who has attacked before and will attack again.

And she's right. Harper Curtis attacked her with a knife, has killed before and will kill again. But what Kirby doesn't realise is that Curtis is almost untraceable. He has the perfect getaway vehicle - only in this case it's a house which allows him to roam Chicago through the ages, searching for the "shining girls" he is obsessed by. Curtis can travel forwards and backwards in time, killing and escaping justice.

With this original premise Lauren Beukes has created what I can imagine will be one of 2013's hottest crime fiction picks. It reminded me of Stephen King at his best,  merging horror and crime to produce a gripping thriller. The book is very well constructed, following Kirby's quest and Curtis' s rampages simultaneously. In lesser hands this could have been confusing (I confess here to having been terminally confused by The Time Traveller's Wife), but Beukes has clearly planned the novel very carefully and it is easy to follow both storylines.

The book is most satisfying when the "loops" of the storyline close together: when Kirby finds one of Curtis' s victims and pieces together what we as the reader have already seen happen,  or when we see Curtis' s viewpoint on the attack on Kirby. The parts of the book following Curtis's murderous outings to the future can be occasionally hard to read; the pity you feel for the victims can make it difficult to read about their horrific deaths at Curtis's hands.

I also really enjoyed the journey through Chicago's history in this novel.  Beukes has clearly done her research; we see a travelling circus of the 1940s, a college student in the 80s, a women's liberationist working in an abortion clinic in the 1970s. Having visited Chicago last year on holiday, I found this particularly interesting,  and made much more vivid by the precise references to streets and parks Beukes carefully gives us.

This fast-paced thriller deserves to be a summer hit: as a reader you care deeply about Kirby's quest for vengeance on the man who tried to steal her life, and fear Curtis's powers to destroy lives. The novel builds to a thrilling climax, and there's even a hint of romance for Kirby. A precision-made thriller, guaranteed to have you turning pages late into the night, made distinctive by the supernatural element.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes will be published by Harper Collins on 25 April. I must thank the publishers who kindly provided me with a review copy via Net Galley.

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6

Ten Things I've Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler: vivid, contemporary women's fiction

Alice is losing her father. In their family home in North London, Malcolm is succumbing to the lung cancer that he has hidden from his daughter while she travels abroad. Recalled to London by her sisters,  Alice arrives just in time to see Malcolm before he dies.

Daniel is losing himself. Homeless and becoming ill, he wanders London searching for his lost daughter and leaving beautiful messages for her in the urban landscape. Daniel sees letters as colours,  and creates collages of detritus in which words are spelled by these colours.

Sarah Butler's moving novel follows Alice and Daniel's journeys as they learn about themselves and their feelings. It's beautifully crafted: colour is central to the novel, and the descriptions of Daniel's collages are a pleasure to read. The novel is also in some ways a love letter to London: in a touching sequence towards the end of the novel, Alice and Daniel walk through London together. Butler describes this walk with a poet's eye and a Londoner's love for the hidden corners of the capital.

Lists can sometimes be the sign of lazy writing; however, in this novel Butler uses them very effectively as a structural device. Each chapter alternates between Alice's and Daniel's viewpoint and opens with a list of what the character has learnt or felt since the previous chapter. The lists are compelling in their succintness; they are a really simple but original way of developing the characters for the readers.

One word of warning: this novel is truly moving and at times almost unbearably poignant. The writing is so vivid and the emotions of the characters so well observed that I found I couldn't race through it. Instead I found myself reading it piece by piece, letting the writing sink in before I was ready to move on.

All in all, I was surprised and touched by Ten Things I've Learnt About Love. An unusually finely-written novel which deserves to be a huge success.

I must thank Pan Macmillan, who kindly provided me with a copy of this novel at their women's fiction party.

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6