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"Pitcher, Annabel"
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My sister lives on the mantelpiece : a novel
With his family still grieving over his sister's death in a terrorist bombing seven years earlier, twelve-year-old Jamie is far more interested in his cat, Roger, his birthday Spiderman T-shirt, and keeping his new Muslim friend Sunya a secret from his father.
Book
We Come Apart review -- a bittersweet teenage romance in verse
Co-authors Sarah Crossan and Brian Conaghan create an all-too-recognisable world of knife crime, domestic abuse, immigration, forced marriage, teenage pregnancy, bullying and racism, rooted firmly in Brexit Britain. If Jess and Nicu want ice cream, they have to earn the money for it by selling discarded travel cards at a tube station Thankfully, things don't descend into slushy love poetry. If Jess and Nicu want ice cream, they have to earn the money for it...
Newspaper Article
Fire Colour One by Jenny Valentine review -- a bittersweet reunion
Iris's father, wealthy art dealer Ernest Jones, is dying of cancer. The timing is unfortunate: he has only just been reacquainted with his daughter after a long separation instigated by Iris's mother, Hannah, a woman dressed in \"credit-card finery\" who hides her lack of tears at Ernest's predicament behind a pair of large black sunglasses (\"High-impact accessories are my mother's answer to big occasions, in place of actual feelings\"). Her marriage to Ernest broke down 12 years previously, and Hannah took Iris, running away with \"one-time TV star\" Lowell Baxter to Los Angeles.
Newspaper Article
Review: CHILDREN'S FICTION: Annabel Pitcher on a bewitching tale of magic, menace and mystery: Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge 408pp, Macmillan, pounds 7.99
[Triss]'s younger sister, a rather irritating, abrasive character called Pen, holds all the answers. She was there when her sibling emerged from The Grimmer, but is \"sibling\" the right term for the girl who climbed out of the water to take Triss's place in the Crescent family's home? Pen doesn't seem to think so, and delights in telling Triss that she is \"getting everything just a bit wrong. Everything. All the time. And sooner or later they'll notice.\" Triss has no idea what she is talking about. She believes wholeheartedly that she is the real Triss, so it comes as a shock to both her and the reader to discover that she is an imposter. It is an ambitious idea to have a protagonist who thinks for 100 pages that she is someone else, but Hardinge pulls it off with aplomb.
Newspaper Article
Review: TEENAGE FICTION: Annabel Pitcher enjoys a tough and tender tale of bullying and blackmail: Dead Ends by Erin Lange (328pp, Faber, pounds 12.99)
Erin Lange's subject is bullying. In her debut novel, Butter, we were on the side of the victim, a fat boy attempting to eat himself to death on the internet for the grisly viewing pleasure of his peers. In Dead Ends, we are rooting for the bully - hot-headed thug Dane Washington, who kick-starts the action by unapologetically smashing his foot into \"some guy's throat\". In Dane's world, violence is justified if people are \"asking for it\", the only exception to the rule being girls and \"retards\". If you balk at the use of that word, Dead Ends is not the novel for you. Like RJ Palacio, with whom Lange has been compared, she pulls no punches when describing the mistreatment of \"freak\" Billy D, a teenage boy with Down's syndrome, who moves into Dane's street on the wrong side of town (Columbia, Missouri). At best, Billy D is seen as a helpless victim in need of mollycoddling by the well-meaning but patronising staff of Twain High School; at worst, he is \"Flat Face\", teased for his slack jaw, slanted eyes and lisping, high-pitched voice by a group of seniors threatening to beat him up for being different.
Newspaper Article
Review: CHILDREN'S FICTION: A plucky heroine and bouncy plot satisfy: The Mysterious Misadventures of Clemency Wrigglesworth by Julia Lee 336pp, Oxford, pounds 6.99
Luckily, Gully's temperamental skill does not desert him when Clemency is kidnapped by the menacing Miss Clawe, housekeeper at the Great Hall. \"That silly old bat just grabbed young Clem and done a flit!\" exclaims [Whitby] - worried, not by the fate of our orphaned heroine, but rather her unpaid bill for lodging. \"So, we've got no child [and] no cash,\" cries the similarly avaricious Mrs Potchard. Determined to get the family's money back and, yes, save the poor girl, too, Gully and Whitby charge to the Great Hall, where Clemency is being forced to work as a scullery maid.
Newspaper Article
Review: FICTION: Into the drink: Annabel Pitcher finds this novel about teen alcoholism worthy but dull: My Name Is ... by Alastair Campbell 352pp, Hutchinson, pounds 18.99
It's a shame that this energy-sapping technique is used so often, as when the reader is privy to actual dialogue, the novel comes alive - vividly so, in the case of [Hannah]. When she talks about a day-long bender with a friend's mum, it's utterly convincing, brilliantly capturing the teenager's love-hate relationship with alcohol, from the heady moments of the first drink when \"a bar that felt half empty suddenly feels a lot more than half full\", to the humiliation of wetting the friend's bed. Throughout, it's the teenagers that Campbell does best, another high-point being the narrative of Sammy, Hannah's first boyfriend. Their barbed but flirtatious exchanges give us a glimpse of the type of writer [Campbell] could be, were he not so bogged down by his mission to educate the world about worthy issues. This may be a commendable life-aim, but it does not make for a commendable novel.
Newspaper Article
Review: CHILDREN'S FICTION: Annabel Pitcher on an African epic that rewards the patient reader: The Child's Elephant by Rachel Campbell-Johnston 390pp, David Fickling, pounds 9.99
We start with a bang - quite literally. A gunshot is fired and Bat, a young herdsboy, stumbles upon some poachers who have killed an elephant for its tusks. Horrified by the sight of the dead animal rising \"like a mountain from a lake of purplish blood\", Bat vows to look after the elephant's orphan, a pitiful creature flailing about in the bushes. With the help of his feisty friend, Muka, Bat half-walks, half-drags the young elephant back to his village of Jambula, where it takes up residence in his grandmother's hut. Christened Meya by the village's toothless chief because \"it is the name that we give to those we most love\", the elephant becomes a village favourite.
Newspaper Article
Review: MY HERO: CAITLIN MORAN
[Moran] is far more than someone with a puerile obsession with large underwear. She can be irreverent, brilliantly so, but she also speaks with wisdom about sexism at work, the challenges of motherhood, and abortion. The book came out in 2011, when I was 28 and rather baffled by life. I'd groan at gossip magazines, furious with the world's asinine obsession with celebrity, disappointed by women gazing doe-eyed at the camera with vulnerable, save-me expressions on their Botoxed faces. I'd snarl at beauty magazines, asking me to care about Fashion! Weight loss! Anti-ageing creams!
Newspaper Article