Cuckoo, Julia Crouch

When Rose hears that her childhood friend has been widowed, she doesn't hesitate in inviting Polly and her children to stay. What else could she do? But Rose's husband Gareth isn't too happy about this. He's never liked Polly. She gives him the creeps. And certainly, Polly is not your normal grieving widow. She's never quite been normal, a former indie musician, with a history of drugs, eating disorders and other demons that have never quite gone away. But that's just Polly.

But the longer Polly stays under Rose's room, the more Rose feels she is losing her family. Her neatly ordered home and life starts falling to pieces. Could her old friend have anything to do with this?

Cuckoo is not the first book I've read where a newcomer to the household spreads an unhealthy influence, and seems to be gradually weaseling her way into the wife's position. Candia McWilliam's A Little Stranger works on similar themes, although in that case it was the nanny. Araminta Hall's Everything And Nothing looks like another version of the same story, but I haven't actually read that one and am only going by the cover blurbs.

I didn't automatically like any of the main characters, with the exception of Anna, Rose's elder daughter (and I suppose Flossie the baby.) Still, they are real characters, with flaws and struggles, dark secrets in the past, bad tempers, maybe too much drinking and smoking. Still, I grew to fear for Rose as her life started to unravel around her.

Polly was an interesting character, sometimes evil incarnate in a sexy dress, otherwise charm itself, and undeniably a very messed-up person. Sometimes it seemed she was so messed up that she couldn't help herself, and that there was only a certain amount of blame you could throw at her. Other times she was coolly manipulative, casting her glamour - and I mean this in all senses of the word - over Rose, her friends and relations, and eventually even the reader. As Polly began to cast her web, I was almost shouting at the characters, "How can you let her fool you?!" Yet in the end, even I was drawn in, a little. Even after all the evidence, even I wondered if, maybe, Polly was telling the truth and Rose was the one who was a bit mad.

When I started reading Cuckoo, it was with my editorial eyes, and at first I felt myself wanting to go through it with a red pencil. "Stop telling us and start showing! And for goodness' sake, stop telling us 'Rose thought this' and 'Rose thought that!'" Despite this, Crouch sets a really creepy, menacing atmosphere in her descriptions, each little detail leaving me worrying about what new disasters may unfold for Rose and her family. I feared for her.

Some aspects of the plot were visible for miles off, and I wondered how Rose herself could not see them sooner. But there were plenty of twists, too. Its ending was not a cosy, neat one, but if it had been, I would have felt cheated. This was not a neat story, but a messy one of damaged people trying to make their way the best they could.

If you enjoy this book, you may like:
The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs

With its simple cover illustrated with an old black-and-white photograph, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children can be immediately identified as a strange, spooky book. Apart from the lack of fancy artwork or graphics, there seems to be something a bit uncanny about the girl. Perhaps it's just the obvious oldness of the picture, being blurry, unfocused, not sharp like modern photography. Maybe it's the title. Perhaps it's the fact that the little girl's feet are not quite touching the ground...

Miss Peregrine is a unique book in that author Ransom Riggs has illustrated his eerie fantasy story with real vintage photographs found and rescued by collectors; photographs that, like the girl on the cover, seem not quite right. The photographs themselves are fascinating, and I would have happily bought this book for them alone. But around the photo collection, Riggs has woven a dark, twisted narrative based around an orphanage that is not as it seems.

After the death of his beloved grandfather, American teenager Jacob goes to an island off Wales. He hopes to see the children's home where his grandfather spent the war years after his escape from the Nazis in mainland Europe. What Jacob discovers, at first, is a ruin. No one has lived in Miss Peregrine's Home for decades. As he explores deeper, he discovers stranger truths about Miss Peregrine and the children in her care than he could ever have dreamed of.

This book drew me in straight away, with a strong character in Jacob's grandfather, and the mystery of his death, and his past life. The ruined orphanage is a classic gothic ruined house, thick with atmosphere and unfinished business, on the borderline between uncanny-unexplained and fantasy. I felt that the book was at its best at this point, before the secret of Miss Peregrine's was made clear. Even when the truth began to unfold, I was impressed with the originality and unexpected explanation of a ghostly situation.

However, once the scene had been set and the story started to get under way, I confess I found myself losing interest. I felt that Miss Peregrine became less remarkable when the danger, the villains and monsters, were identified. The genre seemed to switch from atmospheric ghost story (of a sort) to a much more generic teen fantasy adventure, and it lost its grip on me. It is set up for the possibility of a sequel, but I feel it would be more effective if it were kept concise and unique.

A Little Stranger - Candia McWilliam

When Daisy needs a nanny for her toddler son, she thinks 22-year-old Margaret Pride is perfect: sensible if a little old-fashioned and reserved, firm but immediately beloved by the child. Yet as the new nanny becomes established in the household, her behaviour doesn't always quite add up, and it becomes apparent that Margaret is not all she seems.

Perhaps I was influenced by having read the back blurb of the book, but from the very first pages I did not trust Margaret. Although narrator Daisy describes her in positive terms: "pretty," "warm," "eager to please," Margaret's own actions and words come across as stiff, stuffy and unnatural. Her first words are a firm triple negative: "No. Never. Not at all." She says "I am," and "I do not" instead of the more natural-sounding "I'm" and "I don't," and her emphasis on neatness - wanting to wear a uniform to work, shunning jeans - makes her seem much older than her young age. These small details, though subtle, put a distance between Margaret and the reader. She never quite seems comfortable, and as such, I never felt comfortable around her. As the book progresses, Margaret's behaviour seems strange, sometimes suspicious, but Daisy seems completely oblivious. I found myself wanting to shout at the narrator for not seeing through her nanny's facade.

McWilliam sets many parallels between the two women. Daisy, after all, used to be used as a nickname for Margaret, and as Margaret weasels her way into the heart of the household, Daisy retreats from the family. Margaret takes on a role as substitute mother for John, and mistress of the house. And it's not only Margaret who isn't all she seems. Daisy, in her seeming oblivion, is an unreliable narrator, and we learn more from what she shows, rather than what she tells us.

A Little Stranger is an intriguing book with a menacing atmosphere. At 145 pages, it is more of a novella than a novel, yet it still took me a while to read. It is long enough for Daisy to spend chapters navel-gazing, reflecting upon her past, and much of the prose is heavily tinted in purple. I felt at times that McWilliam tried too hard to be "literary." Daisy's world seems very old-fashioned, set in an upper middle-class home with nannies and other servants. Except for a few references to (for example) cassette tapes, I would have place this story in the early 20th century, between the wars.

The Considine Curse, Gareth P, Jones

I don't often buy books on impulse, and I rarely buy books from the 9-12 age group, but in Waterstone's the other day I made an exception for The Considine Curse. The story of a "very normal" Australian teenager who goes to visit her strange cousins in England after the death of their grandmother, it looked like a cross between the Addams family and the Lemony Snicket books. Mariel's cousins are very close, many of them hostile to outsiders, and although they share the same grandmother, they don't consider Mariel to be one of them. Mariel's mother didn't even tell her she had any family, and as she gets to know them, Mariel can see why! Only now her mother wants to take her away from her home, school and friends. Mariel does not approve.

The Considine cousins are certainly a strange bunch, each with their own characteristics. Lily and Amelia are strange but seem friendly enough, but Oberon is threatening, and eight-year-old Elspeth is one of the creepiest children I've come across in fiction, oozing malevolence and speaking only in sinister rhyme, hinting at a terrible fate in store for Mariel. I guessed at the family's secret early on, but this did not spoil the story for me, although one piece of foreshadowing came across as too heavy-handed and unnecessary. The story is a great mix of a page-turning family mystery and a gothic undercurrent that gets darker and more dangerous as the story goes along.

I was quite shocked at the level of bloodthirstiness for a book aimed at pre-teens, but what I found more disturbing was the ending. I think it was supposed to be a happy ending, but it was rather bittersweet and a somewhat morally dubious. Although as an adult I don't mind stories with "untidy" conclusions, if I had read this book when I was ten or eleven, I would have been concerned about the decisions Mariel took. Her story may have ended pretty well, but I would have been - and was, a bit - troubled about the wider-reaching consequences for the family and community. Perhaps I think too much. Still, The Considine Curse is an enjoyable, intriguing and creepy read.

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

From the cover of the book, I had a vague idea that it would be a literary, people- and relationship-based novel - which it is - maybe like Atonement. Which it is not. I suspect my mind remembered the last book I read with a picture of Keira Knightley on the front cover. I also expected some kind of hint at ghostly goings-on, because the picture of Knightley at the top made me think of Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights.

What I actually got was something very different - and if you want to read this book open-mindedly, I suggest you don't read past this paragraph - and whatever you do, avoid watching the movie trailers. I'm avoiding plot spoilers but will be making reference to genre and writing style. The short version of the review is: "This book is great, read that instead of the blog."

Potential spoilers below

The first thing Ishiguro tells us is that the setting is "England, late 1990s," and we meet our narrator, Kathy, who tells us a little about her position working as a carer, before sending us back in time to her childhood at Hailsham school. From the very beginning, subtle uses of language alert us to the suspicion that this is not quite the world as we know it. "Carer" doesn't seem to mean quite what we expect it to, and when Kathy describes her school life, the adults are described not as "teachers" but "guardians." A seemingly insignificant choice of word, that could just be a school breaking the trends, but nothing in Never Let Me Go is accidental. Similarly, the emphasis on what is considered important or not is ever so slightly off-kilter, such as the urgency for Hailsham students to be "creative," and the worry when one seems to have no artistic talents. Clearly Hailsham is preparing its students for something - but what?


When the "big reveal" comes, to be honest it's not much of a shock. Superficially it might seem that Ishiguro has been clumsy, leaving too many clues in the text so that that the plot twist isn't as dramatic as it should be. I realised that this, too, is no accident. Miss Lucy, the guardian who blurts out exactly what the students' future holds, tells them that they've been "told and not told," and Tommy expands on this, hypothesising that "the guardians had [...] timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand the latest piece of information. But of course we'd take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly." Like the students, when I read this book there was no one moment of realisation. When Miss Lucy made her outburst, I just realised that I'd known all along. A very, very clever piece of writing.


Alongside the "knowing all along," was a sort of anaesthetising of the horror. The narration is simple, unflowery, and very matter-of-fact. Where apparently insignificant events are elevated to importance, the destiny of Kathy, Ruth, Tommy and other students should be shocking and horrific, but the characters' unquestioning acceptance that this is just the way the world is, makes for a chillingly calm read. Never Let Me Go had a slow-burning effect on me, its impact increasing after I'd finished reading and carried on thinking about it. I was very glad not to have seen the film trailer before reading the book as it gives far too much away and would have spoiled the book, not only in plot details but in its genre and literary qualities.

I'm looking forward to seeing the film in February and would be interested in reading more of Ishiguro's work.

Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson

At the beginning of Banned Books week in September, the Speak Loudly internet campaign reminded me that among the rubbish, there is a lot of important and good-quality young adult fiction about, and I returned to Speak, one of my favourite books when I was about sixteen. Anderson's mixture of humour and tragedy, poetry and really serious issues that made you think, and I was excited to read another of Laurie Halse Anderson's novels.

I found Wintergirls to be a much more disturbing and difficult read than Speak, full of poetic and creative imagery, but lacking the latter's humour. Its central character is Lia, an eighteen-year-old girl who is trapped in a dark, cold world of anorexia and self-harm. Cassie, the girl who was her best friend since third grade, has just died, killed by her own eating disorder, and added to Lia's troubles is the knowledge that Cassie had tried to call her that night, not once but thirty-three times.

Unlike Speak, whose sad, lonely protagonist was one I could recognise all too well in myself, I found it difficult to identify with Lia, and found myself baffled and frustrated to read her thoughts and know all too well where she's all wrong. A few years ago, I was with a friend of a friend who was stick-thin and counting calories on the back of a pot of pasta salad. I could see she had a problem, but I felt helpless, knowing that I couldn't get through to her telling her that someone of her age and size shouldn't even know what a calorie was. Reading Wintergirls provoked the same reaction, and I felt quite baffled and adrift in Lia's thoughts. It was clear from early on that her goal of losing more weight wasn't about looking slim to be pretty, but a target to aim for, and keep aiming for. When she achieves her goal of losing five pounds, she sets herself five more to lose.

"The number doesn't matter. If I got down to 070.00, I'd want 065.00. If I weighed 010.0, I wouldn't be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough would be 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it."

Now, I'd always been told that "eating disorders are mental illness," and "it's not about losing weight, but control," but I'd never really been able to understand this. Books I'd read as a teen exploring the issue, tended to be rather two-dimensional: girl (because they're always girls in the books) thinks she's fat, girl goes on a diet, girl keeps pushing to lose a little more weight, family starts to worry, girl thinks they shouldn't worry, girl admits she has a problem, girl gets treatment.

Wintergirls has many more dimensions. As an outsider I found Lia difficult to fully sympathise with: she knows she's got a problem, why doesn't she want to be helped? At the same time, as an insider - reading her thoughts in first person - I found her hard to understand. Then I realised, Lia was trapped, didn't understand her own thoughts. Anderson uses a great deal of poetic imagery, which could be very effective but I couldn't always understand what she was trying to say. Again, perhaps this was a deliberate decision - to portray a messed-up mind, where madness and reality mix and mingle to create a new reality. Wintergirls evoked in me pity more than empathy, and I think I will need to read it more than once to pick up on what I missed the first time around.

The Other Alice, Julia Clarke

Ally is like a bad fairy who arrived at the party and cast an evil spell over the world. Everything in my life is fracturing and changing and going wrong, wrong, wrong.

Alice is fed up. It is the night of her elder twin brother and sister's birthday party, and she doesn't want to be there. Sister Nell is shouting, Mum is tired from a stressful week at work and Alice's two best friends have stood her up in favour of a double date. When a strange girl gatecrashes the party, all it takes is one small lie about knowing her. Like a vampire, that small invitation is enough for the other Alice, Ally, to creep into the family's affections. Only Alice (our Alice) feels uncomfortable and doesn't trust the newcomer.

The Other Alice is a simply-written story exploring the issues of family, identity and young romance, with a claustrophobic layer of mystery. Although I borrowed this book from the teenage section of the library, it seems to be aimed at the lower end of the age group, maybe for ten to thirteen-year-olds*, due to its straightforward narrative style which has Alice immediately state the thoughts that other novels might take chapters of hinting and suspicion. This is not a criticism, as I wasn't in the mood for a twisty narrative taking a long time to arrive at an inevitable conclusion. The uncomplicated narrative style, middle-of-nowhere Yorkshire setting and realistic characters made The Other Alice a cosy read that took me back to the books I used to check out of the library ten years ago.

I found it interesting that Julia Clarke decided to give two main characters the same name. There was no confusion as one Alice narrated the story and the other used the short form Ally, but it was interesting to think of the two girls as two sides of the same coin. Alice is a good girl, sensitive and rather idealistic with a vivid imagination, while Ally is unpredictable, wild and rather dangerous. Alice senses that Ally wants something from her family, and while Ally makes herself at home and invites herself into family occasions, Alice feels slowly squeezed out.

It was interesting to read The Other Alice immediately after writing my review of Fallen, as there is a similar love scenario to the former. Alice has a crush on her sister's boyfriend Spence, and her feelings for him, while rather vague and unlikely, cause her to turn down the more obvious candidate in her friend Sam who loves her. (Yes, another love interest called Sam! Good name. My first crush was on a Sam. But that is beside the point.) It was refreshing after all the star-crossed-lover, eternal romances that are out there, to read one that is based on liking, hormones and being flattered by someone paying attention. It may be small-scale, but I could relate so much better than in most teenage romances. My only slight criticism was that, lovely though Sam was - and he was! - he seemed a bit too good to be true among a cast of complex characters.

A quick, satisfying read and an enjoyable way to spend an evening.

*I realised after writing this review that The Other Alice contained a bit of language which would take it to a 12A/PG-13 rating if it were a film.

Film: Comparing Creepiness in Wonka's Chocolate Factories: 1971 and 2005

My first ever acting part was as Violet Beauregarde in a primary school production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when I was nine years old. Chewing gum was one of the deadly sins of primary school, so I had to fake it, and I remember that when the time came for me to inflate like a blueberry, somebody put a blue cloak around me and I stuck my arms out. When I say a blue cloak, I mean turquoise. Not violet. Not navy. Turquoise.

Roald Dahl is the quintessential example of an author that when you reach adulthood you wonder how his books were ever considered suitable for children, and yet at the time you hardly notice anything at all. Perhaps this is because there are less clear ideas about what is fantasy and what is real life when you're a little kid, and therefore things that sit on the boundaries don't worry you so much. I don't know.

The 1971 adaptation of Charlie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder was one of the classic children's films when I was growing up, alongside Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Oliver! Apparently Roald Dahl hated this film, but for me it was the film of the book, if not a straight adaptation at least it was the companion piece. Wilder's Wonka was subtly sinister, but in such a way that I only really notice watching the film as an adult. His eccentricity was beneath the surface, and all I tended to see was the polite, calm, unexcitable gentleman he seemed to be, the face he put on. Watching it this afternoon, I found his bored responses to the naughty children's fates rather inhuman, such as his monotone: "Help. Police. Murder." when Augustus Gloop was stuck in the chocolate river. I also found something slightly off-kilter about the chocolate room, which (possibly due to poor special effects when compared to what I'm used to) doesn't feel quite real, or quite imagined. The chocolate river, for example, looks like red-brown water and not melted chocolate at all. Not even a chocolate milkshake.

I say as an adult that I never noticed anything creepy about Willy Wonka when I was its target age group, but watching the film again I realise that isn't quite true. The added subplot character "Slugworth" was creepy enough to designate him immediate "villain" with his Demon Headmaster monotone, and I think it was actually quite late on that I understood that he wasn't a baddie but an actor hired by Wonka to test the children's trustworthiness. And as for the boat ride, why, I simply blocked the worst of that from my mind. Perhaps I remembered some of Wonka's poem "There's no earthly way of knowing..." and the flashing colours, but not Wonka's singing in a cold, thin, quavery voice, turning into a scream, and certainly not those awful, where did that come from?! hallucinations, images or whatever that was they passed. No explanation is ever given, but, boy, that is horrible!

Of the children, there was a certain star quality in Julie Dawn Cole's spoilt brat Veruca Salt, the only child (apart from Charlie) with her own song, "I want it now," sang in a mixture of bratty tantrums and (probably) drama-school trained RP calmness.

As well as the stories of the five children who win the golden tickets, the film shows little snippets from around the world of the less successful searchers to illustrate the international obsession with finding the tickets and winning the grand prize. As well as the forged ticket that does not appear in the book but is used in 2005 by Tim Burton, we witness the turmoil suffered by a woman trying to negotiate with the kidnappers of her husband.

Woman's Lawyer: "It's your husband's life or your case of Wonka bars!"

Woman: "How long will they give me to think it over?"

Among all the Wonkamania, it is as though chocolate itself is devalued by the sheer amount unwrapped and discarded. All anyone cares about is winning this golden ticket, and seeing inside the factory. Even the lifetime supply of chocolate seems like an afterthought. Charlie notices this and says,

"I bet those golden tickets make the chocolate taste terrible."

Even the Bucket family aren't immune. There is a slightly uncomfortable attitude that of all the people in the world (100 billion according to this film!) although there's no chance he'll ever find a ticket in his annual chocolate bar, Charlie deserves this prize, is entitled to this prize because he is poor and good:

"A little boy's got to have something in this world to hope for. What's he got to hope for now?"

Well-meaning, but somewhat melodramatic even in the Buckets' poverty, I feel. Besides, in this version, Charlie is not as good as all that. It could be argued that he's no better than the other four children because of the scene in which he and Grandpa Joe steal fizzy lifting drinks, and are only saved from a gruesome fate by chance. He is redeemed by showing remorse at the end when Wonka finally shows his human emotions of disappointment and anger.

The 2005 film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a film by Tim Burton, so naturally it is more overtly surreal. It came out at a time to make people who savoured Dahl's weirdness celebrate the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp (and Helena Bonham Carter) collaboration, before we started to feel a little weary of their becoming inseparable. The set is full of Burton's trademark twisty designs, garish colours (and a realistic-looking chocolate river!) and an unearthly soundtrack thanks to Danny Elfman (another of Burton's little gang.) Depp's Wonka is in many ways the polar opposite of Wilder's: while Wilder is understated, Depp is immediately bonkers, with a feminine bobbed hairstyle and zombie-grey skin of someone who hasn't seen the sunlight in fifteen years. His childish excitement, childish manner and voice reminiscent of Michael Jackson serve to make his Wonka seem less like an eccentric genius and more as though there is something missing in the connections of his brain.

Yes, Depp's Wonka is creepy when he is clearly not all there, and creepier still when he is. When Veruca Salt is throwing a tantrum at her father demanding a squirrel, Wonka listens intently, and his expression turns to realisation and horror when Mr Salt starts to indulge her, firmly taking parenting into his own hands by refusing to sell the creatures. A moment later, she has fallen down the garbage chute and Wonka's face as he lets Mr Salt in afterwards is beyond creepy. There is something evil about it.

Where Willy Wonka gave Charlie some mischievous traits to prevent him being too much of a goodie-goodie, Burton's Charlie retains his goodness, and we get to see that it is a little sickly-sweet. These Buckets aren't too caught up in Wonka-mania:

"Whatever happens, you've still got the candy."

 When he wins it, Charlie even considers selling his ticket so that the family can eat something other than cabbage soup. The Buckets, getting so little chocolate between them, really savour every bite. Family is what is important to Charlie and the Buckets, and the rather unnecessary backstory (but containing Christopher Lee!) hammers home that value, as well, perhaps, as a moral about having a healthy relationship between chocolate and toothpaste.

The Charlie music is possibly better than Willy Wonka's, especially regarding the Oompa-Loompa's songs, which come in a variety of musical genres and take their lyrics directly from the book, yet they are less memorable than the simpler classic, "Oompa-Loompa-Doopity-Doo." Perhaps that goes for the film as a whole. I would be reluctant to judge which of the two adaptations is better, or more faithful, because they are just so different. To me, Burton's Charlie is slicker than Willy Wonka, and yet it is not the real version. Charlie is a faithful yet wacky re-imagining of the story, while Willy Wonka is the definitive adaptation.