Jenny Q, Stitched Up - Pauline McLynn

Actress Pauline McLynn is probably best known as Father Ted's Mrs Doyle. Jenny Q, Stitched Up is her first foray into writing for teenagers. The book blurb suggests that more stories are to follow about Jenny and her friends and relations in Dublin.

Jenny Q, Stitched Up is a very light read for younger teenagers, a sweeter Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging. The greatest conflicts in Jenny's life are her mother's pregnancy, ("It's just so, well, SHAMEFUL. And now it's going to be plain for all the world to see") the agony of keeping secrets from her best friend, and the horror of her mum eating all the KitKats. The drama and humour comes from the agonies Jenny suffers over the smallest details - after all, when you are thirteen years old, everything is the most important thing in the world!

Jenny Q is full of warm, lovable characters, and despite Jenny's constant griping about how weird and embarrassing her family is, it's clear that they are actually pretty close. Her best friends, Dixie and Uggs (Eugene) form a cosy "Gang" who meet regularly to engage in craft activities, especially knitting (despite Uggs' feeble protests.) McLynn captures well the dynamics of a teen friendship group, the relentless good-natured mockery and unspoken understanding of its limits, the awfulness of not telling your friends EVERYTHING, or worse, sharing a secret with one and not the other.

At thirteen, Jenny Quinn is just discovering boys - or one boy, anyway, her elder brother's friend Stevie Lee Bolton, "who is a god, end of." There is an adorable innocence in Jenny's first crush, how new and strange she finds it all. Stevie Lee is usually surrounded by a gaggle of gorgeous older girls dubbed "the Slinkies" who Jenny and Dixie regard with a combination of hero-worship and contempt, but once you get past the love-hate-girlcrush, it is refreshing to find that SamDanandEmmyLou are quite normal and nice as well as being pretty. In fact, Stitched Up contains only one real antagonist, and that is the class bully who, coincidentally, shares a name with a boy in my high school circle who I couldn't stand. When Jenny Q and the Gang decide that enough is enough, instead of battling the bully, they try to charm him into better behaviour, attempting in a thirteen-year-old way to understand why he is so unpleasant. I found that this story, though quite sweet, was less successful than other parts of the plot. The bully didn't have quite enough of a presence to really make me sense the conflict, and his story seemed to be resolved a little too simplistically.

Jenny Q, Stitched Up is a sweet, easy read, a heartwarming story for teenagers and pre-teens, or a shameless indulgence for older readers. I borrowed this book from the library, but am tempted to buy myself a copy. A book to keep you company on a rainy autumn day, with a large mug of cocoa and a chunky knitted jumper.

Mini-Reviews: Forever & Amy and Roger's Epic Detour

Forever - Maggie Stiefvater:

In Shiver, Grace fell in love with a boy with golden eyes, who was a wolf in winter. The book ended with his cure. In Linger, the werewolf virus that had lain dormant in Grace for so many years kicked into life, and we were left staring after her as she shifted and ran off into the night.

Now Grace and her friend Olivia are, for all intents and purposes, missing. Sam, Cole and Isabel know the truth, but who else would believe it? And when Olivia turns up dead, Isabel's father Tom Culpeper makes plans for the extermination of the Mercy Falls wolves. Even when Grace is in her human form, she can't go home, so this book is much more pack-based than its predecessors. I had a sense of the loneliness of living a life that no one else can be told about. Grace can't even let her friends and family know she's alive, and it seems like survival must be impossible. If Tom Culpeper and his cronies killed her while she was in wolf form, her disappearance would never be explained. Sam, Grace and Cole are faced with the near impossible task of moving the wolves out of the woods to a safe place.

This volume is more of a werewolf race-against-time than the love story of the previous two volumes, and I kept turning the pages with a desperation for everything to turn out all right, but a dread of the more likely outcome. Forever is a beautiful end to a simple but exceptional story.

Amy and Roger's Epic Detour - Morgan Matson


I bought this book after having seen a lot of reviews on other people's blogs, and, I confess, because it has a pretty cover. After her father's death, Amy Curry is charged with bringing the family car from California to their new home in Connecticut, but she won't drive any more. Enter Roger, an old family friend, and the pair decide to make a proper road trip of the journey, taking the scenic route.

I found the plot of Amy and Roger to be fairly standard for a real-issues teenage novel. I'd read too many books with the main character dealing with bereavement and family upheaval (Fixing Delilah, The Sky Is Everywhere, Tiger Eyes, Hold Still, The Truth About Forever to name but a few) for this to really stand out as a story. It was the travel that made this book different. I loved reading about the different places Amy and Roger visited: Yosemite National Park, America's Loneliest Highway, Graceland, Utah and there was a scrapbook effect with photos, ticket stubs, receipts and iPod playlists, which added to the feeling of being a passenger in the car. Along the way, Amy and Roger meet up with some lovely supporting characters, who open their homes and hearts to strangers. When Amy visited Graceland, a trip she'd always been meaning to take with her Elvis-mad father, I found myself close to tears and realised this story had drawn me deeper in than I'd previously thought.