I realise I haven’t blogged about books recently. It’s not that I’m not reading them. I am. I am just reading them slowly, and then falling asleep. I am behind with my reveiws, I am behind with my library books. I am behind with everything.
I am the proverbial donkey’s tail.
Nevertheless I have read a couple of excellent books I would recommend for older teens and people like me.
The Crowfield Curse by Pat Walsh is an exciting supernatural type thriller set in a medieval monastery. It was recommended to me in the excellent way of blogging by Mrs. Jones, who had read about it on this blog; Diary of a Desperate Exmoor Woman. I love how these things work, don’t you?
It is about a young man called Will who lives at a dilapidated old monastery where he works as an odd job boy since the death of his family in a fire at their mill. He discovers a supernatural creature called a Hob, trapped in the woods, and saving its life leads him to uncover a tremendous secret about the monastery and its past that propels him headlong into adventure.
This is taut, suspenseful and historically interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was utterly delighted when Mrs. Jones treated me to the next one in the series for my birthday.
My next recommendation is by the author John Connolly who writes frillin’ macabre fings for grown ups in his day job, but who has started to write a fantasy horror series for teens in his spare time. I read the first one of these, called; ‘The Gates: Samuel Johnson V. The Devil, Round One,’ a few months back, and loved it. Samuel Johnson is a teenage boy who just happens to have a dog called Boswell. Samuel is shy and unassuming, but one day finds out that a lady in his neighbourhood is channelling the power from the Hadron Collider to open the portals of Hell and become possessed by the demon Ba’al, who comes to earth intent on its destruction. Samuel and his friends, with the help of an insignificant and rubbish hell demon called Nurd, have to save the universe, and their home town of Biddlecombe in particular. The sequel is called ‘Hells Bells’, and I was given it to review before its release.
It is every bit as good as the first volume, funny, dark, troubling and scary. It kind of reminds me of Neil Gaiman a little, and that’s never a bad thing is it?
The Connolly sounds good- I like his thrillers – easy to read before I nod off.
The title of the sequel makes me laugh, though, as I worked with a Helen Bell, and always wondered if her parents thought that one through…
Jo
I’ve never read the grown up stuff, but I do own The Book of Lost Things by him and it looks great.