I have nothing flippant to say here - The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

This book is great and you should read it.

Except maybe if you really hate YA, because this is certainly a YA book.

That said, Thomas is a clever writer who neatly cuts through the usual “YA protag is the center of the universe” with a single line of dialogue from her mother.

I felt conscious while reading it that YA success lies in appealing to white 30-something women like me, who - incidentally - watched the Fresh Prince and sang along to 90s music first time around, and it felt a little hamstrung as a result.

Even so, this book will hopefully be the gateway drug for those who weren’t yet ready for the truths of Dr Maya Angelou et al. Like I wasn’t the first time I read them. THUG has made me want to read something which wasn’t written for me.

It’s not racist towards white people.

No, really, that’s not a thing.

When Starr tells her boyfriend he can’t understand because he’s white, that’s not racism towards white people, that’s a 16 year-old not having the language to articulate in a moment of emotion that if you have not lived an experience, you are unlikely to have a full appreciation of what it means for the people who do. This is true.

The white-people/black-people conversation feels a bit shoehorned in.

I felt like Thomas missed a trick. The racism Starr is subjected to has given her blinkers about the ways other races navigate the white world. This doesn’t change and there feels a very obvious moment when it could.

But yes, it’s great.

4.5 stars

Eventually I will manage to work out what the title refers to - Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch

So we finally know who The Faceless Man is! Harumble!

It doesn’t make much difference! Hurumble…?

Okay, from here there will be spoilers for the previous book in the series, The Hanging Tree, in which the identity of The Faceless Man is revealed and it will really wreck your enjoyment of that one if you know from the start who it is. SPOILERS FOR THE HANGING TREE from here on out.

Not as bad as last time - The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch

I had been looking forwards to this book for a long time, with some reservations. Forward because Tyburn, London, and some actual movements towards resolution of the larger story arc. Reservations, because there's rarely a good reason for publication dates to shift, then shift again, then again.

This time we're back in London and The Lady Tyburn is ready to call that favour she's owed. A teenager is dead following a party in a pricey piece of London estate and Lady Ty's daughter was there at the time. It would be very nice if this whole thing could be made to go away, by, say, Peter Grant, but there's more to this than a poor choice in recreational activity, and it has the feeling of a razor against leather...

The Hanging Tree continues the distressing trend of Ben Aaronovitch's books: they're great, you read furiously and then - alas. The ending. This review is being written off the back of the pre-Lies Sleeping re-read and the ending is even weaker the second time around. There's great drama, a race to get there before <something> happens, and then! Turns out that's not a problem because of Weak And Curiously Convenient Reason; let normal Grant'n'Nightingale vs The Faceless Man service commence.

And that weak plotting is not restricted to the end. The very fact that Peter is called in to help smooth things over for Lady Ty's daughter is a pretty odd move for a lady who is very good at getting things done and likely has many better favours she can call in. It feels like a lazy move to get Peter to the right place to discover, gasp, that there are Falcon elements to this after all. To bring up more examples would be spoilers. Is Deus ex Fabula a thing? Because it is all over this book like a rash.

However, I'm still a sucker for these books. The writing has this great conversational style which I love, they're witty, they make a better stab at diversity than the usual White Male author bothers to.

As ever, nobody who starts at the wrong end of this series is going to be convinced, but I do enjoy them far more than my star ratings suggest I do.

3.5 stars

*starts making a list* - Where does it Hurt? by Max Pemberton

As you can probably guess from the title, this is one of those “Medical Professional writes about their job in an amusing fashion” books. I like these kinds of books but they can have difficulty standing out from one another, especially as even the terrific ones (like Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt) can’t manage to avoid the Junior-Doctor-Book Bingo Card. Happily, this one pretty much does.

This time round, Pemberton is attached to the Phoenix Outreach Project, dealing with the homeless, the drug addicted, and the octogenarian former prostitute.

Pemberton is a decent writer who has a nice line in fish-out-of-water humility going on. There’s a good variety of stories, interesting, funny and sad, if never quite as emotionally wrenching as the end of the Kay book mentioned above.

If you like this sort of thing, which I do, it’s well worth sticking Pemberton on your TBR pile - his first is the usual Junior Doctor in a hospital stuff, while his third is about his stint in Geriatrics. This one was great and I really quite enjoyed it.

4 stars

As you do - Round Ireland With a Fridge by Tony Hawks

The late 90’s was responsible for so much: New Labour, Cool Britannia, and the now forgotten non-fiction genre: white-male-comedian-undertakes-wacky-journey-because -they-lost-a-bet-while-trollied-and-writes-a-book-about-it. Dave Gorman (meeting people called Dave Gorman), Pete McCarthy (visiting pubs with his name on), Dave Gorman (meeting people who are singular on Google), Danny Wallace (saying yes to things), Dave Gorman (travelling across America avoiding The Man)... so many wacky, wacky journeys.

Tony Hawks (not to be confused with the pro-skateboarder), having recounted an amusing anecdote to his friends about seeing a man in Ireland attempting to hitchhike with a fridge, accepts a challenge to do the same. If he can get around the coast of the Republic, with a fridge, in a month, he will win the grand sum of £100. Less than the fridge he’s travelling with ends up costing him.

This is a bittersweet one for me. At the time of writing, I’m going to hit the first anniversary moving back to the UK having lived in the Republic since 2003. The Ireland I lived in was very different to Hawks 1996 version. Hawks book takes place in that short space of time when mobile phones were a thing for professional people but the internet hadn’t made the average home (well, not my home, anyway). Post Riverdance, but pre Celtic Tiger and Good Friday Agreement.

A travelogue this is not. This is the story of a wacky journey. While Hawks begins with a degree of engagement, visiting the King of Tory etc, the journey grows increasingly more concerned with recounting Hawks’ stagger from pub to bar to roadside and back again, until it’s just a case of making it back to Dublin. The Cork-Waterford stretch is a couple of hours he spends in a car. His time in Wexford Town (which he insists on referring to as Wexford, annoying me terribly) is mainly about his seduction of a lady.

There’s a lot of that - Tony attempting to chat up ladies and failing - and post #meToo it feels more than a little creeptacular. His continuing lamentations that a particular lady hadn’t called him don’t do much to improve matters.

I listened to the audiobook, read by Hawks himself, and he’s a terrific reader who makes a decent stab at the accents (if not the Irish regional variations), although he’s more occasionally-raise-a-smile funny rather than actual laughter funny. He’s pleasing.

These sorts of books always need to tread carefully with me. They’re so often written from the perspective of this everyman who just happens to be taking this wacky, wacky journey when, in reality, they have the financial backing of a book deal or a comedy tour from the get go. Hawks is open about the support he receives from the (late) Gerry Ryan and his morning radio show, but I suspect there would have been less support if it truly had been your everyman performing the stunt rather than a comedian with a decade strong career. Behind almost every viral internet sensation is a promotional algorithm which has been paid for. I like my wacky journeys with appropriate amounts of disclosure.

So, the first half was pretty good, but the whole thing got more and more repetitive as it went on. Although I find Tony Hawks very easy to listen to, I honestly can’t see myself replaying this or checking out his other work. I can’t recommend it as something funny, or interesting, but his voice is extremely soothing.

2 stars

Not what I wanted, but super readable - A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding by Jackie Copleton

[This book was provided to me free of charge by the publisher Cornerstone, assisted in this awesomeness by NetGalley. I thank them muchly.]

I'm usually leary of books set in countries the author is not from, especially countries like Japan which are so very different from western nations. However, Jackie Copleton's A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding comes with an extremely encouraging pedigree: it was on the Bailey's Prize long-list and Copleton is herself is a graduate of Cambridge and Glasgow, so I had high hopes of this one.

Amaterasu Takahashi survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Her daughter and grandson did not. For almost 40 years she's lived with the guilt of their deaths, until a man with a badly scarred face turns up on her American doorstep bearing a box of secrets. He claims to be Hideo, her grandson, rescued from the ash and debris, then raised by a man Ama would rather forget. To find the truth, she must revisit her memories of days long past, of before the war, and of her belief that everything she ever did was to protect her family.

I didn't care for this book. It's not a bad book, it just didn't offer what I look for. I wanted a book which felt authentic, which told a story I don't know from a perspective completely unfamiliar to me. ADoMU doesn't, not because the author is British, but because it's barely about Nagasaki and its aftermath. Instead its focus is the relationship between Ama and her daughter - Women's Fiction then, which is not always my thing.

Although it opens with this mystery - is the young man at the door truly the grandson Ama believed killed the day the bomb fell? - the question is inconsequential, a jumping off point for Ama's recollections, her diary entries and the papers she is given by the young man. ADoMU covers a lot of ground and consequentially its touches on its subjects are light where I would have preferred a hefty commitment to fewer of them, especially as they were the more interesting (and original) aspects.

If I'd been more caught up in the character, or the writing, I'd feel less short-changed, especially as this book goes down the lazy path so beloved by westerners writing about Japan. I was left very dissatisfied - Ama never feels like an 80-odd year-old Japanese woman.  There was no reflection or sense that she'd become a different person at 80-odd than she'd been on the day the bomb fell. The backdrops - of 30s Japan, of Japan at war - felt shallow, never quite coming alive; at one point the local festival of Shoro-Nagashi is described as being "unlike any other in Japan", but the description makes it sound like a variation of Obon. I want to know how it's different, why it's different, and what Ama thinks about it. When she moves to the US, how does it feel to lose this yearly conversation? What was Shoro-Nagashi like the year after the bomb?

There's also least one aspect felt as though it'd been written with Western attitudes in mind, rather than Japanese. I'm not accusing the book of errors (because I honestly wouldn't know), I was just thrown a bit by the suggestion that 16 is young for a relationship in a country where the legal age of consent is 13 (in certain circumstances). It was one of a few small details which contributed to a lack of immersion.

I think it's important to note there's an ongoing background discussion of white voices telling stories which belong to other cultures. This book left me with an overwhelming desire to read something about the legacy of the nuclear bombs by a Japanese writer but Google is bringing me little: everything I can find in English appears to be by western authors. They must exist, surely, but if they're getting translated I can't find them.

A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding is a good book, it just wasn't what I was looking for. I also hope the Bailey's nomination doesn't put potential readers off; this isn't one of those highbrow "hard" reads, it's an interesting one which must surely be a shoe-in for the Richard and Judy Bookclub. The important thing to note is that, despite my complaints, this is one super-readable book and you could do a lot worse when choosing something to fling in your suitcase this summer.

3.5 stars.

Hmmm - Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovotch

Although I like it, Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series has been a bit hit and miss. The first, Rivers of London, was an absolute stonker - think Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere as a police procedural. The second, Moon Over Soho was slightly dire but managed to redeem itself with a lively final third. Book three was better, book four a bit better than that (provided you have my interest in urban architecture). Foxglove Summer, the fifth entry in the series, is no worse than the previous two.

London copper and apprentice wizard Peter Grant has long since learned not everything is as normal as he used to think it was. This week he's learning that The Folly, the supernatural branch of the Met, takes an interest in missing child cases, just to be sure they haven't been spirited away by anything Grant will only find out exists now. So when schoolgirls Nicole and Hannah leave their beds in the middle of the night, Peter's off to the countryside to interview an old acquaintence of Nightingale's, just to be sure there's nothing 'Falcon' going on. And since he's already out there, Peter volunteers to help the West Mercia Police with their investigation, an offer the overstretched rural force is keen to accept - and not just to show the doorstepping national press that yokels can do diversity too.

The strengths of the series are intermittently out in force: the fun to be had from somebody trying to negotiate the line between getting the job done and filling the paperwork out afterwards; the blending of traditional folklore with the series' rather more modern take on it (high fives for diversity and a pointed look at every fantasy author who's proffered excuses for the majority of white maleness in their books); some great back-and-forth dialogue; and although it's slow in parts, especially at the beginning, when the story *is* moving it's so terrific I risked hideous sunburn to continue reading.

But the weaknesses are there too, especially Aaronovitch's continuing inability to write a convincing relationship. I'm not looking for great romance here, I'd just like a sense of what either of them see in the other beyond a keenness to get carnal. A supernatural moment between the two is incredibly unpleasant but because of the simplistic way we view men as creatures whose interests begin and end with whether they get to have sex or not, it's written in a positive light.

It's frustrating because Peter's laconic narrative doesn't preclude emotion. There is a moment with a tree which is so perfectly done, which shows the underneath parts of Peter so much more effectively than his articulating them would do, that it becomes all the more frustrating for it be placed alongside a relationship which is little more than brief descriptions of energetic lying down.

I'm also having problems with the world building. Each book brings new ideas, often very good ones, but I sometimes feel it's at the expense of developing those already established. And while Foxglove Summer does give some series arc related insights and hints of things to come, those aspects remain very much a sub-sub-plot. I don't feel like we're moving towards a predetermined idea in which all the pieces will suddenly come together and have me scrambling to re-read the series.

While I really liked the premise, the whole thing felt under-done. Removing Peter from London gave some freshness, but not quite enough. The ending itself is horribly rushed, to the point that I feared a cliffhanger approaching. There wasn't, but that would almost have been preferable.

I do like this series and I will certainly be reading the next one, but despite this I can't recommend it (beyond the first book). If you don't like what's gone before there's nothing here to change your mind, but if you do like it this is engaging, occasionally tantalising, and hugely frustrating in equal measure.

3.5 stars