We've Come to Take You Home by Susan Gandar #bookreview

About We've Come to Take You Home

Samantha Foster and Jessica Brown are destined to meet. But one lives in the 20th century, the other in the 21st... It is April 1916 and thousands of men have left home to fight in the war to end all wars. Jessica Brown's father is about to be one of these men. A year later, he is still alive, but Jess has to steal to keep her family from starving. And then a telegram arrives - her father has been killed in action. Four generations later, Sam Foster's father is admitted to hospital with a suspected brain haemorrhage. A nurse asks if she would like to take her father's hand. Sam refuses. All she wants is to get out of this place, stuck between the world of the living and the world of the dead, a place with no hope and no future, as quickly as possible. As Sam's father's condition worsens, her dreams become more frequent - and more frightening. She realises that what she is experiencing is not a dream, but someone else's living nightmare...

My Review of  We've Come to Take You Home

We've Come to Take You Home is a poignant read about family, history, war and reconnecting with your past to form your future. I had no idea of what to expect when I started to read this debut novel. Was it a love story? An historical read? The genre I find very hard to define, even now once I have read it, but I loved this book for its ghostly themes of love and the past,  and strong female characters who both eloquently told their stories.

We've Come to Take You Home tells the story of two women, four generations apart. Although the stories appear to be separate, as I progressed through the book I realised that the two stories were linked in some way. Jess is living through the hardship of the First World War. Her father has been recently deployed and she needs to help support her mother and new baby brother. The depictions of war are harrowing and brutally honest. When Jess is forced to move to London to work as a maid of all jobs, my heart ached for her. She was thankful for a roof over her head and food in her belly, but at what cost? Was she truly living life?

We also read Sam's story, which is just as moving as Jess's, although in an entirely different way, there are similarities to what they are both going through. They are both young, they are having to adjust to life without a father, and they are both mature beyond their years. She lives in the present day with her mother and pilot dad. She has always seen things, people, that are not really there, and as we read her story , she shares with us the fact that she sees images of war. She sees war nurses attending the sick, the bombed out fields and the sick and dying soldiers. This happens to her without warning, she is simply sucked back in time, living via another person. This is obviously terrifying, but she keeps what she believes are visions to herself, as who would believe her? She has no idea why she sees such images, and neither do we.

This is such a clever story, and on paper you would think it could not possibly work. But, it does. Through both Sam and Jess we learn about what it must have been like for a normal, working class family to live through the hardship of war. Although this is the primary story, we also have Sam's struggle, in her trying to reunite her broken family. Her father is a pilot, and on the day that he leaves the family home, he is involved in an accident that leaves him in a coma. Sam has to deal with her father's critical condition, as well as having to learn to cope with the evolving relationship with her mother. 

This is a deeply moving book about the horrors of war, about family and of the important bond between father and daughter. It is beautifully written and the ending couldn't have happened any other way. I highly recommend this novel and look forward to reading more work by Susan Gandar. 

With thanks to the author who sent me a paperback copy for review purposes.

We've Come to Take You Home, published by Matador on 28 March, 2016, can be found in Amazon here.

About the author

Susan Gandar grew up surrounded by stories and storytelling.

My father, John Box, was a film production designer, working on ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, ‘Dr. Zhivago’, ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘A Man For All Seasons’ and the musical ‘Oliver’. Our house was always filled with people, usually eccentric, always talented, invariably stroppy, discussing stories. My mother put my father’s four Oscars to good use as toilet roll holders, doorstops and hat stands.

A major chunk of my childhood was spent loitering around on film sets. Who needs an ‘English education’ when you have the marble-dusted streets of downtown Moscow, ten miles outside of Madrid, to explore?

But then the years of ‘Who Will Buy My Sweet Red Roses’ came to a rather abrupt end. Reality knocked on the door in the guise of the Metropolitan Line to Shepherds Bush and the BBC. Working in television as a script editor and story consultant, I was part of the creative team responsible for setting up ‘Casualty’. I became known for going after the more ‘difficult’ stories at the same time successfully racking up viewing figures from 7 to 14 million.

I went on to develop various projects for both the BBC and the independent sector. The period I enjoyed most was working with Jack Rosenthal, a wonderful writer, on the series ‘Moving Story’ – ‘That’s a situation, a good situation, but now you need to make it into a story.’

Martin, my husband, was made an offer he couldn’t refuse and we left England to live in Amsterdam. ‘Ik wil een kilo kabeljauw, alstublieft’ will, if all goes well, buy you a piece of cod – I decided to concentrate on my writing rather than my Dutch pronunciation.

My debut novel, ‘We’ve Come to Take You Home’, set in the present and in 1918, a crossover aimed at the adult and young adult women’s popular fiction market, was published March 2016.

The White Road by Sarah Lotz #bookreview

About the White Road

Adrenaline-junky Simon Newman sneaks onto private land to explore a dangerous cave in Wales with a strange man he's met online. But Simon gets more than he bargained for when the expedition goes horribly wrong. Simon emerges, the only survivor, after a rainstorm trap the two in the cave. Simon thinks he's had a lucky escape.

 

But his video of his near-death experience has just gone viral.

 

Suddenly Simon finds himself more famous than he could ever have imagined. Now he's faced with an impossible task: he's got to defy death once again, and film the entire thing. The whole world will be watching. There's only on place on earth for him to pit himself against the elements: Mt Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

 

But Everest is also one of the deadliest spots on the planet. Two hundred and eighty people have died trying to reach its peak.

 

And Simon's luck is about to run out.

My review of The White Road

 

"Fingers in your heart, lad"

Oh my! Where do I start? I have no idea as my mind is still lingering on this chilling and deeply unsettling story, which I absolutely loved! This story just won't let go and I find myself thinking about the characters, and what happened to them with a great sense of unease. It is one of those books that will haunt you, long after you have read the final page. It is utterly brilliant. I'll try and organise my thoughts and explain why I couldn't put this book down once I had read the first few pages.

So, at the beginning we meet Simon Newman, a man in his late twenties, an adrenaline junkie and a man who wants to help his best friend, Thierry, succeed in his dream to make his website go viral. So, it is with reluctance that Simon enters the notoriously dangerous and off limits cave, known as, Cwm Port in Wales. His only companion is a caver he has only met online. As soon as Simon meets Ed outside the cave he has reservations, and half wonders about getting back in his car and driving home, but his loyalty to his friend 'T' is fierce and so he goes into the cave. As a result of this, his life will never be the same again.

It is what happens to Simon while in the cave that is the catalyst for the rest of the story. He is the only survivor, but what happens in the darkness of the cave is his secret, and his burden alone. This part of the story is what really got to me the most, and which I found the most chilling. I could smell the dampness of the cave walls, hear the water and believed everything that Simon told me, the reader.  When the footage from his headcam is uploaded to the site and goes viral, Thierry wants more, and as such a loyal friend, Simon accepts the next challenge to reach the summit of Everest. But his motives for doing so are very different to the rest of the climbers that he meets.

Simon is a complex character and, if I am honest, I never really liked him, but that didn't stop me wanting the absolute best for him. I cared for him, all because of what happened to him and Ed in the cave. Simon tells us his own personal story, we follow him into the cave, his rescue from the cave, and then  his mammoth  journey up Mount Everest. We are with him every step of the way and his story well and truly got under my skin.

We also have the personal accounts from Juliet, a hiker who climbed Everest many years before. We read her thoughts, her entrees from her journal while on the mountain, and just like with Simon, I felt incredibly close to her. At first it seemed that Simon's and Juliet's stories were separate, but it soon  became apparent that their two stories were linked. They become entwined, which gave an even creepier edge to what was being unfurled on the page.

As I have already said, I couldn't put this book down, telling myself, just a few more pages... and then finding that I had read half the book. The way in which the caves and Everest are described took my breath away. I actually felt like I was crawling through that rat run with Simon or fighting for breath while on a mountain ridge.

This book really did leave me feeling unsettled and I can't quite put my finger on why that is so. I think it is partly due to the characters within it, they all crawled under my skin, and I am not quite able to let them go. But another, maybe more darker reason, is that I believed their stories, they felt acutely real to me, and it is the unseeing, the 'third man' that walks alongside us, that is much scarier than the dead.

The White Road is a story about ghosts, and about having that sense, that feeing, that someone is with you, walking with you. I shall never forget the last two pages. They, and the rest of the story, will stay with me for a very long time. This is a creepy book, that slowly hooked me in and it isn't quite ready to let me go.

The White Road is published by Hodder and Stoughton on May 4. It is available to buy from Amazon here.

With thanks to Bookbridgr and the publisher who sent me a proof copy for review purposes.

About the author

Sarah Lotz is a screenwriter and novelist with a fondness for the macabre and fake names. Incapable of holding down a 'proper' job, over the years she's painted outrageous frescos for dubious casinos, written scripts for South Africa's first full-length sci-fi cartoon show and lived homeless on the streets of Paris as a teenage runaway.

Among other things, she writes horror/thriller novels under the name S.L. Grey with author Louis Greenberg, a YA pulp-fiction zombie series with her daughter, Savannah, under the pseudonym Lily Herne, and quirky erotica novels with authors Helen Moffett and Paige Nick under the name Helena S. Paige.

Stephen King said her solo novel The Three was 'really wonderful' (which made her cry in a very very good way) and her latest solo novel, Day Four, will be published in the U.K by Hodder & Stoughton in May, 2015.

Pompidou Posse, a YA novel based on her experiences living rough and behaving badly in Paris, will be out in September 2015.

She likes cake, scruffy dogs, fast cars and sitting in her attic making stuff up.

I Liked My Life by Abby Fabiaschi - Review

About - I Liked My Life

Maddy was a loving, devoted stay-at-home mother...until she committed suicide, which left her husband Brady and her teenage daughter Eve heartbroken and reeling, wondering how they can possibly continue without her. Maddy, however, isn’t quite done with them. In an attempt to fulfill her family’s needs, Maddy watches and meddles from beyond the grave, determined to find the perfect wife and mother to replace herself and heal her family. That’s when she finds Rory: a free-spirited schoolteacher, who Maddy maneuvers into Eve’s confidences, but who turns out to be harboring a tragedy of her own.

In a story both deeply moving and charming, with the domestic insight of Jodi Picoult, I Liked My Life from debut author Abby Fabiaschi is a mother’s final blessing for a family learning to live again.

My Review of I Liked My Life

 

I have no idea where to start in reviewing this book, other than to say that I completely adored this story. I'll try my very best to describe the essence of this book and what it means to me, without giving the plot away.  So let me start by writing about Maddy, one of the three characters who narrates the story. She is the mother of Eve and wife to Brady, and throughout the novel we learn of why she committed suicide. I found her to be very captivating and very easy to read. She reels you in with her scheming and the need to once again create the perfect family. She wants Brady and Eve to be happy without her, and so therefore she feels that she needs to find the perfect wife and mother replacements. Now, this whole being able to manipulate people from the grave is a very interesting concept and, it could have really been executed badly on the page. It could have been completely over sentimentalised, causing a chasm between the reader and character. But, this is not the case. The author has managed to pull off a believable and likeable mother figure who is not perfect and who simply wants the best for her loved ones who are left behind. She is startlingly real.

 

Then we have Brady, the grieving husband, and once again, the author has got this just right. We feel his anger and betrayal, because of the way in which Maddy died. Reading his words on the page, we come to realise that grieving for his wife is a difficult process for him, due to the way in which she died. He too is almost in limbo and needs to work out how to push forward. Of course he also has his teenage daughter to care for and all of the complexities that come with raising a teenager. The dialogue between them was some of the most real and frank discussions that I have ever read in a novel.

 

Eve is the daughter left behind, and she too learns how to grieve in her very own way. As well as having to deal with the loss of her mother, she has all of the normal teenage angst and troubles to deal with which make her life far from perfect. I really liked Eve and found her to be a young woman who simply wanted her mother back, to tell her that she was sorry for taking her for granted - my heart ached at her yearning for her mother and the fact that she would never have the chance to tell her how much she loved her.

 

I feel that the book's blurb does not do this book justice. This is a book about  family learning to live again, but it is so much more. It is a ghost story in a sense, that talks of all consuming love. But it is also a book that discusses the complexities of father and daughter relationships. That is what I truly feel is at the heart of this book, the daughter/father bond. It is a book about new beginnings - but also, it is a book about learning to heal from the past.

 

I Liked My Life is published by St. Martin's Press on 31st January 2017