Published by Orion Childrens Books

Alan Gibbons is an Award winning author, having won the Blue Peter Award and been shortlisted for both the Carnegie Medal and the Booktrust Teenage Prize – from the evidence I have just read in An Act of Love it’s not hard to see why he is so well respected.

This is the second book he has written to try to explain or deal with the current world climate following the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York and the wars that have taken place since (the first being Caught in the Crossfire) and he has a real skill in being able to show all the emotions and feelings from everyone touched by or involved in the violence.

He clearly chooses to challenge himself as a writer, saying in the introduction;

‘Why do I choose such bleak subjects?  Well, you only enter a dark room if you think you can light the way out.’

The book tells the story of two young friends, Chris and Imran, from their schoolboy years and choosing to call themselves ‘blood brothers’ at the age of seven, and their transition and break-down of the bond between them as a result of what starts to happen in the adult world.   We follow Chris as he joins the army and leaves his hometown to head to Afghanistan and Imran, who stays home and slowly becomes influenced by those around him and looks as though to be heading on a path that will lead him to potentially strike terror within his own country.

But, the book moves quickly, starting with the present day – Chris about to collect a medal for bravery and struggling to do so, due to an injury from the war, and Imran finding out that an explosive device is somewhere nearby.  We then flashback to the boys’ stories as they grow up and apart from each other, all the time leaving the reader wondering and worrying about how the present day scene will end when we get back to it.

It’s a cracking read, walking a dangerous tightrope but managing to stay completely balanced in its reporting of both sides of such a difficult subject matter.

And, let’s face it, most adults struggle to work out what is going on in our world when we turn on the television news, so I think this goes a long way towards explaining some of it to our children.

Highly recommended to children and to those with children too.

Keith

This is a fantastic idea and, in a way, makes author David Gatward the Jamie Oliver of kids’ fiction, by encouraging them to read more stuff that’s good for them.

A very clever use of modern technology (as the Booksurfers series is only in ebook format) what we have here is the modern day equivalent to what I loved as a kid (the choose your own adventure books) as the reader can choose as and when they want to dip in and out of the new story and into the original text of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Ever wondered what it would be like to not just read a book, but actually experience it?

The set-up and premise is fairly straight forward but is sure to appeal to its target audience, particularly those who love books like the Alex Rider novels and similar tales of children having fantastic adventures.

Jake, Harriet, Ryan and Becca find themselves thrown together, their parents stolen away and imprisoned from them and facing a series of tasks ahead.

The sinister Cruella de Vil-alike, Kaufman visits them and tells them their mission, a mission they must undertake for the equally strange Crookshanks.  They are to go into classic books, into the stories themselves, via ‘rips’ that can be created by a gadget called the Nautilus (a reference to 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, of course).  The Nautilus allows its user to ‘travel in the here and now.  It also allows you to move about in the there and never was’.

Once inside the books they are to steal valuable artifacts from within them and bring them back to the outside world.  The first of these is the treasure map from Treasure Island, but there are constant references throughout to other great novels – many of which I’m sure will follow after the second title (also available now) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

There is a secondary challenge, however, and that is that the children have to ensure that they do nothing in the book that will have an affect on its ending, can do nothing that may change the path of the story and so, in this first title, they choose to try to replicate a copy of the map to leave behind.

Scattering other book titles along the way is a good move, there’s always a chance that the mention that ‘Dracula’ for someone who’s really into ghost stories is ‘brilliant. All that romance and intrigue…’ will be enough to cause a young reader to give it a go.

However, the brilliance here, is that with every underlined section of text, words of a song or mention of a section of the original text, that the reader can simply click and they are taken straight into the original Treasure Island.  Once there, they can choose to continue to read Treasure Island in full, or read a bit and then duck back out to the booksurfers tale, but there are enough comments made by the characters as to how much they loved the book to ensure that readers will be tempted time and time again to read some or all of the original novel.

Alternatively the reader can simply whizz through the great adventure story of the Booksurfers and they will still get a lot of the flavour and feel of Treasure Island and, when they reach the end, they’ll find that the complete Stevenson novel is there for them to enjoy too.

It’s a very clever idea.  Maybe it could be argued that the concept of characters running amok and creating their own stories outside of the ones written for them and reality crashing into fictional characters has been done before, with books such as the Inkheart series, but this is unique in the way it is executed and is sure to catch the imagination of the generation who rarely want to read anything unless it is on a screen and who would, otherwise, be increasingly unlikely to settle back and enjoy a classic.

So, it’s congrats all round –  a great start to an exciting adventure series and a bold and clever way of encouraging children to read some of the old stuff/good stuff too.

Highly recommended – it’s the first book I will gladly let my children borrow my kindle to read.

Get yourself over to amazon and get downloading Booksurfers now.

Keith