Thoughts on Selznick's The Marvels

Our former bookseller Lewi, poet, writer and aficionado of all things art and Victorian, posted an interesting comment on Facebook about Brian Selznick's beautiful book The Marvels - nutritious  food for thought:

"I go to bed tonight a little saddened. I have just finished reading the most beautiful book, recommended to me by my even more beautiful friend Patty, which is 'The Marvels' by Brian Selznick. It is a tale of two halves where 60% or so consists of hand-drawn scenes which tell one story (and reminded me of a visual representation of a Sigur Ros song), while the rest is dedicated to the written word, which frames the first story in another incredibly delicate, plot-twisting, happy-and-sad-at-the-same-time theme which rounds everything off so sweetly. Without giving too much away, there are a gay man and a gender-fluid girl in the story (who just so happen to be gay and non-binary without having the story revolve around those aspects), which, considering the book is primarily aimed at teenagers, I think it is an absolutely incredible way of showing diversity and a 21st century attitude to "different" types of people with whom we share this planet, no? 

However, upon looking to amazon to see what others thought of it, I was upset and, to be honest, quite angry about how many adults consider the aforementioned themes as, and I quote, "controversial", "not suitable for a young audience" and "requiring parental involvement". 
I'm sorry, but what? How on earth can the account of a fictional man expressing his love for another man, and a girl who does not wish to necessarily be represented as such, be considered as "not suitable" and "controversial"?! How else will teenagers, especially those who are struggling with gender and sexuality identity issues, empathise with others, real or not, who are or have gone through the same thing? How else will they learn tolerance for homosexuality and so forth, if this is being attempted to be taken away from them by fully grown adults - a lot of those reviews were from teachers too! What is it going to take to make people realise that it is okay to have gay and gender-fluid characters in books and for it not to affect the storytelling and the plot and so forth? 

I don't know if it is because of the friends I have or how I was raised or my liberal, mostly left-wing views but I see absolutely no problem with any of it in the slightest, and people suggesting that others do not buy this book for their children because of those "issues" (yet they are quick to say how good Selznick's other books are, which contain heterosexual, gender-conforming characters) are purely adding to the problem by creating a stigma around two already very sensitive issues. I thought this was 2015, not 1815. Many, many people are becoming more open-minded, I know, and I think that is fantastic, and I know those reviews are just electronic words on an electronic screen but they have dampened my spirits and shed a perhaps unwanted light on the fact that we still have a long way to go in the name of social equality."

And the winner of our Halloween Short Story Competition is...

FRANKIE HOLLIS, age 9, from Witney!!!

Frankie displayed a ferocious imagination with this little terrifying tale, with an incredible attention to gory detail. What send an icy shudder down our backs was the image of stairs covered in hair and moss. Reminded me of a brief scene from the Pet Sematary film (which Frankie must promise to not watch for another 10 years or so!).

And you will be pleased to know, Frankie, that I've showed your story to horror author Adam Nevill, and he approved of it very much!

So without much further ado, here's Frankie's tale of doom!

Review: Adam Nevill's 'Lost Girl'

I’ve been a fan of Adam Nevill’s tales since Apartment 16 made me too chicken to switch off the lights at night. Since The Ritual made me obsessed with Scandinavian folklore and my Germanic  heritage demons that still haunted my mother (there’s a tale there). Since Banquet for the Damned created a discordant homage of twisted love to the dark beauty of St Andrews and the unfathomable horrors of a Lovecraftian mind. Since the cracked hands of my inner evil porcelain doll clapped enthustiastically to the Victorian horrors unfolding in House of Small Shadows.

So far Nevill has ticked all the boxes of my favourite kinds of fears.  It’s like he is an evil wizard pulling all my bad dreams out of my head like a rope of threadbare, rotten knotted handkerchiefs, twirling my demons like Mickey in a Fantasia directed by James Wan or John Carpenter. Only horror fans might appreciate that particular addictive (if not slightly masochistic) joy.

The paranormal is Nevill’s specialty, and I imagine it will always feature to some degree in his tales of doom. But there is a new side to him, which I can only describe as a modern Dickens. Last year, with the publication of No One Gets Out Alive, Nevill dealt with a modern horror that has touched too many of us: unaffordable housing and unstable jobs, leaving us in a poverty so grinding that we are at the mercy of rogue landlords. Nevill might have exaggerated it somewhat (although I have met people like Knacker McGuire, which makes this book all the more terrifying) – but there is illustration in exaggeration, and Nevill’s recent books have become sharp magnifying glasses pointed at contemporary societal ills, not instilling an indescribable horror but stirring up the familiar already there. He’s done poverty, the housing crisis and unregulated rental markets.

His latest, literally, goes more global. It’s not post-apocalyptic, it’s bang in the middle of it. Lost Girl is not just what some called a version of Liam Neeson’s 'Taken' – though if you prefer to read it that way, you certainly can; it makes a damn fine thriller. But there’s more to it than just the Leeson meme we’ve all seen. Set in the near future, in a world that is increasingly crumbling under the effects of climate change in which man has gone past the point of no return – ecological disasters, food shortages and water rationing and the resulting mass migrations to escape their doom to not much more habitable areas –, in a Great Britain that is collapsing under the strain of an apocalyptically hot summer, killing pensioners off like flies,  an ever-widening gap between the rich and poor, where only the rich can afford to get decent food and protection from an insane organised crime wave so infiltrated in society that the police is as effective as a cocktail umbrella in a super hurricane of lawlessness…  a global horror, a likely horror, a horror bound to happen if one just spins the yarn further from now, a horror along the lines of Soylent Green and The Death of Grass, just more brutal and more likely, where “year after year, decade after decade, always worsening, always leaving things changed after each crisis. The past is unrecoverable. Extinction is incremental. There is no science fiction. Advanced physics, inter-galactic travel, gadgets? An epic fantasy, the lot of it. There is only horror ahead of us now."

In this setting of despair, a family moves to Devon from Birmingham to escape the constant flooding, to a quiet, still somewhat idyllic place where self-sufficiency protects them from the worst of the food shortages. And it is just then when they feel marginally safe, that their beautiful little daughter gets snatched out of their front garden in a moment of carelessness, and disappears.

Lost Girl must have been incredibly uncomfortable to write – I had to think of Stephen King’s discomfort with Pet Sematary.  While there are autobiographical elements (a family moving from Birmingham to Devon with their little daughter), the thought of getting your toddler daughter kidnapped from right under your care is every parent’s nightmare. Add that to happening in a world where you can’t expect help from anyone, the law is impotent, a half-hearted investigation is abandoned due to lack of manpower, and the forces you are up against are gigantic. It’s an exploration of the agonies of a father trying to find his child, not knowing whether she is alive or dead, or what horrors might have happened to her. It’s about the lengths he goes to, at the peril of everything he has and is, to save her.

What makes this tale so much better than bland old Taken is how deeply you get submerged into the father’s mind agonising to the brink of insanity with the grief, loss, worry and uncertainty over his daughter’s fate, and the horrific fantasies tormenting him. What adds to the intensity is that he remains unnamed, known only as “the father” through the entire book, making him akin to an archetype that anyone can identify with, where names don’t distract from the state of his soul. It also gives it the eerie effect that made McCarthy’s The Road such a haunting read.

The father is not blessed with the skills and coldness of an ex-CIA man; obsessive research and the help of an anonymous and just as vulnerable agent aids him in tracking down the captors, but often he is tormented by his humanity cracking under the necessity of barbarity to elicit answers from the most callous and vicious agents of his daughter’s disappearance, people so immersed in a world of corruption and violence that the father’s attempts to be threatening at first seem laughable to them. The dilemma the father faces is that in order to save his daughter from the monsters, he has to become one himself. He has to risk losing his ability to be a good father just to get his child back.

The twist at the end I really did not see coming.  I will not give much more away other than that is left open  like a wound in which an infinitesimally small glimmer of hope is the only balm on offer – but in times of doom one is grateful to at least have that.

Lost Girl is a relentless study of grief and loss, not just of a loved one but of humanity in crisis. Nevill skilfully puts it in a setting that makes this tale both larger than life and just a mere anecdote in the sea of peril slowly swallowing our planet, a brief zooming in on an individual fate in a flood of many, a new take on awe-inspiring horror.

The almost prophetic descriptions of a vast refugee crisis (considering Nevill wrote this book before the current problems hit the papers) was almost spooky in its timeliness. And the vivid details of his story-weaving sucks you right out of this world into the one he is master of.

As with all of his books, I advise that you read it at your own risk. But at the same time, you will be glad you did. 

Love, Patty 

PS: Curious? Read the first chapter here.

Review: Karyn Langhorne Folan's Survivor Stories (Doomsday Kids # 5)

   

I've reviewed the Doomsday Kids installments previously, still not giving up hope that this fantastic self-published series will receive the due and deserved attention of big publishing houses, just as Howey's Wool, Weir's The Martian and The Rabbit that Wants to Fall Asleep did. 

Amy’s Gift left us hanging cleverly, just giving away enough to know that the Doomsday kids had finally reached the safe haven they had left the Mountain Place for, nearly perishing on the arduous journey there, a near-death Amy rescued mid-birth by no one other than Liam’s mother, and all kids taken to  Survivor City’s hospital to recuperate.

And we all took a collective sigh of relief. Right?

Well, turns out it was too good to be true after all.

Survivors’ Stories, book 5 in the series, starts, it turns out, after considerable time has passed, and the first we meet is not Amaranth or Liam or Nester, but Jax. And it turns out he has not seen his friends for a long time. Slowly, through his, and later, Katie’s and Samir’s eyes (remember him?), it unravels that Survivor City is anything but a picnic. Overcrowded, with not enough food, water, medical aid or even housing for everyone, the supposed haven is a hellhole of starvation and corruption, run by a psychopathic general with social darwinist aspirations in which the weak and ill – all of those not able to contribute –  are cast aside, killed or left to die. A caste-like system controls everyone’s activities and connections, dissidents are being “floated”, former friends kept separated to avoid rebel activity from growing. The nuclear winter may be over, but now another sinister effect of the atomic bombs becomes apparent: with a damaged ozone layer and atmosphere, man is forced to work at night to escape the lethal UV rays and merciless heat.

Before, in the Mountain Place, at least the kids had each other. Now they’ve got no one. Alone in a postnuclear Orwellian nightmare, Jax, Katie and Marty are risking their own lives trying to find each other and their friends. But the brief moments of making contact come at a huge cost.

 I won’t give much more away except that the descriptions of their dismal existence, their attempts to connect, the friendships, loyalties and betrayals they face are heartbreaking, and that the entire time I found myself missing the core gang, of whom you mostly get glimpses and rumours. The horrors inflicted on this little community after they already had to go through so much is gut-wrenching and in some ways a greater horror than “just to die” of nature’s indifferent exposure – their suffering now is a choice of misguided morality and perceived necessity of a twisted man with solid delusions of grandeur.

But there is hope in this tale, and love, intense friendship and sacrifice that makes you plough through the pages, more than likely choking back tears, needing to find out what happens next. And I can guarantee you your heart will be put through the shredder – evidence of Folan’s skill to create wonderful, three-dimensional characters with a depth and warmth you will never forget.

An intensely gripping continuation in the Doomsday Kids series that does not just even for one minute refuse to ease up on being the incredible, cinematic reading experience it is, but also serves as an urgent and topical warning in the current Trident debate. 

Our Children's Book of the Month: Darkmouth

Shane Hegarty's new gripping tale for readers from 9-12 is setting the bar high for adventure tales - which is why we've chosen it as our Book of the Month.
Fans of Artemis Fowl, The House of Secrets series and even Percy Jackson will utterly adore this.

Twelve year old Finn doesn't really have much get up and go, and just wants to do what every young boy wants to do. That would be fine, except Finn is about to be the latest in a long line of "Legend Hunters". The town of Darkmouth is the last town in Ireland where portals open and let through human-eating monsters (including Hogboons and Wolpertingers) which he needs to destroy. The big problem is, he isn't really very good at it. His father, the current Legend Hunter, is desperate to show him how to be the best he can and to follow in family tradition, but Finn can't understand why it is so important. Unbeknownst to Finn a prophecy has been made and it's all about him! Until he realises how important it is, Darkmouth and its residents will never be safe.

The story is full of fun and page-turning excitement, not to mention a few mishaps with a Desiccator and a few of the neighbours cars. Boys and girls alike will have their half term brilliantly filled with this great book. It's also peppered with wonderful illustrations by James de la Rue.

And if you really enjoy it, there's good news - this is only the start of what looks to be an awesome series.

If we got you curious, head on over to the main Waterstones Blog for an excerpt. :)

Love, Nina

Our Fiction Book of the Month: Perfidia

James Ellroy is no stranger to crime fans. His L.A. Quartet novels have, at the latest, been put on the map for even non-crime readers by their popular cinema adaptations The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential.

Ellroy, dubbed as the "demon dog of American crime fiction" by director Reinhard Jud back in the nineties, and whose dark past is a strong source for his writing (the unsolved murder of his mother inspired The Black Dahlia), has just started a second L.A. Quartet, this time set in the Second World War, with Perfidia being the first in the series. It's an epic door stop of a book, with the powerful L.A. noir atmosphere fans have come to love so much, in the context of a world-changing event: the attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

Both the Guardian and the Independent have given it smashing reviews, so it might well be that summer read you've been waiting to sink your teeth into.

 

 

But as none of us would want you to just take our word for it, here is a cheeky sample.

 



Think about it!

Earlier, on Facebook...

Timur Vermes' Look Who's Back - an unmissable Waterstones Book Club read



Oh the joy when I heard this gem had finally been translated into English! A bestselling phenomenon in mein Fazerland since its publication in 2012,  for which the film production has already begun, it had tickled my curiosity since I first heard about it, and delighted me when it was gifted to me by the ‘rents last Christmas. A novel about Adolf Hitler waking up in a 2011 Berlin car park, rescued by a newsagent who thinks him a hilarious and scarily convincing impersonator and promptly introduces him to some media fellers who in turn jump on the chance to line their pockets and boost the ratings by giving him some air time.
The bewildered Fuehrer, meanwhile, has to adjust to modern society, its gadgets, people, multiculturalism and social media addiction, and slowly planning, naively, clumsily, but with chilly calculation, his return to power, thus delivering a commentary on modern Germany that is equally frightening and hysterical. Let’s just say, when I read the German original, it was like hearing Adolf speak. I don't know if Vermes studied the speech patterns of Hitler before he started writing, but he did a wonderful job rendering his persona in his book. And the translation, although it inevitably lost the classic Berlin dialect spoken by some of the characters, managed to get incredibly close to the original.

It’s obviously funny seeing Hitler in his 1940s mindset interact with the contemporary age, similar to seeing Socrates and Billy the Kid stumble their way through 1980s mall strip California in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, but at the same time it scathingly satirises an increasingly dumbed-down, historically uninformed or indifferent multi-media generation that is too distracted by Reality TV, sensationalist headlines and Facebook Likes to see the danger the “born again” Fuehrer really poses.

Needless to say, there is a debate whether it is acceptable to make Hitler a subject of comedy. But it’s been done before countless times, with “The Producers”, with “The Dictator”, some more gratuitous, some with enough satire in it to render it more “acceptable”. If anything, “new” about it is only that the Germans are increasingly seen to have a sense of humour about their own history. Not in a belittling or insensitive manner, mind. Hitler and the Holocaust continue to remain a serious subject over there, deeply embedded in the German mentality and Constitution. But the – in my book – ridiculous and unhelpful self-flagellation by people who were barely the glint in daddy’s eye in 1945, undermining any approach of the subject in a grown-up way, is finally starting to cease; Hitler as a subject of comedy becoming less and less restricted to the terrain of risqué Stewart Lee-type German comedians, and is particularly well-balanced in this novel.

Comedy will always remain in the grey areas of acceptability, and perhaps that’s exactly what keeps us on our toes and debating; to speak the truth like a jester, in joke form to escape medieval beheadings or modern censorship. Take from this book what you will. I for one both enjoyed and pondered it. Thoroughly.

- Patty

Little Acts of Kindness

Recently, we have spotted these darling little notes in some of our books. We have no idea who the mystery sweetheart is, but it's just lovely to see, with all the negativity in the world, that someone is trying to put a smile on people's faces in a really simple and creative way. Several comments on this picture, when it appeared on the Facebook page Spotted Witney, prove that it's not just us who love this - but our customers as well.

It doesn't take much to make the world a little brighter, people! :)

Award-winning author Catherine Chanter at Witney Library!

Don't make plans for 23 March! At 7:30, at Witney Library, Catherine Chanter, an Oxfordshire author who won the Lucy Cavendish Prize 2013 for her debut "The Well", which is now being published by Simon & Schuster, will talk and answer questions about her new novel.

To take it from the experts, Jessie Burton, author of the glorious "The Miniaturist", is raving about "The Well":

"There was so much that impressed me… The boldness with which Catherine depicts her characters in their bravery and emotional squalor was incredible... whilst she showed how we manipulate each other, she also focused on the harder, hidden truths about how in turn we want, or need, to be manipulated ourselves.... Set against the natural beauty of the Well, Catherine also paints an exquisitely painful portrait of a marriage under threat - not just from an unnerving meteorology, but the tempests of the mind.... The Well asks us where do we seek refuge, and why? And perhaps it shows us that what is left after all is suffered, is love. Battered, weathered, at the end of the novel it comes cresting over the hill, a herald of relief. Bravo, that woman. I loved this book!"

Good, evocative writing is enough to get this here bookseller totally engrossed in a book. Just listen to this!

'One summer was all it took before our dream started to curl at the edges and

stain like picked primroses. One night is enough to swallow a lifetime of lives.'

But what is it about?

 

When Ruth Ardingly and her family first drive up from London in their grime-encrusted car and view The Well, they are enchanted by a jewel of a place, a farm that appears to offer everything the family are searching for. An opportunity for Ruth. An escape for Mark. A home for their grandson Lucien.

But The Well's unique glory comes at a terrible price, and quickly Ruth's paradise becomes a prison, Mark's dream a recurring nightmare, and Lucien's playground a grave.
With the pace of a thriller and the heart of a literary smash hit, The Well is a dark and devastating tale of obsession, motherhood and the complexity of female relationships, wrapped inside a gripping whodunit.

TICKETS ARE FREE, INCLUDE REFRESHMENTS AND CAN BE COLLECTED FROM WITNEY LIBRARY, WELCH WAY FROM THE COUNTER.

TICKETS ARE LIMITED AND WILL BE OFFERED ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS

Bookseller Vacancy

Bookseller Vacancy: Come and join the team at Waterstones

You love books? We love books…

Our customers love books too, and love buying books and gifts from us, thanks to the fantastic environment, choice and service provided by our knowledgeable, friendly and enthusiastic teams.

Our Booksellers are the hearts of our bookshops and what makes them so unique and enticing. They know what their customers want from their bookshop, and deliver it through their friendliness, enthusiasm, knowledge and love of books.

To be a great bookseller, you will provide excellent customer service, friendly and professional at all times. You will also help keep our bookshops vibrant and enticing; from creating inspiring displays to helping out at our special events, there will always be plenty of opportunity to use your initiative.

If all this sounds like you, you’re in luck as we have a vacancy for a Bookseller (part time including weekends). So if you’re friendly, flexible and enthusiastic*, come in for a quick chat and pick up an application form.

* and love books…

Paddington Story Time!!

If you are looking for something to do this half term, why not join us at Waterstones in Witney for a Paddington story time on Friday 20th February at 10.am. There might even be a marmalade sandwich or two!

And the winner of the Mother's Day Drawing Competition is.... *drumroll*

Some of you may remember that Waterstones held a Mother's Day drawing competition at the start of the year, asking children to submit a drawing of their mother to be used on our Mother's Day window and shop posters. Considering that Waterstones has over 300 shops country-wide, you can imagine that'd be a strapping heap of submissions. While there isn't just one winner - several submissions will be on the posters - it still chuffs us to bits that one of them comes from Witneyshiretown.

Little Edgar Varese's Mumsie will be gracing our Mother's Day poster - congratulations, Edgar!

Doomsday Kids 3: Amaranth's Return - A Review

With book 3 in the Doomsday Kids series, Folan has truly revved up the tension and the stakes.

I have previously reviewed Book 1 and Book 2, and it's safe to say that I've become absolutely hooked.
In fact, when I, after an agonising wait, got this instalment through, I tore through it in just a few hours. Who needs sleep anyway? This was just a few weeks ago, and already I have read it again. And even though I knew what was going to happen, it still gripped me as much as the first time around.

One thing I absolutely love in this series is how each book focuses on a different character and manages to refine them into multi-faceted beings that live and breathe and love and ache and fight and survive and fail in your head. Not that the other instalments don't characterise them enough, but in this format you really get the whole gist.

This time, the story is told from Amaranth’s point of view, the troubled, rebellious outcast with a dark past – and finally we learn where she came from, the demons she is fighting, her previous history with the other characters, and how it has shaped her into the person she is now, explaining all her erratic and angry behaviour. Yet there is no cliché to her at all.
 

           "Amaranth's Return" has some seriously dark undertones, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a new level of grit and maturity that will make this book perfect reading for adults as well, showing what humans on the edge of survival can be truly capable of. There is no whitewash, no light version of the post-apocalypse. There were a few times when I had to put the book down and catch my breath. And if I had had any doubts in book 1 whether a postnuclear world had been “adequately” described in terms of how horrific it will be, those doubts are gone. Amaranth and Rod, who has been reduced to a pitiful shadow of his former self by radiation sickness, are on their way to find out if Rod's mother has survived, facing a world which makes their mountain place look like a holiday camp. Outside the bubble of their well-prepped shelter, as inadequate as it may have seemed to them at first, the outer world has well and truly gone down the toilet. Humans have been reduced to feral creatures out of sheer need to survive. Even the more organised groups have lost all their humanity.
It’s an equally  horrific and heartbreaking world, impossible for a reader to abandon or forget. There is cannibalism, a sinister, cultish commune, and a climatic moment of true cosmic horror. But there is also bravery, despite the tensions tightening bonds between – of all people – Wasserman and Amaranth, an old character returning and a new character being introduced. By the end you will quite possibly be bawling, over someone you never thought you'd care so much about.            

           It’s rare that I have been so emotionally involved in something that is (misleadingly) classed as teen fiction. This is quite possibly some of the best self-published fiction I have ever read, along with Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy and Andy Weir’s The Martian. I have worked as a bookseller and reviewer for years and have seen much less deserving writing receive publishers’ attentions… in fact, I want to slap them silly for not headhunting Karyn Langhorne Folan.

All of it is written in such a fantastic descriptive way that the story unfolds like a film in your head… a film that will leave you quite possibly pumped with adrenaline and your nails bitten to the quick.

And again the story ends with a magnificent cliffhanger that makes you want to scream in frustration that you have to wait for the next instalment.

But at least it's coming. At least it's coming!

Not reading this is NOT an option!

 Lots of booky love,

 

Patty :)

 

The Bees by Laline Paull

Inexplicably, The Bees is a book I'd normally have never picked up. Just goes to show that one can be blinded by one's own literary rut, and looks can be deceiving. I should really know better, because The Miniaturist by Jesse Burton, which not just has been a Book of the Month for us, but is also in our first 2015 Bookclub AND our Book of the Year (and Specsavers', I might add!) was a completely unexpected surprise for me, and now I'm raving like a lunatic (a happy, safe one!) about it. But one digresses. Bees. We're here for the Bees.

 

 

Anyways, I started reading The Bees, and it made my jaw drop.

It's basically Watership Down meets Divergent meets The Handmaid's Tale meets 1984. With bees. WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT FROM A BOOK??

 

Beautifully descriptive, it sucks you right into the bee life, like a strange Kafkaesque Honey-I-shrunk-the-kids-and-turned-them-into-bees experience - it does what a book should do, create a film in your head that involves your every sense.

Obviously I won't give anything away, but if this doesn't entice you, read what author Laline Paull writes about the inspiration of the book. I promise you if you're not hooked and intrigued then, then it's possibly because you have a bee-phobia.

 

In which case, I apologise.

 

 

Wholeheartedly from the hive-mind,

 

Patty :)