The thought of what was wrought between 1933 & 1945, not just to the Jews but also to Gypsies, homosexuals, people with disabilities and many others is almost impossible to comprehend. It was inhumanity of a scale that dwarfs the imagination. I have known about what happened for years, it is taught in schools, many volumes have been written about what happened but until I visited the Holocaust exhibit at the Imperial War Museum several years ago, my knowledge was academic. Seeing the pile of shoes in the exhibit and the clothes worn by the inmates of the camps and everything else displayed there affected me so much that I am actually frightened by the thought of going back in to the exhibit.

In 2010 I was working for Brent Libraries and for Holocaust Memorial Day we were fortunate to have artist Maurice Blik a survivor of Belsen come in to Willesden Green Library to give a talk to a combined group from local secondary schools. I wept as I listened to him speak of his experiences as a child and the loss of his younger sister. He is a phenomenal artist and also a fantastic speaker.

That brings me on to graphic novels, it has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words and that is true of comic books. The belief that comics could be more than disposable entertainment had already begun to change when Art Spiegelman’s Maus: a Survivor’s Tale was published, but it was this book more than many of the other graphic novels published in the late 1980’s that helped change that supposition.

Maus is the tale of Art Spiegelman’s troubled relationship with his father Vladek, a Holocaust survivor, and, through his conversations with his father the story of his family’s experiences of Hitler’s Final Solution. In Maus the Jews were represented as mice, the Germans as cats (Katzies), the French as Frogs and so on. Maus has been described as ‘the most affective and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust’ by the Wall Street Journal and after over 20 years of publication it is still a powerful and moving narrative of the Holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors. Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 after the second volume had been published. A companion volume entitled MetaMaus was published in 2011.

In the pages of METAMAUS, Art Spiegelman re-enters the Pulitzer prize-winning MAUS, the modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since it was first published twenty-five years ago.
He probes the questions that MAUS most often evokes – Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics? – and gives us a new and essential work about the creative process.

Auschwitz by Pascal Croci begins and ends in a squalid room in former Yugoslavia in 1993, another graphic novel rendered beautifully in black & white, Auschwitz is a fictionalized story of an elderly couple trapped in the midst of the civil war that presaged the breakup of Yugoslavia. They relive their memories of being trapped in Auschwitz and what they had to endure to survive. Pascal Croci interviewed a number of survivors to make sure that his story was accurate, and based a number of incidences within the book on events that happened to his interviewees during the war. Auschwitz is relatively short – only 70 pages of story but it is no less harrowing for its brevity, it also contains background information to the creation of the book, including extracts from transcripts of the interviews and a glossary of terms used.

Eric Heuvel is the author and illustrator of A Family Secret, using the ligne claire style of drawing pioneered by Herge the creator of Tintin to illustrate the book, he tells the story of Jeroen, who, while searching in his grandmother’s attic for items to sell at a flea market finds a scrapbook created by his grandmother in 1936. On enquiring about what it was about, Helena starts telling her grandson about her youth in Amsterdam in the 1930’s and the arrival of Esther, a young Jewish girl, and her family.
A Family Secret is a wonderful example of a family split apart by politics and duty, viewed from the perspective of Helena who is telling the story. Using a child’s view for the narration gives the tale of the invasion of Holland and the indignities heaped on the citizens of Amsterdam and the Jews in particular. Helena’s father was a police officer and after the German occupation he had to become involved in clearing the Jews from Amsterdam and one evening he has to round up Esther’s family.

The Search, also by Eric Heuvel is a companion volume to A Family Secret and tells the story of Esther, and what happened to her before and during the war. Both volumes are told via flashbacks from contemporary Holland and America and focus more on what happened to Jewish families during and after the war and how some survived.
Out of all the graphic novels I read it was A family Secret and the Search that affected me the most, I found myself welling up whilst reading, this was in part due to my being a massive Tintin fan and seeing similar much-loved artwork being used to illustrate a heartbreaking story, these books are also the most positive, sad as they are.

A Family Secret and The Search are published by MacMillan, Teaching guides for both books are available from the US site.

Not all the graphic novels are black & white, Marvel Comics published a five issue mini series called Magneto: Testament, this is the backstory of Magneto, the greatest foe the X Men have ever faced. At first I questioned the idea of wedging a comic book villain into the story of Auschwitz and the events leading up to the final solution. It is not a super hero story, it is a story of the Holocaust and a boy who has to grow up quickly in the midst of the most inhumane conditions to not only survive but save the woman he loves and himself.
Writer Greg Pak and artist carmine Di Giandomenico bring you this heartbreaking and historically accurate look at one of the most popular characters in the X-Men canon.
Magneto: testament also contains extensive notes at the back of the book about the creation of the book and historical facts about Auschwitz as well as topics for group discussion.

Marvel Comics is not alone in publishing a Holocaust comic book, DC Comics published the amazing what if… story by Joe Kubert, titled Yossel April 19, 1943.

In 1926 Joe Kubert’s family tried to emigrate to America, but owing to the fact that his mother was pregnant with him at the time, their request was denied. Fortunately not willing to give up his family tried again shortly after his birth and they were successful with their second attempt.
With Yossel, Joe Kubert imagined what his life would have been like if his family had not made their second attempt.
As he wrote in his introduction:

If my parents had not come to America, we would have been caught in that maelstrom, sucked in and pulled down with the millions of others who were lost…
The usual procedure in cartooning is to do the initial drawings with pencil, then to apply ink over the pencils with brush and pen. The pencil drawings are then erased, leaving only the ink rendering.
The drawings in this book are pencil drawings…
As a concept the idea of a comic book composed of rough sketches does not sound too appealing, but when you open the book that does not matter anymore! You forget that these are only rough sketches; the sense of movement in them is amazing. I think that so much vitality would have been lost if they had been inked and coloured.
Again this is a fictionalised account of what might have happened to Joe (Yossel) and his family had they not left Poland. The date in the title is significant; the 19th April 1943 is the date of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Germans thought that they would be able to put down the revolt by the by then starving Jews in the ghetto in three days, but they were in for a shock, although poorly armed and hemmed in the Jews resisted until the 16th of May making the Nazi forces pay in blood for each foot of ground they took.

Maus is already a staple in many library collections with the other titles not being as well-known but also deserving a space.
 
 
The Holocaust was not the only attempt at genocide in the 20th century, but it is the most well-known and reviled. To lear nore about this and the Armenian Genocide, Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia and others visit http://www.hmd.org.uk/

I am SO glad that C.J. Daugherty changed the name of my school in her novel Night School as the secret chiefs of the world would not have been pleased to have the location where their children are educated out there for all to know.

She was a little too close to accuracy in her descriptions of the school for comfort though – the forest, the chapel, the library carrels and the dormitories were spot on. None of the staff made it in though…

Night School is a teen global conspiracy theory novel that makes Dan Brown look like a hack (well he is).

Allie is a girl with problems – kicked out of her last school for rampant acts of vandalism and frozen out of what remains of her family she is sent to posh private school Farringto um I mean Cimmeria Academy where the only things richer than the students are their parents.

Night School is that rare beast – a novel about attractive, powerful people that does not involve the supernatural! The rich girls are bitchy in a non-werewolf way and the rich boys act like over-entitled dicks because they are wealthy, over entitled and never have anyone say no to them not because they have some vampiric power.

Awesome stuff!

There are also mysterious happenings, dark warnings about not disturbing the students of the Night School and an air of secrecy and mistrust directed against Allie as she does not (according to some of the students) fit in, her face is wrong, her pedigree is unknown and someone like her is not just let in to an exclusive establishment because she is a problem child.

None of the characters are caricatures and there is no black or white morality; none of the characters are completely obnoxious or amoral and there is some character development as well as love rivalries, crazy behaviour, amazing night sports and some excellent villainous scenery chewing.

Night School is a brilliant start to a new series and I am looking forward to the next book in the series!

In a world isolated by the Protectosphere – a dome which protects, but also imprisons – Neva and her friends dream of freedom.

But a forbidden party leads to complications. Suddenly Neva’s falling for her best friend’s boyfriend, uncovering secrets and lies that threaten to destroy her world – and learning the horrifying truth about what happens to The Missing…

In writing Dark Parties, Sara grant has combined elements of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984 and some of the grimmest practices torn from today’s newspapers, Dark Parties is one of the darkest books I have read recently.

When he created Star Trek back in the 1960’s Gene Roddenberry used science fiction to hold a mirror up to the issues of the ‘60’s and Sara does something similar with Dark Parties.

Dark Parties is a subtly feminist novel with Neva our protagonist not a hard-core freedom fighter, but more realistically a young girl on the cusp of becoming a woman in a society where women have been reduced to almost second-class citizens fulfilling menial tasks as well as being housewives and child carriers to bolster a shrinking population.

Forget a bright future, the citizens of this society subsist on hand me downs and trading necessities with friends and neighbours, the technology where it exists has been repurposed to create a stasi-like spy network, with cameras on every corner and a population that does not know who to trust.

Brought up to believe that the world beyond the Protectosphere has been so utterly blighted and destroyed by war that their pocket of existence is all that remains, Neva and her friends know that something is wrong but they have no idea what, they just know that things must change, but they do not know how.
I found dark Parties to be a disturbing read, completely plausible and in that lay the seeds of my disquiet. I tend to moments of quiet paranoia and with the current fetishization of CCTV monitoring and tendencies to tighten up on laws especially those governing reproductive freedom I can see how such a society can develop… but I tell myself that it is paranoia and it will not happen (but that does not sound too convincing – even to me!)

Dark Parties has love, loss, betrayal, the now almost obligatory love triangle (between Neva, her best friend and best friend’s boyfriend), scenes of bleak horror that are all too real as well as redemption, reconciliation and release.

Dark Parties is thought-provoking and at times uncomfortable but is utterly compelling and eminently readable! It is dystopian science fiction at its best!

So this is one of the books I greedily grabbed (heh that rhymes) at the Orion Indigo Evening It was originally published last year through Gollancz but is being re-released as a YA novel via the Indigo imprint.

The story is narrated in the first person by Roger who has the somewhat dubious talent of being able to cross over into the Land of the Dead, but only by causing himself pain. This talent is exploited by his utter bastard of an uncle who finds the easiest way to send him over is by administering severe beatings.

So when Roger has the chance of a new life in the royal court, it seems a gift… until he falls in love with the bewitching wilful Lady Cecilia. And in this courtly world he has no idea what he is letting himself in for. With every move to win Cecilia he is drawn deeper into political intrigue and war.

Trapped ina web of secrecy, Roger is torn between his own safety and that of his friends. He can save them, but only if he can bring himself to perform a deed so unthinkable that the living and the dead shrink from it alike…

Crossing Over is an entertaining, if slightly flawed novel the concepts are brilliant but the execution was clumsy in parts. Admittedly as a teenage boy Roger would be overly concerned about his erections – but they kept popping up (slight pun intended) and ruining the flow of the story. A number of things were not explained and sometimes things just happened for the sake of the plot – Roger falling in lust love with Cecilia and following her into the forbidding land of Soulvine Moor – ok this was actually believable especially when teens and rampant hormones are involved, but Maggie mooning after Roger and following him after only meeting him a few times? I don’t know…

On the whole there were more hits than misses with Crossing Over.

I am hoping that the sequel Dark Mist Rising will elaborate on some of the concepts that were introduced in this book.

Go on pick it up – it is a good read!

I will pass it on to some of the teen fantasy fans I know to see what they think.

According to the introduction 23 is the smallest prime number with consecutive digits; a human cell has 23 pairs of chromosomes; julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times when he was assassinated; William Shakespeare was born and died on 23 April; John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, was obsessed with the number 23; Michael Jordan wore the number 23 throughout his career and David Beckham first started wearing the number 23 when he played for Real Madrid; Psalm 23, the ‘Shepherd Psalm’ is the best-known of all the psalms; there are 23 letters in the Latin alphabet (there is no J, U or W) and this is the 23rd edition of Top 10 of Everything.

All lists are all-time and global unless a specific year or territory is noted.

Unless you are an obsessive cover-to-cover reader this book is perfect for dipping into for interests sake or using for checking specific facts. It is broken up into 10 sections. Being a (possibly stereotypical) Librarian I turned to the Libraries & Loans pages in the culture and Learning Section and – hey it focuses on UK Libraries on the first page and also includes a handy definition of what makes a classic. The 10 latest Carnegie & Kate Greenaway medal winners are also mentioned under Book Awards.

This is excellent for quick reference AND calming down a group of over-excited teens (and even adults), it is amazing for exciting even the most jaded anti-book teen just by flashing the crocodile teeth on the cover their air of seen it and couldn’t care disappears and they start reading. the snippets of additional information scattered throughout the books has increased the use of a number of other non-fiction reference books in the library.

**

Being armed with lots of knowledge is your first – and often best – line of defence, whether you’re dealing with a charging bull, an angry mob, a trembling earthquake, or anything else that might shake you to your core.
From the Introduction: The captain’s soothing voice announces over the loudspeaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached our cruising altitude.” Time to sit back, relax, and watch the in-flight movie. but it smells like something’s burning. You look out the window…uh-oh, your plane’s engine is on fire! – this has actually happened to me
I needed The Worst-case Scenario Survive-O-Pedia when I was 11, and not just for the many interesting articles on surviving the worst the world has to throw at you. The information on page 51 would have saved me from near electrocution and blowing all the fuses in my family home.

Deep under the years that have built up around me like a coral reef I am at heart a teenager. I love fact books and books that you can dip into and learn often gory and gruesome facts, the survival tips are also good – I have already made copious notes on surviving shark attacks as I am going back to cape town over Christmas and there have been several incidents involving sharks at my local beach. The teens of today are not so different from the teen that I was, those that love reading are in my library every day and the kids that are not so fond of books are tempted in by books such as this one!

The information is concise, the pictures colourful and the book is written in such a way as to impart information as quickly and interestingly as possible. I keep this book behind my desk as the original that I won on twitter disappeared two days after making its way onto the shelves.

These are both really fantastic books and have proven to be popular with boys & girls in my school, I have had to adjudicate in several face-offs when different groups have wanted them at the same time!

When a crime is committed and the police are at a loss, CRYPT is called in to figure out whether something paranormal is at work. Jud is their star agent.
Jud, unwillingly paired with new recruit Bex, has just landed his biggest case yet … people have been disappearing in mysterious circumstances while others are viciously attacked – yet there are no suspects and a complete lack of hard evidence. The only thing that links each attack is the fact that survivors all claim that the culprits were 17th century highwaymen.

This book scared me…

But then that is what you want from a horror novel. In my defence I was on the Central Line when I started reading!

The last time this happened I was about 13 and reading a book called The Fear of Samuel Walton by Roger J. Green, about a standing stone on a farm and a boy called Samuel Walton that was touched by its evil. Good book – if you can still find it!
Anyway, on to CRYPT; they are a secret branch of MI5 tasked with combatting paranormal menaces when everything else has been tried, including closing your eyes and wishing very hard that whatever it is would go away.

Following the tried and tested format of uniting loner (and bit of a loose cannon) Jud, 16 years old, he is bitter and twisted by tragic events in his past that continue to affect his present and Bex (Rebecca) fresh out of training and ready to face whatever the job throws at her. The writing is fantastic, with the players being fully formed with no two dimensional characterisation but the horror scenes are where this book really shines, the writing is visceral and actions of the antagonists brutal and bloody. Every twisted scene is meticulously described in vivid detail.
That said, this is not just a standard slasher gore-fest, this book contains history and true facts – if you pay attention you will learn as you are being traumatised. The nuggets of history and London geography form an integral part of the story and made me want to research some of the history in more detail (I will not mention it as it may spoil the enjoyment of the book).

The Gallows Curse left me wanting to read the follow up Traitor’s Revenge now!

In closing if you enjoy past-paced reads, brimming with science, action, adventure and a massive amount of horror then read this book, share it and remember do not start reading in the Underground!

I have chosen The Gallows Curse to be one of the main titles in the All Hallows Read event that I will be running in my school at the end of October.

Locked away in the chemically-induced slumber of a stasis tube in a forgotten sub-basement, sixteen-year-old Rose slept straight through the Dark Times that killed millions and utterly changed the world she knew. Now, her parents and her first love are long dead, and Rose – hailed upon her awakening as the long-lost heir to an interplanetary empire – is thrust alone into a future in which she is viewed as either a freak or a threat.

Desperate to put the past behind her and adapt to her new world, Rose finds herself drawn to the boy who kissed her awake, hoping that he can help her to start fresh. But when a deadly danger jeopardise her fragile new existence, Rose must face the ghosts of her past with open eyes – or be left without any future at all.

This book… just wow! I utterly adored it!

Rosalinda (Rose) is literally a girl out of time, discovered locked in a stasis chamber in a hidden room she is awakened by a kiss – so far so sleeping beauty I thought but then I was taken on a tour through a future not far removed from our own present. A world ravaged by catastrophe in the not too distant past, but still an event that lay between Rose’s past and the present (future) that she finds herself in.

A Long, Long Sleep is an epic multi-layered tale about a girl who is as much an outsider in the time she finds herself in as she was when she was in the past. At its heart, the book is about a journey of discovery and self-realisation, as well as love, loss adventure and coming to terms with abuse. I was blown away – I love science-fiction, and this book like all the best sci-fi novels I have read over the years has the science-y parts round the edges of the story just visible to the naked eye but not intruding enough to take over the tale. I found the story of Rose’s childhood as heart-breaking and compelling as her story in her future was thrilling! Her developing friendship and infatuation with the gorgeous Bren as well as meeting Otto, someone else who was as much an outsider as her was fantastically captured. The lack of a love triangle was also appreciated as these seem to have become a staple of a large number YA titles of late.

Rose may have needed rescuing in the beginning but she grows through the tale from a frightened, confused girl into a young woman with a purpose and deeper understanding of who she is and what she needs to accomplish.

Anna Sheehan knows how to drop hints and leave plot-points trailing for future novels I want to see more of this world and travel to the colonies in the solar system, learn more about the blue-skinned human/alien hybrids, hear more of the slang and just find out what happens next!

Cruella de Vil

When my daughter first saw the animated version of One Hundred and One Dalmatians she told me that her favourite character was “the nasty lady”. I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud. This fur-loving monster is one of the all time greats. How can you fail to love anyone whose first thought upon seeing a dalmatian puppy is how lovely it would look as a coat? Made truly infamous by Disney’s adaptation of Dodie Smith’s Novel she has terrorised children and dog lovers for over fifty years

The White Witch

Bad enough that she’s the ruthless, self-proclaimed queen of Narnia but, only someone truly, spectacularly evil could force children to eat the world’s most revolting substance, which is, of course, Turkish Delight. I’m sorry, my personal tastes might have influenced things slightly there… Honestly though, I’m prepared to admit that you might see turning people to stone and plunging an entire world into a magical endless winter as somewhat more unpleasant, but, really, have you ever actually tasted the stuff? I could even forgive the whole Aslan sacrificing thing but, there’s simply no excuse for Turkish Delight under any circumstances.

Willy Wonka

Wait! Come back! I’ve not completely lost the plot, honestly! I know what you’re thinking, Willy Wonka’s not a villain. Oh really? Here’s a man who invites a group of unsuspecting children to his factory whereupon they all suffer a series of mysterious “accidents”. All the while he seems strangely unconcerned by these “accidents”, almost as if he might have planned the all along…. You might think he’s a good guy but I would argue that, in fact, he’s one of the most brilliant and subtly wriiten villains in all of children’s literature. Roald Dahl is, without doubt, my favourite children’s author of all time and he produced some of the most fantastic villains ever created. Whether it’s the Grand High Witch, Miss Trunchbull or Boggies, Bunce and Bean they are all spectacular examples of the art of creating truly loathsome bad guys. Wonka’s still the greatest though….

WIN!

Three sets of the HIVE series plus rucksack, t-shirt & wristbands