[My copy of this book was an uncorrected proof, provided to me gratis by the publisher, HarperColins, facilitated in this act of goodness by Edelweiss. I think this makes me a pawn of Murdoch now.]

From the outside, Caitlin Moran can look a bit like a one-trick pony. Although she's been a journalist and Times columnist for many years, she had massive success a couple of years ago with her memoir/feminist treatise How To Be A Woman which contained many amusing tales about her poor Wolverhampton childhood. She, with her sister, has written a sitcom, Raised By Wolves, about a teenager growing up in poor Wolverhampton. Now there's this.

Despite the authorial introduction in which we are assured How To Build A Girl is not based on truth, one could be forgiven for fearing, as I did, a thinly fictionalised re-tread of the stuff which made Moran a household name. It isn't. Far from it. Although there are clear parallels - and some commercially cynical titling and structure going on - it all read new to me.

Opening in 1990, 14-year-old Johanna Morrigan lives in Wolverhampton. She wonders when she's going to get to finally have sex. She spends much time wanking. The book is hilariously instructional on this point if initially a little ... uncomfortable. The opening scene is of Johanna doing what she enjoys while her 6-year-old brother is asleep next to her. That it manages to get away with this is entirely due to Moran's cheerfully honest narrator, and later, to the other characters.

The book follows Johanna from awkward 14-year-old to 16-year-old music reviewer "Dolly Wilde" to vaguely "built" girl of 18. It is that rare thing, a female narrative untempered by usual sub-plots which so often tacitly reinforce the idea that to be female is not enough on its own. The prose even points it out: there is very little female narrative of what it's like to fuck and be fucked. This is a coming-of-age story. It is about Johanna figuring out who she is. It's not about the mistakes she makes while she does it, and it's not about them *being* mistakes, and it doesn't shame her for anything she does. It just ... is.

Johanna is going to make or break this novel for the reader: she's frank and honest, she doesn't know what she's doing and she's not what she wants to be but she's going to try. She is all feigned confidence and internal doubt, but ultimately just a person who is doing what people do, in a top hat. I loved her utterly and not just for the word "swashfuckler".

There is a section near the end about cynicism, about what it does, and it brought me to tears (and I am not generally a weeper) because it's so utterly true and it made me swear to be a better person for the rest of my days. In an earlier draft of this review, I went on to say the feeling wore off after an hour or two, thank god, but I've read the bit I'm talking about several times and it made me weep again. I'm weeping now. I went away, ate muesli, came back and started up again within seconds.

[...] it is a million times easier to be cynical and wield a sword, than it is to be open-hearted and stand there, holding a balloon and a birthday cake, with the infinite potential to look foolish.

I don't have it in me to stand with balloons. Sometimes I try; invariably nothing happens but it's that nothing which destroys me. I once killed every conversation on a table of 12 people by being enthusiastic about Marina Lewycka's A Short History Of Tractors In The Ukraine, so I went back to what I learned to do at school: not show enthusiasm about things. I play down my love of everything, or I turn it into joke: the crazy cat lady, the foreigner, the girl who waits for somebody else to do maths. I play down the things I am good at because it's easy to deal with that nothing if nothing is what I've given. But I want balloons. I want to have balloons and be proud of them and when that nothing happens, I want it to not matter because balloons.

And this is why I love this book and why you need to read it. Moran's finger is so on the money in so many respects. I don't think there's a person alive who doesn't feel like a fraud at some point, and How To Build A Girl is about a character who is pushing against that as she tries to ... build who she is. Good books are about tension and this one considers the place where enthusiasm and ego meet. It is brilliant, and hilarious, and at times like reading something you knew but have forgotten; we've all been there. 

It misses out on 5 stars very narrowly - it lacks an overall cohesion. With something like Catcher In The Rye, there is a reason for the particular section of story we are told - HTBAG, while thoroughly entertaining lacks that and, as a consequence, sputters to an ending rather than giving that satisfying over-ness. There are some other minor nitpicks, a couple of things which - again - lack that wholeness and which dangle annoyingly. My uncorrected proof had some modern slang terms in it which I hope were removed.

It's also worth briefly touching upon the Twitterstorm of #CaitlinMoranShouldRead. That was a nonsense; this is not YA. This is coming-of-age. It's looking back from the vantage point of adulthood. It has far more in common with Moran's invoked Jilly Cooper than any YA I've ever read (but I'm not a big YA reader). By all means give it to your 14-year-old, but the prime audience are more likely to be me: 30-somethings who know who The Smashing Pumpkins are.

How To Build a Girl is a first-rate read which I thoroughly recommend - it's sweary and graphic and surprisingly educational. Even before the bits which had me weeping over my Kindle it was pretty fabulous, and those bits by no means made the book for me. If we're going to complain about Moran's equine fidelity, we can make sure to note she perfecting it with every offering: 4.5 stars. 

[Hey, look, another ARC! That means I paid no money for it. *maniacal laughter* It's all the fault of the publisher, Little, Brown, and of Netgalley whose clickable buttons makes it too damn easy to end up with far too many books to read. If such a thing were possible. Thanks guys!]

This is another book which has been knocking around in my feed, although unlike The Three it hasn't been a divider of opinion. They're actually a pretty good double act to read back to back; although they don't have much in common in their stories (although at least one of The Three's comp titles fits this one better), they are both intelligent, extremely readable, and both have moments which make you sit back in silent admiration at their cleverness. 

There are two ways to review The Girl With All The Gifts: sticking with the information the blurb gives, or giveing the "spoiler". Some reviews do and some don't. I'm not going to be specific, but I will be referring to it in vague terms because it forms the basis of what I didn't like and I will be specifying the genre. If you really hate any kind of spoiler, know that this is a good book which manages originality in its details but not in the handling of the overall story direction; I don't care for this particular story type but I still enjoyed this book; the pacing, in particular, is excellent.

Still here? Good. After this paragraph there will be a gap, then there will be non-specific spoilers which are revealed fairly early on in the book.

The Girl With All the Gifts is a dystopian thriller/horror/suspense-y thing. I'm not going to specify the nature of the 'stope, although you should know I'd have no hesitation about doing so if this were a terrible book. It isn't. It's very good. Which makes my main complaint about it all the more frustrating.

That complaint is, as I mention, a lack of originality in the general direction of the story. In the broadest terms, we have the "Army and Civilians fail to get along while trying to survive" trope. I could point to half a dozen films, books, and TV series from the last 10 years which have done the same thing and the premise wan't new then. It is one of these ideas which each generation does in its own particular way reflecting the concerns of the time but which rarely lifts itself away from the expectations of a "spoiler"  story. It's all the more frustrating because the particular way TGWATG does this is *really* good.

The characters I'm less enamoured about. Although they are well done, they, like the plot, are a little too close to the stocks of the genre. There was a predictable sub-plot I could really have done without. The exception is Melanie, the girl of the title. The authenticity of her emotions and her attachments make this book; the way they are used to drive the story give it the depth the usual suspects of this 'stope lack. The ending is near perfect.

The other thing which makes this book is the writing. It is quietly brilliant. It's pacey, unshowy, and does a great job in the first 15% of hooking you in, making you *care* about Melanie, before letting you work out the reveal. If James Patterson or Dan Brown are a Hollywood blockbuster, The Girl With All The Gifts is District 9. 

If I'd known what this was, I likely wouldn't have requested it. It's not what I think of as my sort of thing but I did enjoy it a lot, despite a short slump after the brilliant beginning, and it definitely deserves all the praise. Although I don't care for the central idea (or the initially well-trodden route it took), the way it was done more than made up for it.

2.5 stars for the plot (with 5 for the final scene - I *loved* it), 4 for the execution, I'm going to give this 3.5 stars overall, and I do recommend it.

[This book was provided to me for the price of none of your local currency by the publisher. Many thanks to Hodder and Stoughton for this act of generosity, and to NetGalley for being my pusher.]

The Three has been proving something of a divider of opinion in my review feed. Some love, some hate. I love. In fact, The Three is in good shape to be this year's Gone Girl, assuming this year's Gone Girl isn't Gone Girl again. The Three is excellent ... provided you get on the epistolary style. 

Presented largely as a book within a book, The Three recounts - via the medium of interviews, memoir extracts, and the like - the events of and those which followed Black Thursday, the day four planes near simultaneously crashed on four continents killing almost everybody on board. Only three children were recovered alive. Among the last recorded messages are one from a passenger, Pamela May Donald:

 

They're here ... The boy. The boy watch the boy watch the dead people oh Lordy there's so many ... They're coming for me now. We're all going soon. All of us. Pastor Len warn them that the boy he's not to­­--

 

We, the reader, are given accounts which build up a picture of what happened. This is firmly in the land of after the event so there's an amount of "even after what happened later" and "I don't think then that he realised". It stays the right side of tension building for the most part, and is skilful in its rendering of different styles of communication. Pamala's frenemy Reba could have stepped out of Stephen King novel - Needful Things, probably - while the sections of an unpublished memoir by the British Uncle (and guardian) of one of The Three is (amusingly) pitch-perfect in its tone. 

This style has a knock on effect on the story - such as it is. Because we're hearing the story from some time after everything has happened, and because there is a a subtle assumption that the reader is part of the book's interior world and thus *knows* what's happened, there's no protagonist to root for, or danger they have to overcome, or consequences if they fail. Instead there's a winding trail of interpretations, of conspiracy theories, of faith, and of humanity. This is a book which unfolds, fills in the details of an event it assumes you already know about. It is, from an academic level, very well done. The "big reveal" also has a tremendous cleverness about it and isn't afraid to bury it in a single line of dialogue. 

I do have complaints, of course I do, but I don't feel they particularly detract from the book. I found it, as a whole, rather thin in content although it more than makes up for it in substance: there was a moment at about 60% where I realised not that much had actually happened. Crucially, if you don't like the style, I don't think you'll find anything here to make up for that.

I do like a book which makes the effort to do things differently, even if it doesn't manage. The Three manages with aplomb: it's skilful, intelligent, and I fully expect to see it everywhere this summer (and deservedly so): 4.5 stars.

(And if you do like the epistolary style, I urge you to go and read James Smythe's The Testimony which does a similar thing except with talking heads rather than written up documents. It's also very good.)

I picked this one up off the back of having watched the ITV series it accompanies. If I tell you the show was broadcast in the half hour slot between Coronation Streets during which most people are watching Eastenders, you may appreciate what you are going to get here.

The "challenge" of the TV series was for Griff Rhys Jones to rediscover his Welshness. Despite being born in the greatest nation on earth, he grew up in Essex. It wasn't his fault. Each episode, and each chapter, covers him attempting a Welsh themed challenge, from singing the national anthem, to walking a corgi, to finding the holy grail. 

Yes. Yes, I know. Everybody was watching Eastenders, remember?

The book is not so much a written version of the TV show as an account of filming it. While some parts may well have been used wholesale for the voiceover, there are also more general asides regarding the bits between the camera and this book fills in the personal experience angle the show could only represent with its presenter's gurning visage. 

Griff Rhys Jones is a decent writer who occasionally gets all the way up to engaging when the topic serves. The best bits happen when he's away from the narrative created by the editing suite, such as his account of trying to get around a treetop assault course yoke, and he does a straight job on what is not trying to be more than a phoned-in product. That doesn't actually sound like praise but it is.

Honestly, there's not a lot here to recommend it. If you are really interested in Wales and you see it cheap/at the library, give it a whirl because it's fun enough in its own way and there are plenty of interesting facts you can share with any friends you haven't managed to alienate yet. I'm giving it 3 stars because I liked the series and I'm Welsh, but I'm also in an inexplicably good mood. Everybody else can give it 2.5. 

A further note: although this is a TV tie-in book, the Kindle version I read had no images or photographs. This baby is all text. *rubs thighs appreciatively*

This isn't a review because it is beyond my ability to review this book. James Herriot was one of *the* authors of my teen years thanks to a second-hand bookstall and my Mammy's never ending enthusiasm for providing me with stuff she thinks I need in my life. On this matter, she was right.

First published in the 70's, All Creatures Great And Small is the omnibus edition of the first two of James Herriot's books (It Shouldn't Happen To A Vet, and If Only They Could Talk) plus the chapters concerning his marriage from the third, Let Sleeping Vets Lie. They cover his first few years as a practising vet in late 30's Yorkshire, a time before antibiotics, or in fact anything which would do much good. 

Everything I learned about humorous prose, I learned here. As James' boss, Siegfried, tells him, Veterinary work offers unrivalled opportunities for making an almighty chump of oneself and Herriot tells every story against himself with wit and good humour. Whether he's making an almighty cock-up, suffering the enthusiasm of his boss, or trying to impress a young lady, he is brilliant, writing himself as the butt of every joke.

And he's not just funny, he's fascinating - assuming you are indeed fascinated by bovine maternity; he spends an awful lot of time doing intimate things to cows. I feel fully equipped to run over the road with some hot water, soap, and a towel, and getting stuck in.

But he can also do the sad bits. He doesn't shy away from the harshness of the farming life. These early books are devoid of the deep naffness which characterises the final book, Every Living Thing (which I believe was written due to popular demand after the success of the TV series, so I'll let it off. Slightly). He's trying to cure stock animals which are the difference of a family's survival, and very often with barely anything to do it with. Half a pound of Epsom Salts. 

The worst I can say about these books is that they have some language considered acceptable at the time, but which may raise the modern eyebrow and, as one might expect, the attitudes can be somewhat old fashioned. Purists may also like to level complaints about the authenticity of the work (there are a few biographies of the "real" James Herriot if you're interested) but that doesn't bother me in the slightest: they're great stories and if you've never read them, you simply *must*. 

I will freely admit to having biases in my scores and this one is getting the advantage of a lifelong love. It is the bookish equivalent of rice pudding: 5 stars.