Into that Forest by Louis Nowra, reviewed by Ali Bacon

As far as I know, Into that Forest by Louis Nowra wasn't written specifically with young adults in mind, but it was recommended to me by two teenagers whose enthusiasm persuaded me to read it and I gather it’s a popular school read. It's a story about two teenage girls but it’s told by the heroine in her old age who starts with an apology:

"... me language is bad cos I lost it and had to learn it again" something we sense has been caused by the experiences she’s about to relate. 

Hannah lives in Tasmania and she recounts how as a child her parents drowned in a storm during a family picnic. As a result, Hannah and her friend Becky are lost in the outback where they come face to face with two tigers. Despite their terror, they come to realise that the tigers are their only friends and, in a classic tale of survival against the odds, they eventually form a close-knit family unit with the wild animals, letting go of the conventions of their former life and adopting animal behaviour.

At first this is a source of conflict between the two girls, with tomboyish Hannah happy to adopt the animal habits she sees will keep them alive while Becky clings to the remains of her clothes, her speech, and a memento of her mother, until a run-in with a tiger hunter convinces her that not all humans are better than animals.When, after several years, the girls are rescued, they find it equally difficult to revert to 'normal life' in the way that's expected of them and are subjected to a brutal kind of reprogramming. 

It's a remarkable and dramatic story told in a distinctive way with Hannah’s voice consistent throughout, touchingly recreating the innocence of time at which the 'adventure' took place and from which in some ways she has never moved on. The fact that the teenage readers took it as a true story rather than fiction is testimony to its authenticity. 

For me there were some flaws. I found the latter half of the book, where Hannah is packed off to sea on a whaler, less gripping and there were difficulties in maintaining a single first person narrator when Becky's story of the intervening time has to be filled in. The ending also felt too abrupt and I did wonder why the author chose to tell the story in Hannah's old age rather than in the voice of the younger girl, which would have made the events more immediate and the book perhaps more accessible to younger readers.

However  this is an unusual story excitingly told and an excellent read for much of its length. It clearly had two teenagers completely captivated and I would recommend it to able readers of any age who are ready to tackle an unusual voice and take a step into a very different world. 

The book is also available in paperback.

Hider, Seeker, Secret Keeper By Elizabeth Kiem, reviewed by Julia Jones

I was caught up by this novel from the first pages and read it with absorption in a single sitting. The young heroine, Lana Dukovskaya, is a third generation ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet but the experiences of her mother and grandmother are shrouded and lost. Her grandmother's name, we discover, has been erased from the records and her mother (heroine of Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy) is a troubled secretive figure. Lana challenges the conventional notion of a ballerina: she has close cropped hair, loves high speed motor bikes and most of all she wants to experiment with the repertoire.

Lana is rebellious, angry and too well aware of the situation of the Bolshoi in the new Russia of oligarchs and corruption: "The Bolshoi was once our crown Jewel. Now it's a blood diamond." Elizabeth Kiem, the author, lived in Russia for four years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the pleasures of Hider, Seeker, Secret Keeper is the way she allows Lana's patchy, gradual discovery of of her mother and grandmother's histories to be a gradual discovery of three generations of Russian history. This is not obtrusive – the exciting story-line remains central – but it's there and it's appropriate for the Young Adult audience for whom this book is written as well as for adults, like me, who will also enjoy this book.

As readers we are with Lana. Hider, Seeker, Secret Keeper is written in the first person and the present tense. We travel with Lana from Moscow to New York via windowless practice rooms, rich men's mansions and cheap hotels. The place where Lana seems most truly herself is on stage. The central motif of the story is the solo role as The Chosen One, performing the Danse Sacrale in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. I rarely go to the ballet these days but Kiem convinced me effortlessly of the feelings and physical exertions of the dancer as well the emotions and ambitions – the politics in fact – that might surround such a pivotal role. These are the moments that will remain in my mind from this exciting, accessible thriller. 

My review of the first volume Dancer Daughter Traitor Spy has already appeared on this site. I do hope there'll be more from Elizabeth Kiem. Both novels are published by Soho Teens.

Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy by Elizabeth Kiem reviewed by Julia Jones

If you love books about the ballet (suffer from enduring nostalgia for Noel Streatfield for instance?) as well relishing thrillers and the murky history of modern Russia, then you may already have come across these two YA novels by Elizabeth Kiem. I've read them in the wrong order: first Hider, Seeker, Secret Keeper (published 2014) which I reviewed for the Bookbag and now the first volume, Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy (2013). Dancer, Daughter focuses on seventeen year old Marina Dukovskaya whose mother, Svetlana, has been principal ballerina at the iconic Bolshoi Ballet for a decade and is now a National Treasure, a Soviet Cultural icon – a key Soviet asset in the celebrity Cold War.

Or is she? The story begins in Moscow, November 1982 on the day of Leonid Brezhnev's death. Aspirant ballerina Marina is, as usual, measuring out her day with a precise number of tendus, frappes and fouettes, in the advanced repertory academy where she and the other stars of the future are distorting their feet and bloodying their toes to learn their trade. Her mind is mainly full of the forthcoming results of a pop music competition and she ignores veiled hints about possible defections and the jealousy of her class mates for her gorgeous new coat, a gift, naturally, for her mother. Marina works hard for her art but takes her life of privilege for granted. On this night, however, the TV First Channel replaces its regular programmes with a film of the Bolshoi's Swan Lake. There are no explanations, no national news or results from the music competition – and Svetlana Dukovskaya doesn't come home.

Two days later Marina and her father learn that Svetlana has been institutionalised. She has apparently suffered a breakdown and has been taken into custody by the State Psychiatric Directorate. Marina's father, a scientist, makes puzzling comments about bacterial warfare and uses the word 'escape'. The word hits Marina like an electric shock or 'the jolt up your spine when you land a jump poorly […] My parents wanted to abandon the Motherland. And they were calling it “escape”?' The following day they get a call from the director of the Bolshoi – Marina has been dismissed. Her father is taken in for questioning, though he is then released. On the day of Brezhnev's funeral, they flee to America. 'I understand the system […] The rules are: if you pose a problem for the Party, if you are a risk to the People, you must be dispensed with. So we are following the rules. We are dispensing of ourselves before the KGB can do it for us.'

Elizabeth Kiem is a former dancer and a Russophile. She's a journalist who has lived in Russia and who acknowledges real life sources for much of her material. I wondered, briefly, what today's teens would make of this harking back to the post-Stalinist era before I realised that the writing in this first section of the novel – actions taken within a world bound by draconian, incomprehensible Rules – works particularly well as it is writing from within a dystopia. The subsequent, main section, following Marina and her father's attempts to make sense of their situation within the Russian emigrant population of Brooklyn, is atmospheric but more confusing as the hostile forces could equally be KGB, CIA, the bratva (Russian Mafia) – or none of them.

Dancer, Daughter has a twisting plot, where Marina's actions and reactions are as often fuelled by her teenage anger and disorientation as by tangible external threat. I wasn't sure she was quite as convincing a heroine as Lana, her daughter, in volume two but I'd certainly recommend both novels – and will post my review of Hider Seeker for Monday 23rd March.

Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy & Hider, Seeker, Secret Keeper by Elizabeth Kiem are both published by Soho Teens. 

The Firebird Trilogy by Nick Green reviewed by Julia Jones

I've just read the three parts of Nick Green's Firebird Trilogy as one big book. It's been a terrific experience and I'd happily go back to the beginning and start again.

Leo Lloyd Jones is a teenage joy-rider from Salford who is picked – accidentally, he assumes – to be part of an elite group of youngsters who might be required to rehabilitate the world in the case of cosmic catastrophe. This is Project Firebird. Now I don't normally do much in the way of cosmic catastrophe and my appetite for dystopias is distinctly limited. But I love adventure and stroppy teenagers and their capacity for moral decisions and courage and emotion and idealism and that's what Project Firebird gave me.

Leo's quality is leadership, the indefinable sort which is something quite different from ambition or the desire for power. Most of the time he's completely unaware of it but when push comes to shove he's usually able to make the right choices and find the words to inspire others. On his first day at Project Firebird he is sitting next to fourteen year old Rhys Carnavon, the fit, good-looking ' natural leader' who has just trekked back from Antarctica after witnessing the death of his scientist father. The shifting relationship between Leo and Rhys is a main plot strand running throughout the trilogy. It's complex, does not allow for second guessing and has a resonance beyond the individual characters. It's one of the reasons I'd like to read the trilogy again.

Plotting is excellent throughout. For me the books really began to sing at the shift between volumes one and two, Project Firebird to Firebird Dawn. The shock at the beginning of the second volume was, I thought, brilliantly managed – especially when an unexpected twist and additional layer of complexity was revealed later in the book. Another welcome moment was the emergence into the open air. Nick Green seems to be particularly good at evoking effects of light on landscape and glistening natural beauty. Not that the post-disaster countryside is uniformly lovely: there are methane flares from pockets of rotting garbage and a glimpse of a survivor spending his (short) life melting down abandoned plastic. One imaginative insight I especially enjoyed was Leo's occasional sense of his 'own' landscape – Salford, Manchester, the M6 motorway – buried a thousand years below the landscape on which he and his friends are struggling to survive.

There's cruelty and loss in this second volume but I feel somehow that it's the most human of the three. That's a descriptive not an evaluative point. The mainly female Blackwater village, the ruthless Dustral raids are small scale in comparison with the brutalities and stark struggles for existence in the final volume Firebird Radiant. That's fine. I think trilogies should work rather like symphonies with themes introduced, developed and brought to some resounding climax. AS such, however there the obvious danger or predictability and one of Nick Green's clevernesses in his third volume is to counterpoint the megalomaniac’s bid for global domination with the intimate domesticities of broken nights and nappy changing.

There are thrilling action sequences, delicate moments of relationship and some extraordinarily fine descriptive writing throughout the trilogy. There's also plenty of intellectual content and much to reflect on and discuss in our management of the natural world. I rather hope that we are sufficiently co-operative to establish a Global Seed bank to preserve crop varieties – currently I hear more about fragmentation and restrictive patenting. These books could be offered to consumers of The Hunger Games or Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses. Instead each volume is available for £1.85 on Kindle. I don't think this is ideological statement: I think this is 21st century publishing's failure.