The advent of a new year is often a time for pause and reflection.
But publishing houses, great and small, barely note the passing of time as the presses keep rolling to print out books on virtually every topic under the sun, including more than a few volumes readers are bound to enjoy.
How To Build A Girl (2014) by Caitlin Moran is both poignant and fiercely funny.
Johanna Morrigan, 15, lives with her large family in the early 1990s in a council flat in Wolverhampton, a city down on its luck in the West Midlands of England. Her father is a charming drunk and the family barely survives on disability payments from the government–the same government her father despises.
Johanna is friendless, a voracious reader, oversexed and desperate to lose her virginity despite being hampered by outsider status and a total lack of experience.
But she is determined to escape the constricting confines of her existence, and raise some money for her cash-strapped family, by reinventing herself as a rock journalist. Johanna bluffs her way into a job at a London magazine and creates an entirely new persona, including a new name.
She is the type of teenage character that rarely graces the pages of any work of fiction–she is brash, laugh-out-loud funny and unapologetic about her own burgeoning sexuality and her coming-of-age story is a delight for adults young and old.
Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard (2014) a nonfiction work by Pulitzer-prize winning reporter John Branch, is a far different kind of story. It is the riveting, heart-rending chronicle of a young man’s life destroyed by the sport he loved.
A mountain of a man, Boogaard grew up playing hockey on the frozen ponds and in the frigid arenas of Saskatchewan. He desperately wanted to play hockey professionally, and despite being a gentle man off the ice, willingly used his great size and fists to land a role as a brutal National Hockey League enforcer, first with Minnesota and later with the storied New York Rangers.
But Boogaard paid the ultimate price to hear thousands of fans chant his name as he ferociously pummelled opponents and intimidated entire teams—the author argues the fighting on ice led to chronic brain damage as a result of numerous concussion, prescription drug abuse and eventually his death.
Hockey is a beautiful sport to watch and exhilarating to play. Boy on Ice is an revealing examination of the dark side of the game where reputations and even careers can be won or lost on a single punch.
Malice: a mystery (2014) by acclaimed author Keigo Hagashino is a page-turner of the first order—a brilliantly conceived cat-and-mouse tale that pits a detective and a killer in a battle of truth and the events that led to a baffling murder. Acclaimed best-selling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally slain in his office, a locked room, within his locked house by his wife and best friend, both of whom have rock-solid alibis…or so it seems.
Det. Kyochiro Kaga arrives at the crime scene and recognizes the victim’s best friend, Osamu Nonoguichi. Years ago both he and Nonoguichi both taught in the same school. Kaga later joined the police force and Nonoguichi eventually left to become a full-time writer, though he failed to earn nearly the success of his friend Hidaka. The detective eventually uncovers evidence that suggests the murder victim and Nonoguichi enjoyed a far different relationship than it appeared.
The question Kaga strives to answer in this highly original mystery is why Nonoguichi killed Hidaka, not who or how. And the answer to that question will baffle and surprise readers to the final page.
These three new titles are available through your Okanagan Regional Library, www.orl.bc.ca.
– Peter Critchley is a reference librarian at the Vernon branch of the Okanagan Regional Library.
