Google Alerts – what fun! Choose the keywords you want to monitor and Google will send you an email whenever something with those words gets posted on the web. It doesn’t catch everything – content from static web sites takes a while to come down the pipe. But anything from news sites or blogs – basically anything that uses RSS – arrives in the mailbox pretty quickly.
Jez’s memories of the shattered city in which he grew up, hiding unexploded World War II shells in a secret den, tattooing himself as part of an initiation ceremony into his boyhood gang, Das Bombers, and the way he is misunderstood by his father and brother make Jez the most intense of all the three voices. Although Pads’ sophistication and Mehmet’s family loyalty do make them interesting and readable voices, it is Jez with whom I fell in love.
With three voices so utterly distinctive from one another, and so honest and compelling in their narration, it is easy to lose yourself in Mez Packer’s novel. Three hundred and five pages make this a story deep enough to get your teeth into, yet compact enough to maintain a swift pace.
In 2006 Becci Fearnley won the Branford Boase Award for Young Writers and has had her poetry published in a Young Writer’s anthology. She is currently studying English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick, and is working on an eighth novel – bloody hell! She’s only 20.