Tower and Town, October 2024 (view the full edition)A Good ReadIf you should happen to be looking for a short, sweet, funny coming of age tale, with sex, drugs (not enough to frighten the horses) and Bach, then may I point you to Almost Nothing Happened by Meg Rossoff? Callum is returning home from a miserable French exchange trip, in which his 17- year- old sense of being a Total Failure is compounded by being utterly unable to connect with his cool-as-illicit-vodka-shots, chic-as-all-get-out, deeply unwelcoming hosts. Impulsively he decides not to board the Eurostar and plunges into a heat-wave stricken Paris, with his phone battery dying just after (phew!) he's established contact with an unknown older cousin. There follows 48 frenzied hours of classical music, insurance fraud, art theft, climate activist protests and manic chases across the city on the back of a scooter driven by the irresistible Lilou, everything he has always imagined French girls to be.... This is officially a Young Adult title, but this Old Adult enjoyed it immoderately. I have, alas, never zipped across Paris on the back of a scooter, or even driven in a sports car with the warm wind in my hair. Though I've had my moments (no need to pity me) I was, even in my prime, pretty nerdy, and have only become more so with advancing years. As a child I would have, and as an adult I do love Tom Read Wilson's Wonderful Words That Tell A Tale. It's an etymological exploration, in which the author takes four words from every letter of the alphabet, and explains their origin and derivation. It's full of lovely illustrations (from the Latin illustrare, 'to enlighten') by Ian Morris, and bouncy (possibly from the Dutch bonzen 'to beat or thump') rhymes. If you or a child of your acquaintance is enthusiastic (from Greek 'to be inspired or possessed by a god') about words - then I strongly recommend this book. From the Latin commendare 'to commit to the care of'. I really will stop now. (But did you know that the word 'fart' comes from Sanskrit? And 'barbecue' from Arawakan?) I'm all about simple entertainment this month, so my last pick is The Formidable Miss Cassidy by Meihan Boey, a mix of romantasy (it is a word) and historical fiction. Employed as companion and tutor to a frail orphan in 1890s colonial Singapore, Miss Cassidy, a long way from the down-trodden Victorian governess, deals calmly and competently with multi-cultural dark forces, gods and demons. It was described to me as 'a cross between Mary Poppins and Buffy the Vampire Slayer'; I couldn't have put it better myself. Debby Guest |