Janni Howker

Marvellous. Captivating. Another of those books for kids that isn’t. The honesty of the protagonist's brutal relationship with his father – more metal than physical – never lets you go. Yet his tenderness, and the way it is conveyed through nature and all his other relationships, is balanced perfectly.

The real tragedy is that this isn’t more widely read. It had no weaknesses at all.

A captivating dark tale from the Border reivers’ period written with a gentle rhythm and occasional rhyme. The drama is recounted through a storyteller who speak with a light Borders’ dialect, and whose embellishments and imaginings often wander into the fantastic. It’s criminal this book isn’t more widely read. Janni Howker writes so, so well.

This probably falls into the YA category, and it’s certainly an easy enough read, yet the family dynamics and the handling of teenage boy hormone-time is superbly handled – far better than some of the in yer face stuff I’ve scanned recently.

Janni Howker can write the hind legs off a mysterious quadruped, which is so important to my enjoyment of a novel. I quite easily lost myself in the small-town-within-the-moors. So much so, I was halfway done with the book before I noticed it’s show more written in the first person narrative; something I usually avoid.

Great storytelling, and great writing are hard to beat. show less

Five moving stories of alienation and loss transforming into belonging and acceptance. An abrasive love of humanity pervades every story lending them warmth without sentimentality.