On the Feast of Stephen

 

 

It's rotten having a birthday just before Christmas. 

Sometimes Toby gets just one present for both his birthday and Christmas. Sometimes people just give him money because they've run out of present ideas.  Then when he comes to spend that money there's hardly anything left in the shops. It’s the same this year. He can't find any Lego bricks he wants. 

An old man who reminds him of his Grandpa Jack is sitting cold and hungry on the street. Toby thinks of another use for his birthday money.  What he does afterwards reminds his Grandpa Jack of a well-known Christmas song.  

On the Feast of Stephen by Gill and Ashleigh James is a feel-good story for early readers. 

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280 x70 by Gill James

 

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What does that first picture that you see each day on social media say? Sometimes it makes you laugh and sometime it fills you with dread, all of which you must express in exactly 280 words. That was the challenge. It’s up to the reader to decide if it’s been met.

These very short stories wander and wonder through multiple aspects of 21st century life, give a nod to the future and a glance back at the past. They pose questions and occasionally offer suggestions.

Gill James offers food for thought in 280 x 70.

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Girl in a Smart Uniform by Gill James

 

 

Gisela adores her brother Bear, her gorgeous BDM uniform and her little half-brother Jens. She does her best to be a good German citizen and is keen to help restore Germany to its former glory. She becomes a competent and respected BDM leader.

But life begins to turn sour. Her oldest brother Kurt can be violent, she soon realises that she is different from other girls, she feels uncomfortable around her mother’s new lover and there is something not quite right about Jens.  It becomes more and more difficult to be the perfect German young woman.          

Girl in a Smart Uniform is the third book in the Schellberg Cycle, a collection of novels inspired by a bunch of photocopied letters that arrived at a small cottage in Wales in 1979.

The letters give us some insights into what life was like growing up in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

This novel explores what may have motivated young women growing up in Nazi Germany and offers an explanation as to how a school for disabled children was allowed to carry on functioning throughout World War II.    

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I very much enjoyed this novel. It is fairly straight forward to find stories about war written from a male perspective, not so easy to find one that not only has a young woman as the main protagonist but Gisela is also a committed member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) the female equivalent of Hitler Youth in World War 2. She is so proud of her uniform and her opportunity to serve Germany and right the wrongs she perceives as having been foisted on her country. The reader follows her journey through adolescence and into womanhood, as she comes to terms with love, loss, identity and the discovery of the fickle nature of trust and truth.

            The short diary style chapters allow the reader to become engrossed in a narrative that switches between time, place and narrator. This technique works well; I could put the book down, pick it up a few days later and carry on with the story. As with all good stories, the reader is left with a few questions about some of the characters. This book is part three of a series of four book, The Schellberg Cycle, and I now want to read the others. That said this is a complete and satisfying read. It ends on a note of hope and possibility as Europe struggles into peace in the late 1940s.

            This is a terrific book that I wholeheartedly recommend.

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