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03:49 pm - Mondays Are Red, Nicola Morgan

Have now finished The Fourth Horseman, for which my review may just be 'Oh dear', and half wondering whether to start on another book or not after doing this review...

I'd fairly high expectations of Mondays are Red, as both daughters had read and approved it, and the theme of synaesthesia seems a brilliant one for a YA novel. And it was good - excellent in some ways - though I can see its not being everyone's cup of tea quite easily. In a purely idiosyncratic way, I see three stories in the book: that of Luke's newly-developed synaesthesia, the result of his nearly dying of meningitis; a very creepy fantastic story, of power and its abuse; and that of Luke's discovery of the power of language. In the 'About the author' page at the start, Nicola Morgan says 'Mondays are Red is about the power of language and power itself', and I guess many novels are in some way about the power of language. It seems to me that she's set herself quite a job though, in having those three stories woven together. Not only does she have to use language in all kinds of unusual ways to convey what synaesthesia feels like (which of course is part of the appeal to a writer, as she says in an author's note at the end), but she has at the same time to use that language to create a very frightening story and show Luke's growing power to affect people through language. The problem with the latter is that others' response to his language is crucial to the story - and it's not always quite credible. For example, there's a time when Luke has written a story (which, we as readers know is the story all-too-likely to come true) of a 'metal man without a face' watching and following a girl, and finally calling her to her presumed death. And yes - it's scary, and gripping. But is it really scary enough to cause one girl to have an apparent epileptic fit (which she's never done before), and a boy to be white-faced, shaking and unable to speak because he sees a figure like that in the story outside the school? Or the 'poem' Luke writes when describing the girl he wants to create - 'Her skin is cinnamon in the sun, cake-warm, her hair long as honey. She flows like cream, blows candy-floss bubbles in the air. Runs like tomorrow, whispers one day, promises never. Her distant touch is soft as smoke, deep as a breath.... ' Hmmm. Well, okay, maybe unusual for a teen boy who'd never even have considered writing a poem before, but powerful enough to make people see her in their minds (including his mocking and pissed-off older sister)?

I'd much rather a book which tried something (or somethings) quite different and didn't succeed completely than one which didn't try much of anything, of course, and Mondays are Red certainly did the former. And it packs an ominous punch in there with its supernatural thriller story, too. Wonder why the 'a' in 'are' isn't capitalised though...