My Side of the Diamond

The only thing which can be said with any certainty of a new Sally Gardner novel is that you're guaranteed an intriguing, challenging, genre-defying read. My Side of the Diamond is certainly no exception with its multiple character viewpoints, flashbacks, detailed illustrations and moleskin notebook format, mirroring the notebook in which the main, and now missing, character wrote her own sci-fi novel as a child. Part sci-fi, part romance, part thriller, part diary this is, essentially, the story of Jazmin who witnesses her best friend Becky seemingly jump from the top of St Paul's Cathedral with enigmatic boyfriend, Icarus, but never hit the ground. Suicide or murder? The case has strange and sinister parallels with a similar fall years before. Several years later Jaz, who has been blamed by the courts, and other key witnesses are interviewed and forced to recreate the weeks before the couple's disappearance. So far, so believable. As Jazmin is questioned by the mysterious Mr Jones we learn of Becky's recent recovery from an eating disorder and the widespread belief that Icarus was in fact an alien, descended to earth to learn about love. There are UFOs and cyborgs, secret agents and conspiracy theories but also unguessable plot twists, suspenseful narration and an extraordinary exploration of love and hate and what makes us human. For an older audience than Maggot Moon, this is definitely not a book for every reader. Often adult in tone and narration, the complexity of the plotting and the flipping backwards and forwards in time of the narrative will confuse all but the most committed reader. Those who stick with it - and fans of Doctor Who - will find much to reward and budding writers will learn much from its unique structure to inform and enrich their own story writing. Another intelligent, scientifically authentic and highly readable alien romance is Lauren James's; The Loneliest Girl in the Universe. 240 pages / Ages 12+ / Reviewed by Eileen Armstrong, school librarian.

Suggested Reading Age 11+

My Side of the Diamond is beautifully presented to resemble the moleskine notebooks that Becky writes in/ wrote in. You see, Becky and Icarus jumped off a tall building. Twenty years earlier, Skye and Lazarus also jumped off a tall building. Not one of them landed. They just sort of 'disappeared'. Now the quiet Mr Jones is here to interview witnesses. Each has suffered since the events and each is willing to answer Mr Jones's quiet questions. No-one has really listened to them before; Mr Jones offers them the first chance they've had to fully recount, without judgement. Their recollections of the event are so at odds with rational explanation that prior to Mr Jones they've been dismissed and ridiculed. He listens. For them it's a cathartic process. Each articulates a tender love - whether for a child, a brother, a friend, a boyfriend - and that is what the quiet Mr Jones wants to understand. Love. What it means, what we'd do for it, the power of it to construct and destruct. The witnesses all linked together through their relationships with the disappeared and each had a different account of love; through their narration, Sally Gardner masterfully exposes the events. So hold on to the idea that we're all about love and the conduit to discovering it is the quest of Mr Jones - and aliens. Yes, aliens. The aliens are a useful tool to the exploration of love. Surprisingly, I was OK with the aliens, it was the Frankenstein construct of the humans, the alien-cyborg hybrid Doubleday, that unseated me. He was the antithesis of love, an innocent corrupted by human meddling and while he added a frisson of mystery and thriller, Doubleday didn't really have enough of an explanation. I would have liked to have loved this book more. 240 pages / Ages 12+ / Reviewed by Catherine Purcell, school librarian.

Suggested Reading Age 11+