Show them the full horrors of what it feels like to be mashed to within and inch of your life. Show them the pain, the agony, the suffering. There’s no point in having someone beaten to a pulp off screen and then have them coming bouncing back on as though nothing had happened.
And I feel that violence should be shared with teenagers in a realistic way. But all of it was within context and he deftly drew out the characteristics of the various shades of nutters that roam this planet. The brutality throughout this book was graphically drawn, Brooks pulled no punches. I was willing these boys to triumph, to solve this unspeakable murder and to bring the complete bastard perpetrators to justice. But through all of this is a sense of hope that kept me turning the pages at a furious rate. The landscape is bleak and dark, the weather is cold and miserable and the people are just downright nasty. They’re met with a closed community resistant, aggressive, hostile. The face of a devil’s angel.Ĭole and Reuben travel to Lychcombe to bring their sister back. It’s the kind of face that does what it says. It’s a good face to look at – seventeen years old, dark-eyed and steady and pure. Reuben is introspective, questioning, a deep thinker with reasoned actions and sensible decisions. The main character, fourteen year old Reuben has the gift of second sight, he “saw” his sister being killed and he knows the Dead Man did it. Their sister is brutally raped and murdered in a small village on Dartmoor, the police are slow to investigate and their mother can’t bury her daughter until the case is solved. Reuben and Cole are half-gypsies living in London. The Road of the Dead is a gripping murder mystery, very dark and in some places extremely violent. (This was something I hadn’t considered when naming my child – and it does become an issue when you’re wasting hours in an airport shop or have pocket money to spend in Woolworths.) Anyway, after reading The Road of the Dead, I discovered this book is absolutely not suitable for an eight year old, so it shall be put away until he’s older – bummer! I have an eight year old called Cole, a somewhat unusual name, so unusual that you can’t get pens or key rings or mugs or those signs you hang on doors saying “Cole’s Room”. I was initially drawn to this book when I discovered it has a character named Cole. Today, I want to share my thoughts on The Road of the Dead by Kevin Brooks.
And this is where we bloggers have the upper hand.
My feeling is that a review that comes from a real person, someone you’re beginning to know a few things about, rather than just a name at the top of the page, is more compelling. The thing I love most about reviewing books on VL is the freedom to write anything I like.
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