The Book Zone Book of the Year 2011

This time last year I announced the Book Zone Book of the Year 2010. To help me I had been naming a Book of the Month throughout the year. For various reasons I did not do that during 2011 and so I have left myself in a little bit of a hole. I have decided to do it in a similar way to last year, and decide which was my favourite book released in each month (notice I say released, not necessarily read in that month). And so here are my favourite books of 2011:


January - Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

With honourable mentions for Long Reach by Peter Cocks and Witchfinder: Gallows At Twilight by William Hussey.

February - Dancing Jax by Robin Jarvis

March - Department 19 by Will Hill

April - The Damned by David Gatward

With an honourable mention for Casper Candlewacks in Death By Pigeon by Ivan Brett

May - Changeling: Zombie Dawn by Steve Feasey

June - Mirabilis: Year of Wonders Winter Vol 1 by Dave Morris and Leo Hartas (not sure exactly when this was released officially but this is close enough)

July - Wereworld: Rage of Lions by Curtis Jobling

With an honourable mention for Money Run by Jack Heath and TimeRiders: The Eternal War by Alex Scarrow

August - Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

With an honourable mention for Doc Mortis by Barry Hutchison and S.T.I.N.K.B.O.M.B. by Rob Stevens (Confession time - Doc Mortis was the winner when I wrote and scheduled this post last week. However, since then I have read Ready Player One and it completely blew my mind. Sorry Barry.)

September - Kill All Enemies by Melvin Burgess

With an honourable mention for Witchfinder: The Last Nightfall by William Hussey

October - Mister Creecher by Chris Priestley

November - The Haunting of Charity Delafield by Ian Beck

December - I'll be honest, I don't have one for December. Due to the fact that I had to put my blog on hold for most of November I am still playing catch up.

And so, time to announce my Book Zone Book of the Year 2011 and it is:






Department 19 by Will Hill


Part of me feels a little bad in naming this book my Book of the Year 2011 as I first read it back in October 2010. Somehow me and Department 19 just clicked, and I knew once I had finished it that it might be a very strong contender for 2011's Book of the Year, and that any book that came along to challenge Department 19 for the top spot would have to be totally amazing. To hell with feeling bad though, no book came close in my opinion (edit: although, Ready Player One, read only a few days ago, has now come very close indeed). Department 19 has everything I, and many 13+ boys (and girls) want in a book: great characters; an imaginative and compelling premise set in a world that is close enough to ours to be real; awesome action scenes; loads of blood splatter; vampires that aren't sparkly and would rip your throat at faster than you could blink; the list goes on and on and on. When I reviewed it back in February I stated that it was 'possibly the best action horror I had ever read'; with hindsight (and several more readings) I think I could have lost the 'possibly' from that statement. In addition to this, the sequel, Department 19: The Rising is also my most anticipated book of 2012 - I really cannot wait to sink my teeth into it.

The Book Zone Book of the Year 2010

Back in April I started a Book of the Month feature on The Book Zone whereby at the end of each month I would name a book released in that month that I had enjoyed over all the others. I managed to stick to this, without ever cheating and naming more than one book, the idea being that it would make choosing a book of the year much easier. However, as I started doing this in April for some reason I never went back and named my top books for January to March, and so here, some of them for the first time, are all of my top books of 2010:


January - When I Was Joe by Keren David

February - Zero Moment by M.G. Harris

March - Witchfinder: Dawn of the Demontide by William Hussey

April - Mortlock by Jon Mayhew

May - Wintercraft by Jenna Burtenshaw

June - Hattori Hachi: Stalking The Enemy by Jane Prowse

July - Dark Goddess by Sarwat Chadda

August - Raggy Maggie by Barry Hutchison

September - Trash by Andy Mulligan

October - The Dark by David Gatward

November - The Mourning Emporium by Michell Lovric

And the Book Zone Book of the Month for December is Mythical 9th Division: Terror of the Deep by Alex Milway. I love his two yeti books so much and I have given copies to a number of appropriately aged boys as Christmas presents this year. Early reports suggest that they are going down a storm with the 7/8 year olds. Mission accomplished yetis!

As I mentioned at the start of this post, the original idea behind choosing a monthly favourite book was to make my decision about my Book of the Year a little easier. Looking back at these great titles (and some of the others I have read throughout the year and now a few months later seem worthy of the title - The Double-Edged Sword by Sarah Silverwood and Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld certainly now feel like they should have been in there) I wonder whether I have just made life even more difficult as choosing from those twelve feels like a mighty task. However, I promised myself back in April that I would name a Book of the Year and it is.........................


Dark Goddess by Sarwat Chadda.


I really, really love Sarwat's writing: in Billi SanGreal he has created a character that should she ever appear on the big screen could, in my opinion, become a truly worthy successor to Buffy's crown as Queen of the Monster Fighters. I am fascinated by the amount of detail Sarwat puts into his stories, and the time he spends on researching his material is very evident. But he doesn't just take old folk tales and rehash them, he puts his own mark on them completely (I believe I called it the Chadda Twist back June when I reviewed the book). When can we expect to see the big screen version? Or action figures? Or at the very least a graphic novel of the series? Please?!

I have had the pleasure of meeting Sarwat a couple of times and I am sure there are few authors of Young Adult books out there who are as tireless as he is at promoting the reading of good horror writing. 2010 saw the creation of The Chainsaw Gang (masterminded by Mr Chadda), bringing together some of the best talent in YA horror in the UK, and I am sure there is much more to come in 2011. Perhaps world domination?! I do not know whether Sarwat has plans to release a third book in the series in 2011 but if he does I will be elbowing my way to the front of the queue for a copy.

My Favourite Book Covers of 2010

I have mentioned before on The Book Zone that I teach Design Technology, and most of my teaching timetable focuses on teaching Graphic Products at GCSE and A-Level. In fact some of my A Level students are currently designing book covers and promotional materials for several unpublished writers that I have made contact with through Twitter, and later in the year I hope to be able to reveal to you the fruits of their labours. It worries me that as ebooks become more and more popular the need for a good book cover to grab the attention of the reader will begin to wane, which I think will be a terrible shame. A good book cover should make a potential reader WANT to read the book before they have even read the blurb, but it should not be misleading and should be a good reflection of the book's content.


To create a Top Ten list would have been quite easy for me, but instead I wanted to highlight the book covers that are, in my opinion at least, the best of the best, and so I wanted to limit myself to a very difficult Top Five. However, this proved to be so difficult that I cheated and so here are my Top Six book covers of 2010:


And so, kicking us off at Number 6 we have Crawlers by Sam Enthoven

Credit for this gloriously creepy cover goes to Rhys Willson, the in-house designer at RHCB. Supposedly he used a slightly mashed squid that he bought from the fish-market to create his vision of what a Crawler would look like.


At Number 5: Raggy Maggie by Barry Hutchison

This is my favourite cover of the Invisible Fiends series so far (including the soon to be released The Crowmaster), although I have seen a close-up of the fourth book in the series, Doc Mortis, and illustrator Jonny Duddle has come pretty close to beating his Raggy Maggie cover. I am still hoping and praying that one day HarperCollins will commission a set of action figures based on the series - if they do I will be first in the queue for a Raggy Maggie and Caddie toy (maybe I will try to make my own in 2011).


At Number 4: Trash by Andy Mulligan

You really need to see the cover of this book in real life to truly appreciate the beauty of Richard Collingbridge's artwork. However, if you do not have a copy to hand then click the above image to see it in super-large size. Trash is a heartwarming story about a group of children who have grown up living on one of the huge trash heaps such as are found in cities like Rio de Janeiro and the cover perfectly captures the tone of the story.


Number 3: Lockdown: Escape From Furnace by Alexander Gordon Smith (US version)

Lockdown, the first book in the Furnace series by Alexander Gordon Smith, has been out for some time in the UK. However, 2010 saw its debut in the US, with a cover that is, in my opinion, far superior to the UK covers, and also far more indicative of the menacing theme of the story. Credit for this awesome design goes to Christian Fuenfhausen. Christian is the designer for all of the covers of the US editions, my complete favourite being the cover he did for Death Sentence which you can see here, although I understand that this has now been changed to a different design.


Number 2: Mortlock by Jon Mayhew

The cover illustration by Christian Lorenz Scheurer for Jon Mayhew's victorian horror masterpiece is a perfect representation of the dark horror themes within the story. If you are a teen horror fan I would imagine you would find it very difficult not to pick this book up off a shelf based on the cover alone. 


And at Number 1: Blood Ninja by Nick Lake

I first saw this cover in the Corvus Books online catalogue and I fell in love with it immediately. Months later I still love the striking red on black image that Orlando based designer Hydro74 (aka Joshua M Smith) has created for the book, which is set in 16th Century Japan. Everything about this book cover is right - the embossed image, the colours, the typefaces used, all complemented by the black edged pages to create the perfect package for a great vampire/ninja story. Sometimes I have to box books up to create room for new favourites - this is one that will never be hidden away and will always sit on my bookshelf.