What an amazing book! I love when books turn out to be much better than expected. This one is about standing against a bully, finding an inner strength and to move forward in your life, beyond grief and loss. When you escape to imaginary world to forget & avoid real life problems, those monsters will eventually find you in your dream world as well, and you're forced to face them. Very well written, gripping from the first page and keeping you on your toes the whole time, wrapping all the details neatly and in a satisfying way, this book was an absolute treat to read.

As this book is a fantasy book, I wouldn’t normally chose this genre to read however, I am incredibly glad that I did. It really reminded me of A Monster Calls due to the fantasy aspects developing in the mind of one of the characters. Bren is the main character and has suffered grief in his life through the death of his sister. Since her death, his life has changed considerably: his dad is withdrawn, his mum works all the time and he is struggling with relationships at school. He misses his sister and creates an imaginary world where he can share his thoughts with his sister and feel safe. In this imaginary world, he is able to deal with hi emotions, especially those linked to the friendships that he has lost and the upset he is suffering at the hands of the school bully Shaun. The insecurities and fears that Bren experiences creates a monster in his imaginary world. He realises, with the help of his new found friend and sister, that he must overcome the monster to make make his life in the real world enjoyable and enable him to accept the changes in his life.

I have championed Darren Simpson's books since the brilliant 'Scavengers' came on the scene in 2019. Since then magnificent 'The Memory Thieves' has come out too. But his latest has really blown me away. 'Furthermoor' is Darren Simpson's best yet: raw, daring and beautiful, in form and content it is a highly immersive, emotive and startling read. ​ Darren Simpson doesn't just write stories, he writes colossal structures: junkyards like cities, islands like prisons and the imagination like a glittering tower. 'Furthermoor' is the latter. With conceptual and narrative power, Darren Simpson has brought to life one boy's staggering imagination as a refuge to the bullying he faces in the real-world and the grief he experiences at the loss of his older sister, Evie. As he writes in his author's note, Darren was not out to write a fantasy; instead this is about the power of the imagination to overcome oppression, from bullies and from the inner voice that says you don't deserve the world. It is an important and challenging read for these themes, but oh how it is so, so beautiful and emotional too. Descriptions of both Bren's imagined world and the real-world are staggering and poetic in detail. Darren has this incredible ability to describe life, from the mundane to the magnificent, in sublime sentences that can be raw like bruises or razor-sharp and propulsive like clockwork. Underneath the layers there is true heart too. The realism that Darren brings to life in Bren's inner and outer battles, the dialogue he has with friends and families and the responses from all characters has real, emotional punch - so much so that a later chapter that didn't feel the same, actually had its own twisty purpose!  This book brought out a lot of emotions in me too; it helped me remember my run-ins with bullies at school, but how actually, like Bren, I managed to find my courage and voice to stand up to them. As a Key Stage Two teacher I think this is an important book, particularly to return to during Anti-Bullying Week, but with all important books, some children may respond sensitively or emotionally to its story and message. It is also an exciting, spellbinding, wonderfully written book, and I really need to use passages in class to show how writing has its own power of escape. Bravo, Mr Simpson! Keep up what you're doing! It's all magnificent.

Very occasionally, I find I am teaching a child whose taste in books is very similar to my own and it is a huge delight to me to share reads with them that I am confident that they will love just as much as I do. Currently, I have a boy who is rapidly working his way through a great many of my titles and I was thrilled when he asked for a list of recommendations to pass on to his family to point them in the right direction for Christmas gifts. While I was rather tempted to create an extraordinarily long list, I though better of it and managed to narrow it down to half a dozen stories, amongst which was Darren Simpson’s The Memory Thieves, published earlier this year. With its tense and sinister plot, it has proved to be one of my stand out reads of 2021 and so when this – his latest title – became available to request on Net Galley, I immediately asked to read it after what felt like an eternity of checking routinely for its presence. While very different from that story, here again is another title which has some very tense, and actually quite scary, parts which will surely prove to be one of the top reads of 2022 for many people. Our story focuses on Bren, a 12-year-old boy who watches as class bully Shaun turns his attention to new boy Cary, who has just arrived at Williamsborough Academy. Biding his time until the class has been dismissed, Shaun takes offence at the new boy’s ease in making his peers laugh and decides to show him just who rules the roost. As Cary stands up for himself and turns the full force of his cutting wit on the bully, Bren watches on from the side-lines until Cary turns to go, leaving Bren to feel the full force of Shaun’s temper. Afterwards, Bren makes his way to the deserted arts block and hides himself away in order to make his way secretly to Furthermoor – an idyllic place only accessible to himself – to visit his dead sister Evie. After letting off steam, and brining Evie up to speed with what is happening in school, Bren returns to the real world in order to complete the rest of his school day. As Shaun continues to make his life a misery, and with no friends to turn to, Bren visits Evie over and over again until things start to change within his secret world, and he and Evie discover that their sanctuary has been stumbled across by Featherly – a malevolent creature who wants Furthermoor for himself and who has been damaging the clockwork animals which reside there. Can the siblings reverse the damage that Featherly has been causing and rid Furthermoor of his presence, or is Bren destined to remain trapped in a ruin of his former haven forever more? There are so many threads woven through this story that it is difficult to know where to start but perhaps most obvious is the grief that Bren and his family feel following the accidental death of Evie. Without friends to turn to, no evidence of any pastoral care in school and parents whose own grief is so all-consuming that they are unable to provide their son with the support he needs, Bren’s only solace is in spending time with the sister he has lost to dampen the pain of her absence. Beautifully written, the sections where the two are together really pulled at my heartstrings as their relationship is such a close one – unlike a great many siblings of their age who very often bicker and fight despite their mutual love. Also covered in some detail is the bullying of Bren by Shaun. As someone who was bullied mercilessly at school, for a variety of reasons, I recognised so many of the actions of both perpetrator and victim and a great many other readers will too, making this an excellent read-aloud in upper KS2 and into KS3. Although we regularly talk about bullying in PSHE, by using a class text to start discussions, children are often more prepared to open up about their experiences. Here, some powerful conversations could be had about constructive strategies to adopt in the place of Bren’s passive responses, which he adopts in the hopes of having a quieter life which – of course – doesn’t come. This is a book that I possibly wouldn’t read to my very immature Year 5 class at the moment, although by the summer they may well be ready for it, but last year’s class would have enjoyed it a great deal, as would the class I taught before them. Tense, thrilling and with some great plot twists that I won’t spoil here, this would be a great addition to my little library shelf. Enormous thanks got to Usborne Publishing and Net Galley for my advance read ahead of publication on March 3rd 2022.

I thought I was coming across a new fantasy, and here is the Journey is almost internal: we follow the processing of pain and an emotional growth for The protagonist of the novel. Darren Simpson is reconfirmed as an author who loves symbolism, his is A novel aimed at young people but indispensable for the older ones. The real world is a hostile place for 12-year-old Bren, at school he is haunted by the bully, Shaun, and his family life is fractured by the death of his sister Evie in an accident about ten months before the tale begins. Bren's only safe place is Furthermoor, a fictional world of mechanical trees and animals, where Evie is still alive. In Furthermoor, no one can hurt Bren ... until the mysterious and menacing Featherly arrives. Now Bren is forced to face his deepest fears and must decide whether his place in the real world is worth fighting for. Usually in fantasy stories, the characters escape their world for an exciting adventure, here Bren visits Furthermoor to escape the pain and misery of everyday life. The fantasy world building is simply enchanting and Furthermoor's descriptions are stunning: forests of wood and gears, crystal and glass; mechanical squirrels, foxes, otters, jeweled peacocks and butterflies. It looks even more vivid next to the cold concrete forest where Bren lives, Dale Estate. The portrayal of Bren struggling to process the loss of her sister, the spiral of depression that inevitably envelops her parents, and the horrifying victims of bullying are real, raw, awe-inspiring. The ending moved me, I admit, with the awareness that the difficult but only way to survive is to accept and resume the journey ... this is True Courage.