The Private Blog of Joe Cowley: Return of the Geek by Ben Davis

Book review: “The Private Blog of Joe Cowley: Return of the Geek” is, as the title suggests, a sequel, not that you need to have read the original book before this one although it does feature the same characters.

 

On his blog Joe writes about his life. This includes his home life with his heavily pregnant mum, whose pregnancy has made her a bit mental, step-dad Jim, step-brother Gav, who is also the school bully and who Joe shares a room with, and mad nan Doris. Then there are his school friends Ad and Harry, Harry who speaks in an old-fashioned way calling people “old chap” and all that as he contemplates life’s problems by sucking his empty pipe. And then there is his girlfriend Natalie who Joe is worried will dump him at every turn.

 

The main stories running through the book are Joe’s attempts to win over his girlfriend’s dad who is very much his adversary. Then there is the DJ competition in which Joe acts as manager to his friends Harry and Ad and their double act as they take on another adversary, the smug, son of an MP, Seb.

 

The front cover of this book makes the comparison to the Wimpy Kid series and with Joe getting into plenty of embarrassing situations which escalate you can see the similarities. However there are fewer pictures here than Wimpy Kid, and the material is more suited for teenagers.

 

I laughed at Joe’s “pain and humiliation” and recommend you do too.

 

Publication date: 2 April 2015

 

Amazon UK link: The Private Blog of Joe Cowley: Return of the Geek

Ibarajo Road by Harry Allen

"Ibarajo Road" is set in 1984 in Nigeria and is about a person “who kills and trades children”.

The main character is Charlie. He is from a wealthy white family in Nigeria. He attends a fee-paying school that “was custom built to specifications by a company in America to ensure quality.”

One weekend his parents are away so he organises for his mates to come round for a night out to the Crocodile Bar, a place that “can get very dangerous at night”, where he hopes to pick up some girls for him and his mates. But the night goes disastrously wrong as one of his friends gets slashed with a knife. This incident leads to him being expelled from school. However “there is one option, one way to avoid expulsion. If you can convince me that you have found a worthwhile way to spend your time, something that will reflect well on the school, then you will only be excluded for the rest of the academic year.”

And so begins his voluntary work in Ilakaye Refuge Centre, a refuge for lepers, drug addicts, the homeless, the crippled, abandoned babies, the mentally disturbed, those affected by AIDS, and so on.

Charlie becomes invested in his work and along the way learns more about the relationship between Joseph Obohense, the head manager of Ilakaye, and Michael Danlami, the priest who was a lawyer, who was a charity worker and who is primarily a seller of children. Danlami will also do everything to ruin Joseph and with the right bribes “the authorities are revoking Joseph’s lease. They are demanding that Ilakaye be handed over.”

It is left to Charlie and his friends Guppy and Yejide to ensure justice is done and that the child snatcher does not prevail.

This was a very good book that tugs at the heartstrings and inspires the reader to think about what they could do for those less fortunate than them.

Publication date: 2nd August 2012

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed HERE.)