A powerful, compelling novel from the critically-acclaimed author of the Branford Boase-winning I Am Thunder, about making friends, and breaking them too.Fifteen-year-old Ilyas is under pressure from everyone: GCSE's are looming and his teachers just won't let up, his dad wants him to join the family business and his mates don't care about any of it. There's no space in Ilyas' life to just be a teenager.Serving detention one day, Ilyas finds a kindred spirit in Kelly Matthews, who is fed up with being pigeonholed as the good girl, and their friendship blows the social strata of high school wide open. But when Kelly catches the eye of one of the local bad boys, Imran, he decides to seduce her for a bet – and Ilyas is faced with losing the only person who understands him. Standing up to Imran puts Ilyas' family at risk, but it's time for him to be the superhero he draws in his comic-books, and go kick the moon.Kick the Moon, is Muhammad Khan's explosive second novel, with original comic-book art from Amrit Birdi, bestselling illustrator of Username:Evie.'Funny, angry, powerful' Patrice Lawrence, award-winning author of OrangeBoy'A powerful novel that encapsulates the experiences of teenage boys with wit and heroism' Nikesh Shukla, author of Run Riot '[Written] with humour and empathy' Independent'[An] ambitious, wryly funny, optimistic-against-the-odds novel' Times Literary Supplement'Khan's gift for authentic characters and believable dialogue makes his writing sing' Bookseller
CONTRIBUTORS: Muhammad KhanEAN: 9781509874071COUNTRY: United KingdomPAGES: WEIGHT: 217 gHEIGHT: 197 cm
PUBLISHED BY: Pan MacmillanDATE PUBLISHED: CITY: GENRE: YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Family / General, YOUNG ADULT FICTION / School & Education / General, YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Bullying, YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Peer Pressure, YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Sexual AbuseWIDTH: 130 cmSPINE:
Book Themes:
Children’s / Teenage fiction: Family and home stories, Children’s / Teenage personal and social topics: Bullying, violence, abuse and peer pressure, Children’s / Teenage personal and social topics: School, education and teachers
This book will make you angry. This book will make you laugh. Muhammad writes with humour and empathy about friendship, belonging, toxic masculinity, maths and - best of all - comic geekery. Fabulous!, A powerful novel that encapsulates the experiences of teenage boys with wit and heroism . . . Khan has created a book steeped in drama and empathy, as well as providing two iconic superheroes, [Written] with humour and empathy, Khan’s empathy and wry humour, accentuated by a deft use of slang, make this authentic and relatable, '[An] ambitious, wryly funny, optimistic-against-the-odds novel'
Muhammad Khan is an engineer, a secondary-school maths teacher, and now a YA author! He takes his inspiration from the children he teaches, as well as his own upbringing as a British-born Pakistani. He lives in South London and has an MA in Creative Writing from St Mary's. His debut novel I Am Thunder won the Branford Boase First Novel Award, the 2018 Great Reads Award and a number of regional awards. His second novel, Kick the Moon is also published by Macmillan Children's Books.Amrit Birdi is a No.1 bestselling comic book artist, best known for illustrating Joe Sugg’s Username:Evie series. He and his team have delivered comic art, concept design, storyboards and commercial illustration for international brands and publishers such as Netflix, Square Enix, SKY, Porsche, Universal, Hachette, Pepsi Co, ITV, Ubisoft, Nike, Warner Bros and Titan Comics.
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A powerful, compelling novel from the critically-acclaimed author of the Branford Boase-winning I Am Thunder, about making friends, and breaking them too.Fifteen-year-old Ilyas is under pressure from everyone: GCSE's are looming and his teachers just won't let up, his dad wants him to join the family business and his mates don't care about any of it. There's no space in Ilyas' life to just be a teenager.Serving detention one day, Ilyas finds a kindred spirit in Kelly Matthews, who is fed up with being pigeonholed as the good girl, and their friendship blows the social strata of high school wide open. But when Kelly catches the eye of one of the local bad boys, Imran, he decides to seduce her for a bet – and Ilyas is faced with losing the only person who understands him. Standing up to Imran puts Ilyas' family at risk, but it's time for him to be the superhero he draws in his comic-books, and go kick the moon.Kick the Moon, is Muhammad Khan's explosive second novel, with original comic-book art from Amrit Birdi, bestselling illustrator of Username:Evie.'Funny, angry, powerful' Patrice Lawrence, award-winning author of OrangeBoy'A powerful novel that encapsulates the experiences of teenage boys with wit and heroism' Nikesh Shukla, author of Run Riot '[Written] with humour and empathy' Independent'[An] ambitious, wryly funny, optimistic-against-the-odds novel' Times Literary Supplement'Khan's gift for authentic characters and believable dialogue makes his writing sing' Bookseller
CONTRIBUTORS: Muhammad KhanEAN: 9781509874071COUNTRY: United KingdomPAGES: WEIGHT: 217 gHEIGHT: 197 cm
PUBLISHED BY: Pan MacmillanDATE PUBLISHED: CITY: GENRE: YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Family / General, YOUNG ADULT FICTION / School & Education / General, YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Bullying, YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Peer Pressure, YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Sexual AbuseWIDTH: 130 cmSPINE:
Book Themes:
Children’s / Teenage fiction: Family and home stories, Children’s / Teenage personal and social topics: Bullying, violence, abuse and peer pressure, Children’s / Teenage personal and social topics: School, education and teachers
Muhammad Khan is an engineer, a secondary-school maths teacher, and now a YA author! He takes his inspiration from the children he teaches, as well as his own upbringing as a British-born Pakistani. He lives in South London and has an MA in Creative Writing from St Mary's. His debut novel I Am Thunder won the Branford Boase First Novel Award, the 2018 Great Reads Award and a number of regional awards. His second novel, Kick the Moon is also published by Macmillan Children's Books.Amrit Birdi is a No.1 bestselling comic book artist, best known for illustrating Joe Sugg’s Username:Evie series. He and his team have delivered comic art, concept design, storyboards and commercial illustration for international brands and publishers such as Netflix, Square Enix, SKY, Porsche, Universal, Hachette, Pepsi Co, ITV, Ubisoft, Nike, Warner Bros and Titan Comics.
A really fantastic look at South Africa through the eyes of three groups of South Africans. An easy , page turning novel by Lance Thorburn. Strongly recommended
Female equivalent to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
This novella is the female equivalent to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which | also enjoyed), except that this is a memoir and that was fiction. I am sure there is both truth and fiction in both versions though.
This book covers so much philosophical ground relating to our perceptions and understanding of sanity vs insanity, what is deemed normal for women vs normal for men, how we think about the brain, and the lack of communication between those who study the brain and those who study the mind. It also raises important questions about social norms and how this affects people (especially kids) whose particular personalities or ways do not fit in with the ideas of how things should be.
In many ways we have come very far, and in other ways we still have so far to go. A novella such as this, set in the late 1960's but recounted 25 odd years later, shed some light on this even as it is being read by someone who was an adolescent in the 1990's and is reading it in 2023. Will this have less of an impact if you have never been diagnosed with a mental disorder of wondered whether you were crazy? I don't know. Are there any such people? I have never met them... In my experience, almost everyone has had some way that they did not fit in with the world around them, and the only difference was how much of themselves they had to break or give up - or if they were even able to do so - in order to appear normal, or have a lifestyle that was acceptable.
If you like pondering some of our most persistent questions about being human and the societies we create while we force labels on everything, then you may find this book quite profound. It provides no answers, but it does shed some doubt on some of the answers we thought we had. And this doubt is important if we allow for the necessity to form a more inclusive society, one that does not INTERRUPT the being of those who are different and those who don't quite fit our idea of what the world should look like. Because those people are more than we think and looking at the amount of kids that are anxious and overwhelmed and depressed these days, this shift in thinking may very well be the most important thing we need to do.
This book gets a whole 5 stars because it will stay with me for quite some time, and I think I will be rereading it often.