Hannah Green is eleven years old, and lives with her father in the small coastal California town of Santa Cruz. Hannah’s parents have recently split, her mother now working in London, and Hannah is beginning to feel that her life could be best described as mundane, a word she has recently learned from her Aunt Zoë. Hannah’s father is not coping well with the separation and, in an attempt to get some space to think he sends his daughter to stay with her itinerant grandfather. But Granddad is not all he seems; when an old man turns up looking for Granddad’s help, and calling Granddad the Engineer, Hannah finds herself involved in the adventure of a lifetime. Granddad, it would seem, is over three hundred years old, and his friend claims to be none other than the Devil himself.

It is four years since we’ve seen a novel-length release from Michael Marshall, and closer to ten since his Michael Marshall Smith alter ego has provided us with something. While the fact that Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence was being released almost passed me by, I’m very happy to report that it has been well worth the wait, regardless of which personality you’ve been waiting for. It’s a wonderful coming-of-age story, as a young girl learns the value of family and friendship, and that no-one is truly good or evil, but one of many shades of grey that form the spectrum between the two. At its core is a quest that examines this disparity in more detail: Hannah Green and her grandfather must help the Devil, and in doing so, save the world.

Granddad is the Engineer, a man who has created an intricate machine that draws evil from the world and channels it through Hell, providing the Devil with power. The Devil has been missing for some time now, and when he wakes up on the terrace of a Miami hotel, he has no memory of where he has been, and he quickly learns that the machine no longer seems to be working. When he tracks down the Engineer, an accident imp by the name of Vaneclaw at his side, he discovers that his old friend has company in the form of his eleven-year-old granddaughter. This is as much Granddad’s story as it is Hannah’s and, in fact, Granddad is the only character whose background is examined in any detail during the course of the story. His comfort around the Devil makes the fallen angel’s presence seem more natural and, despite the evil that follows him like a bad smell, we can’t help but like the grumpy old man in the rumpled black suit.

Hannah treads that fine line between childhood and young adulthood, too old to be one, and not quite old enough to be the other. She’s a precocious child, and she hardly bats an eyelid as she learns the truth about her grandfather, and her grandfather’s friend. As the action moves from the Pacific Northwest to the bottom of a crevasse in the deepest wilderness of Siberia, it becomes clear that Hannah retains the resilience and courage of a young child, and this helps to keep her focussed on the task at hand. Her relationship with the Devil and his sidekick seems to be a playful one, despite the constant danger that surrounds them, and it’s clear that by the end of the story, the old man has a grudging respect for the young girl.

Smith’s sense of humour shines through in the narrative, which is peppered with jokes and comic observations, and it’s the perfect tone for the story he wants to tell. That said, there is never any doubt that we’re in the presence of the Devil, the humour not quite disguising the old man’s true nature. Prepare to laugh out loud and experience shivers within the space of a couple of sentences. No-one is safe from the Devil’s whims, and the background body count grows with each interaction.

"The rage [the Devil] felt was sufficient that, fifteen miles away, a father of three who was camping in the woods with two other families reached immediately for the axe he’d used to help build the fire upon which he and his best friends were about to grill steaks and deployed it to commit acts so appalling that they passed into local legend. Two heads were never found."

Smith describes the story’s origin as a bedtime tale he told his son and, despite the very odd swear-word, there is an argument that Hannah Green would be suitable for a younger audience. Much of the humour and several plot elements are aimed at a much older audience, so the story works on a number of levels. I’ll give it a couple of years before I introduce it to my 7-year-old, but it seems like the perfect entry-point, alongside the likes of King’s The Eyes of the Dragon and Gaiman’s Coraline or The Graveyard Book, to the often-horrific worlds of the weird and the wonderful.

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence is beautifully-written and entirely engrossing. It’s the type of book that cries out – and deserves – to be read in a single sitting. The characters – even the obviously fictional ones – are fresh, interesting, and fairly leap from the page, and the narrative voice is a touch of sheer genius. It is great to see Michael Marshall Smith back at the helm, and Hannah Green is an excellent return to form for one of the world’s best – and possibly most underrated – authors of speculative fiction. If you’ve read Smith, you know what I’m talking about; if not, start here, and work your way back to some of his earlier masterpieces. Either way, Hannah Green and the Devil await your company; you won’t want to miss them.

I recently bought a new kindle after my old one broke. For some reason I was unable to download this title from the cloud onto my kindle, therefore I will be unable to review this title. I am sorry for any inconvenience caused

Really enjoyable read. Good characters and a Good story. Well worth a read. Think others will enjoy.

A cleverly written story about a girl who escapes her parents break up by going to live with her eccentric grandfather, whose presence in her life turns it upside down.

Hannah is a sassy young girl who escapes living with her parents break up by going to live with her eccentric grandfather. It is a clever imaginative read reminiscent of Neil Gaiman as it shows that her grandfather works for the devil and he needs her help. So off to hell then go..... Hugely inventive and funny I will be looking at the authors other works.

This was absolutely delightful. Well developed and paced story of an eleven-year-old girl who finds out her grandfather has some interesting friends. It wasn't overly complicated and is overall a quite easy read. I liked it a lot and would definitely recommend.

Michael Marshall Smith gives the familiar subject of marital breakdown a new twist in his novel Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence (review copy from Harper Voyager). The titular Hannah Green is a young girl dealing with the break up of her parents' marriage. Her mother has left her father for a work colleague, and has moved from the West Coast of the USA to London.

The marriage break up is the unfeasibly mundane part of Hannah's life. So common a set of experiences and so frequently covered in fiction as to be unremarkable. This is a well-trodden emotional journey for all the participants in it.

Hannah's family story becomes interwoven with that of the Devil, when she is sent to stay with her grandfather for a while. The Devil is trying to deal with a coup aimed at unseating him, and enlists the assistance of that same grandfather. This allows Marshall Smith to take the domestic story on an abrupt jink to the side. Introducing these supernatural elements lets him explore the family's crisis in an allegorical manner, focusing on humanity's ability to cause harm to family and friends. It lacks no less of the emotional punch and impact of a traditional literary fiction treatment of these issues, but is delivered with a wry, sideways smile.

This is a heart-warming book that uses traditional genre tools to tackle a traditional literary fiction topic.

Goodreads rating: 3*

Good quick read. An easy way to pass time while waiting at the aiport. I liked all the characters and the story rolled on at a good pace. I guess I was expecting something like a coming of age story, but apart from a few throw-away references at the end, the book wasn't really the story of Hannah Green. So while it was better than an angsty coming of ages story, it could have been called the Adventures of Vaneclaw: Accident Imp Extraordinaire and it could have been the same story.

What would you do if you found out your grandfather was actually over 200 years old and had been friends with the Devil for the majority of his life?

That’s the situation Hannah Green finds herself in during Hannah Green And Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. Amidst the falling apart of her parents marriage, she has to travel from one end of California to the other (with a quick trip to Siberia), to help the Devil figure out where all the evil energy from the world is going, because he’s sure as hell not getting any of it (pun definitely intended).

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed when I started this book as I hadn’t realised it was YA. I don’t know if it’s definitely meant to be YA, but it has some tendencies towards the genre.

But I need to stop being so damn judgemental against some genres because I bloody loved this book. It was amazing. The first thing that came into my mind was that it’s a mix between Terry Pratchett and Roald Dahl, with a little bit of Jasper Fforde thrown in for good measure. If you don’t think that’s a fantastic combination then you shouldn’t be allowed to read books ( I jest, everyone should be allowed to read books, no matter their awful opinions).

It’s easy to compare this to Terry Pratchett and books like Soul Music; the link between evil and grandfathers is apparent in both. But the difference is that the Devil is nowhere near as likeable as Pratchett’s Death. He is most definitely evil, taking pleasure in the discomfort, pain and death of people on Earth. But what Michael Marshall Smith manages to do is make him still somewhat appealing. He’s the bad guy but you’re still gonna like him, and root for him. His dry wit is also hilarious and makes you look forward to all his scenes.

He’s not the only character that has more depth than you might think. Hannah herself is a fantastic narrator. Children come with the danger of being too precocious and annoying, and Hannah’s demanding and inquisitive nature had the possibility of being just that. But she’s not, she’s actually ridiculously endearing. She’s very smart and determined, even when the adults around her are dithering a bit. She’s not afraid to ask the questions that we all want to know the answers to.

Her parents are possibly the most relatable of all the characters. Their situation is heartbreaking and so real that it’s hard not to sympathise with them. They’re in the process of splitting up, but it’s not a dramatic ending. It’s clearly been a slow release, they’ve been drifting apart for a while and it just needed one of them taking the first step of admitting it and walking away. The fact that there’s no huge fight, and no one to blame, makes their relationship so much more accessible. Everyone has been in a relationship like that with someone in their life.

It’s these more human parts of the book that make it all the more enjoyable. These are the mundane parts of Hannah’s life that she cares more about than the supernatural goings-on around her. It’s ultimately a story about a family trying to work out who they are and how to deal with life., it just happens to be told through demons and Hellish themes.

There’s not too much more I can say about this book without giving too much away. But one thing I do want to talk about is Smith's writing. It's stunning. There are no other words for it. It’s just stunning. His descriptions are so unusual, yet make so much sense, it’s amazing.

‘An odour came off the gate. Acrid but insidious, the kind of smell that would pick your pocket rather than rob you at gunpoint.’

‘They felt like the emptiness in the last drawer you check when you've been searching for something you loved but which is now lost.’

They’re the kind of descriptions that make the writer in me so happy to read them, while being so jealous that I’m never going to be able to come up with something as good.

Basically, this book is genius. Just read it. Stop reading reviews for it and just read the damn book. Now.

Hannah's parents have split up and they are all having trouble coping with the new situation. In an attempt to get some space to adjust her father sends her to stay with her grandfather, an eccentric wanderer who just happens to work for the Devil. The Devil. The problem is that the Devil has just emerged from several years of "sleep" and things have gone wrong in his absence, the essential balance of evil in the world is shifting and he needs his old employee's help. Oh, and there's a demon cheeky, simple-minded demon called Vaneclaw that happens to resemble a large mushroom.

There's a slightly rocky start and Marshal Smith takes a little while to find his feet in the narrative and to establish the tone. For a while I wondered how the strands were going to come together when the tone was sometimes wildly different. Hannah is an enjoyable protagonist sitting on just the right side of precocious, she entertainingly cynical and world-weary without losing her childish qualities. The Devil is the Devil and he does Bad Things, but this is the devil in his most relatable form, a part of the necessary balance between good and evil . He's bad, but he's not all bad. My unease was with the trio of criminals that form the antagonist group, some of their segments were really rather dark, in a way that I found difficult to reconcile with the more typical YA fare of the rest of the narrative. It's a problem that was never fully resolved with moments of unexpected violence that were just a shade too much.

Aside from this I found myself enjoying the story more and more. The interactions between the Devil and his dry deadpan delivery and Vaneclaw's silly puns and asinine comments are amusing and the relationship between the Devil and Hannah's grandfather in an inventive take on the age-old trope of making deals with the Devil, though a little more development would have been very welcome. Hannah is funny, brave hero out to save her parents and the world while grappling with the changes wrought by their split. She wants them to reunite but a conflict of potentially biblical proportions puts everything into perspective, even for an eleven-year-old! Once the tone (mostly) settled it was a fun, pacy ride with enough originality and style to make it truly enjoyable. The balance between the morals of the story, the sly humour and the acknowledgement of the darkness out there in the world definitely placed it in the better class of YA, with just enough depth to keep young readers and adults (children at heart) happy.

‘I need a hero. I’m holding out for a hero’ With apologies to Jim Steinman and Bonnie Tyler you may just need Hannah Green.
Apparently unphased by the changes in her life which are significant and possibly dramatic, Hannah steps up to be the hero or as we trendily say being the change you want to see in others.
Life has become a shadow of its previous happy self as Hannah’s mother walked out some months ago. It continues in more or less the same way but has become a series of mundane events. Her grandfather visits and tuts over her science homework and her trendy and tattooed Aunt Zoe, Dad’s younger sister visits, offering much but delivering nothing.
‘The kitchen table goes all big. The dishwasher sounds too loud’ and her screen-writer father cannot write himself out of his increasingly pale version of existence. When he suggests she goes to stay with Grandad for a while she knows that whilst will miss him she must grasp at a chance of adventure and anything for a change.
Finding out your Grandad isn’t necessarily who you think he is and is friends with the Devil himself, is a big learning curve. Taking her experience in her stride Hannah is a role model for us all and if anyone can heal the universe I’d put my faith in her.
The Devil has come out to find out what is wrong with the world, despite the evil and horror of modern life he’s not getting served the power this creates. He seeks out the engineer responsible for the machine which is supposed to channel it. In doing so he sets off a chain of events involving Hannah and her Grandfather. It’s time to save the world.
This is a great read with plenty of little ‘moments’ where we can ‘get’ Hannah. Her situation in a very broken home is something we can relate to and empathise with. The comedy of the piece also shines through with the supporting characters including the invisible talking mushroom being very much part of its enduring charm. Set in contemporary America this is just a step away from any kid’s normal life with the everyday mundanity set against the series of extraordinary events. Perfect then for escaping from our own lives and jumping into an adventure we could be part of if reality shifted ever so slightly.
This is a book to savour. There’s even sympathy for the devil. Hannah’s parents are not totally side-lined either as often happens in books where kids must battle through while deprived of their parents.
I really did enjoy this escapade and its ways amazing to ponder on how some people have these wonderful ideas in their brains trying to jump out. I’m wondering also if this might become a continuing series as I think Hannah is the girl to put the world to rights.

I’m a huge fan of Michael Marshall Smith. I’ve read a lot of his stuff under his pseudonyms including Michael Smith and MM Smith. I prefer his crime fiction.

I thought Hannah Green and her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence was an amazing book, crazy, nonsensical at times and utterly delightful.

Although I started the book a few days ago, I didn’t properly sit down until today and read it in one setting, unable to stop. I was completely addicted.

I loved everything about this book. The characters are fantastic, made of flesh and blood, adorable and sympathetic, even the Devil and the Imp. I loved Hannah the most. I love the way the book is narrated by an omnipotent third person, like the voice of God or something. I don’t read this style very often and it works really well here.

For me this book is DNF which don’t happen often for me, the problem is the story has just not held my attention or interest. I don’t think that the story is terrible I think that maybe I shouldn’t have requested it as it is not something that I am particularly interested. The story centres around Hannah whose parents are going through a divorce so she is sent to stay with her Grandad for a while. Whilst Hannah is there she finds out that her Grandad has made a deal with the devil and they go on an adventure with him. Now whilst all that sounds very interesting the pace is far too slow and it feels like you are constantly waiting for something to happen. In addition to this I failed to make a connection to any of the characters and didn’t really care what happened to them. I am going to give this book 1 star and I’ll probably one of the only person who does, but I have to go with how I felt.

Eleven year old Hannah Green finds the world isn’t quite as mundane as she thought, when it turns out her grandfather is in league with the devil. The world is out of kilter, and the unlikely trio have to work together to put things right. A thoroughly enjoyable read, with great descriptions, bags of humour and believable characters.

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence is a new standalone novel from Michael Marshall Smith. It’s something of a coming-of-age tale, as the young Hannah Green travels with her Grandfather and the Devil (yes, the actual Devil) in an effort to hold the seams of reality together, and help her parents work out their relationship.

Hannah is the young girl whose existence is apparently so mundane. She lives in a world of routine – of trips to other parts of the state, in the back of the car whilst her parents talk. Of school – lessons, bells, and so on. It’s a universe of certainty, where each day holds close to something of the previous. That routine is shattered when Hannah’s parents decide to stop living together. Smith manages to give Hannah a unique, persuasive voice. She’s only eleven, and so lacks some of the context that an older reader may get, as her parents relationship gently fails. But she’s bright, inquisitive, and not afraid to ask questions – and if there’s an innocence there, it never grates. There’s some great characters floating through this text, but Hannah is probably the most challenging, and the most convincing – a girl thrown into situations she doesn’t entirely understand, determined to make the best of them, to be treated as if her opinions matter, and do the right thing.

Where Hannah is a gentle and amusing protagonist, her parents are something else entirely. Smith paints a picture of a relationship which isn’t in crisis, per se, but in slow decline. There’s an energy to it, a sense of individuals struggling to define their emotional connection to each other – or redefine it. If Hannah’s character is one of the highlights of the text, this relationship – febrile, built on memories and now in flux – is another. The silences, the justifications, the sense of drifting further apart, of quietly needing different things, is well-crafted and feels genuine.

Then, of course, there’s the Devil. He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a nice person. Still, as Hannah and her family have layers, so does this personification of malice, whose efforts to work out why he’s no longer as powerful as he should be are entangled with Hannah and her family. The Devil’s straightforward, politely expressed spite is a gem – each appearance mixes polished banter with an aura of lethality. The Devil is joined by an “Accident Imp”, also described as a talking mushroom, which attaches to people and gets them into, well, accidents. As a foil to the Devil’s polish, the imp is a gem – avuncular, chatty, aware of its low status in the Devil’s er…organisation – and prone to mishaps of its own. There’s a warm comic timing between the two, and the imp’s interactions with other people are equal parts hilarious and charming, inhabitant of Hell though he is.

Along with Hannah’s grandfather, a man with a penchant for machinery and mystery, this motley collective make up a thoroughly enjoyable cast. The frustration and emotional devastation of Hannah’s parents is palpable and real, at least as much as the whimsy and determination of Hannah herself, the Devil’s temper and penchant for overwhelming force, or the accident imp’s surprisingly insightful banter.

That they operate, mostly, in the real world is helpful – the vistas of Nothern California are lovingly described when required, and the small town life which Hannah leads really does seem to come alive as one meanders through it alongside the story. From a multiplicity of coffee shops and forests, through to the environs of Hannah’s home, each environment feels both strange and familiar, coming off the page with vivacity and verve.

The plot – well, no spoilers, but I think it works rather well. Hannah’s journey is one which encompasses both an effort to save the world, and one to understand her family. Both these threads are fascinating in their own right, and where they wend and intersect with each other, it becomes impossible to stop turning pages. This is a story of a journey, and of a family, as much as it is one of demons, ancient pacts and talkative mushrooms. I’d have to say that these, and the sheer imagination deployed, make this book one that is very much worth picking up.

Hannah's world is turned upside down when her parents split up - just as the Devil wakes from a long sleep to discover someone is stealing the evil deeds of humanity. And Hannah and her family will be central to putting this right. For various definitions of right. He is the Devil, after all.

This is a book that's perfectly fine, but I can't help but be a little disappointed after many years waiting for a new outing from MMS.

While this is charming and exhibits Smith's trademark humour and ability to home in on the heart, I mostly found it a little bit too young for my taste - perhaps more young adult than adult with its eleven year old heroine and clean lines. That said, it's oddly jarring in some of its juxtapositions of tone; in places perhaps bordering on too grown up for an 11 year old like Hannah. Consequently, I'm not sure who it's intended for but I hope it finds an audience to bring a new generation to MMS and his dark worlds. I also hope there's a more grown up book in his future.

I received this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

IMG_20170818_175921_549

Four stars out of five.

Hannah Green is an eleven year old whose mundane life suddenly becomes irrevocably unmundane, when she learns her grandfather is somewhat older than they all suspected and, despite being long past the age of retirement, has a very interesting employer.

I was attracted to this book by its cover and title; the cover was eye catching in its lush colours and the title curious in its juxtaposition (to the picture on the cover).

It is a book that focuses a great deal on relationships; on how they can be built upon, or picked apart, and how they can directly and indirectly affect those around them. Smith employs the most fantastic metaphors to express the emotions of his characters and their reflections upon their relationships with various people.

I think the thing that struck me most about this book was Smith’s artistry with words;

There was a clunking sound, low and somehow awful. It was like that feeling you get when you realize you’ve done something wrong, and deeply terrible, and won’t ever be able to take it back.

It was wonderful the way in which Smith was able to recognise these incredibly human sensations and carry them across into his writing. It added that little bit of extra depth to his writing, made his characters that little bit more human and relatable (even showing the human sides to characters who were distinctly not human)

Smith has managed to achieve a well constructed balance in this story; there are moments that are deep and make you think, but these are countered well by moments that are light and downright funny. The writing, the dialogue, is full of light and dark; cleverly mirroring the plot and it’s complex characters.

I would recommend this book if you like the kind of stories that blend the everyday with the fantastic; I’ve seen a lot of people compare Smith with Neil Gaiman but I would add that the writing is quite similar to Tom Holt too.

I absolutely loved this, and want to buy it for every teenager (& adult) I know. I hadn't heard of Michael Marshall (Smith) before, but definitely want to check out his back catalogue ASAP.

Much like Jeff Noon, whose new book I also recently had from Netgalley, Michael Marshall Smith was an SF writer I read a lot when I first came to London. And then, like Noon, he vanished – though in this case it was hiding in plain sight, dropping the ‘Smith’ and turning to thrillers. To which I never followed him, because I don’t really get thrillers, and the plots had generally been the thing I liked least about his books anyway. Apparently the Smith returned once before, for a 2007 novel I missed, but here it is again, attached to a title which seems distinctly YA. I mean, a title like that, you expect a rather whimsical story about some kid dealing with everyday issues, don’t you? Say, an eleven-year-old living in Santa Cruz whose parents’ marriage is falling apart?

And funnily enough, that’s exactly what this is. Except that there’s also another plot strand about how the Devil has been having a nap, and certain things have got away from him in the meantime, and it’s probably not giving too much away to say that this will dovetail with the story of Hannah and her parents. The whole is told in something of the same fabulist, self-aware tone as Valente's Fairyland books (though this is not quite such strong wine) - but then Smith always did have a gift for hilarious descriptions, he’s just tilting it a little more fantasy and a bit less SF here (not that he was ever too scrupulous a respecter of that boundary anyhow). I was particularly keen on the description of Big Sur, though I don’t really want to spoil that; also this one: "The house was silent. Oddly, noticeably, ostentatiously silent, in the way houses are when you catch them unawares, as if they've recently stopped doing something secretive and weird, and the furniture has only just got back into its usual positions.” Or how about "She was even more tired when they eventually landed at the other end, but tired in that wide-eyed, brittle way that feels like you’re completely not tired and will never be tired again but on the other hand if someone is rude to you you are likely to bash them over the head with a brick until they are completely flat.” You get the idea. The sort of thing whose appeal depends a lot less on the age of a reader than their sharing a certain wry sensibility. Though I suspect the recurring image of everyone's life as an act of writing will always read more melancholy to those of us with more pages already irretrievably filled in.

Not at all what I would have expected, in summary. But recognisably the same writer, and still a lot of fun. Especially when it concerns the Devil and his sidekick (himself part of a whole intriguing and barely-glimpsed Infernal ecology).

It's great to see Michael Marshall donning the Smith part of his name again. The SF novels he published under that byline are among my very favourites, funny, sassy, imaginative and clever. This new book carries on that tradition, although it's not really SF, more a tale of higher powers interfering with mortal(ish) lives. Hannah Green is a young girl living in Santa Cruz who takes refuge from the breakup of her parents' marriage in staying with her eccentric grandfather. In another strand of the plot, there's a guy walking round who seems to be locating evildoers and then out-evilling them. What's he up to? What's his connection with Hannah's grandfather?

Anything more would be too spoilery, but you can be assured that this lives up to the reputation of the earlier MMS books. If I had to grumble, I'd say that tonally it can be a bit weird - there are long stretches where I was thinking that my bookworm nine year old daughter would really love this, and then there's a sudden burst of casual violence that drives those thoughts right out. Nevertheless, it's a fine read. It's funny, inventive, and reads like a modern fairytale. It also does a good job of making a good guy out of possibly the least likely candidate ever for such a role. If the lead character of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens had been an eleven year old Californian girl, it might have turned out a bit like this, and that's pretty good praise in my book.