Thursday, 29 August 2024

Beginnings

A couple of years ago, I wrote about endings, and how important they were for really making the book stick in your mind. I presented a few of my favourites.

But beginnings are equally, if not more, important. After all, if you don’t like the beginning, you won’t want to read to the end. As I’ve grown older, though, I’ve become increasingly impatient with them. I can take down and then replace a book on the shelf after just a few sentences. (It used to be a few pages; now it’s just sentences.)

What I’m looking for is not impact – one of those three-word ‘whack-you-in-the-face’ sentences * – but a sentence that makes me want to discover what comes next. A sentence that doesn’t try to grab me but that lures me in. That makes me want to find out more.

What follows are three of my favourites.

 

 

My earliest memories are a confusion of hilly fields and dark, damp stables, and rats that scampered along the beams above my head. But I remember well enough the day of the horse sale. The terror of it stayed with me all my life.


 

 

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.

 


 

 

In 1928 my foot was hurting all the time, so they took it off and gave me an aluminium one that only hurt about three-quarters of the time. It would be all right for a bit, and then any one of about fifty things would start it off and it would give me hell.


 

 

* I've recently discovered an American crime writer, Don Winslow, whose books are pretty much nothing BUT whack-you-in-the-face sentences. And I find them impossible to put down. Ho hum!

Tuesday, 27 August 2024

Book Launch Shenanigans, by Claire Fayers

 August has been a busy month with the launch of my Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins, and a very tight writing deadline for my next book. 

One of the ghost stories in the book is set in Bookish in Crickhowell (a fabulous independent bookshop that is apparently haunted by a ghost called Muriel) so it was the obvious place for the launch party.

Preparations started well in advance. My friend made me a charm bookmark to celebrate my previous book and I liked it so much I commissioned her to make a batch of themed bookmarks to give away on the night.


I'd never had a launch party where the shop sold tickets before so I was worried nobody would come, but I shouldn't have worried. A week before the event, we were sold out. 

Inspired by the drama workshop at Folly Farm last year, I turned part of a story into a script and roped in some friends for a bit of amateur dramatics. my husband was on hand to capture the result on film.


It's nice to do something interactive at an events, and I've always loved making story postcards - the book cover on one side, a writing prompt on the other. This time, Firefly Press went one step better with a colour-in book cover. 


My DIY ghost story on the back  has produced a surprising variety of stories. I've used it in every event so far, for adults and children.


And of course, there had to be cake.


All in all, it's been a fantastic launch month. Now back to writing!


Monday, 26 August 2024

The Seal on the Beach, by Mara Bergman - review by Sue Purkiss


Full disclosure: Mara Bergman is an excellent editor as well as a writer, and some years ago, she edited two of my books, The Willow Man and Warrior King. But much as I like Mara, I wouldn't be reviewing her book if I didn't think it was something very special.

It tells the story of Maggie, a little girl who is on holiday at the seaside with her aunt and uncle. We soon find out that, much as she is enjoying her holiday, all is not well in Maggie's world; her baby brother is seriously ill, and her mother is consequently having to spend alot of time in the hospital - with the baby, and away from Maggie.

One day, she goes for a walk with her uncle and aunt and spots a baby seal, alone on the beach. Worried, they tell the lifeguards, who are reassuring: the mothers often leave their babies alone on the beach while they go hunting for food: this one's mother will come back, they assure Maggie - everything will be fine.

But Maggie isn't so sure. She feels a connection to the seal - she dreams about it at night - and she is worried about it. She goes back to check on it, and it is still there, but it's becoming listless and sad. The lifeguards, prompted by her, call the RSPCA, who came to the rescue and take it away to be cared for.

So then the two stories - of the sick baby seal and Maggie's sick baby brother - run in parallel, and are both resolved happily at the end.

It's a simple enough story, so what makes it stand out? Partly, of course, it's the emotional heft - it's not overdone, but we very much feel for Maggie. But it's also, I think, to do with the solid, real world which Maggie inhabits. When I first read this story, just last night, I emerged feeling that I had been inside this world and out of my own - and for me, that's one of the most important things I want from a book: I want to be immersed in a different world to such an extent that for a while, I quite forget my own. That this happens is partly because of the strength of the story - but also because of the space which is taken by Mara to describe the detail of this world and make it real. For example:

Then a walk along the sand's

    pebbles and seaweed.

Maggie found a bright yellow shell

    and a smooth white stone,

Like a gull's egg.

    Another, sleek black and blue.

It's seen, of course, through a child's eye: the colours and the textures are what Maggie notices - she doesn't know what kind of shell it is: she doesn't need to, and neither do we.

And notice too the way the words are set out: this is not quite poetry, and not quite prose. It's somewhere in between the two. (Like that bit of the shore between the sea and the land - liminal.) And it creates a spell, an atmosphere, which again binds this world together. It is, literally, enchanting.

There is one thing that puzzles me. Maggie's father is not mentioned at all - where is he? The only hint I could find was this:

She wished she could make 

    everything all right, the way it used to be. 

Before the baby got sick.

Before

    everything

        went

            wrong.

Was Maggie's father one of the things that went 'wrong'?

I hope I've not given the impression, though, that this is a heavy, message-laden book. It really isn't. It's full of the delights of the seaside, the joy of a child's feelings for other small animals, and it's full of hope.


And I haven't mentioned the illustrations, by Brita Granstrom, which are just lovely, and full of details that children will love to pick out. Really, a beautiful book.

NB This post first appeared on my book-reviewing blog, A Fool on a Hill, a few weeks ago.

Thursday, 22 August 2024

Twenty Questions, written by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Christian Robinson, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

 

            

This is a picture book quite different from most. It doesn’t tell a story … but it sows the seeds of many many potential stories. Those seeds just need a child’s imagination to work on them, maybe within a group, in order to grow and flourish. I wonder what those stories will be? 

            Sixteen spreads of bold collage and print and drawn images by Christian Robinson work with twenty questions set by Mac Barnett. 







            Do questions have to have answers? That’s up to you. Is there a right answer? That’s up to you. Might there be multiple answers, surprising answers, unlikely answers? Again, up to you. 

            Perfect for any imaginative child. 

Tuesday, 20 August 2024

Some Writing Opportunities for Children and Young People - Joan Lennon


Albert Ankar Schoolgirl doing Homework 
(though I'd like to think she might just as likely be writing a story or a poem ...) 1865 Wiki commons

As a writer, I try to break up the long haul marathons (novels and full-length non-fiction) with sprints. I set myself the task of submitting something short (a poem, a story, flash fiction, micro fiction) once a month. (Okay, so it's often nothing for months and then a big wodge of submitting to catch up, but still.)

How many keen young writers do you know who want to start by writing Lord of the Rings, and then never finish? Well, here are some opportunities that might inspire them to have a go at something a bit shorter and a bit more finishable.

This resource is for children and young people based in Scotland. If you know of similar opportunities in other parts of the world for children and young people to flex their creative writing muscles, please put them in the comments below.

Young writers, I salute you! (Now get stuck in.)


Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

Sunday, 18 August 2024

The patchwork of memory - by Lu Hersey

My partner moved in with me recently, and to avoid either of us falling over furniture or stubbing our toes on unexpected boxes, we needed to clear a lot of stuff. Worse, my father has had to move into a care home, which means I'm trying to sort and clear stuff at his place too - which is all making me think minimalism is blooming good idea. 

But there are always some things you want to keep, even if they serve no practical purpose. Inside a big wooden chest I found a patchwork quilt, made long ago by my grandmother's family (seriously long ago - she was born in 1881).  Grandma was the 13th of 14 children, and I remember her telling me that anyone who visited the house when she was young had to sew a piece onto the quilt before they were allowed to leave. She said the tiny purple velvet pieces were from the mourning collar and bows she wore attached to her clothing when her father died. In fact to her, every fragment of fabric in the intricate patchwork represented a memory of a dress or blouse, or something from the household like tablecloths - a design made of memories of her family and friends, gathered by the fireside in Yorkshire, long ago.


I thought about why I wanted to keep it, now it's too fragile to use on a bed or hang on a wall. What does it mean to me? Perhaps not as much as it meant to Grandma, but it instantly conjures my memory of her  - an old woman I loved dearly, who came to live with us when I was a child. The smell of Foxes Glacier Mints and 4711 cologne. And how this patchwork quilt always rested at the end of her bed. But what will it mean to my children when I go? Even less. They might remember me telling them about my grandmother and how many brothers and sisters she had, that's all. 


Anyway, all this stuff moving has got me thinking about our memories, and the things that are important to us.

Take my father. At 96, living in a care home, his memory gets patchier by the day. After he's had a nap (he generally has at least a couple every day), he thinks it's the next day when he wakes up and demands another breakfast. The care home staff obligingly present him with one, regardless of the time - which seems like a good way to deal with someone whose reality is different and who lives two or three days in one. Like a hobbit, he has at least two breakfasts, as well as elevenses and lunch, afternoon tea and a supper or two. He also believes it's his birthday at least once every month, and I've started sending presents to avoid him getting upset and thinking we've forgotten him.

But his house, which he lived in for 50 years, refusing to move while either of his wives (not simultaneously) lived with him there, means nothing at all to him now. He never mentions it. His life is his breakfasts and birthdays, and lugubriously lamenting his forthcoming death (though he's actually not in any pain, and is well cared for). All that stuff he hoarded, that garden he worked on, those books that fill his bookcases - all meaningless to him. 

The main thing I'm learning from all this is that the things people insist on hanging onto are mostly very unimportant. Maybe keep them if they hold a memory of someone dear to you, but don't expect that object, whatever it is, to mean much to anyone else. There'll probably come a time when it won't even mean anything to you. In the end, only the people and pets you hold (or held) dear are important. (And breakfasts, if you're my dad)

For now I'll keep the patchwork quilt and maybe find some way to preserve it - a piece of folk art that people might find interesting. But the stories, like the people who made it, are long gone. That's just the way of things. How very cluttered the world would be if it wasn't.


Lu Hersey

Web: Writing the Magic

twitter/X: LuWrites

Threads: luwrites


Thursday, 15 August 2024

Wordsmithing symbols, like you do - Rowena House





I got a handle on symbolism this week. Not in any grand sense, but a working definition that can serve the WIP.

As a literal person, symbolism isn’t a subject I’m inclined to engage with but needs must, so I turned to Penguin’s Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, having been confused by the way John Truby uses the term in his writing guide, The Anatomy of Story.

The Penguin dictionary defines a symbol as ‘an object, animate or inanimate, which represents or stands for something else.’ It can be a thing – scales represent justice, doves peace etc – or an action or gesture. A raised fist symbolizes victory, defiance, or power (in my book, at least).

So far so good.

Literary symbols, apparently, ‘combine an image with a concept’ and may be ‘public or private, universal or local’. A journey to the underworld is (according to Penguin) universal as a symbol, though what it symbolises – a redemptive odyssey, for example, or a dark night of the soul – varies.

Fair enough. Onwards...

The dictionary helpfully points out words themselves are also symbols which, at one level, makes this post ‘symbolic’. *eye roll emoji* Let’s leave semiotics aside, shall we?

Blood in Macbeth symbolises guilt and violence.

In Hamlet, disease and weeds represent corruption and decay.

But then...

‘In King Lear, clothes symbolize appearance and authority.’

What?

Okay, elite clothing is designed to express authority, crowns and ermine and whatnot, but how do they symbolise appearance? They are appearance. Unless the dictionary means ‘the appearance of authority’ which is a bit redundant, in my not-so-humble journalistic opinion.

It’s like Truby saying Moses’s tablets of stone represent the ten commandments. Surely, they are the things the commandments are written on, mineral slabs with chiselled words. They might represent concepts about a supreme being’s unwavering will and rule over humanity, but how do they represent themselves – unless we’re back to semiotics again?

[I do hope no theologian reads this and feels compelled to ‘educate’ me. It’s a creative writing blog, with zero spiritual significance.]

Anyway. I’ve decided to treat symbols as another type of subtext. They are things or actions which carry meaning to the reader through connotation.

Some of these connotations are self-evident enough to be considered universal – AKA, they don’t need explaining within the particular context of a story.

For example, the seventeenth century assize trial on which my WIP is based took place in a castle. I’d bet two groats and a tankard of your finest, barkeep, that the justice system chose that location deliberately. 

The historic power and control exercised by the military from their fortress was coopted by the civilian authorities to symbolise their power and control over the local population. Thus the castle is symbolic as well as a girt great pile of stones.

My protagonist is a pamphleteer, so his pen symbolises his trade. If he broke that pen in two, I’m guessing most readers would get the point at once: he’s had enough.

I’m thinking of using an extended symbol as a closing scene. The particular becoming universal through a piece of technology. I think it could work, and at the moment it certainly seems preferable to convoluted explanations or contrived dialogue.

So that’s a tick. I’ve got my ‘symbol web’ as Truby calls it and can explain what I mean by it should anyone ask.

Yay.

For those who care about these things, I’m sticking it out on Twitter at @HouseRowena, defending the ‘town square’ for the wokerati.

Meanwhile, whittering about the witchy work-in-progress at Rowena House Author on Meta’s slightly less toxic FB space. Have a good one.







Wednesday, 14 August 2024

Summer Quiz Answers by Lynne Benton

 I do hope you enjoyed last month’s quiz.  For those of you who had a go, and even for those who didn't but were interested, here are the answers:


1          Anne Shirley                                    H         L M Montgomery

2          Jemima Puddleduck                         K         Beatrix Potter

3          Tom Long                                         A         Philippa Pearce

4          Lucy Pevensey                                 C          CS Lewis

5          Petrova Fossil                                  D         Noel Streatfeild

6          Jo March                                          P          Louisa May Alcott

7          William Brown                                J          Richmal Crompton

8          Bilbo Baggins                                  N         JRR Tolkein

9          Katy Carr                                         F          Susan Coolidge

10        Tracy Beaker                                   L          Jacqueline Wilson

11         Mary Lennox                                  B         Frances Hodgson Burnett

12        Artemis Fowl                                   Q         Eoin Colfer

13        Percy Jackson                                  O         Rick Riordan

14        Charlie Bucket                                 I           Roald Dahl

15        Mary Poppins                                  S          PL Travers

16        Mr Toad                                           T          Kenneth Graham

17        Cruella de Ville                              M         Dodie Smith

18        Wendy Darling                               E          JM Barrie

19        Alice Liddell                                   R         Lewis Carroll

20       Christopher Robin                           G         AA Milne


Congratulations to everyone who got them all right!  ( know there were one or two tricky ones in there.)

Sorry there’s no further blog today – I’m in the closing stages of finishing my novel, and haven't got time or head-space to come up with something new.  Enjoy the rest of your summer, folks!

Website: lynnebenton.com


Tuesday, 13 August 2024

Mary K Harris -- an underrated writer by Sheena Wilkinson

Previous posts on this blog -- particularly Paul May's wonderful series about past Carnegie Medal winners, have reminded me of many old favourites, which is possibly why recently, at the Bristol Conference (essential for anyone who’s interested in vintage children’s books), I did a talk on the English writer Mary K. Harris (1905-1966). I’ve noticed that people either say, Never heard of her, or Oh gosh, I love her! I’ve so far met nobody who’s read Harris’s books without them having left a positive impression. 


Mary K Harris is, I would argue, one of the most undervalued children’s writers of the mid-20th century. She was not without recognition in her day, nominated twice for the Carnegie Medal. She published 16 books for both adults and children, between 1941 and 1968, of which several, as far as I could discover, seem only to have been published in America. Certainly I couldn’t find any copies. Her British-published books are long out of print, but can be found online. 


However, not much else can, which makes me doubly grateful to the Encyclopaedia of Girls’ School Stories, edited by Sue Sims and Hilary Clare, for supplying more information. Born in Harrow, Middlesex, in 1905, Harris was educated at Harrow County School for Girls though she is not listed in the school’s list of distinguished alumnae. Her parents separated, and she lived with her semi-invalid and demanding mother. They weren’t well off, Mary did all the housework, and even after her mother’s death, she looked after an elderly aunt until she herself died, of throat cancer, at the young age of 60. 

It doesn’t sound very cheery, does it? And though her books are delightful, they definitely reflect a life of compromise and maybe sadness – their world view is not an especially jolly one.

Harris’s novels are a mixture of home and school stories. Gretel at St Bride’s (1941) and Henrietta at St Hilary’s (1953) are set in traditional girls’ boarding schools, with the first being most notable for its heroine being an Austrian refugee. 



In Emily and the Headmistress (1958) Emily is left at her boarding school over the holidays. Harris likes writing about empty schools, evoking vividly the atmosphere of a building left without people. Given how mean some of her own characters are, and her comments about the horrible children she was at school with herself, perhaps she preferred them that way! Emily is interesting as it foreshadows her interest in older characters as more than just necessary background – like Noel Streatfeild, she’s very good at adults generally. 




Seraphina (1960), Penny’s Way (1963) and The Bus Girls (1965) are set in girls’ grammars, with none of the heroines quite fitting in – Seraphina, an orphan, is more or less dumped in the school’s boarding house.Penny, living above a fish and chop shop, struggles in the bottom form of her grammar school, while Bus Girl Hetty is delicate, and has a single, seamstress mother, struggling to make ends meet and almost afraid of the clever daughter who has grown far beyond her. 

In Jessica on her Own, Jessica, the middle and difficult daughter, goes to the secondary modern where, though it’s never stated – a great deal is unsaid in Harris’s books – it’s clear she is posher than the average pupil. This is Harris’s most modern book. There is talk of drunken orgies and Freedom from Hunger marches. A far cry from the Chalet School or Malory Towers.

When I chose to talk about Harris, my own memories of reading her were rather vague. I remembered well-written, thoughtful books, where the main action was interior rather than exterior. I always linked her in my mind with Antonia Forest, with whom she shared a publisher, Faber, and whose books were actually advertised on the back of several of Harris’s novels. 

And certainly I, a Forest lover, was influenced by that subliminal ‘if you like this, you’ll like that’ messaging.




The two writers are very different – Forest’s milieu is much posher, but they share a deep exploration of character and a refusal to romanticise either school life or human nature. 

There’s also a kind of sadness in her books which reminds me of Nicola Marlow’s inarticulate grasp of the complexities of the human condition when she learns the Latin phrase sunt lacrimae rerum.  In Mary K. Harris’s books, there are always tears of things. But strictly of the unshed variety – a kind of quiet desperation rather than an old-fashioned stiff-upper-lip. Her heroines suffer. Not exactly the torments of the damned, and they don’t have to save the world or anything tiresome and high concept like that, but they all suffer loneliness, inadequacy, unpopularity – learning early the lesson that life can be difficult. 



Which I hope is in no way to suggest her books are miserable – far from it! She’s a prose stylist of wit and charm. She can be very funny – in the sharpness of her observations, the pithiness of her dialogue, or in some of the pickles her luckless heroines stumble into. For example, when the ever-helpful Penny agrees to go to the dentist in place of her ghastly friend Mavis, believing he will find one mouthful of teeth to be much the same as another, and then finds herself with a new filling and a bill for a pound – a lot of money in 1963, when you’re only 13 and you live in the flat above the chip shop. 



Her settings are both vividly evoked and varied, both geographically and socially: though we have no great extremes: nobody is either very rich or very poor. Seraphina is set in a small midlands town, The Bus Girls in a windswept East Anglia. In Penny’s Way the family move, for financial reasons which are never really spelt out – possibly because neither Penny nor the child reader would understand – to a flat in a busy high street, whose sights, smells and sounds are vividly rendered as Penny hurries through the lighted dusky streets. Jessica’s home is professional middle-class suburban. 

Harris has a particular ability to evoke atmosphere, should that be around the family tea table, in the dormitory of a girls’ boarding house, the bustling lamplit high street where Penny’s family live; the baking hot suburban summer of Jessica on her Own; the Suffolk marshes in The Bus GirlsIt was a little seaside town of clean colours and salty smells.

I find some of her heroines slightly reminiscent of some of Streatfeild’s more awkward characters – especially Jessica, the prickly middle child and Penny the hapless youngest in a clever family. Hetty is rather sharp and dismissive of the nervous mother who’s seeing her daughter grow far beyond her – which must have been the case for many grammar school children at that time. As so often happened, Mrs Grey never knew how to reply to Hetty’s remarks.

Harris renders with at times painful realism the lonely helplessness of being a young teenager. All three girls have families – in Hetty’s case only a mother, who love and appreciate them, though Hetty’s mother is clearly rather frightened of her. Yet they struggle with self-esteem or to find their place in their society. Their eventual triumphs are quiet ones too – the realisation that one is not quite as dim and unlikeable as one believed is about the most a Harris character can hope for. 


Seraphina, the only one to tell her story in the first person has more to grumble about than most Harris heroines, though she is blessed with a high intellect, a methodical mind and – something I was always envious of as a child – long red plaits. She’s also the only one with a romantic, children’s-bookish background – abandoned as a baby, she’s been brought up by a kind granny, whose death takes place just before the start of the book. She’s taken in by nice neighbours, but their house is as full of people and mess as it of love and welcome, and off she has to go to hairdresser Aunt Edna, who clearly doesn’t want her. 

So far, so standard classical kidlit, but Seraphina doesn't get a happy ending. She doesn’t discover a secret talent and the wonderful friend Stephanie is taken away from her by her fairytale ending. Rereading the book as an adult, I was struck by its sadness in a way I wasn’t as a child. It’s one of the loneliestbooks I’ve ever read. Seraphina tells us that her habitual neatness and competence – which don’t endear her to her new schoolmates – are in case her parents should return and claim her – she wants to be found worthy. But – sorry for the spoiler – they never do come back.

And Aunt Edna, disgusted by Seraphina’s efforts to weave a fantasy life for her mother, tells her a few home truths:

The facts are these: your mother dumped you on Gran from the day you were born, and she’s never lifted a finger for you since… Rosalie … was as hard and selfish as they make them… I’m sorry to be so blunt, but you’re fourteen now and should know the truth…

If it’s not much fun being a child in a MKH book, there’s little to look forward to when you grow up. Aunt Edna is a monster, but she probably didn’t want to take charge of her pretty sister’s sulky, bereaved teenager. Hetty’s harassed widowed mother is terrified of the telephone and often of her clever, sharp daughter; Penny’s mother is trying to adjust to living in the flat over the Fish and Chips, dealing with a demanding family; Jessica’s mother Lydia is a Cambridge graduate and former geography teacher who is clearly finding life as a wife and mother rather less exciting than she’d like – until her twin sister is killed in a car crash which probably is quite exciting though not what she’d have hoped for, leaving a traumatised orphan, Isabel, for her to bring into her own family – which she does with a great deal more alacrity than Aunt Edna, but with rather unfortunate consequences.

There are no obliging maids or nannies to help with anything; and the men aren’t up to much either. Edna is single; Hetty’s mother is widowed; Penny’s father is mostly silent, disappearing from meals when his children’s squabbling makes his ulcer play up. Jessica’s father, rather dashingly for 1968 a physiotherapist, is about the best of them but even he doesn’t do very much. 

As you’d expect, the teachers are nuanced and human too. There are kind headmistresses and fierce, sarcastic form mistresses, often bringing a sense that they might actually, for all their idiosyncrasies, be human beings. The aptly named Miss Wolff in Penny’s Way surely owes something to Antonia Forest’s Miss Cromwell. ‘There is no need to consult your watch, Sylvia. I am quite capable of being your time-keeper.’

I’m particularly fond of Jessica’s form-master Mr Berryman: He was a heavily-built man, with small beady eyes. He did not look particularly nice, but he was nice. Unfailingly kind and always cheerful, he would throw himself down on one of the ordinary school chairs without ever a thought that it might crack beneath his fourteen stone. 

As for friendship among the girls, that too is complicated. Friendships ebb and flow much as they do in real life. Seraphina makes an engaging, if chaotic friend in Stephanie, but Stephanie’s own good fortune takes her away. Well-meaning Jenny is desperate to be Seraphina’s friend, but Seraphina treats her badly, though her guilt about that, and her efforts to make up for it, are a crucial part of her self-development. 

Penny’s former friend dumped her when she was moved down to the bottom stream. Her so-called friend Mavis is jealous of Penny and always eager to take her down (‘Do I smell a fried-fishy smell somewhere?’) But the narrative voice invites sympathy for Mavis: Poor Mavis; if she went only where she was welcome, she might never go anywhere.  And Penny grows close to the much nicer Nicola instead. 

Jessica’s friend Nance is sharp and chippy, though loyal and brave – and they spend as much of the book fallen out as they do together. There are also boys to complicate the dynamics of Jessica’s class.

Davina in The Bus Girls blows hot and cold, and behaves badly not only to Hetty but to the rest of her form. When she shows Hetty at the end of the book that she does want to be her friend, I for one wondered how long it would last. 

Some of the virtues for which girls would be rewarded in more conventional stories aren’t always appreciated. I don’t like Ann particularly but she is quite the nicest person I know. 

So, how would I sum up Mary K. Harris’s books? Quiet. Thoughtful. Realistic. 

Life is tough. People are hard to read or inconsistent. Friendship is complicated. Schools – and she wrote about all sorts of schools – are difficult communities to negotiate. And being a grown-up will bring its own compromises and challenges.

There are days, Penny reflects, when home can seem quite depressingly ordinary

In their very ordinariness and their pain, Harris’s novels seem to form a bridge between the traditional school story and the grittier teen novels which would follow in their wake. 

And they express that ordinariness with wit, charm and a deep understanding of what it is to be human, and especially what it is to be female. I hope you’ll discover – or rediscover them – for yourselves. 

 

 

Monday, 12 August 2024

Slug Life by Moesha Kellaway, review by Lynda Waterhouse

 

This debut picture book is about the world’s grumpiest slug and no wonder Stevie is feeling so upset. Slugs get such a bad press; labelled as a pest, called disgusting, gross or just plain EW!

Stevie is sent to a slug self-esteem class where there are lots of fascinating facts about slugs to discover, including their scientific name Gastropod meaning stomach foot, how they evolved from snails, and shown examples of all different types of slugs including sea-slugs.

After hearing all this information Stevie says,

‘Mr Babosa says humans don’t like us

Because they think we look weird,

Our slime is yukky and we only eat their favourite plants.’

Reading this I can only hang my head and say… GUILTY AS CHARGED!

Slug Life is the first book in a new series combining great picture book storytelling with lots of information and facts that hopefully can change the way some creatures are viewed.

I learned a lot; that plants are only one part of a slug’s diet and the important role they play as decomposers. Who knew that slugs can regrow bits of themselves and have 27, 000 teeth (I have been telling everyone I meet this fact)? Slug slime is reframed as ‘liquid crystal’ which sounds magical.

Moesha’s illustrations are colourful and lively and conjure up the subterranean slug world. The text and the illustrations are perfectly pitched for a young reader to enjoy both the characters and to learn valuable information.

I have two minor niggles. There are two spellings of health centre/health center on one page. The slug love-in protest and the bringing in of the humans broke the spell of Stevie’s world for me and the speech bubble ‘AARGH IT’S A SLUGPOCALYPSE’ was a tad confusing.

Once Stevie has learned of the value of slugs the grumpiness goes away and Stevie has now a plan to spread the word to the small humans that SLUGS ARE SUPER.

I found this book in the Garden Museum in South London which is a great place to visit if you are in the area. There are always lots of activities for children

https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/

ISBN 978-1-91539-509-2

Rocket Bird Books an imprint of Harper Collins

www.rocketbirdbooks.co.uk


Tuesday, 6 August 2024

A Poet and a Lark - Two Great Carnegie winners - by Paul May

Elizabeth Acevedo has a story she tells about rats. And a poem. The story concerns a creative writing professor (and poet) who tells her that rats are not noble enough creatures to be the subject of an ode, and she needs to get more experience. You can watch Acevedo tell the story and deliver the poem on YouTube, but here's a few lines from Rat Ode.

Because you may be inelegant, simple,
a mammal bottom-feeder, always fricking famished,
little ugly thing that feasts on what crumbs fall
from the corner of our mouths, but you live
uncuddled, uncoddled, can’t be bought at Petco
and fed to fat snakes because you’re not the maze-rat
of labs: pale, pretty-eyed, trained.




Elizabeth Acevedo is not going to be told what it is OK to write about. Her novel, The Poet X, which won the Carnegie medal in 2019 is the story, told in a series of poems, of 15 year old Xiomara, a Dominican American growing up in New York City. Xiomara has a troubled relationship with her very religious mother and is very close to her twin brother Xavier. She's learnt to defend herself from the unwanted attentions of men. She can use her fists, and she does. She is also a poet who is shy about revealing that part of herself. 


This book has one of the most completely convincing first-person voices that I've come across.  If you want your novel to be about a young person who is a poet you need to be a poet to write the novel. Acevedo is that poet, so the voice is right and the poetry is right and this makes for a powerful and moving book. What's more the book is tightly plotted, the different strands of the story moving towards a climax where poetry, religion, Xiomara's relationship with her mother, her boyfriend, her twin, all come together in a satisfying way.


Maybe, though, just a teeny bit too satisfying for an adult reader. I watched an interview with Elizabeth Acevedo on the publication of her first adult novel Family Lore. It's on an American show called Let's Get Lit, and she said something I found interesting because, as you will know if you've read many of my Carnegie posts, I'm a bit puzzled by the idea of YA fiction and how it differs from A fiction. Here's what she said, talking about that adult novel:


'I think this adult book let me be really expansive in terms of language, in terms of the big questions I wanted to ask. Not that my Young Adult books don't do that, but I think I hold young people more tenderly in a way that—I think I was unflinchingly honest with this book and the things that I was asking.'


You know from the first few pages of The Poet X that, whatever happens, Xiomara is going to be OK. For me, that's a good thing. I like my detectives to be implacable, I like to turn to the end of a tense book to make sure that the protagonist comes out OK. And, to be fair, this isn't all tied up neatly like the end of one of those Shakespeare comedies where everyone gets married. The future here seems likely to have rocky patches, but you kind of know they'll all navigate them safely, and I think this is what Elizabeth Acevedo means when she says she 'holds young people tenderly.' It's not to do with the subject matter or the language, but maybe that 'unflinching honesty' in her adult fiction means that there aren't always going to be happy endings there.


I loved this book, which is unlike anything I've read before, full of memorable images, full of rhythm and life. It may have helped me that I went to a Catholic primary school and was an altar boy for years, so I get all the Catholicism, but the writing is so vivid that I don't think anyone could fail to understand what's going on. 


You can see plenty of Elizabeth Acevedo on YouTube reading her work, and also as a wonderful bonus, she reads the Audible version of the book herself. In any case, once you've heard her performing her poetry you will hear her voice constantly as you read The Poet X.




And so from New York to Yorkshire and the 2020 winner, Lark, by Anthony McGowan. This is, at the moment anyway, my favourite of all the 80-odd Carnegie winners. Lark is the final instalment of the four-part series entitled The Truth of Things but it works just fine as a standalone story. This is another utterly convincing first person voice. Nicky is a teenage boy with an older brother Kenny, who has a learning disability. The relationship between the two boys is at the heart of the book and is beautifully described in direct and simple language and cracking dialogue.


The way Anthony McGowan gives the reader almost the whole of the family's back story in just a couple of pages at the start of the book is masterful. The book opens with a short prologue. Nicky, Kenny and their terrier, Tina, are lost on a moor in the snow, so you know from the start what kind of thing you're in for, and by drawing the reader into the action at once McGowan creates the space for Nicky to explain how they've ended up in this situation, including that all-important family background. 'It wasn't supposed to be like this,' says Nicky. 'It was meant to be a stroll, a laugh. A lark.'


It's not a lark, of course, though the skylark is a central poetic symbol in the story. Anthony McGowan says, in an interview with Peters when the book was shortlisted for the Carnegie, that Nicky is 'a normal kid from a one-horse town in the West Yorkshire Badlands,' and one of the many things I love about this book (and the others in the series), is the way the characters stumble though life, making mistakes, taking wrong turnings (literally in this case) but somehow making it through because they care about, and look after each other. In this story Nicky makes every mistake that someone going out for a walk in the hills could possibly make. The boys set out late with an inadequate map, they ignore the falling snow, hoping for the best. They haven't checked a weather forecast. They have useless clothing and not enough food and drink. Then they try to take a shortcut over a hilltop in terrible visibility.


This is a genuinely terrifying story and it's remarkable that something so gripping and with so many layers is told in such clear, direct language. I kept thinking, this is so great, an eight year old could read it easily. And actually there is so much in it that an eight year old would love, like the discussion about bad language that opens the book:


"I don't bloody like it."

   "Language, Kenny," I said to my brother. "You don't have to bloody well say bloody all the bloody time. It's not clever and it's not funny."

    I copied the whining voice of Mr Kimble, our English teacher. But it was wasted on Kenny, as he didn't go to my school."

    "But it is bloody cold," Kenny said.


Forty-odd years ago we were staying with my parents at Christmas and our four year old daughter went downstairs to the kitchen where my notoriously strait-laced and irascible father was making tea. Her little voice floated up to us as we lay in bed. "Grandad, I'm BLOODY hungry." We'd never heard her say anything like that before, and I'm sure my dad's blood pressure went through the roof. But back to Lark . . .


Passages like the one I just quoted made me realise, firstly, how rare it is to hear people in books for younger children talking in natural language (ie with swearing included) and, secondly, how rare it is in YA fiction to hear the essential childishness of the young adults in question. Kenny, of course, is going to remain childish all his life in many ways, but we can also see that, for all that Nicky takes his responsibility for looking after Kenny seriously, in his playfulness and vulnerability he is still very much a child himself.


Anthony McGowan has commented on the effect that writing for Barrington Stoke had on his writing. On Barrington Stoke's website they say 'Our award-winning short novels are designed to ensure an accessible read for those who struggle and a quick win for more confident readers.' McGowan said about this: 'writing for Barrington Stoke made me focus on the bare bones of what makes us want to read: on character (above all), on the story, on the setting.'


This is the kind of writing I most admire, but the narrative is not entirely unadorned. Anthony McGowan has a great line in similes, the kind of similes that actually tell you how things are, not the clever, showy-off kind. There's the bus driver 'whose face was all screwed up as if he'd just bitten into a bad pie.' Or this: 'Our feet crunched over the snow, making a sound like you were eating biscuits.' The great thing about these images is that, as well as giving you an exact picture of what's happening they also tell you more about the character who's making the comparison.




Lark owes a lot to Barry Hines's famous book, A Kestrel for a Knave, which Ken Loach made into the even more famous film, Kes. Anthony McGowan dedicated Pike to Barry Hines 'who showed us how this might be done.' In Barry Hines's afterword to the 1999 edition of his book he talks about 'the dramatic juxtaposition of industry and nature' to be found in the mining towns of the Midlands and the North. He was often asked (presumably by southerners) how he knew so much about the countryside, coming from a place like Barnsley. Anthony McGowan's books are set in just that kind of place, though today the mines have gone. 


And that reminds me to mention that, in a way, The Truth of Things is a set of historical novels, because the stories are set 'forty years ago.' I guess that's a spoiler because you don't find that out until the end of Lark, and it must say something about the way things still are today that I never wondered when the novels were set until I read the ending.


I'd better go now as I have a lot of Olympics to watch. The Carnegie seems to have passed successfully through its grim period and moved on to something very much more hopeful. I hope that continues.