How To Be Free is out today! I am so happy that she’s officially in the world and I hope you enjoy her. She features my favourite bullet points ever, my favourite Hanna moment ever, and quite possibly one of my favourite cakes ever. There is also some excellent dangling by Eloise Taylor (play to your strengths Eloise!), Very Heartfelt Chat about dumplings, and also some Mysterious New Characters…
Thank you so much to everyone who’s enjoyed / supported / reviewed / read / gifted / requested at the library / passed onto other readers / recommended / generally been awesome about the books so far. How To Be Free exists because of you and you’re all stars.
I sometimes think that the nearest thing to literary Arcadia is Lorna Hill and the Northumberland countryside. It’s just so perfect to me, the way she pauses on a beat and suddenly you realise everything here is so endless and perfect and it might rain, maybe, for a brief second, but mainly it doesn’t because this is all about the glory of the moment: sun and blue sky and ponies and riding across the moor and eating luscious (always luscious) lunches and days that are full of nothing and everything and all the time in the world to enjoy it in. I ache for it, I love it: it’s perfect.
This is the start of a new series and if you know some of Hill’s other work, you’ll be familiar with some of the characters who appear here. The big new one is Judy, who is Freshly Relocated to the countryside and Not Keen on it. She butts heads and makes friends and buts heads and then there’s the pony bit and the moors bit and it’s just beautiful, utterly, ridiculously, lovely stuff. And yes, there’s the slightly chauvinistic chap who Just Knows Best and the girls are Highly Emotional but god, it’s somehow all brilliant because it’s in the hand of a born storyteller. (This, I think, is something I shall call ‘Seven Brides For Seven Brothers’ syndrome…).
As ever with books of this age, there will be some elements which have dated poorly. The pronounced one here is the name of Judy’s pony so please be aware of this upon reading and sharing with other readers.
I finished this and I thought: isn’t it weird that the more things change, the more things stay the same. There are parts of The Kingdom By The Sea that feel like something from another world: people who were born before 1900; an overnight room with Bed and Breakfast for £10; people still wrestling with the impact of the Second World War; but then there’s other things that feel weirdly familiar: train strikes; a nation at war with a distant enemy; a preoccupation with royal news. What is Britain and is it this? It’s a question that Paul Theroux tries to answer repeatedly in his journey around the coast of the country and it’s one that, I think, he has some delight in never quite answering.
There’s a delicious irascibility throughout this book and it’s one that is very readable, even at its irascibilitest (this is not a word but I think it should be and so, it is in). Theroux writes of places that are respectful, wild, dangerous, dull, dancing on the edge of the wilderness, and he isn’t ever quite afraid to let you know how he feels about them. He dislikes a lot of them, let’s be frank, but then all of a sudden, he finds himself loving something incredibly small or weird, even when he doesn’t really want to. Amateur dramatics. The British tendency towards hopefulness. Cars full of people who drive to the seaside to sit and watch the sea. Britishness, I guess, in all its eccentric, self-conscious, strange, mad glory.
I liked Theroux. I liked how he travelled. He walked an enormous lot and got the trains with an enormous amount of casual ease (lol, not today bud) and I never quite understood the description of the shoes he wore but I liked that. I liked the idea of this slightly strange and unknowable figure just kind of meandering through the landscape. I actually found something almost folkloric about his movement through the landscape, the way that he was a witness to these very specific moments in time and space before then moving on, never quite stopping, always looking and listening and learning from the world about him. In a way, I feel like there might always be somebody doing something similar right now, moving along the coast from story to story, looking inwards as much as they do outwards, realising that what this country is, this moment is, is never quite fixed, solid, never quite known, and understanding that that, perhaps, is its greatest strength.
A Kind of Spark centres on neurodivergent Addie and her campaign for a historical memorial in her hometown. The memorial is for the women who were killed in the witch trials, centuries ago, by the townfolk. Addie learns about these women during a school project and how they were labelled as witches and died in awful circumstances, simply due to their differences. She decides to stand up for them, to tell and honour their stories, and in the process she breaks your heart and makes it whole a thousand times over.
Ever since its publication, A Kind Of Spark has been at the heart of a vital, important conversation about autism, neurodivergence and representation and I’ve appreciated (and admired) what this story, and indeed McNicoll herself, have done for children’s literature. I will always admire those books that do what they have to do, in the way they have to do it, and in the way that only they can do it, and I will always admire the publishers who understand what those books can do in the world and their vital importance.
And what A Kind Of Spark does is very specific, very smart, and very wonderful, because every word of it is full of utter belief and truth and faith in character and circumstance. This book knows what it is doing and how it is going to get there and it made me cry, several times, at how much it trusts its characters and their choices. It’s a fierce, remarkable debut, and one which just has this palpable sense of heart about it. The familial relationships are particularly well done and just ring with truth. Things go well, things go poorly, but underneath it all is this family that burn with love and respect and faith in each other and what they are together.
This is such a good book. McNicoll writes with a very vivid honesty and truth about being autistic and even though I hated it, she also explores the range of reactions that people can have to neurodivergency. Adults and children make good choices and bad and sometimes we just kind of have to witness the hideous nature of being different in a normative world and rage against it all and I kind of loved that McNicoll went there because the story had to go there. There’s no coyness about this; it’s a book determined to tell its story honestly and with truth and even during these difficult, horrible moments, you know at every inch that it is full of kindness and love for its characters, it has their backs, it loves them and because of that, you do too.
So that’s A Kind Of Spark; a wonderful, truthful, honest story about difference, about being autistic, about being your own person, about fighting for a way to be in the world on your own terms, about being a kind of remarkable. I adored it.
The tall, dark-haired reviewer sat down to write her review on the book and considered how to begin. It was interesting, she thought, how everything in her busy, vivid life had suddenly required two adjectives. She wasn’t sure if it was connected to the dynamic, beautifully designed book in front of her but she did know that it was connected to something. Something strange and mysterious. All of a sudden she heard a noise outside the window! She turned and saw a man with a ray gun! He pointed it at her window! Luckily enough, the window had been made with Antiraygun Glass, an invention that she had made somewhere in between breakfast and lunch, and the ray gun was repelled! The man put down his ray gun and shook his fist at the window. “I’ll stop that review whatever the cost!”
Bit dramatic, thought the reviewer, as she sat back down at the brown, wooden desk. She began to type her review. The books, she began, were kind of like a science-fiction version of the Hardy Boys meets the Nancy Drew books with the emphasis on the science. They were a lot of fun and she had genuinely enjoyed reading them even if one had kind of seemed the same as the other. And the pace of them, she reflected in a thoughtful, considered manner, was remarkable! Things happened so swiftly! A character would go to space as nonchalantly as going to the shops! And then, all of a sudden, she felt the temperature in the room fall!
“Okay,” she said. “What now?” She turned around and realised that there was a low mist coming into the room from under the thick, solid door! It was slowly turning the room cold! She wasn’t quite sure about the scientific specifics of this one but knew that, in thirty seconds, her Antimysteriousgasunderthedoor extraction system would kick in! She sat back on her chair and counted to thirty. Sure enough, the fans kicked in and the silver, cold mist disappeared and the temperature in the room returned to normal. She glanced at her tall, mysteriously handsome chum who had been quietly working in the corner throughout all of this. “What do you think of that, chum?”
“I think somebody’s out to stop your review!” said Chum, because that was also his nickname in a time-saving sort of manner. “I’ll phone our contacts at the CIA, the BBC, the FBI, the MBA, the WWE and at the ANPR! And you just keep typing! Quickly though! I think there’s a space ship about to crash on us!”
“Okay!” said the reviewer. She wrote quickly: these books are great but also deeply ridiculous, if you’ve read one, you know what you’re getting in all of the others, the covers are outstanding, I really rather loved them, and then she paused for a brief moment. Just as she did, the space ship appeared outside of her window, just as Chum had said. It was okay though: because of the invisible web of Catchingfallingspaceshiprays she had previously installed just above street level, the space-ship came to a gentle halt. The space beings opened the door. “Thanks!” they said.
“All in a day’s work!” said the reviewer. And then she pressed send.
I love these comics very much and devour them whenever I come across them. They’re beautifully constructed things and the amount of knowledge they pack into six frames (six! frames!) is incredible.
The only thing that really very much annoyed me here was the introduction and blurb which sets this up as something to laugh at: “[it] appears to be an over-the-top 1950s spoof but is in fact a wholly genuine period piece”. I just don’t find this a productive or even interesting way to frame these texts (and yes, I know I’m coming from a very particular angle and have a very particular interest but I do just find it … dull? reductive?).
What I think is much more interesting here is a reading which recognises the ferocious capabilities of Mother and how, even in a time when she’s not allowed to escape the domestic (or even given a name), she’s still the most capable woman on the planet. This woman can sort everything. She’s amazing. Her knowledge covers everything and she does it all by herself. Father pops up in one strip to kind of marvel at an awe-struck distance before then firmly retreating. Auntie also pops up every now and then but she’s pretty much just here to go “god, Mother’s amazing”.
And isn’t there some interest in that? Isn’t there interest in recognising how Mother’s power and agency is still power and agency despite it being something quite unfamiliar and different and even funny when read from a modern day perspective? Perhaps we need gentler readings of women’s agency, more flexible interpretations of what it meant back in the day, kinder ways of relating to that. I don’t know, particularly when it comes to things like this. I think I’m longing for gentleness a little bit.
It’s an interesting one this because I did like it and I did enjoy it but also I found some strange stickiness about certain parts of it. Let’s start with the good stuff. Elizabeth Zott persists despite everything the world has to throw at her and this, in 1960s America, is a lot. She is a woman out of time, a scientist unable to carry out her research, a genius level intellect who has to deal with sexual innuendo, attempted assault, every sort of disparagement under the sun, because of her gender and the world’s inability to cope with who and what she is. Circumstances circumstance and ultimately, she comes to present a cookery show on television. It is ferociously popular and comes to be transformative for viewers (and indeed, the presenter).
There’s a lot of energy in this book and that’s always a curious thing. Garmus is a deft and confident writer and this is palpably good, purposeful work and that energy does really pull you through the pages. It’s fiercely open, very distinct in tone and texture, and incredibly comfortable in what it says and how it says it. It feels like it’s not taken much work at all but I suspect that it’s rather the opposite: this book is very carefully and very deliberately put together and this has taken a lot of work and I appreciate what Garmus has done here, very much.
Yet that energy, that energy. When there’s so much of it, and it’s so charged and full of texture and craft, there’s always going to be difficulty in sticking the landing, so to speak. For me, the ending didn’t quite work, and I found myself thinking about how much things like hindsight and perspective plays in books like this. Lessons In Chemistry benefits very much from being written when it is written but there’s also something a bit sticky about how that hindsight interacts with the situation of the time and how it interacts with the agency and powers of the people who were there (and how it can, perhaps, also work to erase those agencies and powers). I don’t know if I’m being clear, I rather suspect I’m not. I’m trying to figure it out as we speak. I just think there’s something wider here to unpick and figure out about writing historical work and the role that power and perspective play in that process and it’s something that reaches wider than this book, for sure.
Anyway. I really did like this and every now and then I liked it a lot. I think you should read it. It does something different which is in itself something to be remarked upon and valued; it’s hard to go somewhere new in fiction because somebody, most likely, will have already explored a similar pattern or rhythm in their own work (note: the exciting work comes, I think, when you recognise this and acknowledge this legacy but still tell your own story regardless). One of the best characters is a dog (yes, more of this please publishing, yes). It’s confidently told, often very funny, and I think that when everything aligns, it’s kind of delicious, even with that difficult uneasiness underneath it all. This really is a provocative thing.
I’m very fond of what E. Nesbit does because she does it very well. She has a deep understanding of the messy, vibrant rhythm of family life and inter-personal relationships and it’s this, really, that makes her work still immeasurably readable and interesting for contemporary readers. It works. People are people. And even though she does embrace some familiar pattern in her work such as the ‘something happens’ and then ‘something happens again’ and so on, you can kind of disregard it all because it’s charming and vibrant and genuinely good.
The Enchanted Castle was first published in 1907 and sees three siblings discover an abandoned country estate. It’s beautiful, wild, and full of magic. This is only underscored when they discover a sleeping princess and then a magical ring which grants wishes to the bearer. As is to be expected, these wishes turn out to be complicated things and Things Happen. These things include dinosaurs, ghosts, a deeply disturbing episode with statues (seriously, this was one of the moments where if you pause to unpick it, you just have to go – wait – what? You’re actively choosing this?), and then there are the Ugli-Wuglies which, let me tell you, are basically a horror film waiting to happen.
There’s a lot here to unpack, not in the least in the way that there’s this deeply freaky subtext underneath it all. I couldn’t quite get over how there’s just this edge to everything here in a way that I’ve never quite really noticed in Nesbit’s work before. Of course there’s a darkness in a lot of what she does, a kind of hovering cloud of ‘this is the real world and it sucks, go out and change it, I believe in you’ but I’ve never quite noticed it like this.
This book is so interesting. It’s magical and fantastical and supernatural and strange and really rather dark underneath it all. I don’t know it’s one of Nesbit’s most accessible titles but it’s definitely one of her strangest and weirdest and I found it rather fascinating. Also if you’re a fan of Mary Poppins, there’s a really interesting scene which I suspect PL Travers might have come across.
Finally, it’s important to note that the edition I read had an incident of the n- word in. Please be aware of this if you’re picking up an unabridged edition.
I am slowly working my way through the last few Chalet School books I’m yet to review and picked up Excitements, prompted by the discovery of a nicer paperback in the shop. I like this slow and steady collection making, when you find one of them somewhere by accident, rather than the swifter rewards of the internet. There’s something haphazard about it, an unexpected joy when you see one of them staring back at you from the shelf, and I love that moment immensely.
So: Excitements. A later book but one with Miss Ferrars in, and that’s always a plus. She’s such a dynamic character. In terms of plot, this is A TERM WITH A DIFFERENCE. I mean, it’s not really a term with a difference, it’s a term where things happen in a steadily sequential manner, everybody forgets about the moment that they’ve happened because the next thing’s about to come, there’s a trip somewhere, somebody has an accident, everybody goes oh my god, the middles, we stop everything for an enormous meal, there are CAMEOS FROM THE PAST (honestly, these capitals, forgive me), Joey flies in and out, there’s the coadjutor (this name always bothered me, just call her Rösli, quit with the dehumanisation of her), but somehow, somehow, it’s also intensely charming? In a way that really startled me?
The later books are as a rule, not the best. Quality starts to dip and as I wrote about this book on Twitter, the ‘excitements’ part of this one’s title is more than a little bit ambitious. It’s all very soft and kind of brief and we’re just moving through things and yet, and yet, there’s something here and it’s a something about family, I think, the fact that if you’re in the Chalet School club, these people will go to the end of the world for you, and it’s a something that brought me to sudden tears: twice! Twice! Can you imagine it? And yet it happened in this book where literally we sing a song, somebody has a chat, and there’s a goat. Oh my god. (I shall not spoil it for those of you who do not know but for those of you who do: Matey, and then Hilda’s line about giving the window …)
It’s ridiculous. There’s so much admin. Vast amount of it are instantly forgettable. And yet, and yet, all of it can suddenly break your heart. I love it.
A while ago, I had a very particular need to read some Susie Day. I have adored her work for a long time and I think that in many ways, it demonstrates everything that is good in present-day children’s literature. She writes stories that are full of such hope and kindness for the world that sometimes I just want to kind of walk into the page and let it all sort of sink into me and never let it go. She is good, her work is good, and I think that if you know her stories, then you know a very quiet and rather lovely glory.
Max Kowalski Didn’t Mean It is a story about a young boy trying to deal with the world. His mother is dead and when his father suddenly disappears, it’s down to Max to look after his three young sisters. Things do not go well and then, all of a sudden, Max makes a decision that will change all of their lives forever. He and his sisters are going to the Welsh mountains. And when he’s there, he’s going to slay a dragon…
There’s some delicious character work going here and I loved it entirely. Max’s father is engaged in some not particularly legitimate activities and the resolution to this plot strand is delivered with such sensitivity and delicacy that I just loved every inch of it. I cried at several points. I beamed at others. I loved it entirely.
Love. I know that whenever I write about Day’s books, I tend to use that word a lot but I do because it’s true. I find love and loveliness everywhere in these books: love for people, love for literature, love for messed up people who don’t know how to make things right but eventually figure it out, love for potato obsessed siblings, love for life, love for people who can be brave even when they are terrified, love for everyone in the world and everything in it.
I found this remarkable and have been taking some time to quite figure out how to review it and what to say about it. I am unfamiliar with Laurie Halse Anderson’s original text so was coming to this fresh. I had some idea of what it was about due to my research work and I knew that it was iconic but I did not wholly know what it was. And then, all of a sudden, I did. I knew everything about this brutally honest, deeply affecting, breathtakingly emotional, fiercely raw piece of storytelling and I knew that I loved it and admired it and respected it immensely.
I also wondered if I would be able to write about it because I knew that sometimes the experience of reading something like this does not quite translate into words. They feel too simple, somehow, to brief, to unable to encapsulate those moments when you know that you should go to bed or that you have other things to do but you cannot stop reading and yet every page makes you want to hug the protagonist so very hard and never let her go and yet, you can never get away from the fact that you are just this person, this distanced onlooker, who must witness and pay testament to this devastating documentation of the impact of trauma upon a young girl.
So this, so that, so here we are. I feel the back of my neck tingle again with the memory of it, my fingers remember the way I turned the page and how I desperately willed for certain things to happen in this story and then I willed for others to stop, to end. It is graphic and it is brutal and it is hard but it is also one of the most visceral and fearless pieces of storytelling that I have come across for a long time. I can’t comment on how well it’s adapted because of my unfamiliarity with the source but I can tell you this: what Emily Carroll does is bloody and raw and brilliant. She embraces wildness on the page in a discomforting familiar manner. You think you know where the page is going but then, all of a sudden, you’ll be somewhere else. Somewhere darker. Somewhere full of rough and uknowable edges. Somewhere fiercely, utterly true.
There are content warnings here of course, and they involve sexual assault, physical assault, emotional abuse, physical abuse, self-harm, and dealing with the after effects of trauma. It’s not an easy read and the ending is some of the most difficult stuff I have ever read. And yet also with that, it is also some of the most empowering and powerful stuff I have ever read. It’s an amazing, essential, horrific, awe-making read. Every inch of it is perfection.
(Please note that I was offered a copy of this to review from my publisher. This hasn’t impacted my feelings about the book nor the content of this review).
This is infinitely, infinitely, infinitely charming stuff. I loved every inch of it. It’s like getting a hug and then getting another hug when you think the first one has stopped. It’s so, so lovely.
The premise is fairly straightforward: Norma and Belly are Squirrels who have burnt their breakfast and now really want a doughnut (I shall use the British spelling here, forgive me but otherwise my inner spell checker might explode). Luckily enough there is a doughnut seller in the park and his doughnuts smell pretty wondrous and Norma and Belly are pronounced of a Substantial Amount of Mission Impossible skills to get one. Cue an adventure of the highest stakes and yet told in the gentlest and softest of manners. It’s delightful and I adored every inch of it.
Song’s soft and relaxed use of colour and delightful embrace of the visual is so well done throughout. There’s some genuine laugh out loud moments and some just utterly perfect panels. There’s also an immense amount of trust and faith shown in the reader throughout and I loved it, god I know I’m getting repetitive but it’s true.
One final thing to note is that this would be a lovely entrance way into the world of comics for young readers. It’s so nice and incredibly accessible and yes, I know I’ve said it but it bears repeating: this is a good, good book and every inch of it is good.
Adapting Shakespeare and then adapting Romeo and Juliet is not the easiest of tasks to set yourself. Not only do you have to wrestle with an incredibly familiar text that everybody knows (and even if they don’t, they still sort of do – this story’s so deeply embedded into popular culture now), you also have to find a fresh approach for a story which has already been told a thousand times. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to do so; classics survive when we retell them and remake them for new audiences, when we re-purpose the story to tell new stories and have new resonance for new readers, when we are not afraid of them. And when they are plays, in particular, we should not be afraid. These are stories to be performed and made real for people and so there’s an opportunity here to play (pun unintentional!) and see if something interesting happens.
And something interesting does happen here. The combination of Sonia Leong’s determinedly youthful and vibrant art coupled with a well-edited text from Richard Appignanesi managed to make me look again at a story I know very well. I really liked the work done with the Nurse and the Friar in particular as Leong’s art managed to give them a really nice sense of identity and purpose that I feel can sometimes lack. For me, the heart of the piece is with Juliet herself and in her joyful movement on the page. Leong really captures what it means to fall firmly and enormously and dizzily into love and the heightened nature of some of these pages are particularly lovely.
One thing to note is that this is designed to be read left-right and top to bottom rather than the right-left and bottom to top that you might expect with Manga. It also has a little summary of the play and a little (nicely-opinionated and not just written by rote!) biography of Shakespeare himself. I liked it. It’s a nicely handled text which shines new light onto a very old story.
I read this, my first Sally Rooney over Christmas and the New Year. I was quite determinedly ill at the time, hurtling from one virus to another and then another in that breathless, desperate way that people can do when there’s nothing on the diary other than Be Ill and Buy All Of The Tissues In The Entire World, and I read this in the middle of the night and in the soft lessening of the dawn, and I admired every second of it. It’s a story of character and it took me a while to figure out the way things were going to be here but once I did, I was in. Normal People is kind of fascinating in how it burrows deep into the heart of people that aren’t normal, not in the slightest, but exert considerable effort to be so but also fail entirely, and also knew that, all along.
Rooney’s style is very beautiful, very clean, and deeply readable. What I admire most is her clarity of purpose: there’s nothing on the page that shouldn’t be there. It all feels so definite and directed and when you read it, you kind of know that you’re with somebody who knows what she’s doing and then that gives you confidence, faith, in where the story’s going. Even when I didn’t like it or didn’t quite gel with the characters, I knew that I still wanted to be here, that I had to be here because I admired what Rooney was doing and how she was doing it. I don’t know if I found this enjoyable (a curious quote on the front of my edition) but I knew that I was with somebody who was very good at what they were doing and I appreciate that very much. You learn a lot from the good stuff and this is that; a book which captures the soft, strange, intimacy of being human, of loving and losing, of being in the world and knowing that others are there, alongside you.
I thoroughly enjoyed every inch of Linda In Lucerne though I must caution you that it is not, perhaps, the highest of literature nor is it perhaps the most believable. It is not the best writing I have ever come across nor is it particularly plausible. In fact there are a thousand things that it is not and yet somehow, it is more than all of that because it is delightful. It is ridiculous. It is is perfect.
It includes a bit where they uncover a secret message which says something along the lines of (I’m trying not to be spoilerish here) “thing happening nine o’clock, at this location” and one character looks at this and says, “there seems to be a thing happening at nine o’clock at this location” and it includes a bit where another character just enjoys being as high up as she can (I mean, it’s a trait). and so all you can see of her is her disembodied legs dangling from a windowsill and my God, I adore this kind of thing until the end of time. I think there’s a very fine art to it, I really do.
So, the premise! Linda is a detective. She ends up in various places. She solves a mystery. If you’ve read a children’s book, ever, you’ll know how it goes. Disguises. Shenanigans. Well meaning adults who just get in the way a lot. But then Winifred Donald throws in the most wanted Nazi in Europe and it just all goes to a place that is everything. Yes Linda is ridiculously capable and yes, she’s able to conjure disguises out of literally a piece of lettuce and yes, we all know how it ends. But God, it’s fun in how it gets there.
And so, the end of the year and the start of a new one. Christmas and then the bit beyond. A time when the world gets a little bit thin and unsure of itself. December slides from all purpose and helter-skelter intent to something pale and thin and I love it. I love the strangeness of it, the doubt that even time has upon itself.
Some books read well under such circumstances and some don’t. H Is For Hawk reads spectacularly well at this point in the year because it’s a book about losing control. Grief. The pale grey light of winter. Knowing who you are and then losing it entirely only to slowly, palely, find it again. It’s about a bird and the way that knowing it and flying it helps to bring yourself back to life. It’s about the strangeness of academic life and the humanities, that wilful association with the text, the dislocation of the self with the now, and it’s about the strange, deep tension of having a job and a family and then, having nothing but the finest of grips upon the cliff as you try to stop yourself from falling into the void.
H Is For Hawk is breathlessly perfect writing. It is fearless and crazed and unapologetic and raw with sadness and Macdonald does not apologise for one inch of it. It’s often uneasy and painful to read and you can feel intrusive and voyeuristic but then you realise that the writing is so brilliant and acute that there’s no way you can let it go. Macdonald is transcendent here and finds brilliance in nearly every paragraph. It is just such good, good, good stuff.
Threaded throughout the text is a parallel story, of sorts, a crack in the mirror, that tells of another person and their bird. This is TH White, author of The Once and Future King and more and possessor of quite a few questionable decisions. Macdonald positions their story against that of White’s and it’s fascinating because the two threads begin to influence and ricochet off each other and in the middle of it all, that fierce stomach punch of grief that brings Macdonald to their knees, a star in the heart of their universe, burning out, and they can’t even begin to work out what comes next because they’re too busy being burnt out by what happens now.
H Is For Hawk isn’t an easy read, nor is it a particularly gentle one, but it is rather breathtaking and wonderful and starkly perfect. Read it when the world is thin about you and the sky is raw and grey, and all seems strange and new and unknown, and it will bring definition and clarity, even to the palest of skies.
The Chalet School – Hilda Annersley, Nell Wilson, Mademoiselle, Madge Bettany, bonus points if you included Miss Bubb because she’s amazing.
The School of the Good Sisters – Good Sister June
Deepdean – Miss Barnard, Miss Griffin
Knight’s Haddon School – Miss Fotheringay
Whyteleafe School – Miss Belle and Miss Best
The School For Bad Brownies – Mr Grim
St Rollo’s – Miss Lesley, Mr Quentin
Crunchem Hall – Miss Trunchbull
Am I a character from an EJO book or am I a vegetable?
RADICCHIO – Vegetable
RAVARATI – EJO (Technically this is the surname of a character, but I’m going to go with it).
ROSALY – EJO
RAPINI – Vegetable
ROSABEL – EJO
RAMPION – Vegetable
ROMANESCO – Vegetable
ROSILDA – EJO
ROSALIND – EJO
RUTABAGA – Vegetable
Five by Five Bonus round!
Name five ….
of the Ladies Circle in Whitby … – Alice Boston (Aunt Alice), Matilda ‘Tilly’ Droon, Dora Banbury-Scott, Prudence Joyster, Edith Wethers, (And I will also take Rosalyn Cooper here as well…).
The Famous Five in order of best-to-worst … – George, Anne, Timmy, Dick, Julian.
Members of the Galloping Fanes’ livery yard … – Another Legend, Comet, Nelson. The Mare Who Sometimes Slips A Stifle, The Bad Tempered Chestnut.
The Five Children of Five Children And It … – Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane and ‘The Lamb’
Inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood … – Kanga, Roo, Winnie-the-Pooh, Tigger, Owl, Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit, (and, of course, Heffalumps!!!!)
Deck the halls with boughs of holly and clear out your bookshelves: it’s time for the Fourth Ever Quite Niche Children’s Literature Quiz! If you’re new to this, then let me explain: it is a terribly specific quiz on very niche aspects of children’s literature. I share the questions with you on Christmas Eve and publish the answers on New Year’s Eve.
You can catch up on previous quizzes here (The First, The Second, The Third) and all of the answers for the relevant quiz will be linked from those posts.
This year we’re doing things a little differently and will have three rounds and a bonus … 😊
Who’s that Chalet School Girl?
COME JOY LEN
NEWTS NOSE
ACCENTS HENRY
ARCHY FRIEND
BAT HARBOUR IF
ANDY HURT WRY
DUSK ELIJAH
JOHN TOELESS
DIMENSION SERENADE
CLARIFY DYNAMITE
Name that Head (some of them have more than one…)
Malory Towers
St Clare’s
The Chalet School
The School of the Good Sisters
Deepdean
Knight’s Haddon School
Whyteleafe School
The School For Bad Brownies
St Rollo’s
Crunchem Hall
Am I a character from an EJO book or am I a vegetable?
It’s unsurprising that certain themes reoccur in Brazil’s work. She was immensely prolific and an author who, for the most, stuck to a particular age group and genre. She knew what she could do and she did it very well. The Nicest Girl In The School was her most popular title and also a relatively early one at that (1909) in a career that was going to run to the 1940s. It’s also a title that feels slightly different to her work. There’s no interminable interlude where somebody shares local folklore or tells a fairy story and neither is there a Suitable Elderly Woman to pash on (although we all do pash instead on the central character who is just a Very Good Egg And We All Love Her).
What there is, instead, is actually a really well-told and very genuine story about a girl just going to school and having adventures. Some of them are big, some of them are small, and all of them are just told in such a fresh and distinct way in contrast to other titles of the time that you get why this sold. This is a story that wears its moralising through the action of the characters involved. Gone is the kind of Victorian moment where we all stop and get a little lecture from one of the adult characters or the narrator tells us wistfully about a Higher Power Knowing Best when everybody suddenly carks it (v fond of the death stuff, them), and it’s all replaced by the girls having a sense of personal, practical and moral agency of their own. I can’t tell you how big a paradigm shift this was. And without that shift occurring, I don’t think we’d be writing or reading the books that we read today.
One last thing to note is that the original text features the n- word so please do be aware of that. More modern editions of The Nicest Girl In The School do exist and I suspect will have productively and rightfully addressed this.
There was a point in reading this where I thought about how disappointed the average schoolgirl in the 1930s or 1940s might have been when her school didn’t burn down, nobody fell down a pit and needed rescuing, the school’s honour could not be saved by getting that vital goal in the last few minutes or impressing the local dignitaries so much with your daring-do that you all got an extra day of school holiday because of it. I mean, the disappointment of an average term! Not one broken bone requiring setting with just a twig and a doily!
What you might be gathering from this is that Chaundler’s exploits in The Madcap of the School and the other short story of this volume (“The Prize For Valour”) tend towards the more sensational end of the genre. The title story is the better of the two and focuses upon Judy’s unadulterated pash for one of her mistresses who first thinks poorly of her and realises what a good egg she is! It’s not a spoiler, trust me, if you know the genre then you know how this is going to end up from page one. But it’s still a very dynamic and well-told story that sort of deliriously hurtles from incident to incident and does it all in under fifty pages and god, I love that sort of attitude very much. Give me feverish info-dumps, give me wild and overblown drama and resolve it all in thirty seconds, ugh, I love it, books like this, they’re the bomb.
The second title in the volume is a slightly more complicated thing. Chaundler’s still focused on that whole big and overblown vibe in her work but manages to carry it off with aplomb. The girls are concerned with winning a prize for valour but oh no! there’s a wet lettuce in the form who’s scared of everything! What on earth will happen? (We all know, right?). Despite reinforcing my conviction that no author of this period quite knew what an artery was or indeed where one might be, this is great stuff. Two sandwiches short of a picnic, deeply incomprehensible, deliciously delirious stuff. Perfect. Five stars. Fifty five stars. Ratings are inconsequential!
Earlier this week I managed to watch Enid (2009). It’s a film which has been on my radar for a while because it tells the story of Enid Blyton and, ifyou’vebeenreadingthisblogforawhile, you’ll know that I find her an incredibly fascinating character. Enid Blyton is messy. She’s brutal, direct, determinedly readable, casually cruel, and embraces every problematic trope under the sun. She hates anybody called Anne (genuinely: if you’re called Anne in an EB book, everybody hates you. Even the author). And yet she’s still here. Definitive. Provocative.
The film itself is a fairly straightforward biopic. The adult Enid is played by Helena Bonham-Carter who brings to the role a deeply determined ferocity. She is a woman who knows what she wants and is often deeply unlikeable in her pursuit of it. She is neglectful of her loved ones, possessed of a casual cruelty to her children, and cuts contact with her family as soon as she is able. There’s a particularly poignant moment later on in the film where one of her brothers comes to inform her of their mother’s death and Bonham-Carter plays it so well. She quivers with a kind of rage at being interrupted in her new life by her old, of being inconvenienced, of being made to face the world which lies beyond that which she has crafted so carefully. And yet underneath it all, a sadness that she doesn’t even have the vocabulary to understand let alone realise.
(I am increasingly intrigued by unlikeable women on screen who are allowed to be unlikeable. To not be redeemed. To not be made better).
As a whole, the film plays out in a fairly expected manner and increasingly mines the thread of Blyton’s prodigious creative output against public doubt. She is repeatedly provoked by public comments that she must have ghost writers because she simply can’t have written as much as she has. It’s an easy, tempting claim to make and you can see why people made it. Her output is awe-inspiring, shocking. But I don’t really have time for claims of ghost writers. Not only would she had been hideous to work with, she’s too present in her work to be detached from it. Yes you can mimic Blyton and do a bang up job of it. But I think there’s something unmistakeable hers in everything she wrote, even in her thinnest of texts, her most casual of poems.
There was also an interesting scene regarding Blyton’s uterine health and about how her uterus was underdeveloped. Here it was linked towards her determination to have children and while I see it as relevant here, I do have to admit I always find it a slightly problematic angle to take in terms of storytelling. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard about the bodily issues of male authors (maybe I have? It just seems a slightly reductive thing in certain contexts …).
As a whole, Enid really is a very watchable thing. The remarkable Ramona Marquez pops up in a role as one of Enid’s children whilst the ever-watchable Denis Lawson does good work as Kenneth Waters. From what IMDB says, it was all recorded in a remarkably short time-frame and that energy and purpose really does suffuse the film with a sense of pace. Sometimes it’s a little too quick but that’s the nature of such projects like this. Everything’s done in time for tea. It’s all rather meta, if you ask me.
When the sky is blue and the air is sharp, the world calls for Moominland Midwinter. I read it outside until the light began to fade andI was too cold to read. And as I walked home, I thought about all of the different words for snow that I knew and how different cold can be and how much each footstep I took felt a little bit like I was walking along Moomin Valley, waiting for the world to wake up around me.
Moominland Midwinter is so strange and so wonderful. I like books that make you have to chase their meaning, that make you succumb to the delicious peculiarities of their storytelling, to wallow as much in the knowing as you do the not knowing. It begins with something unexpected: Moomintroll wakes up early from his hibernation. And while the rest of his family sleeps, he sets out to understand the brave new world that he has found himself in. There are new friends to make, new wonders to discover, and the brutal edge of Winter to realise.
The Moomins make me happy but this book makes me marvel. It is dark and experimental and full of an honest magic. And when it gets to the Lady of the Cold, the spirit of Winter and somebody who you can’t look directly at without freezing, it becomes even more magical. I think there is something wonderful to be found in truth and being honest about brutality, even. Winter is hard and this world is not full of rainbows for some of the smallest souls in the world at this time. Jansson is genuine and honest about this and so you get something rather eloquent indeed.
There’s such magic here, and it’s a magic that’s wrapped in thick snow and soulful illustrations and forebears who live behind stoves and Little Creeps and it’s all so inventive and fiercely truthful and eloquent that I adore it rather immensely indeed.
I have just tried to start this review several times but I’ve never been quite able to figure it out. So let’s start with the facts: Diary of a Young Naturalist has had a lot of buzz about it. It’s written by a young author and so connects with my research areas of interest. And I’ve taken a while to get round to reading it. One of the reasons for this is that nature writing has never really been my area of choice. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy it – far from it – but rather that I’ve never really sought it out as my first area of interest. My heart was always with school stories and with ponies and the fiction side of things.
But Dara McAnulty is the sort of writer that makes you reconsider everything. He writes with such a sense of purpose and identity and every page is full of such a big thick fat love for the world that you can’t help but be bowled along with it. It is remarkable stuff and if he continues to write, there will be wonderful things ahead. I always dislike that sense of writing about juvenilia, when the reviewer says ‘oh this author will achieve remarkable things but has not done so yet’, and so this is the part where I say that he has already written things better than most. This book is remarkable. It slips and slides in and out of poetry and makes you just see everything differently around you.
Alongside his writing about the natural world, McAnulty also writes about his life as an autistic teenager (his mother and two siblings are also autistic and his father is not). His writing here is particularly remarkable stuff and vibrates with such a love and warmth for his family and all that they do. Whether it’s mixing magic spells and leaving them in jars or traipsing through the muddy woods or wild swimming, this remarkable family lives and loves and works because they are together.
I was struck as well by McAnulty’s writing about education. He talks about how the arrangement of a classroom can impact his ability to learn and about the difference between surviving and thriving at school. There’s a lot here that the people who make decisions should listen to.
Overall, this really does deserve all of the plaudits that it’s received. It’s genuine and beautiful and eloquent and richly wonderful and all of it is enveloped in such a sense of love for the world and everything in it that you can’t resist it. I adored it. It’s remarkable.
When I began this, I had two problems. The first was that I kept confusing it with The Silver Brumby, a series I adore with a fierce and heartfelt passion, and it took a while for me to disentangle The Brumby from that. Both books are set in similar spaces, feature a horse called Yarraman, and a silver brumby. I even got to the point of wondering whether they were the same authors and had to do some research before I could satisfactorily figure out who was who and what was what.
My second issue was that this felt a little slow, a little stiff, and I wasn’t quite sure if there was going to be enough space in it for me as a reader. Some texts can feel tight like that and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that they need to be told and don’t necessarily need to be heard by me. Or sometimes it’s that my reading and the context that I bring to it don’t connect. Not everything is everybody and that’s okay. And for a long time I wondered if this was going to be one of them.
And then all of a sudden, I started to understand it. The Brumby is a story that’s cut from the same cloth as things like My Friend Flicka and For Love of a Horse and it is really rather good. You know the drill: a child wants – needs – a horse. The child is lonely in a way that, perhaps, they do not completely understand or even realise. They seek completion. And the horse will provide that. They will love and through that love learn what life can be.
The child at the heart of The Brumby is Joey; a boy who lives in the countryside in a place past the end of everything. This is the wild edge of the known world and it is brutal. Life is hard and often violent. People make choices that are not easy nor are they wise. The day can turn dark, so very swiftly.
Patchett understands how difficult life can be in this space and what it takes to survive that and trusts the reader to understand that as well. Chapters shift from Joey’s perspective through to that of the brumbies and somehow it never loses track. It’s full of such respect for the reader. And I respect that immeasurably. I respect how Patchett goes to the reader: love is wonderful but it costs and sometimes it might hurt and sometimes you might lose everything. It’s bare boned, emotional, vicious, and often incredible stuff.
(It’s important to note that I do read this as an adult and so, younger readers might still find some of this difficult to handle. If they’re managing something like Green Grass of Wyoming and particularly the more adult angles such as Nell’s story, then I think they’ll be alright).
I recently picked up a fair few of the older children’s literature theory books, the ones that I’ve always known as points of reference to be read in extracts and photocopied chapters whilst also taking them with a slight pinch of salt due to their age. Time moves on, there are always children and there will always be books for them and both publishing and theory moves swiftly and sometimes not at all. It’s one of the things I’m realising now, with one foot in publishing and another in academia, that one field talks to the other and the other talks back to it and sometimes both of them spend years not listening to each other in the slightest.
But an unexpected haul of the older theory books interested me because: theory books are expensive when they’re first published, sometimes it’s nice to remind yourself of the bedrocks of your field, and if you pick them up and read them with the knowledge that things have changed and that they are not as definitive as they once were (but paradoxically still definitive in their own way), then there is something fascinating in that. As with my books (Daisy May Johnson), I find a lot of use in knowing where children’s literature has been to know where it is going.
An Introduction to Children’s Literature was published in 1994 by the Oxford University Press. It’s a deeply readable book that resists the urge to be too scholarly whilst also being unafraid of giving you some theory. It’s also deeply deft at points; Hunt has an ability to give you a line or two, here and there, that are so articulate and to the point that I found myself stopping and underlining. Metaphorically. Not actually. I’m not a monster. ANYWAY. It’s a well-written book and even though the concept of it demands lists of titles and years and for a necessary pace that leaves you longing for more time to be spent on certain authors, I think it’s still a very solid introduction to the field. As it was. A lot’s happened since then but this does still stand very nicely.
Another thing to mention is that this is primarily about British children’s literature and although there is mention of other cultures, namely America and Japanese, they tend to be wedded to literary movements or cultural phenomena. In many senses it’s useful to remember the time and context Hunt is writing in; this is early internet stuff, he’s a British writer, and global children’s literature really doesn’t have the visibility in Britain that it does now. (I can remember being absolutely dazzled as a child when we went on a trip to America and discovering that there were all these other titles in a series that I was collecting – hundreds and hundreds of them – when all that had ever been published in the UK were the first four…).
I like this book. I like how steady and solid it is. It’s worth picking up if you come across it second hand if only for the way that it will tell you about titles that you’ve never heard of and suddenly really fancy reading. It’s also rather prescient in terms of discussions of representation and diversity and does, I was quite pleased to see, hint at some of the tensions that characterise these discussions today. I also really liked how Hunt treated the influence of female writers and how he actually gave Angela Brazil a little space to be considered! the novelty! justice for angie!
I’ve been struggling to figure out how to review this but then, I think, that’s what reviews are for. Working out how you think about something. Teasing out that reaction in words. Figuring out what these tiny marks on the page made you feel and how they made you feel it. And so the first thing that I will say in what follows is that this is a fragmentary review. Bitty. But then, I do think that this is where I am with this unusual, definitive, graceful book.
1. I read Spare very quickly, conscious of the still huge library reservation list behind me, and I genuinely enjoyed it. If you strip all of The Discourse back and take the noise away from this book, you’re left with something that’s very graceful and lyrical. J.R. Moehringer, the ghost author here, is to be complimented for their efforts. Spare has a very beautiful and often deeply poetic aesthetic and it really does add something very fascinating to the world of memoir
2. The first third is perhaps the strongest of the book. The final third strumbles* after itself and the book really does struggle to find a definitive ending. But then, I suspect, it was always going to feel like this. I felt a little bit as if Harry, even after telling all of this story, wanted to tell some more. But then I also felt like this book was also more than ready to end. But then the story had not. Time had rolled on, more of it was yet to be told. But then. But then.
3. I wish Harry and his family well. He has experienced remarkable and often horrific things and lived through situations that are almost impossible to understand. Vast swathes of this book are moving, poignant, and often deeply, deeply sad. And yet often not in the way that you might expect them to be.
4. There is a tendency throughout to focus on the very granular. I can understand why: it’s human. A thousand tiny cuts. Each and every one felt, each and every one remembered. And yet, the constant wonder of what this story – and in particular, that final third – might be like without that detail. Easier? Freer? I don’t know. I can’t remotely understand what it’s like to be at the eye of that storm. But then, but then.
5. This is a genuinely remarkable book. I don’t think we’ll read anything like it for quite some time.
* a typo, but I rather like it. Strumble. A portmanteau of ‘crumble’ and ‘stumble’. Let’s let it stay there, at least for a while.
There was a table in the bookshop, right at the back of the room, with several piles of books on it. The sign, recycled from a piece of packaging, said that these titles were all £1 and many of them knew it. There were books that would barely have sold the moment that they were published; great, obscure things about niche topics, even then, and things about topics that the world had moved on from a long while ago. Technology books always date quickly, often before they’ve even been published, and then there’s the maps. There’s always maps. Somebody will love them but it takes them a while to find each other.
And then there was this. I thought the author was the film director until I read the blurb: this was a journalist from back in the day who had witnessed atomic bomb tests and the war in Korea. He had been a foreign correspondent, present during the Chinese invasion of Tibet and meeting characters such as Winston Churchill and Albert Schweitzer along the way. I was going to see Oppenheimer later that week. I was intrigued. But more than that: I have a fascination for those firsthand stories of people in the middle of extraordinary times. The domestic stories, I suppose. The ones where simply people try to live their life and love their loves and to simply persist in the middle of great earth-turning events.
Point of Departure chronicles some of this moments of persistence. Technically it’s a memoir, I suppose, but it sort of hovers somewhere between a ‘Greatest Hits’ and a biography. Cameron is a delicious writer; deeply opinionated, deeply political, deeply of his time, and occasionally very, very brilliant. Were I the sort to be highlighting and underlining books, then I would underline pretty much all of this. It’s quality writing. His work about the nuclear bomb tests is transcendent, similarly his writing about the Korean war, because he’s unafraid to let you know his feelings about the situation. You get the entire picture. I found myself rereading substantial parts of this, quite unable to fathom what it was I was reading until all of a sudden I did.
(There is a way, I think, to tell the horrific and that is this: to simply tell it, and Cameron gets that).
Towards the end of the collection, I felt the essays got a little thinner and the whole affair started to run out of steam. That’s a slender section of an utterly remarkable collection and no reason to step away from this volume. Rather, it could be argued as a kind of meta-reflection on that which has come before. Cameron has witnessed so much, done so much, and watched humans bring themselves to the very brink of humanity. The wars; the brutality; the frank shock of the Atomic bomb tests; any ending would feel weary in comparison to them.
I understand why Point of Departure found itself on that table at the back of the bookshop: it’s not an easy book. It’s deeply political, deeply obstreperous. And yet here I am, reading it almost sixty years after it was published, and in awe of it. Writing like this, wherever it is in the bookshop and indeed, however long it’s there, will always make itself heard.
I have been aware of Pollyanna for a long while, mainly because “Pollyanna” has been used as a kind of insult in some of the books I read. It’s normally attached to a Slightly Over-Dramatic Child who might have been weeping a lot but is DETERMINED to see the best on everything (and yes, irritating, no? Sometimes it’s quite satisfying to lean into the grumpiness providing you lean out of it on the other side). And so, when I found this combined edition the other day, I felt like now was the time to figure out the girl behind the myth.
Pollyanna is an orphan (inevitably!) who is sent to live with her Aunt following her father’s death. She brings with her a game that she played with her father, namely the seeing of ‘glad’ in everything. For example, if one dislikes Mondays then one can be glad that there is a WHOLE WEEK before the next one. It’s a lot, right? And yet, it’s oddly charming stuff. Pollyanna charms the whole town, the grumps get ungrumped, long lost romances get rekindled, and everybody skips merrily around in a Positive Frame Of Mind.
As you might imagine, I was ready to dislike this book intensely and yet I found myself genuinely enjoying it. It’s all just very genuine and straightforwardly done. Porter’s writing is deft and determined and very, very readable stuff. Stylistically and thematically, you know that this is early twentieth-century, but in terms of the actual writing, it’s dated very well. I was trying to think of a comparative author and Edith Nesbit was honestly the first that came to mind as there’s that similarly light, sunny edge to Porter’s writing.
BUT THEN COMES THE LAST QUARTER OF THE BOOK. (I am putting that in capital letters to convey the enormity of my reaction). Pollyanna experiences something which seems the very definition of leftfield. It’s all intensely baffling, both in terms of plot development but also in terms of the entire book.
And the weirdest thing of all was that it happened again in Pollyanna Grows Up (1915). The first three-quarters of the book are perfectly charming and deeply readable. Bits of it have dated but fair enough, that’s going to happen. Certain characters have kind of completely changed since the previous book but fair enough, I can let you get away with that for plot purposes, alright.
BUT THEN COMES THE LAST QUARTER. This sees the most convoluted relationship ever, even more convoluted misunderstandings, the weirdest and slightly ick ‘well if you want to marry me I am BOUND BY DUTY to accept’, and basically it all goes to bonkers town. Again.
To sum, then, three-quarters of the Pollyanna books are very solid things indeed and quite surprising in their readability. The last quarters, however, are not. I am FASCINATED by them.
(A few preliminary notes. It’s important for me to tell you that I share a publisher with Foxlee and received this from them as a free copy. This has not impacted upon my thoughts).
I really liked Miss Mary-Kate Martin’s Guide To Monsters. It’s a little bit as if Fungus the Bogeyman made friends with Eloise and then added a sprinkle of Frances Hardinge and a little bit of The Lambton Worm for good measure. And if that’s not a mixture that catches your eye then I don’t know what is. Luckily enough Foxlee delivers – and in spades.
Mary-Kate Martin and her mother are on their way to Woolington Well, a small and deliciously eccentric village. Trust me, you know the type. There’s Meaningful Things happening that nobody wants to talk about and there’s Clearly A Mystery To Be Solved and also a BAD EGG TO GET IN THE WAY. Honestly, bad eggs are the worse. Anyway, because Mary-Kate’s mother, an archaeologist, is busily surveying the site of the intended shopping centre it’s down to Mary-Kate herself to do the honours.
What I particularly enjoyed here was the kindness of Foxlee’s writing. There’s plenty of awesome girls being awesome in children’s literature (and rightfully so!) and Mary-Kate is a lovely addition to that canon. Where she differs, however, is in how she explicitly wrestles with her worries and anxiety in order to do so. She doesn’t believe in herself but keeps going until she does and that’s rather utterly wonderful. It’s also relevant to mention that her mother is supportive and helps her to walk through these moments of catastrophisation and doubt and has a wonderful, endless belief in her. Foxlee handles this all so carefully and so cleanly and I appreciated it endlessly.
I also loved Freda Chiu’s illustrations very much. There is a pony in this book called Pickles who is AMAZING. He is uninterested in everything but eating and scowling and there is one moment (quite near the end of the book) where Chiu draws him and honestly, it is all of my dreams come true.
I’m always interested in those moments when you pick up a book without knowing anything about it at all. For me, The Children Who Stayed Behind caught my eye because of the cover but also because it’s a post-war Puffin. These are a kind of legendary imprint when it comes to children’s literature because they embodied this kind of radical liberalism and hope for what a new world might be. The work of editors such as Eleanor Graham and Kaye Webb helped develop a list of titles which still resonate today. A post-war Puffin is always an interesting thing and one which is worth paying attention too. You can always spot them as well by their distinct design work.
The cover, as I said, did the work for me here. It showed a group of children posing against an armoured car against the backdrop of the Brighton seafront and I was sold. I was more sold when it came to the premise: Brighton was being evacuated due to the imminent invasion of the Germans during World War Two. The only people that were left were the children from two families – and they do not like each other very much at all. I mean, that’s interesting – right? And it’s more and more provocative when you start to tease it apart. The image of the Brighton seafront lit up as the country’s invaded. The idea of a handful of children being the frontline. The idea of an alternate history hinging over a missing and much loved rabbit.
When it comes down to it, however, The Children Who Stayed Behind feels a little too slender to hold all of this inside it. The edition I read was just over 150 pages and that’s not a lot of space to do a hell of a lot of work. The ending was a little too swift for me and the beginning a little too long and so you end up feeling rushed when you shouldn’t and taking your time when you should be being a hell of a lot more purposeful. But that’s not to say that Carter is a bad writer because he’s far from that. Brighton lives here and in intimate, known detail. The dynamics of the friendship group are charming and I rather loved how he handled the sudden exodus of the adults. He’s also unafraid of a kind of Blytonesque brutality: there’s a moment when one child is ‘punished’ by the other family and I had to reread the page several times to realise that yes, the child is being put out to sea in a lifeboat which then immediately loses its oars.
There’s so much that’s interesting here but it’s never quite wholly fulfilled. But I do wonder if this is because of the fact that it’s 1958 and children’s literature isn’t quite where this book needs it to be in order to do so. (Time-slip has been happening for a while with books like A Traveller in Time and we’re also about to see Tom’s Midnight Garden storm into the world, but alternate history? Less pronounced, I think).
My point isn’t to say that this is a bad book because it’s far from that. Carter’s writing is fluid and sharp and he’s fiercely readable. I’m so intrigued by everything that he gives us here. It’s almost a thought experiment at points.
(My point isn’t also about the absence of alternate history books because I bet they’re out there and I’m just drawing a blank on them).
My point is, I think, that were this published now, with all the liberty that time and distance brings and with an extra fifty pages or so, you’d be nominating it for all the medals in the world.
I think what is really interesting in books is where they start to get away from you. I know that makes no sense so let’s work it through a little and see where we end up. Every book has an edge, I think, a space where you know what the story is and you know it very clearly. And then there’s the edge where beyond that, you might know what the story might be but maybe you don’t. Maybe there’s an intimation as what that story might be, a suggestion as to where the plot might go, maybe it’s all mapped out, sharp as day, and maybe it’s not. That’s the edge. The barrier between what you know and what you don’t. The moment where the what if gets in.
(I think this all ties in with some other thoughts that I’ve been having. I was at a thing recently where they said that writing for children should be simple, direct, uncomplicated. And that’s fine advice in some senses, but equally I found it really bothered me. I think that there should be some things that are unknown. Words that you’ve never come across but you can make out from context. Ideas that you might not understand then but all of a sudden do. Things that simmer away and then come to the boil. It is alright to have things not make sense. It is alright to have a bit of a story remain unknown to you).
And so this brings us to The Snow Spider trilogy, a series I have been meaning to read forever and apparently read in 2015 and rated as two stars? Reader, I was an idiot. Or perhaps, more accurately, more kindly, I was reading differently then. People change and books change and finally, when I came back to it now, I adored it. I loved the unknowable edge of it. I loved the way that Nimmo presents you with a rather traditional form of story, one that’s familiar and understood, a boy coming into his self, a story of growing up and coming to terms with tragedy, a story of language and myth and folklore; familiar, familiar, and then all of a sudden: not.
All of a sudden: the slender edge of the world, the world beyond that, a silver spider, people from myth and legend becoming fact and truth, a simple, straightly told story with a dark and unknowable depth, traumas being confronted on the wild edge of the mountain, people standing up when the world tells them to sit, all of it so familiar, so unfamiliar, so full of wilderness.
And every now and then, a moment where the story took its own rhythm and became something happening, almost without me, existing so vibrantly and so endlessly into the dark –
There is a lot to love here. There’s a lot to love in how genuinely Nimmo frames her story and how the immediate demands of the everyday butt up against the wildly magical. I loved how there were moments when I felt myself wondering where this was going to go and what it was going to go do and I loved, loved, loved that I didn’t know. This book got away from me and all I could do was run and keep up. I loved it, I adored it.
I have had Jummy At The River School on my radar for a while; it’s the first of a series of school stories detailing the adventures of Jummy at her new boarding school set by the beautiful Shine-Shine River. The River School is the best boarding school in Nigeria and when Jummy passes the entrance exams, she is thrilled to become a new girl there. Yet her best friend Caro, from a family of less privilege and wealth, does not have this option. Her family cannot afford the school fees and so she and Jummy must be separated.
I liked this very much and will look out for the next. It’s a very charming and quietly told school story. There’s a deliberate concern for friendships and relationships and generally Being A Good Egg which I liked a lot. It also deals quite gently with issues of privilege and classism which are perennially vital discussions to have, I think, in this genre, so I welcomed that and the delicacy of it, very much.
One of the things that I also really valued was Adyeinka’s sense of space and quality of storytelling: she is very, very good at telling you where the girls are in the world and what they’re eating, tasting, experiencing. Whether it’s the handfuls of puff-puff that the girls eat or the distant shine of the river, this is a school story that knows very firmly what it is and what it wants to share with the reader and I liked that very much.
In terms of reading, this read quite young so it might work well for somebody who is just coming to terms with longer middle-grade fiction, trying to gain a bit more confidence in their reading, or for somebody who wants a nice bedtime read.
I also found myself thinking about other books that would work well with this (I always like it when a book starts to suggest ideas to you and tells you where about in the world it might work best!). I think there’s potential, for example, in connecting Jummy to things like Alice-Miranda at School; Hi So Much and Pea’s Book of Big Dreams. Think of rich, gentle storytelling that focuses on people and you won’t go far wrong.
I wasn’t surprised to discover that this trilogy was first published in the fifties. Some periods in British children’s literature wear their heart very much on the sleeve. If you cut them, they bleed time and place. That sort of thing. The children’s books of the fifties, particularly when they’re of a historical ilk, give you some very heightened, rich language and quite classic storytelling. Adult, almost, perhaps, although I always feel that that’s a bit of a messy word to use when it comes towards children’s literature (the myriad of meanings that it has, the clarification it needs…). I suspect what I’m trying to work towards here is big storytelling. Ferociously accurate and sometimes even unreaderly detail. Books that look back and try to understand what sort of people we were and how that’s made the people that we are now.
(I generalise, of course, forgive me, of course these are aims that apply to much of today’s children’s literature but I think that there is still something so very interesting in how marked it is in the books from this period).
The Viking Saga, then, is the story of a man but also a story of how to keep your faith in a complex world, how to keep hold of your believes and how the world can so often be stranger than fiction. It took me a while to get into it because it’s not written in a particularly friendly manner (I am increasingly intrigued by thinking of writing in terms of friendliness: I like the way it captures something of the two way exchange of it, the necessity to be both ready to give but also to receive..).
But the more I read of it and the more I thought about it, I began to realise that Treece is not really concerned about being friendly or making it easy and obvious for the reader but rather about telling the story in the shape and way that it must be told. And that’s not to say that he doesn’t want it to be read because he does or that he tells it poorly for he does not. He exerts notable effort to do so in both. But he asks you to make the effort to read it, to come and meet him where he is, towards understanding and figuring it out, to becoming part of this strange and unusual band of men, to becoming part of their journey and their dreams and their fears, and all of a sudden you do. You get it.
And then all of a sudden you’re sat on the edge of the bed, unable to move until you’ve read a few more pages, unable to move until you’ve figured out how it ends.
In terms of contemporary readalongs, I’d be interested to see this paired with something like Louie Stowell’s Loki: A Bad God’s Guide to Being Good and there’s also a comparative critique begging to be made with historical fiction from other periods because fifties books really do fifty so hard and I think there’s something super interesting in that.
Biggles Defends The Desert is the story of a shindig in the desert. We go attack them, they attack us, people are trapped, people are rescued, Biggles has his head basically blown off but then recovers in spectacularly swift fashion, and there is never any doubt as to what the ending might be. But then, I suspect, that might be the way things roll in these books. It certainly is the way that things roll in the (outlandish, ridiculous, fabulous) Worralls books which was my route into them.
It was all a lot more Blytonian than I expected: Johns starts writing and then he does not stop and all you have to do as a reader is keep up. It is also very much of its time, and reminded me a lot of the Powell and Pressburger Colonel Blimp film and also a lot of the propaganda films I’ve come across from that period. It also feels like one of the last hurrahs for the boysown-let’s-go-turn-the-world-red-rah-rah-empire quality that so dominated the turn of the century. It didn’t surprise me when I had a look at Johns’ biography to discover that he was born in 1893 and that he worked as well on magazines. There’s a very strong serial vibe to them.
Did I like it? I’m not sure. I didn’t find it quite as diverting as the Worrals books but I’d certainly pick up another one if I came across it.
[A brief content warning prior to this book. I am always in favour of content warnings because I am always in favour of making deliberate, conscious decisions about the books you read and engage with. You are in control of literature and not the other way around. Hence this note.
The following review mentions abuse and the book itself concerns an adult-child sexual relationship. Please make good and appropriate choices for your own wellbeing. I found the book genuinely brilliant but also deeply, deeply challenging and I would not be being honest with you if I did not share that].
I don’t know how to begin and yet, perhaps, that is the beginning, there. My Dark Vanessa has left me a little in awe of it: Russell’s writing is so sharp, so clean, and so utterly fearless, that I sort of look at this book and don’t know where to begin in describing it. So perhaps there, there, in the sharpness of the language and thought, the way that every inch of this is cut and crafted and so endlessly, endlessly brilliant. What I admire, I think, the most about it, is how Russell engages with power. I think I am increasingly obsessed with understanding power, the threads of it, the expressions of it, and this story is deeply bound up with it.
And maybe now I have said that, maybe now that I have begun this review, I can begin to tell you what this story is about. When she was fifteen years old, Vanessa Wye had sex with her English teacher, Jacob Strane for the very first time. It was not the last. This is one part of the book. The other part is set several years later when another former student accuses Strane of abuse and a journalist has approached Vanessa for her comments on the story. We move back and forward between the two timelines, seeing how the events of one reverberate in the other, how some things are impossible to move on from, how some things were not love, how they were never love, how they were abuse and awful, heartstopping, abuse and always, always that.
This is not an easy book to read nor is it comfortable nor is it anything that ever gives you the easy answer. What it is, however, is brilliant. The writing is next level and every inch of this is full of such clarity, such precision.
Being fat is a process of daily reclamation of your body from a world that wants to claim it as their own. Hagen’s book examines what that means on an infinite number of levels whether that’s sitting on the same row on the plane with your friends, relationships, getting the bus, or simply opening the door and walking out into the world. It’s a mixture of personal memoir and interviews with others alongside guidance and support for those living their lives in othered bodies.
It is a book that is replete with kindness for others and Hagen’s writing is at its best here. There is an episode where she writes about going swimming and seeing another fat person there, looking terrified, as she enters the pool alone. This is the sort of feeling that you know, deep in your bones, and Hagen’s simple expression of love for this individual is incredibly beautiful. I also had an incredibly amount of time for how she articulates her thoughts around fatphobia and the duplicity of fattist thought; that one person can say something and then turn to you, the embodiment of that something, as if you are not even there at all. Being fat, plus-size, possessed of a non-normative body, is a hard and often lonely path. Hagen’s book is like a little piece of armour, a light in the darkness, and I loved it very much for that.
My only sticking point was with the interviews. While I found the interviews incredibly valid and valuable, I felt that they could have benefitted from some tighter editing.
Genuinely remarkable and reading smooth as silk, there’s nothing about this book that doesn’t take your breath away. I have had Educated on my radar for a while but picked it up only recently and then when I started reading, I couldn’t put it down. Westover’s writing is so good, so beautiful and wise and painterly, and her story is astonishing. You’ll no doubt know much of it if you’re aware of her book but if you’re not, then a brief synopsis: she grew up in rural Idaho, in a family that was ready for the end of the world, and despite everything pointing her life down a particular path, she went somewhere else entirely.
It’s difficult to comprehend some of the incidents that Westover tells here and many of them are brutal and violent and deeply, deeply shocking. She writes eloquent forewords and afterwords that give the reader guidance on the text; she explains as to why certain decisions are made (the n- word, for example features and she gives some explanation as to that), explores the recollections that other people have about certain incidents, and finally a list of the names in the text which are pseudonyms.
I did not want to put this down. I think there are moments in it where Westover wrestles with hideous things and does so in a kind of fiercely beautiful way; that her writing soars to somewhere quite remarkable whilst discussing deeply abusive situations; and that you can almost feel her education (in all senses of the world) wrapping around her shoulders like a lifebelt, holding her afloat.
Westover is also so very good on writing about love; about the relationship people can have with people, about the responsibilities we have to each other and ourself; about how to live in the world with grace and hope, even when the world seeks to drag you so very far down inside of it.
When I finished reading this, I found myself searching online for interviews with Westover. I was struck by one of the comments underneath one video in particular. It read (and I paraphrase slightly here) “is anybody else here after reading Educated and trying to gather their thoughts?” and I thought: yes. That was me. And I think I still am. Educated is a rare and beautiful piece of work and I am so very impressed by it.
When I mentioned that I was reading this online, I got nothing but positive responses. And they were not wrong: Dear Mrs Bird is charming and lovely and deeply, utterly refreshing. It’s funny and heartbreaking and very, very funny. Pearce has a delightful eye for character and gives you some very human and very real people dealing with extraordinary circumstances.
In terms of plot, it’s fairly straightforward. Emmy gets a job working on a magazine and, rather than being the war correspondent in training, she is to type up the replies of Mrs Bird. Mrs Bird is the magazine’s agony aunt and redoubtable and very particular in the letters that she answers (she is brilliant, I love her). So Emmy suddenly decides to step into the breach. She will answer the Unpleasant Letters in the style of Mrs Bird, sign her name, and sneak them into the magazine. Things happen, as they inevitably do, and some of them will break your heart a little bit.
I’ve always enjoyed work set in and around this period and particular work that deals with the experience of the everyday woman. I’m also somebody who has spent many happy days in the archives combing through the letters pages of vintage magazines. I love them greatly because they tell you everything about the experience of existing at that point in time. It’s not about glamour, it’s about trying to live a life despite everything that life may be throwing at you at this point. Dear Mrs Bird clearly loves its source material and period very much and I really appreciated that. It’s all very genuine and intensely charming stuff.
I have been thinking a lot about the idea of “outlandishness” in literature, that is to say the notion of people doing things that you would not normally do or believe or countenance and yet somehow you, as the reader, buy into them entirely and find yourself cheering them on. A typical example of this would be the moment that John McClane brings down a helicopter by launching a car at it in one of the Die Hards. (A Die Hard reference in a Worrals review! Today’s unexpected moment!). It is ridiculous and brilliant and stupid and also everything I have every wanted from cinema.
What I am trying to say, in a longwinded sort of manner, is that Worrals Carries On is precisely everything I have ever wanted from a book. It is ridiculous, it is outlandish, it is occasionally deeply stupid (the plot, for example, hinges on the discovery of a geranium leaf on a plane when it returns from a raid….and! it! is! not! a! British! geranium!). And yet it is also amazing. It is everything I have ever wanted.
Let me highlight the amazing. Worrals is built of adamantium and able to survive anything. Amazing. Frecks is her chum and there, as far as I can tell, just to give Worrals somebody to chat with. Amazing. Popping back and forth to France like you’re picking up the milk? Amazing. Foiling the Nazis with our eyes closed because that’s what we do jolly hockeysticks good show? Amazing. Running into spies and double agents every where we go? Amazing.
Can I give this a more literary review? Let’s try. There’s a lot of that determinedly Blytonian quality about Johns’ writing. You will keep going because the book doesn’t allow you to stop. There’s not one inch of this that doesn’t storm towards the inevitable conclusion. It’s a conclusion that wouldn’t know subtlety or nuance if it hit it on the head. I loved it entirely and desperately want to adapt these for television because there’s no way you don’t watch this and then put the next episode on.
Worrals Carries On. What a book. What an absolute car launched at a helicopter kind of book.
I really found this fascinating but it is a book of a very particular angle. Phillips is interested in the politics; specifically, the political machinations that occurred within government and between them, the press, and the royal family – and only that. He leads us through letters and telegrams and meetings where men wrangle about constitutional detail and, in the process, weds the constitutional detail with the occasionally farcical. (I was struck by the chap who flew over to France as part of events, decided to take his doctor because he was freaked out by flying, turns out the doctor’s an obstetrician, and now everybody thinks that Mrs Simpson’s pregnant).
In terms of style, it does take a while to get going but it’s worthwhile persisting. Phillips is comfier in a more academic style but I was amused when his feelings came to the fore. Certain characters are painted in certain lights and I found it interesting that he had some sympathies as well. I don’t know as much as I’d like about this period, hence my reading of this in the first place, and I found that he handled an enormous cast of characters pretty well. I’d have welcomed a cast of characters list, perhaps, or maybe a little more contextual detail for newcomers, but overall he does well.
I think what fascinated me the most was just the idea of all these blokes sat in an office and going “what if” and teasing out all these awful and outlandish scenarios. Some of them, Phillips is careful to add, bore little relationship to what was actually was happening, and many of them seemed to be rather more about the settling of old political scores. Fascinating. Exhausting! Politics!
Cogheart is a punky, sparky adventure with hints of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and I enjoyed it very much. Lily and her friends have to figure out what’s happened to her father. Along the way, she’s helped by a cast of mechanicals – automatons that need winding up in order to work – and her friends, Robert, a local clockmaker’s on, and her father’s mechanical fox Malkin. The band is slowly assembled as things go from bad to worse for Lily and then things wind up (pun unitentional!) to a great and spectacular finale.
What’s impressive here is how confident Bunzl is in his world. Every part of it feels very solidly worked out and real and it’s very easy to race through this book and just embrace the adventure. I had a lot of time for the detail of it – the mechanicals speak in a particular language, and there’s a lot of lovely stuff about airships and clockmakers and a world that’s just different enough to spark interest in every step. I liked this. It’s a very genuine thing.
I also think it’s important to note that this book was recommended to me by my Book Penpals school which is most definitely another mark in its favour. Thanks Penpals! You have excellent taste!
I really enjoyed this. It’s the first of a series of highly illustrated early readers which centre on the playing of a computer game. We follow the lead character – Super Rabbit Boy – as he heads through the levels. Things do not go straight forwardly and Sunny, the person playing the game, needs to find the solution in order to progress onto the next level. If you’re familiar with gaming, then you know how it is. We finish with the baddie being dispatched, a final party for the good guys, and a little page full of reading comprehension questions.
I’m always really interested in the books that try to do something a little bit differently. Whether that’s in subject or in style, I’m here for people who are working things through and trying to carve their own little bookish path within the world. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book like this for this age group and, thinking about some conversations I’ve had recently, I’m also really pleased to see it approaching gaming so positively and genuinely. I’m not here for a ‘them and us’ scenario where the book is one thing and the game is the Evil Other. I think wherever and whenever a young reader finds a text, we should be there to meet them. (So, to sum, I like it. It’s doing good things. Good job).
I suspect that there will be something very productive here as well for readers who are feeling a little bit detached or disengaged with their reading. A genuine, charming book – and what promises to be a very lovely series.
The Jill series is responsible for many things in my childhood, not in the least the solid belief that ponies should just sort of be given to Earnestly Deserving People like myself. They were everywhere in the countryside. Every family had at least seven. Jill herself had two! And it was all so simple and straightforward! If she needed a new bridle, she got one. If she needed a new saddle, it all worked well in the end. At some point a pony would graze in an orchard. There’d be an orchard in the first place. Oh, the envy, it was real.
Jill and the Perfect Pony is delightful (but also insane in that delicious way that all pony book plots are from this sort of period). The plot is that Amanda has the perfect pony but can’t be doing with staying a week with another family to ride in a team gymkhana. So Jill goes instead. Her mum is all COOL BEANS THEY’RE FRIENDS OF SOME FRIENDS WHATEVS. Her guardian is all COOL BEANS I WAS JUST A PLOT DEVICE ANYWAY. And so Jill goes off to stay with these people she’s never met and pretends to be Amanda. Or Jillamanda because she immediately tells them to call her Jill instead of Amanda. (Covert skills, not our girl’s strength). Anyway, highjinks! enormous teas! gallopy gallopy jumpy jumpy! potential concussion just a tiny one but everything alright by show day!
god, I love it, send me three and four pence, I’m going to buy some soap flakes to wash my pony’s tail.
I am always interested in what Nosy Crow do and even more so when it involves an author that I have a lot of time for. My Life On Fire by the sensitive and gentle writer Cath Howe is due out at the start of April and deals with a young girl in the middle of a crisis. Ren’s home has burnt down and while her family is finding its way back from this seismic event, she finds herself starting to replace her lost possessions with those of others. I’ve not often seen books dealing with these issues for this age range (Howe writes very accessible, very open literature) and I’m very grateful to My Life On Fire for that.
Howe’s writing is very gentle, very open, and it’s very genuine. Ren’s behaviours start to come to light during a school project and we see both the impact of this upon herself but also her classmates. A few moments here were genuinely very moving and I think Howe handles them well. She lets you see why Ren is doing what she’s doing and that it’s not necessarily something that makes her happy – this is in direct response to the trauma she’s undergoing. (Also a gentle plea, dear publishing, for more illustrations in middle grade fiction – I think they’d do nothing but lovely things here).
There’s a lot to appreciate here. Howe gives you so much in a very light and subtle way and deals with a complicated topic without assigning blame or sides. I was particularly appreciative of how she wrote the ‘discovery’ moment and the slow friendship between Ren and another character is delightful. It’s just a very charming and solid and very genuine read from the first page to the last.
I wasn’t sure for a while about Small Fires but then, all of a sudden, I realised that I got it. I was not looking for the next chapter end, but rather reading because I was lost to it, I was hungry.
I wanted to see where this fierce collection of essays (texts? poems? gatherings?) about food and kitchens and about cooking might go next; I wanted to see whether we’d have more of those strangely wonderful segues into discussions about The Odyssey; and because I wanted to have more of the ‘recipe’ being read as poem, as love letter, as something profoundly human.
I was into it. I got it. I wanted more of it. I checked the page number (66) because it always interests me when you get a book. When. How. Where. What happens on the page? Why is there and not elsewhere? I couldn’t pinpoint it for Small Fires (I never can) but I knew that it had something to do with the eccentric joys of this book, the uncontrollability of it, the way that it draws on Judith Butler through to Roland Barthes, the way that it talks about semiotics and tomatoes, dancing and anchovies, love and sandwiches.
I think if you understand this as a collection, something more akin to poetic non-fiction and the text as performance, a group of tiny fiery essays, crafted so smart and carefully, then you’ll not be far wrong. It is sprawling and provocative and sensual and so unique (oh, how I am increasingly beguiled by the books that tread their own path).
I have always had a lot of time for Jamila Gavin. Her writing is always very classy stuff and I admire it intently. She has this skill of restraint and clarity that makes you understand something, whatever that something is, very deeply before you quite realise what she’s done. I will always want to read her work because I think she’s one of the best authors that we have right now, quietly carving out this big and classic stories that feel like they’ve always been waiting for somebody like her to tell them.
Never Forget You is the story of four young women and how their lives are impacted by World War Two. The first thing to note is that it sits a little older than I expected it to sit, based on my first impressions, and so I’d encourage you to read it prior to using it in a classroom or educational context. If your readers are comfortable with things like Back Home, Code Name Verityor Tamar then they’ll be in the right area for this. It is also worthwhile noting that there’s nothing here that isn’t handled with grace and delicacy. Gavin’s with the reader every step of the way.
In terms of style, Never Forget You shifts between four different characters in very different circumstances. We begin with everybody at boarding school before the shattering effects of the war push people into new worlds, new lives. As is the nature of books like this, certain things will happen ‘off-screen’, so to speak, and that can feel difficult some times to swallow. Yet that’s kind of the whole point of it: the style tells you as much as the plot does itself. The sun rose, the sun set, people lived, people died, and the war whirled on.
(I’m thinking a lot about style as storytelling at the moment due to having recently read Tender Is the Night – the way that almost ‘collapsed’ at the end, the lack of interest it showed in anything but the lead, told you everything about his state of mind at that point…)
I loved, very much, how Gavin envelopes you in the wholeness of the story she has to tell. I love it when she lets go – there are some really interesting choices made here. She slips tenses, she uses extracts from The Song of The Stormy Petrel alongside wartime diaries, and she does it all very deliberately to make you feel the totality of this story, the immensity of this. This book really is the work of a storyteller.
I had been wanting to reread the Borrowers for a while and then, all of a sudden, started to find it in every bookshop I went into. This happens sometimes. Bookshops, particularly those of the second hand kind that I tend to frequent, go through trends. A while ago it was The Da Vinci Code and then it was Twilight and then it was Fifty Shades of Grey and sometimes, it would be all three at once and a slightly stunned looking volunteer trying to figure out what to do with them. In this case, it was the Borrowers (the Complete Borrowers, to be precise) and I was very happy to take it all as a sign.
If you are not familiar with these stories then a brief precis: the Borrowers is a series written by Mary Norton (1903 – 1992) and features tiny people who ‘borrow’ from the humans and the houses that they live in. The first in the series was published in 1952 and the last in 1982. There was a further short story (novelette? novella?) – Poor Stainless – which was published in 1966 and set just prior to the adventures of the first book: The Borrowers. Norton should also be known for The Magic Bed-Knob: Or How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons which was destined to be adapted by Disney into Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
I had remembered something rich in the Borrowers, something that I had loved very much at the time that I had read them, but I also knew that I remembered very little about the content. This did not bother me so much because I tend to remember textures and feelings about the things I read. The way something felt to read. The way that my heart still has a place for it, even now, hundreds of years after actually reading it. Upon my return to the Borrowers, I was struck by how these feelings remained, for the most, unchanged. These are stories with such endless warmth to them. They are so British, so fiercely of their time and place, and at one point the entire story hinges on model villages. I mean, what is not to love about that perfect perfect set of circumstances?
What I was struck by, however, was the sense of peril that underpins this book. Norton creates a world that’s so convincing and so real that you feel the constant danger that the Borrowers must wrestle with. It is remarkable. And it’s not just the truth of this world that gets you involved, it’s the way that Norton does it. She is classy and subtle and trusts that the reader both can and will follow her. She believes that you will believe and is full of such confidence in this, that you can’t help but believe her.
I think about that idea of ‘trusting a reader’ a lot, about how to balance what I give the reader on a page versus what I ask them to find out or fill in the gaps by themselves. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I get it wrong, but I’m always trying to work out that dance between what you need to know, right now, and what you can’t live with out and what you can bring to this story yourself. The shades of grey, perhaps, between writer and reader. The twilight at the edge of the page. I want to know what happens there and I want the reader to be part of that. For Norton, for the Borrowers, this twilight is full of constant flux. Things change. The safe becomes the dangerous. The lost becomes the found. And she trusts you to understand that, to realise that there can be threat and danger in a footstep, that the sound of somebody answering the phone could be the most terrifying on earth, and that a cat might be the stuff of nightmares. She does not hold back and the books are stronger for it. Everything in these books are strong. Character, plot, tension, everything.
I devoured all of these stories with joy, rolling from one into the other with a sort of delirious joy. When you read somebody who’s good, you want to keep reading. I loved it entirely. I could not get over how well done it is and for how long Norton did this for.
(It’s also important to note that there are maybe a handful of references that have dated poorly but that’s always something to bear in mind with books from this period. It’s literally just a handful and if you’re reading this aloud as a bedtime story – as indeed you should because the chapters will sing in these circumstances – just step right over them. You’ll be rewarded with something utterly rich and wonderful and lovely, and an author at the utmost of her powers).
(Also the final few paragraphs of The Borrowers Avenged are some of the best I have ever read).
Sometimes it’s interesting to come in at the end. This is the first book I’ve read by Fitzgerald and the last novel he completed. I’m aware of his others but I’ve never read them. I wonder if I should write something apologetic about that but I’m not apologetic, not in the slightest. Sometimes you get to the big books, the big authors, when you get to them and sometimes you don’t and that’s all fine.
And so to Tender Is The Night which is, every now and then, remarkable. It’s acute and sharp and beautifully written, achingly so. The talent of Fitzgerald is inescapable. There’s a bit at the start where he writes about two characters walking to somewhere, together, and it’s so simply and brilliantly done that I stopped in my literary tracks to savour it.
I’d like to say that sentiment continued but it didn’t. This took me a long, long time to read because (essentially) not much happens. Everybody is happy and then unhappy, fulfilled and then unfulfilled, hot and then not hot, and throughout it all is a man coming to terms with the fact that he’s kind of messed it all up. I wasn’t surprised to read about the personal circumstances around its publication. There’s an immense, aching sadness to this.
I was thinking about how to review this and indeed, if reviewing was even going to be a productive act for the book, myself, and for the slightly perplexed and slightly confused and often quite intrusive experience of reading it. But then, I began to think about how sometimes reviewing and writing about literature can help to pull that apart and figure out what it is and why it made me feel so … off. And then I began to think that the first part about this review is this: Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is not necessarily what it thinks it is. At first take, it’s a memoir, a fairly typical thing which details the life and experience of a very famous individual in very famous circumstances. And that individual, Perry, can write. Sometimes he writes too big and sometimes he writes too little but sometimes he writes just right and those moments are sharp, nuanced things. I liked it. I disliked it a lot as well. Some of it, I frankly skipped. But others, I read and thought: that is the good stuff, right there, that is writing and that is smart.
A book of contrasts, then, but also of mess and also of love but not quite necessarily the sort of love that you might think of when you hear that word. This is a book about loving and needing and wanting the things that will kill you if they can, if you take your eyes off them for a moment too long, and Perry knows that. He writes about his lows and his highs (in all of the senses of that word) and how he has found his hard-fought way through. Some of it is not easy to read, some of it is frankly discomforting, and some of it aches with a near-Faustian edge to be heard as much as it wants nobody to listen.
There are points when I longed for structure, for some more clarity and rigour to it, but I suspect that it was never going to be the sort of text to have it. Whilst I understand the thematic impulses and the stylistic impact of this, it makes it … thin, at times, a book that’s running away from itself as much of the author is. And yes, subtext, but also the point is made and then the point is made all over again, and I understood that but then I began to think of why and who and what this book is in the world for.
One key reason, I think, is for others who need that journey and to see it in somebody else’s life and to realise: they are not alone in this, and I welcome it for that. Perry holds nothing back and he is bare-boned with his truth. And yet, some of it could be held back, some delicacy, some love, perhaps, for himself, for others. He hints at this throughout but it’s coy, uncomfortable stuff; his admiration for Matt Le Blanc, for David Schwimmer, struck me in particular, and yet these were so briefly rendered that they were like threads of sunlight in a fog.
In many ways, I don’t think Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is what it is dressed up to be. Instead, it is something else, something stubborn and difficult and distinct and raw and red, something faint and lost and hopeful and found. Were I to be presented it by one of my students, I’d be asking them to find structure and to edit and to cut, cut, cut, but I think I’d also be asking them to think about what this meant for them to write. Because sometimes, sometimes, it’s not about the story that you’ve told but rather the fact that you’re here to tell it.
It’s difficult to write any review of this gentle and elegant classic without simply repeating the word “perfect” for quite some time. Nevertheless, I shall persist and try to give something of a review that does not mention how perfect it is on every line. A Bear Called Paddington is the first in Michael Bond’s series about a young bear. The bear has emigrated from Peru to England, and his only Aunt has gone to live in a home for retired bears. Upon his arrival at Paddington Station, the bear meets The Browns who are destined to become his new family. He also receives a new name: Paddington.
When I finished this book, I kept thinking of the idea of clarity. There is a point in British children’s literature (and it is somewhere around the mid-twentieth century) that authors found a very precise space. They were supported by liberal and often quite radical publishing ideas and indeed, a world that was busily remaking itself. Their stories have this very specific quality about them (you see it very much in authors such as Philippa Pearce and Lucy M. Boston), and it manifests itself on the page as a kind of clarity. They’re often not big stories nor super dramatic ones and they hinge perhaps on a clock that strikes thirteen or a marmalade sandwich, but they are somehow so, so acute in what they say about the world. In what they hope for it.
In a long and round about way, this is me telling you that I love this book. I love it for the kindness that it sees in the world, that it expects to be there just because it should be, because the opposite is too outlandish to even consider. I love it for the gentle softness of the stories, the way that it really is all about marmalade sandwiches at the right time, just when everything feels new and ready to be experienced for the first time. I love it for how it captures London and brings it to life, for the way it makes not only the Browns wrap their arms around this young bear and bring him home, but for the city to do it too. And I love it for the way it does all of this with such subtlety, such grace.
One G, one B B, one M all together at Birtwick Park = One Ginger, one Black Beauty, one Merrylegs all together at Birtwick Park (Black Beauty)
One F and one V falling in love on their way to F W = One Fox and one Vixen falling in love on their way to Farthing Wood (Farthing Wood)
One S turning a somersault at F = One Sweetbriar turning a somersault at Flambards (Flambards)
One S J trying to solve a murder = One Sally Jones trying to solve a murder (The Murderer’s Ape)
One J lurking deep in the sewers below Deptford = One Jupiter lurking deep in the sewers below Deptford (The Deptford Mice)
People Doing Things
One hot C C exiting through the window and dazzling M A in the process = One hot Commander Christie exiting through the window and dazzling Miss Annersley in the process (Changes for the Chalet School)
One H and his U N having adventures on trains = One Hal and his Uncle Nat having adventures on trains (Adventures on Trains)
One M S calmly inventing a whole new genre because she is the coolest of all = One Mary Shelley calmly inventing a whole new genre because she is the coolest of all (Mary And Frankenstein)
One P falling through time at T = One Penelope falling through time at Thackers (A Traveller In Time)
I first came to this story through the film of the same name which was something I watched almost by mistake and then enjoyed intensely. I spend a lot of time in the early twentieth century but primarily through the filter of children’s literature, texts written for young girls, and the work of female authors. The story of a man who spent his life exploring the Amazon before, ultimately, losing his life to it, fascinated me. It felt like a real world Boy’s Own adventures but one with a sad and tragic edge (and that’s something that the fictional Boy’s Own stories I read rarely have…).
In the Lost City of Z, David Grann explores the life of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett. One of the last “great explorers” who spent his years exploring the Amazonian rainforest, Fawcett became increasingly convinced that this place hid a secret, long-lost city. He dubbed this city ‘Z’ and devoted his life towards finding it. On Fawcett’s last expedition into the rainforest, where he was accompanied by his son and his son’s friend, the three of them disappeared. Along with exploring this story and how Fawcett’s disappearance scandalised the early twentieth century (and inspired a whole host of deeply unsuccessful ‘rescue’ expeditions), Grann also shares his own journey into the Amazon whilst also offering some ideas as to what may have happened to Fawcett’s expedition.
I liked this. Grann’s style is deeply readable, engrossing, and his subject matter burns with interest. Even during the more fantastical and unreal moments, Grann is careful to provide references and sources and remind the reader that this did all, in fact, happen. There’s a substantial section where these sources and his methodology are laid out in detail and I was satisfied to see that, for example, he had taken much of the quotations he used in the book directly from source material. It’s a well-grounded book.
From a readerly perspective, it’s an eye-opening narrative and one that reveals how brutal and horrific the attitude of the Victorian explorer could be. Grann shares some horrific incidents and attitudes ranging from a little bit of murder to a lot of murder and then doing a bit extra murder and then doing everything else besides. It is an understatement to say that explorers of this book often earned their knowledge at the cost of the people who lived there. Grann is careful to recognise how often Fawcett was horrified by such incidents but I wondered if there was some more critical work to do here (there is something, I think, to realising how much such things appal whilst also realising that the individual you’re writing about is still cut from a very similar cloth..).
It does end a little briefly, a little suddenly, but I think that was always going to be the nature of the beast. We literally don’t know what happened to them, for sure. Grann offers a persuasive reading but still, there’s that unknown edge. What remains, however, is a fiercely vivid and often heartbreaking story of loss and Grann helps us to understand the magnitude of that. The expedition is lost but that loss is felt keenly, sharply, by a thousand other people beside. A poignant, powerful book.
One of the things I like about Goodreads is that, at the end of the year, you get a fairly nifty round up of your reading. Admittedly you do have to remember to put the ‘read date’ in and admittedly that took me quite some time to remember to do (!), but it does all pay off. I’m always interested to see where I’ve been and how my reading has worked out in terms of things like gender, genre, and translations and so on.
One of the things that does amuse me is how there’s a mixture of some very, very historic and niche titles and some very contemporary ones. I am, at point of writing, the only reviewer of The Last Weapon, a rather remarkable and searingly sad anti-war novel from the dawn of the twentieth century, and the first person in six years to post a review of Hilda At School. I’d heard of neither title before I discovered them this year so they were interesting things to explore. (Also, I think, it’s rather interesting about how books find readers in the world and how that happens..)
Stand out titles from this first block are Putin’s Russia, a nonfiction graphic novel which provides a deft and terrifying expose of Putin, and the smart, chatty delicious Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans. My lovely penpal school introduced me to the charming Shine and I thoroughly enjoyed Managing Expectations by the witty, wise and very charming Minnie Driver. You’ll also see the beginnings of an L. M Boston theme here – she’s been one of the authors I’ve really loved to explore over the past few years.
I think Always, Clementine is probably my best book of the year in terms of new releases. I’m always in favour of books that try to do things differently and do it well and Clementine really does. It’s emotional, thoughtful and really well done. It’s also risky in terms of style and I like how it really goes for it.
The Philippa Gregory era! Ha! I read a lot of them all at once and then read The Lady of the Rivers twice during a hotel stay when I ran out of books. I do like Philippa Gregory a lot though I wonder if sometimes they get a bit samey for me. Nevertheless I do like how she handles history and how she centres women and their agency. (Also I really loved The Lady of the Rivers actually, I was V Here for Jacquetta).
Stalking The Atomic City was a standout here and one that gained some horrific relevance as the year progressed. It now feels like a memorial to a place and time in its own right and I would encourage those of you who haven’t come across it yet to do so. The writing is big, wild and unforgettable.
The graphic novel versions of The Baby-Sitter’s Club are a JOY and I recommend them entirely. They’re so happy and heartfelt and really very beautiful. The other standout here for me was Catwings – it’s very slender but rather beautiful, and reminded me that I wanted to read much more Ursula K Le Guin.
And that’s it! A year in books! I suspect I’ll add a few more by the end of the year but this is pretty much it for now. I love how it’s a bit of everything and that I managed to discover some very stylish new authors and artists to me. I’ll be returning to Daryl Cunningham in particular – I really love how he handles information and image and the topics he covers are so fascinating and well done. I also want Minnie Driver to write more. She’s so, so interesting to read and really was a genuine delight to discover.
Hello! It’s that time of year again where I get to enter my final form as a bookish Pokemon and set you all a Quite Niche Christmas Quiz. If you are going “wait, what?” then you can catch up on the previous quizzes here: the first and the second. The answers will be linked from those respective posts, I promise.
All of the books that are featured have been reviewed or talked about on this blog or on my social media and the principle of the questions is this: I will write something like “Twelve L G in T straight lines” and all you have to do is fill in the missing words. In this instance, the answer is: “Twelve little girls in two straight lines” and the book that this references is the incomparable Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans.
There are three rounds and the title of each should give you some additional help as to what the answers might be (but beware! they are niche!!!)…
Answers will be posted on New Year’s Eve!
Lions, tigers and bears, oh my!
One G, one B B, one M all together at Birtwick Park
One F and one V falling in love on their way to F W
One S turning a somersault at F
One S J trying to solve a murder
One J lurking deep in the sewers below Deptford
People Doing Things
One hot C C exiting through the window and dazzling M A in the process
One H and his U N having adventures on trains
One M S calmly inventing a whole new genre because she is the coolest of all
I think that when you were a pony girl, there will always be a little part of you that will remain a pony girl. She’ll make herself known in strange, subtle ways throughout the rest of your life. Like when you see a picture of horse and rider and hear the long forgotten voice of your instructor mutter “reins like washing lines” inside your head. Or when you still know how to measure the right length of your stirrups despite not having touched a stirrup for a long while. Little things. Tiny, fragments of memory. Still inside of you, and forever will be.
This book is one of my fragments. It’s a trilogy (comprising ofEventer’s Dream, A Hoof in the Door and Ticket to Ride) but save yourself and hunt out this collected edition because a) you’ll want to read it all at once because b) it’s better that way. There’s something so delicious about every inch of Caroline Akrill’s lived, eccentric, vivid world that you want more of it and more of it and denying yourself that would be daft, so don’t.
Now that I’ve said that, it’s time to tell you a bit about what actually is going on. Very generally (very), pony stories of this particular era have two kind of key plots: 1. girl gets horse or 2. girl loses horse. Sometimes they’ll flip that by throwing different genders or ages into the mix or throwing in some kind of External Driving Circumstance but at the heart, it’s pretty much the same. Somebody wants / keeps a horse and the world is conspiring against them to make that Not Happen. (And this isn’t a criticism by the way: I am so fond of these books and I love them entirely because they work. They are primal and pure and rich forms of storytelling that very often centre the voices of young women and do so with all honesty and joy).
This trilogy focuses on the experience of Elaine. She is a girl with a dream: she is going to become an eventer and make it on her own. For Elaine, this is a financial necessity but also, as the books slowly reveal, something of a personal cause. She needs to make it work for her because there is no other option. And she will not take the easy path to do so.
The path that she takes leads her to the impoverished and deeply eccentric Fane family. Henrietta and Nigella run a livery stable which is full of all of the horses that everybody else passed on or didn’t want anything to do with. There is the mare-who-slips-a-stifle, the bad-tempered chestnut, and the noble yet rather pro-bolting The Comet. Henrietta and Nigella have made things work with their stable of misfits by selling off their belongings and bits of their ancestral home and kind of just a little bit avoiding paying the bills.
Eventing, however, is expensive and so they and Elaine are forced to find more funds. The overall effect is rather if Tom Sharpe met Christine Pullein Thompson (and indeed the rest of her remarkable family). It’s eccentric, wildly over the top, full of hunting and galloping madly over hedges, bolting horses, ridiculous episodes, heavily dated references, madly moving moments that suddenly knock you sideways, a strange and deliciously peculiar pony story that doesn’t do ANYTHING you expect of it, and it’s all deeply, utterly wonderful.
I first read this a hundred years ago, and I loved it then. And now? I love it all over again.
Perhaps best known for the eternally joyful Madeline, Hotel Splendide allows Ludwig Bemelmans to showcase another side of his personality. This strange, slender and occasionally deeply melancholic book is the story of his time at the Hotel Splendide in the 1920s. Bemelmans moves up the ranks of the hotel staff to become an assistant manager and, as he goes, chronicles the eccentric lives of the staff and guests. At its heart, this is Mitford type stuff where the social detail tells us so much about the people and the world he’s in (I rather loved the episode where he spoke about the Hispano Suiza, a car I have only ever seen mentioned in the Chalet School books and full of a rather evocative imagery in its own right) but it’s also a chronicle of big lives lived at the edge of excess. Characters have enormous, out of control banquets full of glitter and panache and then there’s these counterpoints of the staff who make these moments happen, while living their own wildly eccentric and often deeply poignant lives right alongside them.
It’s perhaps more productive to think of this as a short story collection rather than something sequential or as a pure piece of memoir. Not all of this feels true but then all of it might be, and that gossamer edge between fact and fiction is rather interesting to me. Even the stories that we’re in, the stories that we know, can be given a thousand different interpretations depending on time, perspective, and speaker. Bemelmans gives us a sort of detached interest which tells us little about himself (but almost, conversely, everything…) Focus in particular on The New Suit but also The Magician Does A New Trick, absolute melancholic perfection both. I kept returning to that idea of melancholy throughout this. There’s something deeply melancholic about all of this, a sort of longing and realisation that what Bemelmans is chronicling is so so specific to this time and place and moment, and even amidst the wit (and there is plenty of that), there is always, always this melancholic edge and that intrigues me so much.
One final thing to emphasise is this: this is not a children’s book, so detach it from his other work. Certain terms and attitudes used have also dated.
My goodness, this is a heck of a book. I finished it and had to make a mixture of ‘wait, what’ faces at the wall to calm down. Putin’s Russia has been on my wavelength for a while (I very much enjoyed Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide from the same publisher) and I finally managed to pick up a copy of it at a recent comics fair. I was not disappointed. Cunningham delivers a searing and unrelenting breakdown of how Putin has become who he is and the people who have been pushed – often violently – out of his way.
One of the benefits of Cunningham’s approach, a nuanced mixture of text and art that is graphic non-fiction and fiercely acute acute, is how he works chronologically. He draws together all of these events that can seem isolated and disconnected from a distanced perspective to make you realise how everything actually fits. Everything is connected. And everything is basically horrible. Like, my god, there’s some horrible stuff spoken about here. Cunningham is very good in how he gives you the space to let it all sink in. He lets you breathe, in a narrative full of tightness and discomfort, he lets you breathe.
I can see why some may ask for more here; it is slender, and I did want more but I think much of that is from just being greedy with Cunningham’s style. I enjoy what he does and I want more. There is a restraint about some of his moments but I think, really, the book gains a lot of strength from that. You can almost feel the form and aesthetic strain at the leash and the idea that there is more to say, that the book itself is appalled and disgusted by much of the story it has to tell, can be almost palpable.
A precisely told and deeply well-crafted story, this is an exemplary expression of graphic non-fiction and what it can do. Smart, smart stuff.
I have a list of the books I want to reread and one of the constants on it for the last few months has been a reread of the Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins. If you don’t know of these books, then they kind of marked a point where young adult literature spilt very firmly into the wider popular culture. A huge amount of young adult literary property kind of became a film very quickly (forgive me, young adult specialists, I’m generalising immensely here!) because a lot of people wanted to recreate the success of the Hunger Games. This year marks ten years since the first film in the series came out, and fourteen years since the debut of the trilogy came out, and then I found the entire trilogy in a local bookshop and thought: well, that’s a sign if ever I saw one.
(Sidebar: The problems of a lovely new bookshop opening up on your way home! The delightful problem of it all!).
And so I read and I devoured because 1. flu but also 2. these books are so good and well-crafted and rather deceptively brilliant. I say deceptive because I’m increasingly convinced that simple and ‘straightforward’ prose is the hardest thing to write. I can write big and emotional and blousy with my eyes closed and as much as that can be a good thing for the right place and the right time, it can also be very problematic. The emotion can dominate. If you’re writing something sad, then it can drain everything else around it. It can weigh down the page. Make it heavy. Make it weigh so, so much to read let alone write.
(The secret is to just write the thing. Just to write the thing. Don’t dress it up, don’t euphemism, don’t dance about it – just write it).
(The secret is also to listen to your agent who tells you to Be More Spock and Less Kirk).
And that’s what Suzanne Collins does on every page in the Hunger Games. She writes the things. She writes the boned and bare truth of it, and even when she’s dealing with worldbuilding detail or some stunningly horrific incident, she gives you it in such a straightforward manner that it can feel like the easiest thing in the world. Here’s the thing. Read the thing. React to the thing.
(oh mags).
But books like this work so, so hard. They work underneath the surface to give you everything in the right way at the right time in the right order. Consider the way that you know things in The Hunger Games, and the way that you know just enough for the world to make sense and the actions to fit. You discover the world with Katniss and Peeta, and you discover it just as they do. The brutality of it. The potential of it. The little moments where it will allow them to be who they are. The awful moments when it won’t.
It’s always interesting to revisit a book because you are, in a way, revisiting the memory of who you were when you read it last (lovely work from Alison Waller on this topic here by the way). There’s something of who you were and something of the person you’re yet to be in it; you know that this rereading isn’t the last of this text. It’s a moment in your time together, and the story will continue. The story does continue. Even now new people are picking up the Hunger Games books and discovering these stories and starting them anew.
(I always find it rather remarkable how stories survive. The way that the form of story – the patterns and structures and textures – can be remade in a thousand different ways – but the story, the essence of it – twists and shifts and survives.)
Next on my list of rereads? Joyce Stranger. I grabbed a handful of her books a few years ago, prior to Covid, from a charity shop in Whitby, and I devoured them, then. Now’s the time to find some more, I think. I could buy them easy as pie online but that’s not the same, is it? The hunt, that’s what matters, the search and the finding and that delicious, delicious moment when they’re all there for you. Waiting for you to reread them. Waiting for you to come home again.
The US Covers of How To Be Brave and How To Be True
I got some very special post this week, namely my author copies of the US edition of How To Be True. I wanted to share it with you because pretty books are always a good thing to share, right? (lol, we all know that’s not a question!).
If you’re not sure what an author copy is, then they are precisely what they say on the tin! As part of a publishing contract, an author is given copies of their book. The amount varies and after that, you’re able to buy copies at a reduced price directly from the publisher. I gave mine to family and friends and librarian chums (hello!) but also keep a few on a little shelf where I sit and work (because encouragement, always a good thing).
Both covers are by Flavia Sorrentino and I love what she’s done here so much. One of the common things in both the US and UK editions (and something I’m so grateful for) is how unabashedly character led they are. These are books which make no bones about what they are – stories of girls in the world, doing what only they can do best. Thank you to both Macmillan and Pushkin for making my nerdy little book dreams come true.
I had a sort of sudden realisation the other day (driven, might I add, by the discovery of an excellent boxed set in the charity bookshop) that I had never really sat and read the Winnie-the-Pooh stories all the way through from the start. I knew them of course because everybody knows Winnie-the-Pooh, right? It’s one of those franchises that is kind of so embedded into the world culturally that it’s hard to escape. You know this bear. He’s had films made about him, stories told, cartoons made. You know this world.
But I didn’t know the writing, I didn’t know the way these stories felt.
I didn’t know how the wry and lovely little twists in Milne’s language dance off the page and I definitely didn’t know how he uses this stylistic to (so smartly! so well!) develop a completely unique way to tell a story. It looks simple. It isn’t. There’s something very clever and perfect going on here, and even though people will try and emulate Milne’s style for years after this, nobody will ever be able to do it quite like this.
Sometimes I get a little bit lost when it comes to the classics because I spend so much with the books that never got that label. It can be very easy for me to doubt the books that did and do get that status because, quite often, there’s so much in their favour to allow that to happen. They were written at the right time. They were written by the right man. They were lauded by the right critics. The circumstances were good to them.
Sometimes it’s productive for me to remember that a classic can be all of that and more, but it can also be good. Humans contain multitudes, our literature should be no different. And so it is with Winnie-the-Pooh which is good and it is funny and it is incredibly (incredibly!) poignant and it is graceful and it is gentle and it is full of a rather beautiful, endless sunshine. I loved it. I needed it.
(I’ve talked before about how the right book finds you at the right time).
A very late stage Bessie Marchant novel, Felicity’s Fortune is also a rather interesting thing. It begins with Felicity who (over)works in an office and lives a relatively impoverished life with her widowed mother and the rest of her family. It is, as ever with many books of this era, a life where the Noble Poor Poorly Noble in the best way that they can and full of ‘even though we don’t have much, we’ve got each other and that’s what counts’ vibes. Out of the blue, they receive a letter from the husband of Felicity’s aunt. He is lonely asks for Felicity to come and live with him (I know, it’s a lot, right?). He will pay her a handsome salary and leave her everything when he dies. Felicity is all “bit weird” and her mum’s all “but your Aunt was noble!” and so Felicity goes “still a bit weird but cool beans” and hops on the next boat. But! Her Uncle Dirk is SECRETLY A BAD EGG (this was published millions of years ago so just deal with some spoilers) and Felicity takes literally the entire book to figure it out (not the quickest, our girl).
So! So far, so Marchant. And a lot of it is very icky from the modern perspective. Not only is the relationship between Uncle Dirk and Felicity a bit ick, but the representations of the indigenous peoples is more than a bit ick, and then there’s the colonialism side of things which is also, you guessed it, ick. It moves around in terms of location and features Singapore and Java before focusing much of its attention on a small island named “Balin”. For somebody who never left the United Kingdom, Marchant gives a good try at describing some of these locations but she’s much comfier in terms of writing people than she is place.
Yet despite all the ick, and despite all of the ‘god, can we try to not be a little bit hideous’ thoughts you will have when reading this, Felicity’s Fortune gives you – essentially – a tale of restitution. Felicity makes right the wrongs of Uncle Dirk (BOO HISS, etc, etc) and I honestly think this might be the first book I’ve ever read of that period where somebody goes “look, I know we’re British and clearly THE BEST in everything, but maybe we’re wrong in this and these people actually know best let’s give the thing back to them”. I suspect some of this subplot stems from Marchant’s religious connections but even if it doesn’t, it’s still rather startling to see from a writer who has spent so much of her career going “empire, empire, rah, rah, rah.”
Do I recommend this book? Both yes and no, really. It’s very uncomfortable for the most until all of a sudden it throws everything absolutely on its head in about three pages. And then it ends with her going home to meet the hottie she’s destined to marry (and who she had previously saved from a head injury on a boat which crashes a little but doesn’t sink, honestly, what on earth are these books).
There was a moment, about a quarter of the way through reading, that I realised something very precise about Further Adventures of the Family From One End Street. I think it is better than The Family from One End Street which won the Carnegie and that realisation, sharp and sweet and intoxicating as it was, fascinated me. This book is better than the first and it was published nineteen years after it. That’s interesting.
So what makes this work so well? At first read, it’s a fairly straightforward book. The family from One End Street have adventures. Some of the children get measles and are sent to the countryside to recover. There’s a wedding to attend, a mishap involving a pig, and an outstanding conclusion set back in the house involving Mrs Ruggles, her youngest child and a – no, I won’t spoil that yet. But the secret about straightforward books – those books that feel simple and clean and easy – is that they are doing an enormous amount of clever and sharp and nuanced work just below the surface.
Consider a trip to the countryside. It is a whole new world into being, full of richly coloured characters to meet and new adventures to have. But we’re never dislodged from the story because we see it all from the perspective of the characters. Garnett stays with them so tightly that we meet the new world entirely through their perspective. The sound of a cow mooing in the distance in the middle of the night. The creak of a wooden floor. The mean lady who runs the local shop. It’s so simple and so, so smart. We’re never left with the other characters – we’re always, always with the Ruggles.
It’s also important to recognise that The Ruggles remain one of the few working class families to be represented in the literature of this period and to have their representation done with a lot of love and respect. (I am conscious that Garnett herself came from a middle class background and as such, will have made certain decisions here. I’m also conscious of the paucity of working class authors of children’s literature of this period. These are issues that publishing is still working on today.). Not only do these books document a way of life that is pretty much lost now, they also do it with a lot of fun and joy.
There will be detail that doesn’t make sense (especially for modern readers unfamiliar with the period) but most of it can be deduced through context. The other stuff doesn’t really matter. This is just rich and gentle and good storytelling, cleverly done and funny and smart and simple and so, so well done. I loved it, entirely.
(Also, if you’re wanting a modern readalike, this begs to be read alongside something like Binny for Short or the Casson family series from the great, great Hilary McKay).
Today’s post is an interview with Sarah Todd Taylor and Jo Clarke and I am super excited to share it with you! When I was thinking about it, my idea was basically ‘Paris Middle Grade Authors Assemble’. I knew that we were all authors who have set middle grade books in Paris (How To Be True; Alice Éclair : Spy Extraordinaire; Libby and the Parisian Puzzle) and I thought it might be fun if we had a chat about that….
Sarah – Hi Daisy, I’m utterly thrilled to be here, and to be chatting with you and Jo (I LOVE the Libby series and your How to Be series and am sure that Libby and Alice would be friends if they met).
DMJ – My second guest is Jo Clarke who I’ve known and admired for a long while as “bookloverjo” – a blogger and reviewer of children’s books (bloggers are great, we love bloggers here). She’s now also the author of the Travelling School Mysteries – a middle grade series which travels the globe and has ADVENTURES (also something we love entirely here!). Welcome Jo!
Jo – Hi Daisy, such a treat to here chatting with you and Sarah about all things Paris. I can’t resist a book set in Paris so was so excited to read both of yours and see how you explored my favourite city.
DMJ – Let’s start with the obvious. Why did you choose to set your book in Paris?
Sarah – Originally, Alice was going to be set in London, but as I’d set the Max the Detective Cat series there, while chatting with my amazing editor at Nosy Crow, Fiona Scoble, we discussed moving the action to France. As Alice was a pâtissière, this made perfect sense, as there are so many gorgeous French pastries for her to make, and I knew that I wanted her first adventure to be on a luxury steam train, so the beautiful Train Bleu that ran from Paris to the Mediterranean became my inspiration for the Sapphire Express, and Alice’s Paris adventures began.
Jo – The inspiration behind The Travelling School Mysteries came from a chance conversation at work. A supply teacher mentioned her daughter was going to school in Japan so she could learn about the culture. I’m obsessed with boarding school stories so it seemed like the perfect place to set a mystery but I wanted to do it with a twist so I decided to create an extraordinary school that travelled the world. Paris was my first location choice as it’s my absolute favourite city in the world and it’s the place I have visited the most. I fell in love with Paris when I took my boyfriend (now husband) there for his 21st birthday.
DMJ – And can I ask as well about the writing process? With publishing timelines being what they are, I was wondering whether either of you wrote your books during lockdown – and if so, how did you manage writing the city at a distance? I know for me, I watched a lot of Youtube (thank you Paris and plant youtube! you’re the best!) and ‘streetviewed’ my way around the city…
Sarah – The first draft of Alice was actually well underway by the time lockdown began. I drew a lot on photos I had taken on a trip to Paris way back in 2017 as well as steam train rides I have taken. I found some wonderful books about luxury train travel and also reached out to friends on Twitter who write about trains, who were very helpful. I wrote quite a bit of Alice’s next adventure in lockdown, using maps and documents of the event it is based around that I found online. I’d love to go back to Paris, though, to refresh my memories – and to try more of the pastries that I’ve been writing about.
Jo – The first version of Parisian Puzzle was written over four years ago and I had travelled to Paris the previous year so it all felt quite alive in my mind. Unfortunately I had no agent interest and put it away in a drawer, it was only two years later when I entered it into a writing competition that I decided to rewrite it. By then we were heading into the first lockdown and my memories were slightly more hazy. I used children’s travel guides to Paris in the hope that they might help me with the child’s eye view of Paris that Libby and Connie were seeing. I also had a map above my desk with all the key locations plotted out. I created Pinterest boards with all my favourite places as I really need visual clues when writing.
DMJ – My research for How To Be True involved street mapping my way around the Arc De Triomphe and figuring out how to get there from the Ladurée shop on the Champs Elysées (a vital cameo in the book!). Did you do any particular research before you started writing? What are your top tips for people wanting to write about Paris?
Sarah – A big part of Alice is the cakes, so that was another set of reading up that I had to do. Thankfully there are lots of youtube videos from talented cake makers so I was able to look up the techniquest she uses. I wanted to make sure that the Sapphire Express’ journey through France was convincing so I based it on the journey made by a real luxury Train – Le Train Bleu. There is quite a lot of action in the book that is dependent upon where the train is at certain times so I had to make a lot of calculations about how fast it could travel, and at several points, how fast a car could travel to meet it. I think my top tip, if you can’t actually visit Paris, would be maps and YouTube. As Alice is set in the 1930s, I can’t actually visit ‘her’ Paris anyway, but there is so much footage available on the web so I was able to get a feel for the fashions and look of her world from that.
Jo – When I’m running creative writing workshops I always tell children to pick imaginary locations if they want to make things easy for themselves, using real life locations is really tricky. You have to pay so much attention to detail otherwise someone is bound to catch you out. I checked the timings of Metro journeys, the facilities in the library they used and used estate agent websites to check details about what they would be able to see outside their bedroom window. Street views, Pinterest and maps have been invaluable to my research. Also I had a French reader who used to live in Paris read the first draft and highlight any glaring errors.
DMJ – And were there any locations that you knew had to feature in your work?
Sarah – The Eiffel Tower. I fell utterly in love with it when I visited and I knew that I wanted it in the book. Alice doesn’t actually go to the tower in A Recipe for Trouble, but her Eiffel Tower cake centrepiece kicks off the action, and the tower appears in all her glory in the next adventure.
Jo – As I was rewriting Parisian Puzzle during lockdown and had no idea what the world would be like I wanted to take my readers on a virtual tour around Paris and include as many as the landmarks as possible. I was thrilled when Becka Moor (my illustrator) created a map of Paris so that my readers could visualise where the events were unfolding. The thing I love the most about Paris is when the Eiffel Tower sneaks up on you and you spot it in the most unexpected of places, Libby glimpses it near the beginning hiding behind clouds but we never see her actually go up to the top. I did want to have the ending of the book set at the Eiffel Tower but because of the increased security from when I first visited, I knew it wouldn’t have been realistic.
Jo – I have a whole shelf dedicated to books set in Paris including Alice Eclair and How To Be True of course. I absolutely love Salvatore Rubbino’s A Walk in Paris picture book, it has the most exquisite illustrations and fascinating facts, it’s a beautiful walk through the city.
DMJ – And finally, if you were going to recommend one place in Paris for writers to visit, where would it be and why?
Sarah – Ooh, that’s tricky. I loved climbing to the top of the Arc de Triomphe and exploring the museum within it, but I think I would say the river bank, just because there is so much going on there and it’s such a wonderful slice of the city, passing by the bridges, seeing life pass by on the boats, the gorgeous churches and the tower rising above it all. There are so many stories that could start from anything you pass by.
Jo – Shakespeare and Company. in Paris is the place literary lovers flock. Pop in and buy a book set in Paris and find a cafe nearby and read it with a hot chocolate and delicious pastry, just like Libby would. Avoid visiting during the Summer months when it will be very crowded and you will feel rushed. I think the perfect time is in Spring when the air is cold and the crowds are small. It has the most wonderful atmosphere and a career highlight for me was discovering that they stocked my book.
After many years of not understanding her work, I am increasingly obsessed with Lucy M. Boston. I found The Sea Egg a remarkable thing, and A Stranger At Green Knowe transformative. I think it is the stubborn strangeness of her work that appeals to me. They are not necessarily the easiest books to read nor those with the more straightforward of message but they are so fiercely and utterly themselves and I love them for that. They are persistent stories which tell the story that they want to tell, irrespective of the world about them. I like that. I like that a lot.
The Guardians Of The House is a slender story concerning a boy who breaks into a house and if you have read some of Boston’s other work, you will have an idea of what happens next. But in a way, you really don’t. This is a story where the familiar is made strange and paragraphs twist in and out of themselves, transporting you somewhere else within a heartbeat before even you or even they have quite realised what is happening. There are moments when this works better than others and a few moments that work stiffly from a modern perspective but all of them work in a way that only Boston (or perhaps Philippa Pearce) can do. This is a book that explores the edges of the world.
(I have always described myself as somebody who did not quite understand fantasy and now I wonder if it is because I have just been reading the wrong sort of fantasy, all along…)
A “memoir in essays” is an interesting thing because it’s always going to be more selective than the – already selective – form of the autobiography. It’s a challenge to set for yourself and it’s one that Driver answers very well. Her essays pick out key moments in her life; the birth of her son, a rave in a farmer’s field, her first visit to the US, and are frank and funny and often very beautifully written. There’s a few moments where I think an editor might have pulled a few sentences back but equally, there’s interest in seeing them go off and say something very particular. Driver has a voice and she’s ready here to use it. Fearless too, I think, but paradoxically often very private. She’s very precise in what she reveals here and it’s elegantly done stuff.
Her final essay moved me to tears. It’s really one of the standout pieces in the book, along with the one where she writes about the birth of her son. Driver is very good at seeing the moment in the world and giving you everything that happens there, within it. She is also very good at capturing the essence of people and giving you that in a very precise and economical style. She’s a good writer, she really is.
I did have some issues with how this book is presented though. It’s a little too fond of the the double line break and the big white space between a paragraph. I get the stylistic reasoning behind these and indeed, the aesthetic decisions, but equally it feels a little bit like unnecessary padding. This is a book that doesn’t need that artifice and an extra essay would have helped fill up this space a little bit. Plus it would have helped to fill in a few of the blanks that the reader is left with.
(a selective form, inevitably, leaves blanks, and I don’t know if they should have attention drawn so firmly to them).
Also, I don’t think I shall ever look at scrambled eggs again in the same way. I shall not explain further about this because spoilers, but I am increasingly convinced of the connections between love and cooking and food and how they are all so intimately wed to the other.
I had first read this trilogy a long while ago and then again a couple of years since and not thought of rereading them much since. They were good things, I knew, and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit remained sat in a precise and clean corner of my heart marked ‘classics that we love entirely, forever’, but I had not really thought of rereading the others. But then I saw all of them in a library while I was doing an event and then again in a charity book shop the next day, for the first time in years, and knew it was a sign. Sometimes you come to books and sometimes the books come to you.
I was glad that I did for they are complex and frank things which see Anna figure out how to live in a post-war world that is still trying to figure it out for itself. The impact of the war is there, subtly in the background, always lurking and ready to pounce again. Houses have changed, buildings are being built up again, brick by brick, and people constantly tell Anna that they were never Nazis, oh no, not them. It’s a tense book, I think, and deceptively so because of Kerr’s great grace in her writing. She is very precise and clean in how she works and that can make it feel ‘simple’, almost. That’s there’s no depth. And yet, if you just pause a moment, it’s all there and always was. I love that about her work. The elegance of it, the subtlety.
This is a book that isn’t afraid to be unlikeable, and I think that’s also interesting. Anna finds herself reflecting on how good certain situations would be if she wrote them and castigates herself, almost, for thinking about them like that. Her relationship with her mother is not particularly pleasant nor positive on either side, and even the side-characters become a little bit awkward, a little bit stiff. And I think there’s something in here about how life as a refugee impacts you (there is a conversation with her brother that touches very beautifully on their life) and how it must have been to go back to a world that you had to escape from. How it felt to be back in the city that tried to kill you and your family.
I think what I’m trying to say is that this isn’t Kerr’s best writing by any means, nor her best book, but I think it might be one of the most complex and adult. It doesn’t succeed all the time, nor does it feel particularly reader-friendly nor indeed comfortable with what it’s saying but underneath all of that, there’s still something sharp and nuanced and fascinating to me.
I suppose it all boils down to this: Anna persists. In all her messy and raw honesty, Anna persists.
When I finished reading Always, Clementine for the first time, all I could think of was if I was nominating a book for the Carnegie then this would be it. There is something very special here and it might even be one of the best books I’ve read this year.
It begins at the back of your head, thoughts like that. That little tingle on your spine that creeps all the way up until all of a sudden you realise that you’re reading something good, something good and beautiful and heartbreaking and wonderful all at once. That’s this book. That’s the way it works and I fell in love with it entirely.
Clementine is a lab mouse who escapes. She is also a genius. This book is as much about her life in the free world, with a team of human helpers at her side, as it is her journey towards selfhood. Her life has meaning. She has meaning. And even though there’s a lot of people trying to recapture her and send her back to the lab, there’s also a whole world of new friends to be made and family to be found. It’s time for Clementine to live.
Told in a series of letters to somebody I shall not spoil yet (for their relationship will break your heart), Clementine shares her entire soul on the page. She is a genuine and optimistic and warm-hearted soul who, despite seeing the worst of the world, is so ready and willing to see the best of it. Sorosiak writes her with such love. And such poetry! There are some beautiful moments here where Sorosiak’s writing somehow embraces such a poetic form that it almost shimmers.
This is a book for your heart, and I loved it entirely.
Cherry Tree Perch is the second in a series and sometimes it feels it: you are launched into the premise with very little preamble and asked to simply catch up. It works, for the most, but there are quite a few moments where new readers (such as myself!) will struggle to figure out quite what is happening. Once you’ve worked out what’s happening and who’s who and what’s actually going on, you’re presented with a very interesting and rather charming novel that is a little bit Antonia Forest at its best and a little bit Enid Blyton “shut up, I’ve got to get this done by lunch” at its worst.
The premise is a farm school where the children learn animal husbandry and all of the practical skills that running a farm involves. Upon first reading, this focus on real world skill felt very post-war to me and I was so interested to realise that this was published in 1939. That’s not to say that books like this did not exist at the time but rather to say that they weren’t all doing this sort of thing. Elder positions the children here as the future (that should be a song, right?) but also as the makers of that future. There’s interesting.
What’s also interesting here is how the adults are understood as being a little bit messy. That’s not a description that can be applied to all of the adults, because this is still children’s literature of a certain period and time and there are certain politics that it needs to accord to, but there are adults here who don’t quite know everything. And everybody knows that they don’t need everything. That’s also interesting.
One of the girls develops an admiration for an adult in a way that, only thirty or so years earlier than this in an Angela Brazil, would have had her swooning over every other page. But Elder doesn’t go for that. She goes for the much more interesting angle of letting her have the admiration, the pash (so to speak), and examine this through the filter of her established friendship with people of her own age. There’s some strong character work here and this book is so good and indeed, rather spectacular, when it just allows two young children to talk about friendship.
It’s important to note that there are certain elements here, such as the treatment of the disabled elder brother Kenneth and the way people refer to him, that read very poorly now. Please bear this in mind prior to reading.
There are times, I think, when the world sends you the right book for the right moment. We’ve all dealt with piles of books to be read and sometimes a book can sit on that pile for weeks if not years. And it’s never personal because you know that when you need it, when you want it, and just as you reach for it, you know that it was always meant to be this book for this moment, nothing else, only this.
(That’s one of the great appeals of classics for me because they understand that journey more than most. They slide in and out of hands, out of shelves and into bookshops and into somebody else’s home, moving through the ownership of a thousand readers and always, somehow, being there at the right time, knowing when it is needed, ready for it, so ready).
I picked up The Family From One End Street on a hot, hot day when my brain needed to read but could not quite cope with the effort of it. The exertion of making sense of the word, of even turning with the pages, all of it, too much. But I read because that was what I needed to do and I picked up The Family From One End Street.
Oh, the gentle charm of it! I had remembered a like sensation this from my first read, hundreds of years ago, but I think I felt it more this time. The heat maybe. The heavy, heavy heat. Or perhaps because of reading this only days after visiting the seaside. The perfect time for a book that feels like an endless Summer.
I am splicing this review, running from one idea into the next, because I think that’s a little bit of the magic this book. Each chapter focuses on the adventure (so close to a mishap, so close!) of one member of the family and yet the connections run deep. The Ruggles are full of love and chaotic heart, messy and honest and funny and so chapters exist, yes, but they’re people and this is life and it is rather utterly, utterly lovely. Lovely is something we look for a lot in children’s literature and yet sometimes, I think we do not know quite how to find it. All you need to do is read this, I think, and just let yourself sink into the sweet gentle charm of it. Let this book be enough, be everything, for it really is.
(Also it beat The Hobbit to win the Carnegie Medal in 1937 and that’s interesting stuff right there, dig into that literary historians and let me read your work when it’s done).
I recently found the first five of the graphic novel Baby-Sitters Club books in a local charity shop and reader, I screamed and grabbed them all and cackled my way home. I find these books intensely charming and rather brilliant things and so, this review must be considered to cover not just Kristy’s Big Idea, but also all the way up to The Baby-Sitters Club Graphix #05: Dawn And The Impossible Three. I’m doing it this way because basically, if I don’t, I’ll just be writing “THESE ARE REALLY GOOD” over and over again.
I really like the way that Raina Telgemeier approaches these. Her art is so clean and rich, and here’s the thing: it’s genuine. It’s honest and it’s genuine and it never kind of tries to wry it up (can we use ‘wry’ like that? I think we can, let’s go for it) and it never goes for the cheap or easy win. Telgemeier gives you a book full of love and heart and humour and does it every time. There are moments when you laugh out loud because she knows how little people see the world and how funny and glorious that can be.
I love these books. There is a scarcity, I think, of this girl-centred graphic storytelling for readers of this age, and particularly so in the UK where things seem to skew a little older or a little younger. (I am aware I generalise here so, imo, imo, imo). What I’m trying to say is that the Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels are just really beautiful things. They’re full of loveliness and clean and sharp storytelling (so clean! beautifully judged!), and I would like more of this sort of thing in the world.
I hadn’t ever heard of The Sea Egg until a few days ago; I knew of Lucy M. Boston, of course, and although I rather loved the strange and gauzy light of her books (and the sad, wonderful heart of A Stranger At Green Knowe in particular), I have never had a lot of knowledge of her beyond that. This can happen. Some authors can become defined by one series and the twilight books that lie beyond that can slide past your notice. This is where second-hand bookshops come in, second-hand bookshops and time and a chance to browse and letting your eye slide past the things you know and dwell on the things that you do not. You’ll never know what stops you or why it catches your eye, but something will and that’s when the fun begins.
The Sea Egg then, a slender and graceful story, first published in 1967, and almost palpable with an endless Summery heat. There is a a feel of Minnow On The Say but also Susan Cooper, I think, that edge of finding the fantastical and the otherworldly in the intimate, known world. Maybe that’s not right, maybe it’s more that Susan Cooper quality of knowing that suddenly the world about you isn’t the world that you knew, that there’s something else here to discover, something that was there all along.
Plot wise, it’s straightforward and deceptively so. Two boys discover something unusual at a beach. That unusual turns out to be Unusual, in that delicious way that Boston can do so well. And her writing, my god, there’s some beauty here. I read many of the sentences over and over again, because stuff like “It was a magical morning with a silence like all the secrets in the world, and a light like happiness” will always do that for me. The grace of it!
There’s themes here of growth, of ‘that last summer before everything changed’, the onset of adulthood, the onset of loss, and it’s all so subtle, so softly done. I am made a bit breathless by it, and I think I’m gushing so you must forgive me for that but it is so. so. good. This is classy, big work by a writer who can move mountains and I am so glad I found it.
I have one of those ‘news in brief’ posts to share with you today so let’s get down to it. 😊
How To Be True is the Sunday Times Children’s Book of the Week and I still cannot quite process it. Thank you to Nicolette Jones for being so lovely and thank YOU if you’ve read or shared or mentioned or gifted or commented or ANYTHING because you are all part of this story as well, yes, especially you at the back. I will add a link to the tweet I did with a picture of the review at the bottom of this post so you can see what it said.
I am doing some events in the first week of August with the lovely Explore York public library team and I cannot wait! I LOVE the Summer Reading Challenge so much (always the best part of my librarian year, I have to say) and it’s going to be very enjoyable to be part of it. If you’re in the area, do come along! All details int he link above.
I have been reading David Niven’s lovely, wry, modest memoirs about Hollywood The Moon’s A Balloon and Bring On The Empty Horses and if you are into classic Hollywood vibes (as indeed, I hope we all are), they are everything.
When it is a hot day, we turn to the shadows and we read the books. I had prepared for this day with a visit to the library, picking things that I thought might be in my wheelhouse and things that I had been meaning to read for some while and yet never got around to it. Carbonel has been on my radar for some time and so when I spotted it, I grabbed. I like the way that libraries do that sometimes; they give you the things that you did not quite mean to get and yet knew you always wanted.
Carbonel is a cat and he is under a spell. The spell must be broken by Rosemary who, in trying to find extra money to bring home to her impoverished mother, finds herself embroiled in mysterious and magical goings on. What I liked, however, was how immediate and everyday this magic was. There’s something very particularly British (and very particularly mid-twentieth century British) about magic being found on your doorstep. There’s also something very particular about a slightly sarcastic and curmudgeonly magical chum. I love it. Give me a slightly stroppy partner in crime who will do anything for their friend and I’m there.
There’s something very classic and confident about this, Sleigh’s debut. She’s clearly familiar with what it takes to write a story but also, I think, in what it takes to read a story. This is so reader friendly. The chapters are self-contained and deeply satisfying in their own right and although a more modern audience might be unfamiliar with some of the vocabulary of the time, it’s written so tightly that the reader just rolls along with it.
I liked this a lot. It’s just such a classy, solid story and such lovely stuff. What more does a book need to do?
My new book is out! How To Be True is the story of Edie Berger and how she became the brilliant little revolutionary that she is today. You’ll discover all about her family and her history and also there will be chocolate spread sandwiches and cobbled Paris streets and revolutionary first years and adventures galore. And it’s out today! Now! Right now! (did I say now enough? I think I did. I am overwhelmed, forgive me).
Honestly, I can’t quite believe it and I am SO grateful to everyone who’s been part of the adventure so far. Thank you. I value your support beyond words.
I was pleasantly surprised by this collection because, if I’m honest, I expected something that might have read a little bit worthy. There’s always the risk of that with books like this because it can be a tiny little bit annoying to be told what you should read? And then there’s the risk of getting a book where the extracts are all from books by old white dudes or were all popular a hundred million years ago or all express Appropriate Sentiments For The Youth To Learn From…
Basically books like this are a minefield and yet I think that if you curate something well and recognise precisely where you are and what you’re playing with, you can produce something very nice indeed. That’s what Writes Of Passage is, that’s what Nicolette Jones does.
As ever with a Nosy Crow production, Writes Of Passage looks stunning and is beautifully put together. It’s split into several chapters on themes such as “becoming you and your future” and “childhood and your past” and gives you extracts involving books, speeches, poetry and songs from writers as wide-ranging like Charlotte Brontë, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Greta Thunberg. Every piece in the book comes with a thoughtful note from Jones where she discusses its resonance and why it was included in the book.
I think if you’re after an inspirational book that will grow with your young readers and offer them a lot of potential in taking ideas forward and carving out their own path, then this is an excellent choice. I also think there might be something very lovely in using this in a classroom / educational context for longer investigations and prompts for bigger pieces – it’s a “dipper” of a book, full of things to pull out and savour and dig deeply into. Like I said, it’s a nice piece of work, well done.
The first thing to say about The Chalet School and the Lintons is that it’s a much better hardback than it is paperback. In a way it marks the first of the Armada edits that, to me, make very little sense. So! This review covers the hardback edition because that’s the one I read, and I like the shape of it a lot more than the paperback edit. You have to understand at this point with these books, we’re here for the detail that makes no sense to anyone and innumerably fantastical plot points because that is how this series rolls and we love it.
Okay, so to the book! This is Joyce and Gillian Linton’s first term at the school. Their mama is very ill and her only hope lies to go for the mountain air. Naturally the two girls follow and are enrolled and high-jinks occur and it is great. It is also SUPER dramatic (especially if you get the uncut) and goes to some quite big places and some quite intense moments. I love this period of the books a lot, god, they’re so good. Also THEKLA, drama queen, peerless villain, bacon chomping, AMAZING.
What I also really enjoyed is how EBD writes her adults here. There’s some lovely moments between the adults (and a hot doctor in the uncut being all YOU WILL NOT WALK HOME YOU DELICATE FLOWER MY CHAUFFEUR WILL DRIVE YOU HOME which, outstanding) and Madge going “oh Joey, you twit” and also Dr Jem being SO brilliant and ugh, I love it, I love it.
Two books in one which can be basically summed up as “girls: mean” and “girls: complicated!!!” We begin with a Mystery at the Chalet School which gives us a new girl with a MYSTERY and more of the delightful friendship group of Gill, Jacynth and Gay, and then we get a new girl who has a TINY PASH and we do not APPROVE but then she ultimately gets a grip and settles down to become a real Chalet School girl because THERE IS NO OTHER WAY.
I mean, this is one to read for completions sake and one for doing the series in full (and also for “how on earth did you manage to absolutely wreck yourself with a bit of string on the floor like that???”) but it’s kind of delightful in a sort of absolutely baffling way as well. It’s not what you’d call “good” by any means because I think we’ve rapidly got beyond such ideas in this series, but it still does it. We have genuine emotion and genuine heart in the tale of Miss Annersley returning to the fold, and then we have have [spoiler] pouring a ton of olive oil on her head. Amazing. What a series.
Today was a day for New House. The weather was thick and hot and dense; that still, heavy air that is just hot and nothing else, and what else should one do on such days but read a gentle book like this? Joey Bettany’s last term at the Chalet School as a student is one marked by the softest of adventures (even when they are at their gravest, Joey ‘will get well’), the best of friendships, and the sweetest of goodbyes to an era already iconic in children’s literature. This is not a book for new readers (already a trait of this series – you either sink or swim when we get onto the fifteenth description of floral curtains) but it is a book for readers. Brent-Dyer is comfortable here and strong and her life work has not laid heavy on her yet and the Tiernsee is still the brightest and bluest lake in all of Austria and all is so good and so gentle and so right.
For a while, and most specifically in these early books, Brent-Dyer is breathtakingly good. There’s very little that actually happens here in terms of plot other than “termtime” and yet it works. Everybody knows everybody else so well and the web that connects these characters is so genuine and true. Margia plays her music, Joey fears the dentist, and then all of a sudden a long lost family relative pops up in the way that only makes sense in these books and you believe it all because it’s just so effortlessly charming. This isn’t big drama, or even drama with any particular sense of threat or danger, and yet it works.
I think these books bring you along for the ride so genuinely, so confidently, that you can’t resist it. You can see all of the artifice at work, the devices and the sleight of hand, and you can go “oh my god do they never do anything but weep hysterically with laughter at a performance” and “wait did the maid actually just fall down the stairs because she thought she saw the devil… that actually is what just happened?” and yet you still love it and there’s no fighting it because that’s just the way it is.
I had tried to read The Girls before and it hadn’t quite worked out. I had been put off by the first few chapters because they were tight and dense things, unwilling to let me in and, I suspect, not really caring to be read. Just to be caring to be written, to tell a story that had to be told and not necessarily in a way that even the narrator understands. I find interest in that, and so I came back to The Girls for a second try and persisted in trying to figure out what it was and what this constricted, recursive prose had to give me.
And then, this time, I found myself unwilling to put it down. The Girls is something that revels in what it is and will, I think, take pleasure in letting you read the story that you want to read whilst telling you the story it wants to tell, and never quite worrying or caring if the two were to meet. Evie, our lead, falls into a life that is not hers, beguiled by the promise of a dark and dangerous something that she still can’t articulate, can’t quite understand, all those years later. Her story is told in flashbacks, fragmentary snatches of memory, and sentences that almost feel like she’s worked far too long over them, knowing that she can’t let them go, knowing that she has to. It’s brutal, final, bitter, and yet achingly otherworldly.
You know where this is going if you know your Hollywood history and even if you don’t, you know. There’s a brutal and vicious destination here and I think the book hinges on that, the memory of it, the expectation of it, the sad, desperate tragedy of it. It comes to define Evie and who she is, who she wants to be, the life she lives and the life she’s yet to live. This isn’t a linear book, it’s one that sort of collapses in on itself. Everything is everything, all at once, beautiful and awful, vicious and sad, and all you have to is figure out what story you want to make of that.
The Girls, then, this story is difficult and it is tight and it will put you off and it will leave you knowing that something important has happened here and that you’ll never quite know how you feel about that.
It’s vintage book acquisition o’clock! I recently picked up a couple of annuals from a local charity shop and was pleased to find them rather interesting things. Annuals aren’t my normal space as a collector because the authors that I’m interested in very rarely published in them. There’s quite a clear distinction as the names that I do find within an annual do tend to stay as ‘annual’ writers. The exception to the rule is Ethel Talbot who basically wrote everything for everybody in every moment of the day and was the very definition of prolific.
The Girls’ Crystal Annual 1952 is a collection of multi-chapter stories drawn from the Girls’ Crystal periodical and I wanted to share some pictures with you because it’s an interesting beast*. If you know this period at all, you’ll know what to expect: a couple of ‘blimey, I’m now in the lead role of this film‘ stories, a few ‘my pony and I must save my family’s business‘ stories and even a few ‘restoring wrongs that have been done with the aid of my trusty chums from the fourth form‘. (There’s even one here with a ventriloquist, I kid you not…)
(Shall I make a list of common stories from this period some time?? I suspect I shall, prepare yourselves…!)
What’s particularly interesting about this annual is that it gives you all of that and then, for some deliciously strange reason, gives you a story called: “The Secret Of The Forbidden Houseboat.” Now, I’m going to spoil this for you because it’s brilliant. The Secret of the Forbidden Houseboat is that Aunt Helga who doesn’t like green painted over some mysterious glass jewels on her houseboat and now, somebody’s trying to pilfer the houseboat from her. Cue: Lorrie and her chums who work out that the old owner of the houseboat was a gemmologist and he embedded his collection into the carvings on the boat and painted them all over to keep them safe. The mysterious glass jewels are, in fact, emeralds that this dude just stuck on his boat and thought ‘well, that’ll confound anybody trying to nick them” (?!?!)
I hope you enjoy the pictures! Alas, there is no credit for the artist but whoever it was, was pretty ace. I will amend this post in the future if I come across more information.
*I wanted to recognise here that working with material from this period can often be a challenging thing and there are certain elements about this annual that will read with some difficulty and discomfort today. As ever, I recommend you consider the context you’ll be working and trust your own professional judgement and instincts.
I am so happy to be able to share this guest post with you today from the lovely Rebecca Mills. As you may know, I have a great love for the early Chalet School characters and so this was right up my street. I suspect you’ll enjoy it a lot as well – it’s so interesting! I enjoyed every inch of it… 😊
Rebecca Mills (PhD) is Lecturer in English and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK, where she has taught and researched children’s literature, crime and Gothic fiction, and other literary and media topics. She has a strong interest in popular interwar women’s writing and landscapes in literature, and has been reading and collecting Chalet School books for about 30 years now. Recent publications include Agatha Christie Goes to War (Routledge 2020), an essay collection co-edited with J.C. Bernthal. You can find out more about Rebecca’s research here and follow her on Instagram.
Grand Tours and Great Escapes in the Early Chalet School Books
Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (1894-1969) possessed a gift for painterly landscapes and interest in travel that few of her school story contemporaries wielded. Where Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Elsie J. Oxenham, and to a great extent Angela Brazil, usually sketched the picturesque moors and shorelines of an idealised England 1, and Enid Blyton was most interested in what happened within school walls, making surprisingly limited use of her seaside setting (with the exception of the famous salt-water swimming pool at Malory Towers, of course), Brent-Dyer embraced, and reflected, the spirit of adventure—and beauty, and threat—presented by the mountains where she originally chose to set her series. In The School at the Chalet (1925), the mountains offer excitement and danger from a physical and social perspective, and in ThePrincess of the Chalet School (1927) the mountains create a more sensational, even Gothic, setting for drama and suspense.
In the 1920s, when 12 year-old Joey and her older sister Madge Bettany set off for the Austrian Tyrol with Grizel Cochrane in tow to start the Chalet School, the Austrian Alps were—relatively—accessible from England. The Continent had been familiar ground for the wealthy and the aristocratic since the eighteenth-century heyday of the ‘Grand Tour’, a leisurely crossing of Europe from Paris to Venice and back, including the most culturally rich cities and significant landscapes. As Grand Tourist Joseph Spence wrote in 1741, ‘There is certainly nothing equal to travelling for the improvement of the mind and the acquisition of knowledge’ (4 February 1741). This was accomplished by visiting sites of learning and heritage, studying languages among native speakers of a similar class, as well as enhancing and elevating the senses by exposure to beautiful scenery and artistic and architectural grandeur. These aims, I think, resonate with Brent-Dyer’s approach to European travel; the Bettanys may be travelling by train rather than horse-drawn coach, mule, and sedan chair, and Brent-Dyer’s routes and sight-seeing might be informed more by Karl Baedeker’s famous guide books than Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), but there is an alertness to new scenes, experiences and un-English ways of life that resonates with the Grand Tourists of two hundred years before, as well as an intention to improve the mind of the readers as well as the characters. Incidentally, a 1920s Baedeker guide notes of the Achensee, the basis for the Tiernsee, that ‘a dark-blue lake, [it] is the largest and finest in North Tyrol. It lies in a valley dammed at the end by moraines of the glacier period.’
Everything is ‘fresh and new’ to Grizel as soon as they reach Boulogne; we’re not only on foreign ground but in foreign time—Brent-Dyer frequently reminds us that ‘it was five o’clock—or seventeen, if you cared to take the French time’. Joseph Spence in 1733, declared in a letter that
‘Paris is a very agreable place … I have not mist a night since we have been at Paris of being either at the Opera or the Play: these diversions begin early, and after they are done, we go regularly to the public Walks. Their Plays are good; and not ill acted, very often: but their Opera’s are things that I wou’d not advise any body to go to who has not lost his Hearing, or has no mind to lose it.’
Joey, Madge, and Grizel also find Paris ‘agreable’, enjoying the Luxembourg Gardens and the Champs-Elysees, although they find the opera far more pleasant than Mr Spence— ‘[Puccini’s La bohème (1896)] was an entire success. True, neither of the children understood much of the story, but the exquisite music appealed to them both, and even matter-of-fact Grizel felt a lump come into her throat when Mimi died’. Europe, for Brent-Dyer, is a place where even prosaic middle-class English girls might be moved to appreciate history, and art, and sympathise with the operatic death of a consumptive seamstress.
But the mountains are where these sensibilities are given full rein—appreciation of beauty and the moral and intellectual improvement of travel are infused with a desire for adventure, even danger. Eschewing Mr Mensch’s kind offer of an easy climb up a pleasant mountain to see butterflies, ‘I want to climb the Tiernjoch,’ said Grizel. ‘I like difficult things’. For Joey, imaginative and sensitive to beauty and horror, the Tiernjoch is sinister: ‘It’s such a cruel-looking mountain!’ said Jo with a little shiver. ‘It looks as if it doesn’t care how many people were killed on it!’. Mr Marani comments that ‘It is not a girl’s climb’ and advises her to leave it alone. For Grizel, however, therein lies its appeal. The Tiernjoch offers the opportunity to display her strength (for Grizel is a girl who glories in physicality, who desires to be a games mistress instead of the music teacher’s life she’s doomed to by her parental figures), to break free of confines—both those inflicted by her rigid father and stern stepmother, and the more gentle communal confines of the Chalet School and its expectations for good behaviour and ‘playing the game’. To sneak away in the early morning is decidedly not the ‘straight’ thing to do. Perhaps she also desires liberation from the expectations attached to being a girl—even though the Chalet girls had a lot more physical and intellectual freedom than their Edwardian and Victorian forebears, and the Chalet School actively promoted sports, games, rambles, country-dancing, and gentle climbing, nevertheless these were all communal. On the moors of Cornwall she had been accustomed to ‘run about like a wild thing’ in brief escapes from her stepmother’s supervision, but in the Tyrol she is constantly in close quarters with peers and prefects. For a girl of Grizel’s age and class to climb a mountain solo was transgressive, quite apart from the danger involved.
One of the things that Brent-Dyer does is navigate distinction between self-reliance, to be achieved and commended, and self-centredness, to be trained out, and in Grizel this tension is most evident. She comes to grief on the Tiernjoch, of course:
It was easy going at first, but soon became more difficult. The mist-clouds closed in round her, and presently she found herself struggling upwards, surrounded by white walls of mountain fog, which hid the path from her and deadened all sounds save those of her own footsteps. She was plucky enough, but the deadly silence and the eeriness began to frighten her.
This is solitude with a vengeance, with an uncanny edge. Grizel’s eventual panic at the edge of a literal precipice makes her aware of her need for others, and her desire to be reintegrated into her community and its rituals. Joey appears out of the fog, as if in answer to Grizel’s hasty prayers ‘Our Father, oh, send someone! Please send someone quickly’. It is easy to read Grizel’s crisis, and her subsequent guilt at Joey’s illness, as punishment for her transgression. This sort of consequence for wrongdoing is by no means unknown in children’s fiction—disobedient Katy Carr’s fall from the swing in What Katy Did (1872), or the injuries that overly-confident Amanda sustains when trying to swim in the sea in Last Term at Malory Towers (1951), for instance, come to mind.
There are elements of fairy-tale in all the early Chalet School stories; Grizel has a wicked stepmother, and another pupil’s uncaring parents abandon her and are suitably punished with death. A couple of books later, the fantastical strain of the series is heightened into the fully Ruritanian story of Princess Elisaveta and her mad cousin Cosimo, who plans to kidnap her and blackmail her grandfather, the King of Belsornia, into making him heir to the throne.
‘Ruritania’ is a fictional Eastern European country in Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894); the name came to be associated with popular fiction set in imaginary Balkan countries—the periphery of Europe was far enough from England to be exotic and intriguing, but close enough that its fate had an effect on English foreign affairs, and was therefore fertile ground for English adventurers and political intrigue. We find Ruritanian countries in a great deal of popular fiction between the wars; Agatha Christie invented Herzoslovakia in The Secret of Chimneys (1925), for instance. We’re not told much about Belsornia; its court language is French, its native language is a mixture of Italian, Rumanian, and Greek (a highly unlikely Greco-Latinate hybrid—no wonder Joey ‘had found it not at all easy’!), the capital city Firarto is famous for its fountains. A key feature is the Salic Law, which forbids the female line from inheriting the throne—hence Elisaveta, despite being the sole direct descendent of the King, cannot be Queen. These dynastic concerns, along with the disruptive element of Cosimo’s insanity and cruelty, cause the novel to veer towards the eighteenth-century Gothic; in novels like Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Europe is a murky and treacherous terrain where girls are pawns in the hands of their enemies and their families (not mutually exclusive).
‘If Cosimo finds out what Joey is doing, will he hurt her?’
‘If Cosimo is in a good mood he may do no more than take her prisoner’, he said.
‘And if not?’
‘Then God pity them both,’ replied the captain gravely. ‘Cosimo has a warped brain. I do not know what he is capable of.’
Elisaveta is sent to the Chalet School for her health; in the Tyrolean air she is rapidly transformed from the pale, sickly ‘Little Lady of Belsornia’, overly dignified for her years, to a ‘jolly natural child’ and fairly accomplished Girl Guide. Indeed, as Baedeker’s Guide remarks: ‘The invigorating effect of the Alpine winter climate is principally due to the dryness and purity of the atmosphere.’ Yet trouble and danger follow Elisaveta from across the mountains; the ‘horrid Prince Cosimo’, as Joey calls him, and his accomplice track her across Europe, and dupe her into going with them up a mountain pass, with the intention of hiding her in the German Schwarzwald, or Black Forest—so far so Grimm!
The Princess of the Chalet School, incidentally, was the first Chalet School book I read. The cover showed a girl poised between empty blue sky and rocky mountainside, fingertips clinging to safety, stockinged legs delicately positioned on the narrow path, St. Bernard dog Rufus loyally scrambling beside her. At first, I had assumed that this slight figure in the red beret was the princess, but of course this is Joey Bettany on a solo rescue mission (one of many, I came to find). Later editions of the cover show both Joey and Elisaveta—some mid-rescue, with one schoolgirl precariously lowering the other down a cliff with the aid of cut up and knotted pairs of stockings (reef-knotted, of course, in accordance with Girl Guide recommendations for rescuing princesses). There is danger to life and limb, to be sure—but it’s a matter of sharing wits to solve a puzzle, and the companionship and shared peril ameliorates the terrors of solitude and uncertainty. If the Little Lady of Belsornia is in the process of being rescued, the end of the adventure—baths, bed, hot milk, watchful care—is already in sight. These covers don’t have the same sense of the intrepid, the solitary grandeur of the heroine, the sublime vista of sky and mountain of the original cover.
It got steeper and steeper, and it was all Joey could do to go on. What was more, the sun was setting and the darkness would come very soon in this place, overshadowed as it was by mountain peaks all around. … Joey, following [Rufus], discovered that it was just possible for her to scramble up by tiny projections in the rock, and guessed that it had been necessary to put the Princess down while one of the men went up first, and they pulled her up between them. It would be the only way in which they would ever get her beyond it. She cut her trefoil deep in the side of the soft rock, and then followed a scramble beside which anything that had gone before was mere child’s play.
Joey marks her territory with the trefoil, inscribing the inhospitable terrain with the Guide mark, and demonstrating the resourcefulness of the English schoolgirl. Not enough, has been made of the fact that Joey single-handedly rescues a princess, a damsel in distress, subverting the gender roles of centuries—this is the act of a hero, an escapade worthy of an adventurer. The usual prize would be the princess’s hand in marriage and half the kingdom, but Brent-Dyer decides to re-feminise Joey, granting her an elaborate court ceremony in Belsornia, a string of pearls, and a future post as Elisaveta’s lady-in-waiting as a more suitable reward. Elisaveta does better, as after Cosimo is found dead in a ravine, the Salic Law is repealed and she becomes heir to the throne in her own right, ending her position as pawn.
But there’s another dimension, and that’s the landscape—the inherent romance and danger of the Alps, and their unpredictability. ‘The mists were so dense that they prevented us from seeing the other alps surrounding us’, wrote young George Lyttleton in 1729. Other travellers had a different experience of the same scene: “the journey thro the Alps, till you come to the foot of Mount Cenis is really charming,… The greatness, solemnity, and singularity of the views exceed all one can imagine’, rhapsodised Caroline Lennox 30-odd years later. Radcliffe wrote of her young heroine Emily St. Aubyn in The Mysteries of Udolpho that
It was one of Emily’s earliest pleasures to ramble among the scenes of nature; nor was it in the soft and glowing landscape that she most delighted; she loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain’s stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH.
This recalls Joey’s habit of pausing mid-climb up to the Sanatorium on the Sonnalpe, begun in The Head-Girl of the Chalet School (1928):
‘They could see the school, surrounded by its fence, and lights twinkling in the windows told them that it was already dusk in the valley. Beyond lay the pinewoods, black against the snow, and beyond them the great limestone crags and peaks of the mountains.
In the West the sun was sinking in a glory of saffron light, which told of high winds for the morrow, but Jo paid no heed to this at the moment. She stood there, her little pointed face glowing with the beauty of it all, her black eyes soft and unfathomable.
‘Come on!’ said matter-of-fact Grizel at last when her patience was worn out.
The mountains offer infinite possibility, and this can be terrifying. Even as Jo carves her mark on the limestone, the glory and infinity of the mountains imprint themselves on her cosmology—and ours.
1 Rebecca is grateful for comments offering further details about settings in the UK and on the Continent, and will absolutely consider these in any future work on the topic.
Sources:
Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, The Princess of the Chalet School, W. & R. Chambers Ltd., 1941 [1927].
Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, The Head-Girl of the Chalet School, W. & R. Chambers Ltd, 1960 [1928].
Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, The School at the Chalet, W. & R. Chambers Ltd, 1955 [1925].
Vesna Goldworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, Yale University Press, 2013.
News from Abroad : Letters Written by British Travellers on the Grand Tour, 1728-71, edited by James T. Boulton, and T. O. McLoughlin, Liverpool University Press, 2012.
Sometimes I think thar you can get to books too soon. I first read Brideshead Revisited when I was at school, somewhere around my A Levels, and I was not ready for it. But then, I think, neither was it for me. We were both too wrapped up in our own stories at the time; I was too busy with an educational system that I did not wish to be part of in the slightest, and it was too busy with its long, languid days of introspection. Our first encounter, then, was poor; I was bored by it, I did not get it. But it waited for me to come back to it and I like it when a book does that. I like it when they exist in a kind of very precise point and place in time, ready for being read when world and circumstance and life allows it.
So this time, this reading: different. I was ready for the breathlessly aching prologue, by the way that literally everybody is infatuated with everybody else and if they are not, then they are infatuated with themselves. I was ready for messiness, people lost in systems that they did not understand nor control but that did control them. And I was ready for that surprising edge of callousness that creeps in as the book develops, the way that characters come to care about what’s in front of them rather than those that they leave in the wake. I was ready for stiff upper lips that grew stiffer still and the tight, tightness of the social class structure and I was ready for those misty edged moments between now and then. And yes, I was ready to be bored a little as well, accepting that this is simply part of the texture of this book for me, that there are sentences that break and fall apart, too lost in their own thoughts to consider how the reader might follow and perhaps, not even caring if they did.
But in a way, I still was not ready for grace. Waugh’s writing here is graceful, eloquent, and so very sure of itself that it felt like I was watching somebody carve marble in front of me. It is confident and fiercely certain, and it wins and loses and I suspect that it would do that without a reader or perhaps without even a book. There is something very timeless about this story and yet, paradoxically, there isn’t. It’s a love letter (and love comes so close to loss, I think, to grief) to a generation far gone but somehow still with us.
I wonder what might happen if I come back to it in another twenty years. I suspect that it will wait for me and I suspect it might not. I suspect that it might continue to tell its story, irrespective of whether it’s read or not. Somehow, somewhere, there will always be Brideshead.
It’s difficult to tell you how much I loved this book without just shrieking “I LOVED THIS BOOK” and basically just repeating that for several paragraphs or so. The Secret Garden on 81st Street was everything I didn’t know I needed. It’s basically adorable. Just utterly, endlessly adorable.
France Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden was written in 1910. Not only have we changed a lot since then as a society, but any book that has endured for such a long time brings with it a legacy. Adapting that is hard. Working with that is hard. Putting that into a comic is probably harder still. I have so much respect for creators who can grapple with all of that and produce something as utterly charming as this.
The Secret Garden on 81st Street is a retelling made with love and respect; Misslethwaite Manor is transformed into an enormous New York home with a forgotten roof top garden. Mary is the daughter of Silicon Valley tech parents and spends most of her time online rather than off. It’s only when circumstances circumstance (can I put a spoiler in? I mean it’s a hundred years or so now but still, there are new readers so I’ll be coy) that she is sent to live with her Uncle’s family in New York. Not only is New York a brave new world for Mary to navigate, it’s also full of people and places and secrets.
I loved this book. (I’ve gone too long without saying it, so let’s do it again: I LOVED THIS BOOK). I loved how it’s as much a love letter to the urban environment and the city as it is to the garden itself. I loved how Mary goes out and discovers the world on her own terms. I loved Martha. SO MUCH. I loved the ending. SO MUCH. I loved how utterly genuine every single page of this book was. SO MUCH. And I think above all, I loved how unafraid Weir and Padilla were of the original text and how lovingly they made it speak to a whole new audience. That’s what you do with a classic. That’s it, right there.
Adorable, genuine, and rather utterly beautiful when it needs to be, this is (wait for it) lovely. So lovely.
I was alerted to The Years of Grace by a friend (thank you!) who knew I enjoyed books of this nature. And I do, I am very fond of those kind of ‘how to be a girl’ books from, say, the 1940s and 50s that try to grapple with the fact that they are trying to instruct a generation in how to be themselves when absolutely everything about that world is in the process of changing. Not only do they reveal precisely what factors the adults deem important (and by implication, not particularly present in their readership), they also tell us all about the world these children should be inhabiting. And that’s interesting to me, that tension between where people should be and where they are now and the tension of children doing their own thing when they should not.
There’s a lot here to boggle at whether it’s the chapter about how to watch sports successfully with your brother (turn up, look interested, do your homework, don’t die of boredom) or the chapter where Elizabeth Arden tells you about the importance of washing your belly button (I mean, what?). And if I’m honest, there’s a lot here that becomes a bit exhausting. Your sympathies become very much with those poor kids who had to read about the thousand different things that they were doing wrong. There’s so much!
It’s rescued, a little, by Noel Streatfeild’s curation. She introduces each chapter with a little essay, often self-deprecating and witty, and I particularly enjoyed it when she talked about how to be a writer. Basically you can’t learn to be an author, because they’re “born to write, just as a singer is born to sing” and so you don’t get a chapter on that. Reader, I cackled. That’s the sort of detail I come to these books for. They’re fun. (Even when the rest of it is a lot of work…!).
How To Be True is available for pre-order right now! It’s published in the UK on July 7th and in the US in September (it’s worth the wait, I promise). Pre-orders help a book massively and I’m endlessly grateful to anybody who does so. You can pre-order via Pushkin here (and there’s a US pre-order link here).
What can I tell you about How To Be True? It’s a sequel to How To Be Brave but you can read it without having read the first (I cannot cope with sequels that need Cliff Notes!) and it features a school trip to Paris where Things Happen. There are sock biscuits (biscuits you have in your sock, naturellement) and family mysteries and macarons and of course, a duck. There will always be a duck, I think.
All that remains to be said is a big thankyou for supporting the girls this far in their adventures. I am so appreciative of all of the support you give the books whether that’s tweeting, reviewing, or whatever – you are all stars. Here’s to book two. I hope you enjoy coming along for the ride.
There was a point, just towards the end of The Final Reckoning, the third in the remarkable Deptford Mice trilogy by Robin Jarvis, that I knew that I did not want it to end. I will not give you spoilers for that moment for, if you are not familiar with them then you need to experience it for yourself, but it was one of those moments that you feel deep inside of you. One of those moments where, I think, story happens. You’ve forgotten the world around you, you’ve forgotten the thousand little jobs you have to do and the deadlines that loom because all that you are is here, in this book, in this moment.
I’ve been a fan of Robin Jarvis’ work for a long while, discovering him first through The Whitby Witches, which I read as a child, and then devouring all of the other books he ever wrote. There are prequels (squeakuels?) to the Deptford books which move forward and backwards and somehow everywhere at once. They pull apart the rich seams of fantasy within this series and explore the untold stories left within. I come to all of them regularly, every few years or so, and devour the lot. Squirrels. Mice. Bats. Rats. Arcane, magical, big stories. Unashamed bigness.
Back in the nineties, before certain bestsellers were bestselling, children’s literature was in something of a lull. Good books existed, of course, but they were not yet the big ones. We had not yet reached that moment in culture where every film seemed to be based on a children’s or young adult book and we had still not yet regained that post-war brave new world vibrancy. I often think that the Deptford mice and the Whitby books were ahead of their time. They entered this world and quietly remade it into something big and delicious and suffered, I think, from being at a point just before things happened. But that is what blogging is for, that is what wandering through the second hand book shops is for, finding those quiet books that changed the world and throwing a spotlight upon them once more.
I find the Deptford Mice books different every time I come to them. Memory makes us remember a book, and sometimes we read the memory rather than the book itself. For a while I did precisely that, remembering beats and echoes as if they came out of the fog, and then – all of a sudden – I read the book. There is a moment, I think, where you engage with what is front of you with everything that you have. You lock onto the story. You cast the world aside. You let it go and do so willingly for what you have, what you have – here – is better than anything you could possibly imagine.
For a long time I did not think I read fantasy. I remember telling a friend about this, saying that I did not really do fantasy as a genre because I really didn’t think I did and then I realised all of a sudden that I did and I was an idiot. I had read books about witches and magic and an Abbey that looked out to the sea. I had read about a white mouse with pink ears called Oswald and a grey mouse called Piccadilly and Audrey and Arthur and Twit and Thomas Triton, and I had loved every inch of them. I had read fantasy books, I had loved them, I had loved them.
I had loved them because they scared me, because they told me of gods who switched faces and walked amongst the living, because they conjured darkness on the streets at the seaside where I’d had ice-cream, and because they had been unafraid to give me darkness. The Deptford Mice books are bloody and raw and violent titles that don’t hold back from the truth of the world. They trust in the reader. They trust in the reader so much.
And I had loved these books because they gave me hope. And now, as I look back, I can see that they inspired me. There are characters in How To Be True that can trace their trajectory to Aunt Alice in the Whitby books, or that, for me, talk directly to the dark, raw complexity of the Starwife in the Deptford books. But I think that’s what you do as a reader, you take stories with you and you see the world through their pages and after a while, that story comes to story you.
(I think you can see the patterns as well, of where an author has been in their work, the books that made them who they are, and I take great pleasure in making those patterns visible in my own. No book is an island. Everything is connected).
And so here I am, page-finished and done with mice and yet, I know it’s not over. I’ll pass these copies onto the charity bookshop when I’m done because I know I’ll meet them again some time, at the right time. Books move through the world from reader to reader, shelf to shelf. They’ll find me again and I’ll buy them all at once, grabbing them from the shelf in a breathless, hysterical fashion, because I know what’s to come.
Max Counts To A Million is the first children’s book I’ve read to be set within the COVID pandemic. This is something I’m still wrestling with about whether or not to reference the pandemic in my own work and I don’t know if I’ve quite resolved it yet. What I do know is that I found some of what Williams recounts here actually very emotional to read and I can see the value of representing the peculiarities of this experience within children’s literature very much. Not only will Max Counts To A Million provide young people with a point of reference to discuss the strange surrealism of these years, but I can also see it providing some comfort to anybody who’s still trying to come to terms with what happened. And indeed, how those events continue to impact life today.
The plot is relatively gentle and straightforward and concerns Max’s decision to count to a million against the backdrop of the lockdown. Not only must he grapple with the pronouncements of the “floppy haired” PM, he must also deal with the direct impact of the pandemic on his family. Circumstances result in him deciding to count to a million and the whole community comes to cheer him on his way.
Like I said, it’s a quiet plot because we kind of already know that he succeeds in his quest, but I don’t quite think that the value of this book lies in that. I think that the value of this book lies in those soft and gently handled moments where Max tries to figure out his worries and his feelings in extraordinary times. Not only does Williams give you a lot of love and understanding here, he also gives you adults who are clearly just trying to do their best in difficult times.
I liked this. I think it may read a little younger than you might think in looking at it so don’t rule out a younger audience, and it would also be good to use in an educational context because there are a lot of discussions which will spark from it. It’s very thoughtfully put together by a publisher who knows how to work quickly with timely and relevant material whilst not cutting corners or quality. My thanks to them for a review copy.
I found this super charming and I’m grateful to Nosy Crow for sending me a copy to look at. The first thing to note is how beautifully they produce their books there. I always mention it because it’s always true: Nosy Crow give good looking books. It’s such a good sign because it tells you, the reader, how much they value the stories that they tell. And The Girl Who Lost A Leopard is lovely – it’s a pacey adventure story from the excellent Nizrana Farook and one which fearlessly takes young readers along for the ride.
Selvi lives on Serendib and spends as much time as she can with her beloved Lokka, a wild and beautiful leopard. Their relationship is rendered with a lot of restraint; Selvi recognises Lokka’s wildness and need to be by himself for she has something very similar inside of herself. The two of them move through the mountains together until the arrival of poachers bring danger. How will Selvi save Lokka?
Farook’s writing here is so clean and sharp that it’s a pleasure to read. It makes the story very quick and easy to read and you kind of just keep rolling with it (it’s probably not one for bedtime!).
I really enjoyed it and I think it’s got a very good space in the world to inhabit. Not only does Farook bring in a kind of young ‘people power’ quality to the text, an excellent thing for any young activist, she also delivers some softly told lessons about friendship. Structurally it’s also going to be of particular interest to readers who may benefit from the confidence-building short and crisply told chapters. Lovely stuff.
Every now and then I return to Robin Jarvis’ work like somebody finding dry land after weeks at sea. I first came across the Deptford books a long while ago, somewhere in that messy early nineties period of children’s literature where nothing was quite sure of itself and the era defining books had not yet been born, nor had we quite recovered from the eighties. Children’s literature was in a place that it did not quite yet understand and then there was Jarvis and his wild, rich fantasy steadily burning in the dark. The Deptford books. The Whitby books. They were local, intimate, everyday wildness. The importance of having a book set in places you knew about and not just named with a mash of a keyboard. Children who went to school in schools like you. Real world stories embedded in magic.
These are brutal books and violent, too, and there will be moment that will be difficult for some readers. Yet alongside this is a powerful and deft story that rolls steadily along and pulls the reader with it every step. There’s a wildly moving subplot that was all too briefly present for me (you’ll know it towards the end of the book) and I’d have welcomed more of that. I love those moments when Jarvis juxtaposes the brutality of man (and animal) with a kind of raw hope and faith in what people can achieve and be. I love that.
I also love how much faith Jarvis shows in his readers. These are big, big books that cover a lot of complex and often quite adult themes, but they work because Jarvis believes in his readers. He doesn’t go delicately into that good night but rather he tells you how it is for these people and it’s up to you to find the good – to learn how to see them and find the spaces for hope and kindness, even in all the grotesque shadows.
As this is a prequel to The Dark Portal, I was wondering whether to recommend that you read that first or this. I think you get a lot of benefit either way but for the full kick, it would probably be The Dark Portal (and indeed, its sequels) before heading to The Alchymist’s Cat (and its sequels).
And, as a final note, it’s beyond time for these books to be adapted for the screen.
Before I get to the review itself, can I tell you a bit about my copy of Tom? It’s one of the most precious books in my stash and honestly, it doesn’t look like it should be. It’s a slightly mothy Armada paperback with those soft, rubbed corners, so familiar to a book that’s been read a lot, and I found it at the other side of the world. I was in New Zealand and as you do, I was wandering through a bookshop in the middle of Auckland. I had told my friend about the Chalet School books and about how you had to check every bookshop you were passing, just in case one was there. (It’s the rules, I’m sorry). And the first bookshop we went into after that conversation had a copy of Tom. The last title I needed to complete my collection. It amazes me, even now.
I tucked that copy of Tom into the bottom of my rucksack and carried it around for the next few months. It was joined by a copy of Island for a short while (primarily because I couldn’t quite deal with leaving that on the shelf) but I ended up leaving Island in a campsite somewhere. I had another at home. Tom, though, it didn’t leave my side. Not once. Not ever. Isn’t it strange how a paperback can come to mean so much?
Slight yet solid, pretty fleeting in terms of plot and yet still oddly appealing, Tom Tackles The Chalet School kind of gains in cachet the more you read the series. Everything starts here, be that the recurrent “oh what price getting locked into a cupboard” gag that absolutely mystified me for years before I got a copy of this one, Tom’s legendary dolls houses, and indeed, the legend herself: Tom. Or Lucinda Muriel. Or Muriel Lucinda, depending on which way round Brent-Dyer remembered to put it. Either way, legend. And rather unusual in the world of girl’s school stories: Tom has been bought up as a young gentlemen and so has an interesting time in the female world of the Chalet School itself.
I like this book. Tom’s fun, Bride Bettany’s in it and she’s fun, the doll’s house business always leaves me with a weird urge to make one (and I never did dolls, remotely), and even though it’s episodic and a little over-dramatic (SNOW ON THE MOUNTAINS when it’s actually just kind of a gentle hillock at best…), it’s oddly charming.
I recently came across a copy of this in town and I knew, quite simply, that I had to have it. Published in the 40s (?) by Faber and Faber, A French Alphabet is by Margaret Cardew and does pretty much what it says on the tin. And yet, and yet, the style that’s here. That usine yellow! That juxtaposition of dame / dindon! The aesthetics of the ballon ! I had to grab a copy and equally, I had to share it with you all. Please do join me in fangirling over this ridiculously wonderful thing. I might have to start a new collection of vintage alphabet books on the strength of it.
This is just a quick note to say that the Book Aid for Ukraine auction is now live and, if you’re able to bid, there are some great literary offers on there. I have a signed and personalised copy of How To Be Brave listed (you’ll get your very own personalised duck doodle) and there’s also some amazing other children’s literature related items (not in the least a Worst Witch extravaganza).
I remembered how much I love these books when I got to the part where one character vaults out of the window and vanishes. Honestly, I think I cackled for a week over that one and I will probably cackle until the end of time. These books are so great, I love them.
So plot! Is there plot? It’s vague at best and involves the brief cameo of pirate treasure (I mean), Hot Commander Christie, pigs in the orchard, and a school that’s packing up to move to Switzerland. It’s time to leave the island behind and so we must have a (naturally) riotous regatta, high-jinks on swampy bits of islands (I never really follow this bit and I don’t quite think EBD does either, we’re just here for the drama), the reappearance of the Canadian troupe (a welcome cameo from Madge Russell here), a lot of lounging on deckchairs (amazing) and also a lot (a lot) of Packing Up Stuff. Honestly, if you’re into logistics, you’ll love this one. I remember being absolutely amazed at how these kids could be sent to boarding school (not a cheap thing, I think) and then legitimately be farmed off to pack up the library or sort out the old sports cupboards. I was comforted on this read to know that I still felt the same.
And yet even in all of this, it’s lovely because we get that incredibly specific and detailed minutiae that this series thrives on. Everybody has a kid! People come back! Pivotal friendships are formed! Gangs are split! Somebody has an attack of the hiccoughs that sees them end up being sent to bed under the care of Matron! It’s amazing and honestly, I feel we should produce this book to anybody who says: “look, Kids Books should have Plot and a Clearly Defined Antagonist” and go “dudes, but what about this one with lots of adults having a moan in the staffroom and the kids packing boxes”.
I have such respect for this wild and well-told adventure series and so I was thrilled when the publishers sent me a copy of Sabotage on the Solar Express to review. Adventure stories are hard to plot, mystery adventure stories are even harder, and when you whack it all on a train, you do not give yourself an easy ride (pun unintentional!). Nevertheless Leonard and Sedgman deliver, every time, and I have such admiration for how they do it.
Sabotage on the Solar Express is set in Australia and concerns a train driven by hydrogen and solar power, an invention from the mind of a brilliant child genius. But not everybody is happy with this and, as the journey unfolds, so does the sabotage. Accompanied by Elisa Paganelli’s delicious artwork, so precise and clean with detail, Sabotage on the Solar Express rolls on with utter aplomb.
What I like about Leonard and Sedgman’s approach is how they give you something quite classic and proven in terms of structure and make it work in a contemporary and modern setting. We know how adventure stories work – we recognise the patterns and structures of them and we look for them in our reading. What’s fun is when somebody says “look, we know what you’re thinking about here and we’ll give you that but not quite in the way that you expect”. Leonard and Sedgman do that with such delicious style here, be that in the chapter titles which reference action movies or in the neat subversions of expectations throughout. I love a book that makes me flip back to the start to check the details (I never pick up on anything, it’s a gift) and I love it even more when a book makes me stop everything I’m doing so I can see how it ends. It’s the best, I love this series.
It’s difficult for me to tell you how perfect this is so instead, I’ll tell you about how I had to stop halfway through reading to have a moment over how perfect it was. I have lusted over the Illustrators series from Thames and Hudson for a long while, making a quiet little list of the ones I wanted to get (all of them) and slowly started to pick them up when funds allowed. Judith Kerr was my first and I adored it, endlessly, emotionally, for Joanna Carey’s writing about her is so soft and loving and respectful and the images are perfect, and honestly, it’s just lovely. Lovely, lovely, lovely. (now I have to go and get all the others).
Okay, let’s try and be a bit more coherent here. (IT’S LOVELY). Let’s tell you about the fact that technically it’s more of an adult non-fiction biographical kind of coffee table hybrid of a book which interleaves a long and lusciously written profile of Kerr with richly reproduced images of her work. her earliest work is present due to the quick thinking of her mother, packing for their escape from Germany, and seeing these pieces laid out on the page is intensely moving. I particularly enjoyed seeing some of her college work and tracing the refinement of her style and voice – already fiercely present in her earliest artwork.
Judith Kerr was one of the most present and articulate creatives I have ever witnessed in the world of children’s literature and things like this are such a fitting tribute to the gift that was her work. I love Judith Kerr, I loved this, I loved it.
Delirious, dangerous, and rather intoxicating, Stalking The Atomic City tells of the author’s visits to the ‘exclusion zone’ that exists about Chornobyl. There’s more than a little bit of Trainspotting about it but also I think a kind of longing for life to be lived on one’s own terms, to find a place within the world that can be known in a way that nobody else has ever known it. There’s ennui in it, there’s a discomfort, a sharp, sharp edge of unease, and something rather, utterly fascinating.
I loved this. I’ve been trying to read more translated fiction and was really interested in what this book might do. I know very little about the topic and the area and so, in a way, Kamysh guided me as much as he does the people he takes into the exclusion zone. In a way though, his guidance becomes a kind of manifesto for visiting the zone as much as staying away from it. Come with him. Stay away. Look twice. Close your eyes.
Stylistically, it’s pretty distinct. I suspect you’ll either love it or hate it but you need to experience it. Rich, wild, contradictory sentences spike up against each other. Tenses play against each other, rules are forgotten, perspectives shift – and sometimes all of this happens all at once. There’s a wild edge here, one that tries to evoke something very particular as much as it shies away, self-consciously aware at what its trying to do. I liked it a lot. I’m always on the side of literature that tries to be something, to do something, to break new ground, to form new shapes. And the shape that Stalking The Atomic City makes is intoxicating.
It’s relevant to add here that I share a publisher with Kamysh and that I requested a copy of this to review through Netgalley. My thanks to Pushkin for the approval. The Stalking City is published by them in July. Make a note.
Meet How To Be True. It’s a follow-up to How To Be Brave and it features a school trip that nobody will ever forget, barricades before breakfast, and also cake. Lots and lots of cake. There will always be cake in my books. And ducks. There’s a pivotal duck. Always a good thing, I think.
How To Be True is published in the UK on July 7th 2022 by the beautiful and lovely Pushkin who have understood this book from day one. As with How To Be Brave, the cover is by the wonderful Thy Bui and I am herefor every inch of it.
I’ve had this on my to be read list for a while, interested not only for the author but also because of my research into young female writers. It is an amazing topic to look at and one which fascinates me endlessly (I’m doing a PhD on it) and so Queen Victoria’s book, written when she was ’10 and 3/4′ is particularly up my street.
One of the things to look at in books written by young writers, that is to say ‘children’s literature written by children’, is how it’s presented to the world. The packaging here is very precise and tells you that the author is both Alexandrina Victoria and also Queen Victoria – so she’s kind of captured between the two identities immediately, a writer who is young/old, herself and not herself, and her story is interesting because of that. This isn’t an unusual thing to do: there’s a big tradition of adults having some discomfort about how to represent juvenile texts. For example, I’m working with one at the moment that has a coy little note from the publisher’s that tells us how they haven’t changed the spelling or grammar one bit – and yet, in popping that little note in, they draw a wry adult attention to it. It says – essentially – that it’s a book by a kid and you need to understand that through the filter of your much more learned self. These stories are difficult things for adults to handle and I find that so, so interesting.
The Adventures of Alice Laselles comes with an introduction by Jacqueline Wilson who draws a connection between Victoria’s love of paper dolls and her own. There’s an interesting preface to this which talks about how Victoria’s dolls have been “digitally cut out and manipulated” with the addition of shadows, changed poses and expressions. The work is sensitively done and the dolls are rather delightfully handled, but I find such an interest here in why the work was done and what that work says about us (adults) when we read books written by children.
So what of the story itself? It’s well told but brief boarding school story with echoes of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Sara Crewe, Or What Happened At Miss Minchin’s and a fair bit of L.T. Meade; plot is introduced and tied up with some alacrity, characters are sketched with that kind of deliciously precise ‘she had brown hair and hated toast’ style of the time. It’s nicely written and speaks of a familiarity with literary cultures and also the boarding school story genre. This is quite classic stuff.
I liked it. It’s a nicely put together piece. I don’t think it’s earth-shattering stuff, nor do I think it would have been remotely published if the author hadn’t been who she is, but it’s still a valuable contribution to the world of children’s literature – not in the least because it exhibits something of the tussle between adult and child in the construction of such.
I came to The Last Weapon through one of Wilson’s children’s books Five of Them and could not quite believe how the author of that could also write this, an anti-war polemic that was banned during the first World War. It seemed so strange and almost unbelievable: Five of Them was such a sugary sweet book. To go from that to writing a banned book fascinated me. Thanks to my local library pointing me towards the hathitrust repositories, I was able to finally find a copy of it.
The Last Weapon is the sort of book that you can’t rate, so I must ask you to disregard that. It hovers somewhere between fable and polemic, anti-war sermon and viciously angry fairytale. Every inch of it sings with pain and heartache and raw, raw fury at the world. It is a difficult read at points, disturbing at others, shocking at many, and heartbreaking throughout. It feels like the work of a completely different author and one who, I suspect, wrote this through a very particular prism of pain. Perhaps personal, perhaps political, I don’t know. But this book comes from hurt.
Would I recommend it? I’m not sure. If I’m honest, I don’t know if it’s the sort of book that one recommends. If one can’t really rate it and one’s still trying to figure out how they feel about it, one can’t really pick it up and go ‘hey, this is the perfect read for you’. I suspect it will be of interest to people looking at anti-war literature and sentiment at the start of the early twentieth century, and I suspect it will also be of interest to people who want to find out more about female authors at this point. And I think I fall into the latter category for I’m always intrigued to find out what female authors were writing and talking about in a literary culture that was very particular about what was expected about them (let’s call a spade a spade eh? sexism, misogyny, the patriarchy, etc. etc.).
The Last Weapon is full of religious imagery and quotations and some (a lot) of the more precise theological connections got past me. I am, however, a bit familiar with the representation of popular religion at this time, and this book felt very, very particular to this period. We have big gatherings, people preaching to the congregation, a vigorous centralising of the church in all that goes on, and a look towards preachers and minsters to function as the voice of all that is good and right.
So what happens? Mankind is being tested, and the ‘Sons of Fear’ and ‘the Child’ have gone down to earth to try and persuade them to make a choice: whether to use the Last Weapon. The Last Weapon, we eventually learn, may be ‘hellite’ – an atom bomb like device which will destroy everybody and everything in its path, or love. I won’t tell you what happens but I will tell you that Wilson does not hold back. She is furious and raw and rather endlessly raging into the dark, dark night. It is scared and it is sad and it is searing.
Hovering somewhere between literary fiction, comic, short story, and ‘crisp, stark ruminations about life’, Killing and Dying has left me a little bit breathless. I found it almost by accident in the library and picked it up because I am always here for comics and I am always here for people who find something rather intensely personal and distinct to do with the form. This feels precise and sharp and crafted and I respond to that; I like stuff where I can feel the thought and intent behind every line.
So what is it? Technically it’s a collection of stories about living. They cover life and loss, love and art, hope and sorrow, and pretty much everything in between. They are short and precisely told, unafraid of an exit that leaves you wanting more or of a frame that makes you double back and question everything you witnessed before. Killing and Dying, the titular short story, is perhaps the most stunning in that area, giving you a quiet and sharp sudden disruption that made me literally gasp. It reminded me somehow of reading When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs., that visceral moment of feeling a text inside your very soul.
It’s perhaps useful to think of Killing And Dying as a cracked kaleidoscope: it reflects and illuminates and some of it works better than others and somehow you can see all of that as you for along. I loved the mournful grace and eloquent space of ‘Translated, from the Japanese’ and I was frustrated by it at the same time and then I got to thinking about well maybe that was the point. And that discussion, that little twist of thought about these fragments of life, is something that I value a lot.
Maybe it’s worth getting lost in the library because it ends up in you being found.
Daisy May Johnson 