More Carnegie Reviews...

I must come clean and admit that novels in verse are not my favourite thing.

Too easy, I think
To take fragments of life
And arrange them as
Pretty shards of glass

I read this praised first novel on a Kindle which may have detracted from the poetic-ness of the whole but made it a fast, tube journey read. Some flaws are inherent to the form, slight plot, stereotyped characters (an African doctor who says things like ‘There is no hyena without a friend') but Cassie, the protagonist, is a vividly portrayed thirteen year old growing up quickly as she adjusts to living in a new country caught between  estranged parents. I can see teenage girls reading this and being inspired to write their own poetry. Which is definitely a good thing.

Code Name Verity has had much blogger love with reviewers being ‘floored’ and ‘sucker punched’ by its twists and turns.To summarise, there is a WWII flying ace and a spy, both young women. One is captured by the Gestapo one isn’t. The book is told from one, then the other’s point-of-view. I prefer a book that takes you by the hand rather than one that assaults you but I too was beguiled by the elegant structure, something like a periscope in which the narratorial voices function as prisms that leave one looking at things from an utterly different perspective. There are flaws. A romanticized view of class in which one of the protagonist’s looks, lineage and Swiss boarding-school education do not lead to inbred stupidity, a lackadaisical dependence on Daddy’s money and a propensity for jumping into swimming-pools fully clothed but rather to intelligence, pluck and a Stiff Upper Lip under Nazi interrogation. The final series of events becomes increasingly unlikely, culminating with the ’good German’ collaborator beloved of children’s literature.  This rather lets the Nazis off the hook when a glance at Wikipedia will show that Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo and many others were efficiently executed by their captors. The relationship between the protagonists is so subtly portrayed that many have interpreted it as a story of ‘female friendship’ when it is clearly a love story. So, flawed but a diamond nonetheless.

In Darkness is a slow burner, a dual narrative told from the point of view of Shorty, a fifteen year old Haitian gangster from the slums trapped under the rubble of a collapsed hospital after the 2010 earthquake. Shorty lives, unlike the quarter of a million who died in he tragedy. As Shorty lies without food and water, the tale of his brutal life in the slums is interspersed with the story of the most famous Haitian of all, Toussaint Louverture. The conceit that  Shorty and Louverture undergo some kind of Voudou mind-melding spirit swap is a brave one, some may object to the implication that  Louverture's successful rebellion and defeat of both the French and English was due to a sojourn inside a twenty-first century 15 year old's brain, but Nick Lake manages to balance the two threads and if, by the end we are as interested in the history of an 18th century revolutionary as in the unrelenting  tale of life as a chimere in the slums, this is a good thing. Probably.
Reading other reviews I was struck by the lack of an insider perspective on the book. Does Lake reduce  imaginings of Haiti to  earthquakes, voudou,  slum lords and Toussaint Louverture ? Certainly the NYT review wondered. Lake's novel has already won the Printz, so evidently this wasn't a problem for others. A writer exploring  history fraught with disaster, death and disappointment from a position of safety and privilege should be prepared for the question however.

It's that time of year again...

.... unaccountably exciting for us children's book geeks. Time for the prizes. We've just had the Printz and the Newbery in the States, the Waterstones children's book prize here and the Branford Boase award for a debut author and their editor shortlists soon, not to mention the Blue Peter Prize and the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and several others I have neglected to mention.
The top banana, in the UK at least, is the Carnegie medal and its companion prize for illustrators, the Kate Greenaway medal. Chosen by that unsung breed of heroes, children's librarians, the prize, unlike adult equivalents, comes with no accompanying fat cheque nor guarantee of prominent display in bookshops throughout the land. However it does carry huge prestige in the children's book world and the eight book shortlist is particularly strong this year. The winner is announced on the 19th June.
On with the reviews...

Roddy Doyle's A Greyhound of a Girl has garnered the most publicity, coming as it does from a Booker Prize winning author. I love Doyle's dialogue-driven sharp, succinct style and devoured this book happily.
A multi-stranded tale of a ghost great-granny come to help her daughter, now a dying old lady to The Other Side, the conduit is Mary, twelve years old, who first sees great-granny's ghost. Tansey is wearing an old-fashioned dress and boots and looks a bit thin in sunlight but in all other respects is real and very funny. The humour slices between the ribs and makes a story that otherwise verges on sentimental, a sweet, affecting read. Though Playstations and the like are mentioned in the context of Dommo and Killer, Mary's hulking teen brothers, the book has an old-fashioned air and an idealised view of the female sex (emotions, cooking and suchlike being largely their  domain) which rankled. But y'know, that could just be me. A book which deserves an audience spanning the generations.

I had mixed feelings about Midwinterblood, namely envy, admiration and puzzlement (is that a word?)
Envy that Marcus Sedgwick has published a book of loosely connected short stories with barely a teenager in sight as a YA novel. Admiration at the exquisite simple beauty and understatement of Sedgwick's prose. He moves effortlessly between modes, reality to myth to sci-fi to near-horror, creating an atmosphere both eerie and charged. Every word counts here.
Puzzlement at the unresolved questions. What's the deal with the strange religion that Eric Seven's parents brought him up in (obviously linked to the story of reincarnation but never explained)? Are the islanders  harvesting the orchid for use as an elixir of immortality? If so what do they need children for anyway? There are so many great concepts here not fully explored. The obliquity and half-told rememberings create atmosphere, but I'd love to read a Sedgwick book of  length and depth unconstrained by the YA label.

Wonder, by R. J. Palacio has become a 'publishing sensation' dealing sensitively with the rare issue of cranio-facial anomalies but also tackling more widely stuff around being a kid, who's in, who's out, friends, enemies and frenemies. It does so beautifully in the main with the story told from August 'Augie' Pullman's view of his first ever foray into the public world of 'middle school' after being home-schooled. Augie is a sweet, engaging character who has grown accustomed to the double-take his appearance causes in others. He loves Star Wars and his dog, Daisy, his favourite day of the year is Halloween when he can hide behind a mask like everyone else in New York. Chapters told from other points of view (sister, sister's boyfriend, friends etc) didn't work  for me, detracting from Augie's viewpoint and adding little. The ending was upbeat; Augie becomes accepted and popular even, albeit in a class mascot type of way. Are kids ever this nice? Not in my experience. Sadly, in school as in life ( perhaps not in the world of children's books) bullies win out.

life in three lines

The elevator pitch. We all have to have one. Screenwriters have the pitch, i.e the one line sell and the log line, a one or two sentence sketch of the story. Twitter has got us all posting stories in  throwaway bites (see the Jennifer Egan thing here) and  I liked the recent series of novels in a single tweet from The Guardian
The London Writer's Club Blog had some great advice here
l I like their approach, the three sentence pitch, conforming as it does to the three act structure and leaving  room for a twist or surprise.





This whole business isn't new however.
The postman just delivered Three Line Novels, vignettes of turn of the century Paris life by an anarchist, bricoleur and dandy named Felix Feneon and originally published in Le Matin.

Example: Besting the French champion who could dance no more than 14 hours, M Guattero was at 12:27 declared winner of the waltz marathon.
Sublime.
More here

O do not love too long

 SWEETHEART, do not love too long:
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
All through the years of our youth
Neither could have known
Their own thought from the other's,
We were so much at one.
But O, in a minute she changed -
O do not love too long,
Or you will grow out of fashion
Like an old song. 

Fog

Many writers have spoken openly and bravely about their struggles with depression recently, including Marian Keyes  and children's author Robert Muchamore. Matt Haig is eloquent on the booktrust blog here

For many years I've found reading and now writing to be a way of staving off those winter blues. Once, in my twenties, I read nothing but Anne Tyler for a month while  recovering from a relationship break up. Writers from Jane Austen to Joan Aiken to JD Salinger have helped me through various of life's stages; indeed I became interested in writing for children after a bout of baby blues led me to retreat, most sleepless nights, to a hot bath and a favourite novel of childhood. Escaping to the fantasy land of one's own imagination and recapturing the 'play' of childhood imaginings is wonderful, as Freud said


'The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously — that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion — while separating it sharply from reality.'

The world is a troubled place where this morning alone, a brief glance at the BBC news homepage and Twitter are enough to send anyone into a spiral of sadness, fury and impotence.

Reading Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium I was struck by his description of feeling oppressed by the weight of the world and his belief that only by writing about it was he able to escape this feeling.

'At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone; a slow petrification…it was as if no one could escape the inexorable stare of the Medusa. The only hero able to cut off the Medusa’s head is Perseus, who does not turn his gaze upon the Gorgon but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield… I am immediately tempted to see this myth as an allegory on the poet’s relationship with the world.'

I am fortunate in that I have never been clinically depressed. I have always been able to hold down a job, sleep, care for my children and so on. Clinical depression on the other hand is often likened to being lost in a dank, bitter fog where nothing gives either pleasure or pain. The writer cannot take pleasure in writing, the reader in reading, the gourmand in food, the mother in her child. The oppressive weight of the world becomes too much to bear.

William Styron wrote about this in Darkness Visible which opens with the memorable passage:



'In Paris on a chilly evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder  in my mind–a disorder which had engaged me for several months–might have a fatal outcome. The moment of revelation came as the car in which I was riding moved down a rain-slicked street not far from the Champs-Elysees and slid past a dully glowing red neon sign that read HOTEL WASHINGTON.





My particular foggy January blues are dealt with easily, reading a good novel, a successful bit of writing, a brisk walk or baking a cake soon see them off.

Clinical depression however requires patience, understanding and most importantly, treatment. This may involve  medication, counselling, cognitive behavioural therapy and sometimes admission to a safe environment. I hope that writers talking about this common and difficult condition make seeking help easier for sufferers.

The Midnight Folk

Domestic fantasy or urban fantasy for children is characterised by the passage between the mundane everyday world and the fantastic or supernatural. The transition may be aided by a magical talisman or creature but is surprisingly often a physical door, opening or portal, the most famous of course being the wardrobe door in C.S Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but also the rabbit hole in Alice 
and the invisible window cut between worlds by The Subtle Knife in the second of Pullman's trilogy.

My favourite book of magical transitions is John Masefield's The Midnight Folk. The  transition between the 'real world' and the 'magic world' is a tricky thing for the writer. Having established the characters  and grounded us in their reality, to maintain the reader's belief through to the magical is a delicate operation. The surreal, dream-like 'fade' between the real and supernatural in The Midnight Folk is one of the best.  Kay Harker, an orphan living in an old house with only a governess and housekeeper to care for him is falling asleep in his bed listening to the sound of music from the drawing-room below.


After a time, he did not think it was a guitar, but a voice calling to him, ‘Kay, Kay, wake up.’ Waking up, he rubbed his eyes: it was broad daylight; but no one was there. Someone was scraping and calling, inside the wainscot, just below where the pistols hung. There was something odd about the daylight; it was brighter than usual; all things looked more real than usual. ‘Can’t you open the door, Kay?’ the voice asked. There never had been a door there; but now that Kay looked, there was a little door, all studded with knops of iron. Just as he got down to it, it opened towards him; there was Nibbins, the black cat.

‘Come along, Kay,’ Nibbins said, ‘we can just do it while they’re at the banquet; but don’t make more noise than you must.’

Kay peeped through the door. It opened from a little narrow passage in the thickness of the wall.

‘Where does it lead to?’ he asked.

‘Come and see,’ Nibbins said.

Kay ends up with Nibbins, a reformed witch's cat, at a coven led by his very own governess, the genuinely terrifying Miss Sylvia Daisy Pouncer.


There are not only witches, but also mermaids, pirates and the knights of King Arthur.  Secret doors open, portraits come to life and roll up their shirt to show us their tattoos, talking owls, otters, cats and a fox with the memorable name of Rollicum Bitem Lightfoot come to Kay’s aid.
We are flung headlong into the story (ostensibly of Kay’s search for the lost treasure of Santa Barbara to avenge his great-grandfather’s name) and swept along (there are no chapters), now riding a witch’s besom with Nibbins,  now on a winged black mare with a mysterious grey-eyed lady visiting Miss Susan Trigger (the daughter of the man who stole the treasure) a sprightly centenarian smoking in bed and sipping champagne. We sail out from Kay’s bedroom on a perfectly ship-shape model of the Plunderer, Kay’s great-grandfather’s ship, manned by water-rats, into the Caribbean seas to consult with mermaids. In between these adventures Kay must learn his Latin verbs, go to church and eat his supper much like any other boy. And Kay is a real, very believable boy. He likes real boy things, fossils and horses and boats and guns, tales of pirates, smugglers and buried treasure. The book veers between wild adventure and fantasy as the whereabouts of the missing treasure is (almost incidentally) revealed.

Brian Alderson in Books for Keeps says of The Midnight Folk
'Phantasmagoria rather than fantasy it may be. You climb into the book rather as Kay climbed into the portrait of his great-grandfather and find what might be the imaginings of a child all strung promiscuously together. '
I think this is the secret of its appeal-you climb into the book and find it impossible to leave. I now own three editions including this lovely Folio Society edition, but still  hanker after a first edition, with its beautiful, rather minimal 1927 cover.

John Masefield (1878-1967) was Poet Laureate from 1930 till his death and author of twenty or so novels.

The Midnight Folk and the Box of Delights are the best known of his books for children. Orphaned at six, sent to sea at seventeen by the Aunt who was his guardian, he worked in bars, in a carpet factory and was a vagrant in America for some time before coming back to England and becoming a successful poet.


The sequel, The Box of Delights is equally wonderful and takes place just before midwinter, 'when the wolves are running' rather than the witchy midsummer of The Midnight Folk, where the natural world and its creatures are beautifully described. Both the Midnight Folk and sequel owe as much to Masefield's sea-faring adventures as his poetry, the language is direct, inventive and funny rather than flowery and the pages are overrun with lovable and not-so-lovable rogues including Rat the cellarman who 'does a bit in the dustbin and comes a bit close to a old bone now and then'.

Borderlands

I have a guest post over here at Jim's YA contemporary blog in which I discuss my favourite YA contemporary writers, those who work in the wild borderlands between realism and fantasy...