Dear teenage me...

Dear Teenage Me,

I am sending you a present by means of time travel.
Books, your favourite thing after new vinyl and clothes.
Naturally, I would also like to assure you that things turn out basically OK. Things, meaning Life, the universe, yadda yadda? At least until you reach the advanced age of 43 and after that, who cares, right? Why am I talking like an American sitcom? Child, in the future, everyone talks this way.
What's that you say? No, you don't marry a rock star. But you do marry someone very wonderful and you have two beautiful children. No, you don't live in a house with two staircases and a lake and peacocks strutting in the grounds but you live in a perfectly nice house, OK?
Yes it is in England. In fact it's about two miles from where you are now!!!
!!!
Yeah, sorry about that.
Anyways...What do you look like? Well pretty much the same plus two dress sizes and a lot of grey hair...no, no don't kill yourself! It is fine, honestly.You learn to make the best of what God gave you. Just like your mother always said.
OK well on to my presents. You see here in the future things are different. They have this thing called Young Adult literature that didn't exist back in your (our) day.  I know you're enjoying your diet of Jane Austen Nancy Mitford and Agatha Christie but believe me you would have ADORED these books. And you would have learned SO much.

Siobhan Dowd A Swift Pure Cry: This is beautiful writing. Remember it.

Sherman Alexie: The Absolutely True Diary of A Part Time Indian. You
will cry. And fall in love with the protagonist thus opening your eyes to the joy of geeks, a move which will prove wise. Trust me on this one.

How I live Now. Basically, the Mitfords transplanted to a dystopian future
England. Like The Pursuit of Love with more war and cousin incest.

Melina Marchetta, Jellicoe Road
Taylor is a tough girl and sorry, but you could really do with toughening
 up. Friendship here is mixed so beautifully with loss and pain. Something you'll come to understand one day.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks. E. Lockhart.
This is basically a feminist tract wrapped up in a fluffy boarding school and boys
package. Read, digest and remember.

So there you go! Something to keep your permanently book starved mind fed. Sure there's other stuff that's big, Twilight, and  Hunger Games but trust me you would hate it.
What's that? Are there books  about you? You mean about British Asian girls growing up in the suburbs, listening to punk and dreaming of the City? Funnily enough, not really. Yes I'm aware thirty years have gone by, but pretty much no. There's Sherman Alexie but that's the other kind of Indian
But you know something, sweetie?
 I might just write you one.
Love and kisses

Adult You


Sent from my iPhone (trust me you will LOVE these!)

Final Carnegie Reviews and more prizes...

This is the new 'adult' cover for Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner very much in keeping with the Brave New World feel of the story. I've heard so many good things about Maggot Moon I saved it for the last of my Carnegie reading,  concerned a book described as 'perfect' by none other than Meg Rosoff could not possibly live up to its hype. Reader, it did. I devoured it  quickly, over a couple of days which also involved the usual distractions from reading (work, children) and now I want to read it all over again. This is a book one reads with the rising certainty that like How I Live Now or The Book Thief  or The Curious Incident... it is a book that redefines YA literature. Told in brief chapters in first person by Standish Treadwell whose dyslexia is integral to the plot and the means for Gardner to play beautifully with language. Many gorgeous examples but to quote but one or two:
The place smelled of overboiled cabbages, cigarettes and corruption. The teachers had on their glad drags
The striplights looked to me like loneliness. They were too bright, they revealed everything. Read it and weep, aspiring writers. Sob.

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is a charming illustrated fable which I enjoyed despite my sneaking suspicion that the Bear was actually God and the Boy was Mankind and the Boat was Our Doomed Planet. But I'm probably reading too much into it with my adult-brain. The 8 year old quite liked it and loved the pictures but wasn't keen on what he described  as the 'cliffhanger' ending, saying he would have preferred the Boy to have got to Wherever He Was Going. He has recently learned the word metaphysical (don't ask) but took a literal approach to this one. Perhaps he's too young and I'm too old.

The Carnegie Shadowing site here has some illuminating reviews from younger readers and great videos of the shortlisted authors discussing their work.

I see also the Guardian children's book longlist is out, a wonderful selection with only some overlap. They also have a prize for young critics, the entire long list which is pretty good. My young reviewer settled for a Lego mini-figure.
The Branford Boase award longlist is equally strong. The prize, which is for a debut author and their editor also has a competition for young persons  (now closed). You get to write a short story starting with a paragraph written by the previous year's winner. I might try it just for fun, being slightly too old to officially take part.
So many fabulous ways to encourage kids to read interesting and challenging books! And if anyone's teen needs further persuasion, this might help.

A collection of essays about the love of reading by such luminaries as Zadie Smith, Michael Rosen and Jeanette Winterson it should persuade anyone.
 I am the last person to need persuading but I bought it anyway.
I am no good at predicting winners, but if Maggot Moon doesn't waltz off with the Carnegie, Gardner can legitimately claim she woz robbed....

Graphic Novels for teens.

I am new to this form. We didn't really have them in my youth. As a (cough) mature reader I've previously found the graphic form to distract from rather than enhance the narrative and the print rather too small for comfort.
Having read a couple I now stand corrected. There is some excellent stuff around.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is the best-known of the new wave of graphic novels more concerned with the protagonist's coming of age than superheroes in tight suits. It has now been turned into an animated film and was the subject of controversy when it was recently banned from Chicago high schools. If you haven't read it, you really should.

Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol is the vaguely supernatural tale of a girl who falls down an abandoned well and is subsequently haunted by its resident, somewhat needy ghost. Set against Anya's insecurities about her Russian immigrant background and fitting into high school, it wraps a cautionary tale of how some boys are not what they seem in a sweet, spooky package.

I loved Susceptible by Genevieve Castree, a dark tale of the author's peripatetic childhood with her young single mother. The story is told in fragments of narrative and wordless images, much as we retain memories and this is perhaps what makes it so enchanting despite the sadness apparent in the pages. Castree is also a musician and has written several other French-language comic books which seem, sadly, to be tricky to track down.

The Young Inferno, by the dream-team combo of John Agard, a legend among writers of children's poetry and Satoshi Kitamura, possibly our favourite children's picture book illustrator ( Captain Toby and Lily Takes a Walk) is not strictly a graphic novel but this retelling of Dante's Inferno is very much in the graphic novel style.
In the middle of my childhood wonder
I woke to find myself in a forest
that was-how shall I put it-wild and sombre

No sign of light. Not a star twinkling
The whole thing was creepy and kind of crawly
I still shudder in my trainers, just thinking
                             
of those scary monsters lurking in the leaves
and death itself putting on a grinning mask
and rehearsing its whispers for the breeze

It is brilliant and so much better than Dan Brown....
I think I am slightly hooked on the genre, I've also added these to my shopping list:

Azzi in Between is the story of a refugee child and looks like a Persepolis for the primary school crowd while Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary could be the story of my own teenage years.

 I also plan on reading my way through Malorie Blackman's excellent selection of her top ten graphic novels here

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.