December 2012: Lucy Boston's "Children of Green Knowe" and our January book

Off to the Cambridgeshire Fens this month with Lucy M Boston's classic story The Children of Green Knowe (1954), the atmospheric first book in her series of six.

The Children of Green Knowe is simply gorgeous: a sophisticated, eerie book that demands careful reading.  The tale of young Toseland (Tolly), sent by train from prep school to spend a solitary, snowy and haunted Christmas with his grandmother in the family's ancestral home, arriving in a boat rowed across flooded meadows by an old retainer, is an appealing mix of one central story embellished with individual tales about the plague-dead (yet still present) children of the house and their animals - tales told by the old lady during firelit evenings before Tolly is packed off to bed to dream in his shadowy attic room.  It's never quite clear where real life ends and magic begins.  

Lucy Maria Boston (1892-1990) was born into a middle-class family in Southport, Lancashire in the north of England, the fifth of six children.  Her father, who died when Lucy was six, was fervently religious and their home was crammed with items he had brought back from a visit to the Holy Land - painted friezes, lanterns, Moorish wooden arcades and other middle-eastern objects.  It is this sense of a house full of fascinatingly magical things that she translates so well into the English surroundings of Green Knowe.

After going up to Oxford, Lucy left to nurse in France during WW1.  She married in 1917, but the marriage ended in the 1930s and she worked as an artist in Europe for a few years.  When her only son Peter went up to Cambridge University she followed him and, finding a run-down Manor House at Hemingford Grey near Huntington, she bought it, moved in and spent the rest of her life there; renovating the house and gardens, writing, making patchwork quilts, and enjoying welcoming curious passers-by to show them around.  One of our group had been lucky enough to meet Lucy Boston themselves as a child.

Like one of her famous patchwork quilts, Lucy Boston weaves together sumptuous imagery with eerily evocative writing.  Tolly goes out on a snowy morning: "In front of him, the world was an unbroken dazzling cloud of crystal stars, except for the moat, which looked like a strip of night that had somehow sinned, and had no stars in it."

There is Anglo-Saxon mythology, biblical imagery and Tudor history - and through it all we hear the haunting sounds of the flute played by a long-dead boy, and the ghostly hoofbeats of the thoroughbred horse that used to occupy the magnificent stables.  There's terror too, when one of the ancient yew trees begins to come to life ...

Lucy's son Peter's beautiful black and white line illustrations add to the pleasure of the book: incorporating the real-life objects from his mother's home they possess a slightly frantic yet eerie quality themselves: their close study is very rewarding.  The front cover shows Tolly arriving by boat, with the haunting effect of the lantern shining on the flood waters and lighting up the ancient trees.

This is a beautiful, minimalist book which continues to reward with re-reading.

Next month we're back off to the United States when we'll be reading The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright (1941), the first in the series of books about the Melendy children.

November 2012: Anthony Buckeridge's "Jennings' Little Hut" and our December book

Fossilised fish-hooks!  We went back to 1951 this month to spend some time at Linbury Court Preparatory School with JCT Jennings, his friend CEJ Darbishire and 77 other well-brought-up but excitable small boys, and to laugh at their adventures in Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings' Little Hut: building dens, exercising a goldfish in the school pool, smashing the Archbeako's cucumber frame with a wayward cricket ball, and generally getting into scrapes.


Born in 1912, Anthony Buckeridge was a schoolmaster in a prep school in Sussex in the 1940s when he began to invent tales about a boy called Jennings.  Like Joan Aiken, whose stories were first heard on Children's Hour in 1941, Buckeridge submitted a  script to the BBC about the well-meaning but hare-brained little boy, and between 1948 and 1962 Jennings and his perpetually ten-year old schoolfriends were Children's Hour favourites.  The first book, Jennings Goes to School, appeared in 1950 and a further 24 titles followed over the next 45 years.  Buckeridge died in 2004, aged 92.

It seemed we either loved Jennings or were  baffled by him.  Those of us who had fallen in love with Linbury Court as children were not disappointed by returning.  Those for whom it was their first visit found the book harder to enjoy, and somewhat  anachronistic.  The first chapter, devoted to the technicalities of hut building, proved difficult to overcome; the complexities of cricket - so vital to all boys' school stories - was also something of a turn-off.  But everyone loved the unique language: particularly the boys' specialised vocabulary of complaint and exclamation - everything being 'ozard', 'wizard' or 'supersonic',  accompanied by imprecations to 'ankle round', 'hoof off' or 'fox round', while the teachers were either 'heading this way at forty knots' or 'taking off on a roof level attack'.
We explored the differences between the girls' school stories of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers with its bullying spitefulness, and Buckeridge's Linbury Court with its focus on the boys' comic high spirits and well-intentioned schemes, and where everyone seemed to be liked by their peers - even 'clodpoll' Darbishire, the 'newt-brained shrimp wit' who is rubbish at games and tends to quote his father - a vicar - and Tennyson rather too often.  We compared Jennings with that other 1950's schoolboy of repute, the satirical Nigel Molesworth of St Custard's, the male equivalent of Geoffrey Willans' other school series, St Trinian's.  Molesworth seems just that bit more street-wise and appealing, with his 'history started badly and hav been geting steadily worse' attitude and his sketchy approach to 'speling', while St Custard's is more anarchically terrifying than gentle Linbury Court, ruled as it is with an iron fist by Headmaster Grimes (BA, Stoke on Trent),  constantly in search of cash to supplement his income and who runs a whelk stall part-time.
We discussed the powerful literary heritage of 19th and early 20th century boys' public school stories, and the imprinting of their ethos, language and experiences on subsequent generations, as evidenced by books such as Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days (1857), Frank Richards' Billy Bunter and others - right up to today with Harry Potter and Hogwart's school (a name which first appeared in the Molesworth books as the rival school to St Custard's).  We looked at some examples of the genre from Bath Library's archive of historic children's books, including a copy of A Toast Fag (1901) by Harold Avery, which had been presented as a prize in 1911 to a child at South Oldfield Junior School - far removed from Eton, Harrow and Rugby.  We ended by briefly discussing the influence of P G Wodehouse, who was Anthony Buckeridge's favourite author.
We are staying in the 1950s next month to read The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston (1954) and will meet again on Wednesday 5 December 2012 at 1015.

October 2012: Joan Aiken's "Midnight is a Place" and our November book

We journeyed back into some unspecified time and location this month when we opened the covers of Joan Aiken's 1974 classic, Midnight is a Place.  With grotesque characters,  a bleak and snowy countryside, a pair of ragged orphans - and a grimy mill town with an extraordinarily high workplace accident rate - it was redolent with parodic echoes of Charles Dickens and Mrs Gaskell at their most melodramatic.  It's reminiscent too of The Secret Garden and Jane Eyre.  While we winced at the author's use of "oop north" dialect to distinguish the workers from the gentry, the Boz-like illustrations by Pat Marriott added to the illusion of being somewhere in Victorian industrial England, most likely beyond the Watford Gap ... 

Born in 1924, Aiken was the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Conrad Aiken and the step-daughter of novelist and poet Martin Armstrong. Home-educated between the wars on a diet of much Victorian literature and early 20th century writing, her heritage is unmistakeable.  This is a quirky book, stuffed with inventive and memorable imagery, and fascinating ideas that appeal to children and adults alike.  

Those who had read Midnight is a Place when they were younger recalled most vividly the scenes in the carpet factory: particularly the enormous press thundering terrifyingly down from the roof to squash any little clot snatcher too slow to get out of the way.  As adults, we were each struck by any number of tiny and imaginative details: Handel's tuning fork, a grandmother living in a Georgian ice-house, loaves of bread baked with chestnut flour, the red coat, a mediaeval jewelled saddle fished out of the sewers, the Friendly Society that's anything but ...

Aiken's beautifully observed young hero, Lucas, sets out the central thesis in his schoolroom essay in the opening pages: "Industry is a good thing because it is better to work in a carpet factory than to be out in the rain with nothing to eat".  He then spends the rest of the book discovering the truth about this middle-class perspective on the lot of the poor.  Thrown together with the fiercely independent young French girl, Anna-Marie, and then abandoned to their own devices, the children are subjected to a series of trials and hardships so monumentally awful, in a winter so cold and dreadful, that you just long for the first sign of spring to bring some relief!  There's surprising tragedy too, including a ghastly and unexpected fight to the death with a piece of industrial equipment.

One interesting theme in Midnight is a Place is that of the role of the music teacher being used as a device to cross the divide between the gentry and the working classes.  We think this may occur in other books too - we just need to confirm this with a few examples.

Finally, the consensus was that (although the story was initially hard to get into) most of us were "gripped without loving it".  Almost too darkly melodramatic - rainswept, snowy, cold and filthy - and with any number of convenient plot twists advancing to a rapid conclusion, Midnight is a Place has just a slight tinge of a Victoria Wood Christmas Special.

Next month we're off to a boys' prep school when we're reviewing Jennings' Little Hut by Anthony Buckeridge (1951).  Supersonic!

September 2012: Erich Kästner's "Emil and the Detectives" and our October book

Today was spent tracking criminals through the back streets of Berlin with Emil (Tischbein) and his two dozen or more young friends, as we reviewed Erich Kästner's 1928/9 classic children's book, Emil and the Detectives.

Born in 1899 in Dresden, by 1927 Kästner had established himself in Berlin as a prolific and respected journalist and author, and one of the most important intellectual figures in pre-WW2 Germany. A pacifist who had served as a young soldier at the end of WW1, he published poems and articles in many important periodicals and newspapers. During the book burnings in Berlin's Opernplatz on 10 May 1933 he was personally denounced (amongst others) by Goebbels in what is now known as 'die Feuerrede' (the fire speech), and his works were thrown onto the bonfires - with the exception of Emil and the Detectives, which presumably stood alone in matching up to the regime's demand for "decency and morality in family and state".

"Gegen Dekadenz und moralischen Verfall! Für Zucht und Sitte in Familie und Staat! Ich übergebe dem Feuer die Schriften von Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser und Erich Kästner."  (Against decadence and moral decay! For decency and morality in family and state! I hand over to the fire the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser and Erich Kästner.)

Our knowledge of the ghastly events that were just around the corner for Emil, his friends and their families adds a real poignancy to this simple yet enormously satisfying story. 1920s Berlin comes happily to life as Kästner locates the action firmly in its bohemian café society. Music plays in the streets, there's the smell of frying sausages in the air and the villain enjoys his coffee and a cigarette at a table in the famous Café Josty (the pre-war meeting place for Berlin's writers and artists which was destroyed during WW2 and has been reincarnated in the Sony Centre, one of Berlin's modern landmarks). 

The boys of 1920s Berlin had enviable freedom: unhampered by over-anxious parents with mobile phones they roamed the streets having wonderful adventures, while still managing to be incredibly polite to grown-ups and thoughtful of each other. They are largely unconcerned by social differences: Emil is a country mouse in town, but is welcomed by the streetwise young Berliners. The children - more than a hundred of them by the end of the book - inhabit their own exciting world and operate just under the adult radar; free to come and go, they have adventures that turn out well for all concerned, while a slice of apple cake and a hot chocolate is fair reward for their efforts.

Wittily illustrated by Walter Trier (an anti-fascist who was also bitterly opposed to - and by - the Nazi regime), and with Kästner's occasional humorous asides and sly insertion of himself into the story, adult readers are kept as amused as their younger audiences, and the book is refreshingly free of moralising (apart from Grandma's outdated exhortion to "always send cash through the post"). There's even the mandatory comic policeman who can't remember Emil's surname.  However, Walter de la Mare's lengthy introduction was universally condemned as a dreadful plot spoiler!

There was some discussion of the quality and nature of the English translation from the original German (we were reading Eileen Hall's 1959 version), with the view expressed by those of the group who are German speakers that the book is more genteel in tone than would have been the case. Perhaps there's an opportunity for a new translation of Emil that uses a more authentic voice and replicates the Berlin street slang of the original? The portrayal of Pony, the only girl in the story, although understandable for its time, was something of a disappointment. Despite her seeming liberation at first, with her bicycle and her brisk approach to boys, she remained firmly in the role of home-maker and head chef.

All that said, we loved our brief stay in pre-war Berlin. In comparison to the more sophisticated stories that children read today, Emil and the Detectives is a charming, simple yet fast-paced story that ends well and leaves the reader satisfied that all's right with the world.

At our next meeting we will be reviewing Joan Aiken's historical novel for young adults, Midnight is a Place (1974).

July 2012: E Nesbit's "Treasure Seekers" and our September book

We met in July to share the hugely enjoyable adventures of Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel and Horace Octavius (HO) Bastable, as they tried to find the means to restore their family's fortunes in E Nesbit's The Treasure Seekers (1899).

A socialist and a founder of the Fabians, Nesbit led a notoriously complex personal life, but it was her need for money to support her family which encouraged her to publish children's stories, and the echoes of her real-life "treasure seeking" resonate through her fiction.  Writing with an eye to the Sunday-school sensibilities of her Victorian audience, she nevertheless managed to deploy knowingly subversive humour, social observation and some biting sarcasm.  The first person narrative voice is unusual for its time, and solving the "mystery" of who is telling the stories is all part of the fun.

The children come from that lost era before television, computer games and manufactured entertainment intervened, and reading about their imaginative games and amusements is a joy.  Much of their charm is in their innocence, while their wild inspirations for how to set about making money are frequently drawn from classic literature; stories which were so familiar to Nesbit's readers at the time.  They have an occasionally antiquated turn of phrase too: referring to their “ancestral home” for example.

We laughed out loud at some of the adventures – and the adults’ reactions to their attempts to sell Oloroso sherry, to develop medicines, and to edit their own newspaper which included some Sensible Advice (“It takes four hours and a quarter now to get to Manchester from London; but I should not think anyone would if they could help it.”).

There are some uncomfortable moments for 21st century readers with modern sensibilities: the children can be unkindly judgmental of others such as Albert-next-door with his frilly collars and knickerbockers (an early version of Violet Elizabeth Bott); there is some semitic stereotyping and the word "nigger" - common 19th century parlance - makes an appearance.  (We always try to read original editions of the books we select, and while we are unsurprised to read words or descriptions that are unacceptable nowadays, they are often unsettling when they appear.)

We talked about the role of the pet dog in children’s literature – from the Bastable’s partner in crime, Pincher, to the almost-human Timmy in the Famous Five; we discussed the structures of fictional families – often four, five or more children with twins not uncommon, all trying hard to be good but so often failing, while a previously deceased mother or father causes the remaining parent to be largely absent, hard working to the point of exhaustion and much loved.  The Bastable children benefit from the kindly intervention of Albert-next-door’s rather mysterious uncle – we felt that there was another story here ripe for the telling.

We were able to examine some E Nesbit first editions from Bath Library’s archives, while we were recommended to read A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book for its closely related echoes of the Nesbit family’s chaotic lives.

We are taking a holiday in August and meeting again on 5 September when our next book will be Erich Kastner's iconic Emil and the Detectives (1929), set in pre-WW2 Berlin and translated from the original German.

June 2012: Tove Jansson's "Moominland Midwinter" and "The Summer Book", and our July book

We spent June in Finland: first we visited the dark and wintry northern forests with the Moomins, before travelling on to explore an island in the Gulf of Finland during a long light summer.  Our books were Tove Jansson's charmingly eccentric Moominland Midwinter (1957), together with her semi-autobiographical story The Summer Book (1972).

Several of us knew and loved the Moomins and were delighted to have a chance to return to them; for others amongst us they were entirely new, and rather strange - even confusing - and unlike any other children's book we have known!  But the story grabs you and pulls you in: in the end it doesn't matter that you don't know who the characters are: you just begin to accept them.  The story of young Moomintroll waking early from hibernation and discovering an unfamiliar and rather frightening world going on around  the sleeping Moomins gives children the opportunity to share in his fears, before retreating to the safety of Moominmamma's comforting, dreamy presence.

The illustrations that bring the Moomins to life are so important, and Jansson's artistic heritage and talent shine through on every page.  

As a companion piece, The Summer Book is fascinating.  It reinforces Jansson's ability to capture the most powerful personality traits and re-cast them so that they are immediately recognisable, either as Moomins or as the humans on the island.  The grumpy grandmother and her relationship with her perky grand-daughter was brilliantly described, and the story encompassed melancholy, hope and innocence as well as some savagery.  Neither was Jansson afraid to address impending (arguably actual) death - as she had done in Moominland Midwinter with the story of the squirrel who appears to freeze to death.  

The Moomins offer serious writing for children - the books don't talk down or mollycoddle.  But Jansson also offers a safety net if the anxiety gets too much - if children are worried about the squirrel they can turn to a later page to discover it alive and well!   The same safe haven is not available to readers of  The Summer Book.

The "foreign-ness" of both books is quite striking for native English readers - also true of the illustrations.  The independent Little My in Moominland Midwinter was particularly admired.  To those who have never experienced truly deep and dark northern winters, it is clear that the climate was clearly of enormous influence and importance to Jansson - waiting for spring to arrive assumed a significance that was quite new to us; Moomintroll celebrating the coming of the new sun with golden ribbons in his ears was utterly charming.

Jansson teaches us to prepare for winter and to prepare for death - it's a certainty that both will come in the end.

Our next book is E Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers: being the adventures of the Bastable children in search of a fortune (1899).  Sadly, in a sign of the times, the library service in Bath & North East Somerset no longer keeps sufficient copies to supply our book group - luckily, several of us have our own copies that we can use instead!

CILIP Carnegie Medal Winner 2012: Patrick Ness, "A Monster Calls"

In an historic announcement this month, the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal for 2012 was awarded on 14 June to Patrick Ness for his novel, A Monster Calls (Walker Books), with the same book also winning the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for its illustrations.

This is Ness's second consecutive Carnegie Medal (a feat only achieved once before, by Peter Dickinson in 1979 & 1980).  And it is the first time that the winner of the Carnegie has also won the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal - sister award to the Carnegie Medal - with Jim Kay taking the prize for his haunting illustrations.

In A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness has created a tale using the final idea of the late children's writer, Siobhan Dowd, who died in 2007. Dowd was herself a CILIP Carnegie Medal winner in 2009; posthumously for "Bog Child".

A Monster Calls is the story of 13 year old Conor who is running from the knowledge that his mother is dying from cancer; and of his encounter with the monster of his nightmares. A share of the royalties from every copy of "A Monster Calls" sold goes to the Siobhan Dowd Trust which aims to bring books and reading to disadvantaged children in the UK.

Patrick Ness is an American who has lived in the UK since 1999.  He always knew he wanted to be a writer and had his first short story published in a magazine in 1997. The Knife of Never Letting Go - the first book in Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy was his first novel for young people and was written while he was teaching creative writing at Kellogg College, Oxford. It won both the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. His second book, The Ask and the Answer won the Costa Book Award, and the third, Monsters of Men the 2011 CILIP Carnegie Medal.  A Monster Calls has already won the National Book Tokens Children's Book of the Year Award at the Galaxy National Book Awards and the Red House Children's Book Award 2012.

CILIP Carnegie Medal 2012: Shortlist

The winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for 2012 will be announced this month (June).  The eight short-listed books are:

• My Name is Mina, by David Almond
• Small Change for Stuart by Lissa Evans
• The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett
• Everybody Jam by Ali Lewis
• Trash by Andy Mulligan
• A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
• My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher
• Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Depetys

The list contains some familiar names: A Monster Calls won the 2011 Galaxy Book Awards, while My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece was shortlisted for the same prize.  Readers of this blog will know that our group reviewed My Name is Mina at our meeting in February 2012: we felt it was a less satisfying book than Almond's earlier prize-winning offering, Skellig.

See Carnegie 2012 Shortlist for details.

Bath Festival of Children's Literature 2012

Bookings will open shortly for the Bath Festival of Children's Literature, which runs at venues around the city from Friday 28 September to Sunday 7 October 2012.  

Friends booking opens on Monday 18 June.  Telegraph Readers' Priority Booking Weekend is 23-24 June 2012.  General booking opens on Monday 25 June 2012.

Call 01225 4663362 for more information.  The website is Bath Kids Lit Fest but it doesn't yet contain details of the 2012 festival.

May 2012: Gabrielle Zevin's "Elsewhere" and our June books

We took a break for school holidays in April, and were delighted to get back together this month with coffee, biscuits and two new members, ready to explore Elsewhere.  American author, screenwriter and Harvard English Literature graduate Gabrielle Zevin’s prize-winning debut novel for teenagers made the Carnegie long list in 2005, but was new to most of us.  It tells the story of fifteen year old Liz who is killed in a bicycling accident and wakes up on a cruise ship bound for the afterlife in Elsewhere – a place that seems just like the suburban American she inhabited in life, but with observation decks where she can watch her grieving family and friends through binoculars.  Liz learns that everyone in Elsewhere ages backwards until they are seven days old, when they are placed in the river and return to Earth, reincarnated into a new life.

Elsewhere is an interesting idea, and it was a simply written and sometimes compelling read (“candyfloss” for some), but sadly it wasn’t a book that any of us enjoyed wholeheartedly, with so many loose ends, tangles and gaping plot holes it’s difficult to know where to begin!  “I kind of liked it”, and “Unsatisfactory” were two comments that sum up how we felt.  Zevin seemed to have started on a promising concept that she’d found increasingly difficult to manage until (about two thirds of the way through) she’d simply thrown in the towel and stumbled to the finish, coming down all of an untidy heap.  Her editor must take some of the blame: the book was snapped up for publication – perhaps because the idea was so unusual and the teen appeal so obvious that finessing the plot and ironing out the anachronisms went by the board.

We enjoyed the Prologue voiced by Liz’s pug dog Lucy, and the interesting use of the present tense (a current vogue in children’s literature); also the symbolism of water and ships.  Reflecting the author’s background, the novel does have a filmic quality, but some questioned her rather heavy-handed approach to literary references – Shelley’s Ozymandias and E B White’s Charlotte’s Web amongst them.  Using binoculars to observe those still alive was reminiscent of The Truman Show (1998), while others mentioned similarities with the adult stories The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (F Scott Fitzgerald, 1922) and The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger, 2003). Another children’s book that deals unremittingly with the afterlife is The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren (1973). 

"Contrived", "trite" and "lacking in any sense of consequences for one’s actions": you can tell that Elsewhere hasn’t tempted us to read anything else by Gabrielle Zevin.

Next month we are dipping into the Scandinavian genre and reading two books by the same author: one written for children and a semi-autobiographical novel for adults.  Both are by the Finnish writer and artist, Tove Jansson: Moominland Midwinter (1957) – the fifth in her famous Moomins series for children – and The Summer Book (1972).

March 2012: our book display in Bath Library

Come along to Bath Library before the end of March to see our book group's display of beautifully bound classic children's books from the Library's collection.  They are in two secured glass cabinets next to the Reception Desk.  Many are now available to read online or as ebooks.  They range from Seagull Rock by Robert Black (1872) to a 1954 edition of Visitors from London by Kitty Barne, the first Carnegie winner (1940) to go out of print.  

There's an English Struwwelpeter by Dr Heinrich Hoffmann with its frightening illustrations of the boy with enormously long fingernails, and many other much-loved titles to stir childhood memories. 

Books we must get round to ...

Every time we meet, someone mentions a particular book, and we all say "Oh, we MUST get round to that one ... " so here's the Must Get Round To List.  We'll keep adding to it every month.  So many books, so little time ...

• Something from the Jennings & Darbishire series by Anthony Buckeridge (1912-2004): DONE
• Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1877)
• Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken (1964)
• The Borrowers by Mary Norton (1952)
• Anything written by Mrs Molesworth (1839-1921) because her name keeps coming up: DONE (The Cuckoo Clock)
• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken (1963)
• Five Children and It by E Nesbit (1902)
• The Phoenix and the Carpet by E Nesbit (1904)
• House of Arden by E Nesbit (1908)
• Mistress Masham's Repose by T H White (1946)
• The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902)
• The Wool Pack by Cynthia Harnett (1951)
• Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1935)
• Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
• The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean by R M Ballantyne (1858)
• Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling (1906)
• Dragonfly by Julia Golding (2008)
• The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff (1959)
• Arthur: the Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland (2000)
• Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876)
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
• War Horse by Michael Morpurgo (1982)
• Polyanna by Eleanor Porter (1913)
• The Nicest Girl in the School by Angela Brazil (1909) or similar
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
• Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (1871)
• Down with Skool! A Guide to School Life for Tiny Pupils and their Parents by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle (1953) or How to be Topp! A Guide to Sukcess for Tiny Pupils, Including All there is to Kno about Space (1954)
• Numbers by Rachel Ward (2009)
• The Railway Children by E Nesbit (1906)
• Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones (1977)
• Any book by Henry Treece
• Bows Against the Barons by Geoffrey Trease (1934)
• Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (1958)
• The Golden Treasury by Francis Palgrave and Alfred Pearse (1861)
• Carrie's War by Nina Bawden (1973)
• Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian (1981)
• The Arabian Nights
• The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Colludi (1883)
• The Box of Delights by John Masefield (1935)
• Any poetry by Roald Dahl
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)

Blue Peter Book Awards 2012

The children who watch the long-running British television programme, Blue Peter, have voted US author Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid the Best Children's Book of the Last Ten Years.  They chose from a shortlist of the ten best-selling (by volume) fiction books of the last ten years for 5─11s with a first publication date between January 2002 and December 2011. Only the top-selling book of each author was included.

Interestingly, boy heroes dominated - Greg Heffley, Horrid Henry, Harry Potter, Alex Rider, Theodore Boone, Thomas Peaceful and the young James Bond.  This gender skew must be something to ponder, given that girls are regarded as the more voracious readers.  The sole female protagonists were Chloe (Mr Stink) and Floss (Candyfloss), with the three Baudelaire orphans (Austere Academy) making up the list.  The shortlist by publication date was:

• A Series of Unfortunate Events: Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket (2002) 
• Alex Rider Mission 3: Skeleton Key by Anthony Horowitz (2002)
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J K Rowling (2003)
• Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo (2003) 
• Young Bond: SilverFin by Charlie Higson ( 2005) 
• Candyfloss by Jacqueline Wilson (2006)
• Horrid Henry and the Football Fiend by Francesca Simon (2006)
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney (2008) 
• Mr Stink by David Walliams (2009)
• Theodore Boone by John Grisham (2010)

Blue Peter Awards 2012

March 2012: T H White's "Sword in the Stone" and our April book

This month we've been reading The Sword in the Stone by Terence Hanbury (T H) White, published in 1938.  This whimsical children's story by the former Stowe schoolmaster - based on Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485) - was an instant success when it first came out, with Walt Disney acquiring the film rights in 1939. White amended it to become the first volume in his more serious - and much less readable - Arthurian quartet, The Once and Future King (1958).  Lerner and Lowe purchased the latter three books to make the successful musical Camelot in 1960. This finally motivated Disney to make the cartoon version of The Sword in the Stone: it came out in 1964, one year before White died suddenly aged 57 in Piraeus, on board the ship on which he was returning from a lecture tour of the United States. He was buried in Athens.

One of us had read and loathed The Once and Future King leading to some reluctance to tackle The Sword in the Stone.  Luckily, these fears proved unfounded!

Our wide-ranging discussion touched on aspects of White's somewhat eccentric and melancholy life as well as the book's extensive sources and intertextual references.  Having persevered through the first chapter with its obscure falconry language - evidence of his own passionate enthusiasms - we all agreed that (rather like King Pellinore's Quest) it had been worth the struggle!  In fact, the shape of the book seemed to echo White's melancholia with its highs and its lows, personified by Pellinore and the Beast eventually coming to terms with their inter-dependency.

There were so many "highs" to talk about, despite some of the dated language.  The description of the interior of Merlyn's cottage, so like Remps' 1690 painting of a Dutch cabinet of curiosities that we felt White must have been describing it; the perfectly-behaved English weather when the white snow never turns to slush; the night in the mews; Wart's transfigurations into animals, birds or fish; the scenes with Robin and Maid Marian; the modern references (such as Merlyn appearing like Lord Baden-Powell in running shorts, or the cigarette cards of wildfowl paintings by Peter Scott); the trees' discussion about their various utilities; the Wind in the Willows-like scenes with Athene and the hedgehog and badger ... It was interesting too with White's interest in Catholicism to recognise the religious references - including salvation for the wicked bankers! 

The American Book-of-the-Month Club magazine wrote in 1939: "Mr. White is evidently a scholar. His knowledge of the codes, the customs, the courtesies of medieval England, is extraordinary ... This book is unique. You may not like it if you cannot take a mixed drink of phantasy and realism, edged with satire, and beautifully blended by a humorous imagination. But if you like it, you will not like it moderately."

We didn't all like The Sword in the Stone, but those of us who did, definitely did "not like it moderately". 

Our next book is Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin but we won't be meeting until Wednesday 2 May because of the Easter holidays.  It's going to be hard to wait that long!

So what's a corkindrill?

Are you reading The Sword in the Stone? So what is a corkindrill? There's one hanging up in Merlyn's study.

Find out the answer to this and many other obscure words used in The Once and Future King and The Book of Merlyn by clicking on the link to the T H White Glossary of Terms, part of the Camelot Project website by the University of Rochester. Thanks to Hannah for finding it!

PS: it's a crocodile.

A new blog ...

One of our book group members has just started a new blog.  Called Books: 7 to 11, the intention is to list and highlight popular, useful and well-written books for primary school libraries, book corners and school staff rooms.

The focus is on books for 7 to 11 year olds (KS2), but there will be occasional forays into the world of younger picture books and books for teenagers.

Take a look!  Here's the link: http://books7to11.wordpress.com/

February 2012: David Almond's "Skellig" and "My Name is Mina" and our February book

January gave us a double dose of David Almond.  Not only did we get to grips with My Name is Mina, published in 2011, but we also read Skellig - the 1998 Whitbread and Carnegie prize-winning book to which Mina is the prequel.  Both books led to some intense and wide-ranging discussions. 

On the whole, the vote was in favour of Skellig as a more satisfying read for both boys and girls: it has substance, strong and sympathetic male and female characters, and plot momentum.  The stylised girl's diary approach and typefaces used in My Name is Mina were less well received and we commented on the missed opportunity to introduce some drawings into the text.  We had different opinions about whether Mina's character was realistic and whether her home schooling experience - an apparently well-tempered and idealistic partnership between mother and daughter - was credible.  We appreciated Almond's description of Mina's day in the Pupil Referral Unit - but we were drawn into a discussion about whether some pages in Mina felt more like a writer going through some technical exercises to demonstrate his craft than moving the plot forward. 

We discussed the poetry and art of William Blake; the tightly woven metaphors relating to birds and flight; the references to the classical Underworld with Persephone's journey acting as a simile for birth; the island of Skellig Michael and the archaeopteryx.  We talked about reading age labelling for books.  We enjoyed many of the thought-provoking ideas that Almond's books must inspire in children: particularly the dust particles of skin and people's breath lingering in the atmosphere. (11 year old son to Mum, after going to bed: "Mum, am I getting dusty when I lie in bed at night?")

Our next book takes us into the mediaeval Arthurian fantasy world of T H White's The Sword in the Stone (1938).

"My Name is Mina" and home schooling

Hannah noticed an article in the Guardian, 13 January 2012, about a young girl who refused to go to school.  It mirrors some of Mina's experiences in My Name is Mina, including a referral to a unit for children with behavioural problems.  If you want to read the full article, you can find it here: Refusing to go to school.  This is an extract:

" ... eventually I was sent to Larches House, a pupil referral unit that specialises in children with behavioural problems at risk of being excluded. I was 13. There was a boy whose epilepsy ... made him unpredictable and aggressive. A girl who cut off her hair with a pair of kitchen scissors because she thought her mother wouldn't send her to school if she looked like she'd been scalped.  There were swings. They were kind. They asked me what I wanted to read. They let me write stories. I was happy there. I made a friend who was like me – clever and quiet and no trouble at all, so long as she was getting her own way. We walked around the gardens and decided to invent a new language. I remember my mum commenting on how bright and happy I looked, how she hadn't seen me smiling, with my hair up, for months and months. But my placement there ended because I refused to carry on going when it was made clear that I could attend for only one term and the aim was to ease pupils like me out of their phobias and back into mainstream schools. I declined."

2012 Bath Children's Literature Festival

This year's Bath Kids Lit Fest will run from Friday 28 September to Sunday 7 October 2012.

Click here to sign up to the newsletter and receive advance notifications and news.

Bath author wins Children's Costa Book Award 2011

When the Costa Book of the Year 2011 category winners were announced on 4 January 2012, the £5000 Children's Book prize went to Bath-based Moira Young for Blood Red Road.

This is the adrenaline-fuelled story of a girl, Saba, searching for her kidnapped twin brother Lugh with the help of a clever crow.  When he's snatched by mysterious black-robed riders working for an evil king who wants him as a human sacrifice,  Saba sets out on an epic quest to rescue him.  In a lawless land, where life is cheap and survival is hard, Saba has been brought up in isolated Silverlake and has never seen the dangers of the destructive society outside.  Written in dialect and set in the future, the tale of Saba's journey sizzles with danger ...

The judges said: “It’s astonishing how, in her first novel, Moira Young has so successfully bound believable characters into a heart-stopping adventure. She kept us reading, and left us hungry for more. A really special book.”

Blood Red Road is the first instalment of a trilogy (Dustlands) which is already creating excitement in Hollywood.  Her new novel has been optioned by Ridley Scott and screenwriter Jack Thorne is in the process of adapting it for film. Young said much of her own inspiration came from the epic movies with which she grew up, from Gone with the Wind to The Searchers to The Wizard of Oz.

Born in Canada, Young moved to the UK in the 1980s.  She worked as an actor – including appearing as a tapdancing chorus girl in Richard Eyre's High Society in the West End – before becoming an opera singer.  More recently she has been PA to the Editor of the Bath Chronicle, the city where she now lives. In 2003 she enrolled on a writing for children course and has not stopped writing since.  "I'm hoping I'll stay here for a bit" she says.  "I think this is where I was meant to be heading."

Blood Red Road has also been nominated for the 2012 CILIP Carnegie Medal, awarded by children’s librarians for the outstanding book of the year for children and young people.

Read more at Blood Red Road

William Blake's 'Infant Joy' (1789) for "Skellig"

For those reading Skellig by David Almond, this illustrated poem by William Blake is significant.  Spot the angel in the picture:

"I have no name;

I am but two days old."

What shall I call thee?

"I happy am,

Joy is my name."

Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!

Sweet joy, but two days old.

Sweet Joy I call thee:

Thou dost smile,

I sing the while;

Sweet joy befall thee!

January 2012: Enid Blyton's "First Term at Malory Towers" and our next book

Jolly hockey sticks (or rather, lacrosse sticks)!  We returned to 1940s England for some middle-class girls' boarding school fiction this month when we read First Term at Malory Towers by Enid Blyton. 

Well, our sour faces said it all!  What a change from the joyful cheers that had been raised last month when we agreed on this favourite book!  (Please note the elaborate use of exclamation marks here, in tribute to the favourite chapter-ending style of the author.)  What a shock to read about Darrell Rivers and her classmates with 30+ years' hindsight and through 21st century eyes.  The endemic bullying, the violence (euphemistically described as 'scolding'), the stereotypes, the priggishness, the underlying theme of relatively low expectations for 'first-rate girls', the lack of character development, the celebration of mothers if they were 'sensible' and 'pretty', the general feeling of being drowned in saccharine ... it seemed that no-one really enjoyed the school on the Cornish cliffs this time around (apart from the description of the wonderful swimming pool by the sea).  In fact, several of us who had loved Malory Towers as children - despite the secret-code language of 'hols' and 'dormies' and 'beastly' girls - had discovered that we were very reluctant to read it again, all too aware that our precious memories would be unpleasantly shattered.  And so they were.

Blyton herself said: '[M]y public, bless them, feel in my books a sense of security, an anchor, a sure knowledge that right is right, and that such things as courage and kindness deserve to be emulated. Naturally the morals or ethics are intrinsic to the story—and therein lies their true power.' Her recurring theme was that good children are rewarded with friends and honours, while naughty children are given a precious chance to repent and become worthy. Problem children are reformed, simply by being part of the school and absorbing its special atmosphere. From our modern perspective however, the judgements are harsh and the treatment of unfortunate or noncomformist children is downright cruel, while gender and social stereotyping makes the reading even more uncomfortable.

Much has been written in the academic literature about Enid Blyton which will not be repeated here, but one of our group was lucky to have had Sheila Ray as a tutor: her 1982 book The Blyton Phenomenon examines the controversy surrounding her work and the reasons for her effective exclusion from the BBC and from public libraries over the years, meaning that her books were often bought as treats or given as gifts.  We discussed the negative authority-figure responses to a diet of Blyton, and so we were particularly delighted when another of us brought along a very competent short story she had written aged about eleven called First Term at Riverton Manor: clearly entirely based on Malory Towers! 

We also discussed the re-packaging and modern re-editing of the original stories, as well as the spin-offs by Pamela Cox, and we mentioned in passing modern books on the school theme such as Beswitched by Kate Saunders and J K Rowling's Harry Potter series.

Well, we've had enough of middle-class children for the moment, so we're going to tackle David Almond's My Name is Mina this month, the book he published in 2011 as the prequel to his 1998 success, Skellig (which won both the Whitbread Children's Award and the Carnegie Medal).