"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.

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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).