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."

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).