'A most awful, hideous place'

Maggie Blue and the Dark World by Anna Goodall (Guppy Books, 2021)

This new adventure story - the first in what will hopefully turn into a series - is quite unlike anything I have read before. An original take on the 'portal story', with much literary allusion and some vivid and engaging characterisation, this is a challenging and rewarding read especially well-suited to those young (and old!) readers who have read Narnia, Harry Potter and His Dark Materials and whose reading diet has taken in a few children's classics along the way, too.

Maggie Blue is an unhappy girl living with her eccentric aunt Esme. Neither school nor home offer her enough in the way of comfort, from having to contend with the bullying Ida and unsympathetic teachers during the day to dealing with the lack of central heating and a comfortable bed at night. But there is something about Maggie. Dot, one of Esme's musical friends, senses a difference in the girl while that difference seems to set her as an ideal target in Ida's eyes. It is when Ida disappears and Maggie discovers strange things happening in the woods that the story then takes an eccentric path.

Perhaps intentionally, the threads of the story start to unravel here and the novel takes turns that for me were genuinely unexpected. Some will feel the presence and madness of 'Wonderland' in Goodall's 'Dark World' ('a most awful, hideous place' as one character calls it), though it is an even more violent and disturbing version of Carroll's already nightmarish land. But because of its richly woven tapestry of allusions, I am sure each reader will find their own connections to past reading.

For me, though, the strongest parallels were with Mozart's and Schikaneder's fairy tale, The Magic Flute. (Is the eponymous character's name a garbled echo of that opera's English title even?) Once Maggie enters The Dark World, scenes evolve - as in Flute - in a kind of weird, improvisatory, devil-may-care way but with a solid internal logic all of their own (The latter point, for me, most emphatically sets Maggie Blue in contrast to the knowing, self-conscious illogicality of Carroll's book.) Further potential connections are also intriguing to consider: the bird-catcher, 'everyman' figure is perhaps taken by a particularly wonderful one-eyed cat called Hoagie who, despite his completely self-centred attitude, is one of the most lovable characters I have met in literature of recent years; Day and Night, Light and Darkness are tangibly to the fore replete with Moon-witches and a 'Sun-god/magician', whose designs on Enlightenment become a key plot point; while also haunting the narrative is a spectacularly dazzling but terrifying creature, bent on evil - a transformed Queen of the Night. I shall not say too much about Maggie's parents here, but their almost-absence throughout (which perhaps may become more of a part of the future sequels) felt like a nod to the challenging tensions between parent(s) and child in The Magic Flute.

As every performance of Mozart's masterpiece will reveal infinite wonders and unseen connections and contradictions, I felt strongly that re-readings of Maggie Blue would uncover many things new. This novel is a truly original piece of work and very much recommended to intelligent, thinking readers of 11+. I, for one, cannot wait for the sequel.

With thanks to Guppy Books who sent me the new paperback edition of Maggie Blue - it was so good, I have put it in the class library...and bought myself the hardback!

One to Tackle

Rampaging Rugby by Robin Bennett, illustrated by Matt Cherry

Firefly, 2021

I was never great at sports at school. I'm still not much good now but teaching sports lessons does allow me to ensure every child knows the thing that really matters - to have fun! And with this book, the first in a series that does for rugby what Horrible Histories did for the Tudors, children will have LOTS of fun on and off the pitch. 

Robin Bennett and Matt Cherry have produced in Rampaging Rugby a book that is absolutely jam-packed with detail, both about the game (its history receives a whole section, for example) and how it's played (an incredibly detailed but super-clear portion of the book). The illustrations are humorous and lively but never play down the authentic and passionate tone of how the information is relayed. It really is a great introduction for children in upper Keystage 2 and Keystage 3, who may be coming with interest to the sport for the first time. 

Not only will Rampaging Rugby inspire many young people to take an interest in the game but will also help to engage children for whom sport is already their 'thing' in the enjoyment of reading. A double win! 

I'm very pleased to have been invited to 'kick off' the blog tour for Rampaging Rugby, doubly so as I have been able to ask Robin a few questions about the book: 

What’s the reason for young people reading about the game when they could just *play* it?

Like Conrad Smith says in his foreword, as a kid I loved playing sport but I also loved reading - so anything that combined the two was up my street.

You focus on the history of the game…and (hooray) the history of girls’ rugby. Why is the backstory such an important thing to know about for today’s rugby fans?

Sport is as much about the spirit of the game as the rules and that comes directly from its culture and from its history: its heart and soul. 

In the section on playing matches, you don’t shy away from the toughness of the game. Isn’t this a bit scary for some young readers? 

Partly because it's impossible to dress it up any other way and do it justice but also because I think most kids' games involve physical contact  - they're more comfortable and enthusiastic about bumping into each other than we give them credit for sometimes (more than adults!).

The book is packed with technical detail giving a fantastic in-depth overview of the sport. How did you go about balancing this level of detail with reading about it in a pleasurable way?

That was the biggest challenge - I started off with bare bones facts, then added jokes and anecdotes but that didn't really work ... so I just imagined I was chatting to our kids and that helped it come across more naturally.

You end the book with a look at the future of Rugby Union. What would you like to see for the game in the next few years and beyond?

More people playing: more girls, more older people (like me) and more countries. I would like to see safety remain high on the agenda, obviously not at the expense of flow and set piece.

Thanks, Robin! And best of luck with the launch of the book. I know a number of children in my class will love to read it. 

***

Rampaging Rugby is published on August 5th, from Firefly Press, and can be bought from all good bookstores - do support the independents where you can! 

The Big Five

The Climbers by Keith Gray

Barrington Stoke, 2021

Obsession is an unusual theme to observe in a children's - or even young adult - novel, at least when it takes the form of the threatening kind that drives Keith Gray's new novella, The Climbers. It is the kind of madness that grips tightly,
making its unfortunate victim believe the unreal, and which occludes their eyes to their own personal shortcomings. 

Sully's determination to climb the tallest tree in the town park and name it as his reward has overcome everything for him. When Nottingham, a boy who has just arrived in the town, shows his exceptional prowess at climbing and announces as his goal to race to the top, the worst side of Sully comes to the fore and the competition becomes fierce and deadly. 

Blind to seeing what his obsession has made him, Sully is not the usual kind of protagonist in literature for young people.  He may seem to be the hero at the start, but very soon it is revealed that he is 'a right arsehole' - to use Nottingham's words; being party only to Sully’s view of things in the narrative, this makes for uncomfortable reading indeed. Like the unstable branches on which the climbers place their Adidas Swift runs, we are on treacherous ground to the very end. 

Keith Gray pinpoints exactly the teenage mindset, desperate to break free and find their own place in a world that has contained them, passive for the first fifteen years of their lives. Sully's friend, Mish, is determined to go to university and leave behind a small town that is easily excited by (but which all-too-soon loses interest in) the antics of the climbers. Sully and Nottingham still need to find what it is they want but they have for the moment settled on being the big cheese among their peers. They have much to learn...much of which from each other. 

And then, of course, there are the trees. Silent imposing guardians of the natural world, they stand astride the human world that buzzes around them. They haunt the book like green ghosts; you can smell their bark, sap and chlorophyll as they thwart the boys' plans to dominate them. One in particular, 'The Last Tree', fights especially hard - it has never been climbed without a fall - and, like Moby Dick, will not give up without adequate compensation. It is the major success of the book that through his vivid  characterisation, both corporeal and arboreal, Gray's depiction of humankind's determined plan to conquer all, even the very earth from which it was birthed, is subtle and sharply pointed.

***

The Climbers is published on August 5th by Barrington Stoke, and can be bought from all good bookstores - do support the independents where you can! 

Everything in its place

Mystery of the Night Watchers by A.M. Howell

Usborne, 2021

As a fan of A.M. Howell's writing it is a huge pleasure to provide the first stop on her blog tour celebrating the publication of  Mystery of the Night Watchers, her third and latest novel. I have read and shared Howell's wonderful novels with my classes ever since The Garden of Lost Secrets was published in 2019 and every time the children are mesmerised; often they mention the almost relentless piling up of mystery upon mystery as the vital key to the stories' success. Elsewhere on this blog I have written about Howell's connection to the work of Helen Cresswell and Philippa Pearce, authors of my own youthful reading whose highly charged prose connects the everyday with the supernatural and fantastic world of the child's imagination. Howell is a contemporary author to cherish - one to join those ranks of great authors -her quiet, intense worlds blooming to life in today's readers' minds.

When The House of One Hundred Clocks was published, I was overjoyed to find that the setting was my personally beloved city of Cambridge, and I wrote a walking tour to help readers locate all the places in the book. The way in which Howell takes great care not only in the historical accuracy of the novels but in their geographical placement too, is one of their great successes too, their authenticity ringing true even as one marvels at the almost incredible details of their plots. Suffolk and Cambridgeshire have a particularly personal resonance for Howell, so when she offered to tell us more about how this part of the world provides inspiration for her books - particularly as she is the winner of the East Anglia Book of the Year! - how could I possibly resist?

Ann-Marie Howell writes: 

The rich history of East Anglia has provided huge inspiration for all of my stories. My regular walks around Ickworth Park near Bury St Edmunds, managed by the National Trust, inspired my debut, The Garden of Lost Secrets, and my time spent living and working in Cambridge was the reason for setting The House of One Hundred Clocks there. 

I have always wanted to use my hometown of Bury St Edmunds as a setting in one of my books, but I needed to find the right story to tell. It’s a very historic town with many listed buildings, a beautiful cathedral and ruined abbey. After I had decided the backdrop to Mystery of the Night Watchers would be the exciting passing by the earth of Halley’s comet in 1910, I realised perhaps I had stumbled across the right idea. In the centre of the town is a lovely seventeenth century building called Cupola House, now occupied by a restaurant. The house gets its name from the cupola on its roof - a type of roof top observatory. I realised this could be an excellent place for my characters to watch the comet from!

My fourth book with Usborne, publishing in 2022, was also inspired by living in the east. I can’t reveal too much, but it is set after the second world war and is full of secrets and
unexpected twists and turns. Living in this part of the country has given me lots of ideas for future stories too – I now just need to find the time to write them all!

With Mystery of the Night Watchers hitting the shelves this month, readers are in for a treat - if you have enjoyed the puzzle-laden plotting of Howell's first two books then you will love this one too! And if you are as much a fan of these novels as I am, doesn't the sound of the fourth one coming next year fill you with excitement? And the possibility of more books inspired by the author's surroundings? I just can't wait, Ann-Marie! 

***

Mystery of the Night Watchers by Ann-Marie Howell is published on 8th July 2021. Do support local independent bookshops where you can! 

With thanks as always to Ann-Marie Howell and Fritha Linqvist for their help in the preparation of this blog. 

A Recipe for Success

The Cooking Club Detectives by Ewa Jozefkowicz

(Zephyr, 2021)

Food is one of the great pleasures of life. As a teacher, I've found that the act of making something that ultimately will be eaten and enjoyed by its maker (or their friends or family) is one of the most immediately satisfying creative things that children can do. So many children can't wait to get into the kitchen with huge amounts of confidence to 'have a go'; there's excitement in the air every time cooking is on the timetable. 

So it was with great pleasure that I turned to Ewa Jozefkowicz's latest novel, The Cooking Club Detectives. Here was a book that combined two of my personal - as well as professional - passions: reading and cookery. I'm not only dedicated to ensuring that every child considers themselves a reader by the time they head to secondary school, but that they feel confident to make themselves good things to eat and moreover want to do so. These are personal aims that I hope will turn into life-long habits for the children. In becoming so, good physical, mental and emotional health is more likely assured. 

Jozefkowicz's new book is full of the same warmth and joy as her others. She always writes convincingly about the relationships between children and adults and this book is no exception. Erin and her mum are  trying to find their way in a new town having just moved there. Mum struggles to make her dream of making cookery a professional reality and during the story finds it difficult to overcome the online trolling and professional setbacks. But her daughter is there to help her through these challenges, making it her mission to find out who it is behind the nasty comments and the identity of whoever it is trying to close down the local community centre. She is joined by her good friends, Tanya, Frixos and Sam, not forgetting her charming dog, Sausage! 

The story unfolds bit-by-bit and I think children will particularly love the layering of mystery on mystery. They (like me!) will also very much enjoy the interwoven recipes, cheap and easy to make, perfect for young people from about Year 4 up to make in the kitchen, with a little help where necessary. They also draw attention to how food connects us all: the dishes are all favourites learned from friends and family and the ultimate one being the simple, no-frills comfort of banana bread that tasty staple of family teatime. There's nothing complicated or fancy here, just straightforward things that can be made to show that love between the maker and their friends and family. These recipes will be made, shared, consumed, enjoyed...and remembered. 

I very much hope this latest from Jozefkowicz reaches the widest audience possible. Not only will the story and characters enchant, but the passion that sings from its pages of the joy of cooking, the confidence it engenders, and life-changing impact it can have on all of us from the earliest age will come across loud and clear. The Cooking Club Detectives truly is a recipe for success.  

***

PS Now, wouldn't it be remiss of me not to share one of those dishes that appear in The Cooking Club Detectives? So to give you a 'taster' of the book, here is....

Frixos’s Feast

Ingredients
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 stock cube
• 500g paella rice
• 1 head of broccoli
• 1 bag of fresh peas
• 1 tablespoon saffron powder
• 1 bag of frozen seafood

Method
1. Heat the oil in a large frying pan. Add the chopped onion and stir until softened (about 5 minutes).
2. Prepare a large measuring jug of boiling water from the kettle (500ml) and stir in the stock cube until dissolved. Then tip the 500g of paella rice into the pan and immediately add about 100ml of the water, so that it covers the rice completely. Keep adding the water bit by bit and stirring, until the rice soaks it up.
3. Meanwhile, chop the broccoli into florets and put them in a separate pan with another 500ml of kettle-boiled water. Place on a low heat and cook for twelve minutes, adding in your peas five minutes before the end. When cooked, drain in a colander.
4. Finally, stir in a tablespoon of saffron powder, then put the seafood mix into the pan and cover it with a lid. Simmer for 5 minutes until it is cooked through. Then add the vegetables and stir these in gently.

With thanks to Fritha Linqvist for supplying photos and encouragement - and Ewa's recipe! - in the writing of this blog-review. 

Striking a chord

Even When You're Sad by Jenny Pearson
Beginnings by Eloise Williams 

The more I read, the more I feel. 

These are not just words. When I read, I sense particularly deep connections with some books that seem to really strike a chord within. That musical metaphor is not just words either. Music is very important to me. Whenever I think about the question, 'What luxury would you take to your desert island?', it would either be my piano or my record collection with some way to play it!. (And it would probably be the record collection because I can't play everything I love particularly well!)

When I was growing up, my parents bought me a magazine partwork called Storyteller. Many of us 80s kids remember this fondly: every fortnight I would buy a magazine of stories which were read on an accompanying tape. I would plug into my Walkman and listen. The stories I remember most vividly are the ones that I also remember for their music. One in particular, Captain Bones, completely terrified me at the moment where a skeleton aboard a rowing boat appears to the strains of an ondes martenot wailing. I could feel the horror of the boy in the story. Every emotion heightened, all thanks to that strange, sliding tune. 

I have written music myself since my teenage years, studied composition at university, and now write songs for my school to learn and sing. I want to share with the children the sense that music not only enhances our lives but helps us connect - with stories and with each other. Singing is a community thing.  Reflecting on this, I realise that my other great passion in teaching is reading aloud to children - again, a community thing, like singing, easy and fun to do. 

One of the books that I read to my class a few years ago now that changed my whole outlook on what stories meant to the community of readers in my class was Jelly by Jo Cotterill. I wrote about how this book transformed the quality of Book Talk in my class for the Open University Reading for Pleasure site (https://ourfp.org/eop/tell-me-in-story-time/). What was developed simply as a result of reading a fantastic story with inspiring characters and then talking about it all as a class is still wonderfully mysterious to me. I know things were happening in the children's heads and in their hearts as we read but what those things were is still left up to each individual to understand. 

I've recommended that book to so many teachers and children in the years following that reading of Jelly, so I was delighted to be paired with Jo for the Empathy Lab's Blog Tour for Empathy Day 2021. And to work with her on choosing music inspired by the Empathy Shorts was just the perfect activity: I remember very well indeed the moment at the end of the novel where Jelly sings and, instead of reading, I played Jo's song that she had written for her protagonist: music for the author, clearly, was the best way to express the feeling there. (You can hear it here, but read the book first/alongside! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgd_okmKSE0) 

For Empathy Day, Jo chose music for Eloise Williams' Belonging and, being the super-creative that she is, also drew a picture to express her feelings from the story - interestingly, my classes all love to draw too while I read aloud to them each day! For me, I went straight to Jenny Pearson's Even When You're Sad and immediately felt the urge to write a song inspired by the story. Hopefully, I've managed to capture Jenny's brilliant ability to write of children's deep sensitivity with each other, but also their strength, good humour and resilience, too. The song, despite the thoughtfulness of the lyrics, is a kind of wonky, upbeat march. 

I hope children and grown-ups everywhere get to use their deep resourcefulness and unashamed creativity this Empathy Day to celebrate and develop their own empathic responses. Draw! Make! Listen to music! Compose! Stories are strange, arcane, borne of the human creative impulse; let's use our own creativity to connect with them.

The Empathy Lab's Empathy Shorts are all available to download here for FREE! https://www.empathylab.uk/empathy-shorts 
A Family Pack of activities has also been produced with loads of great ways to develop and celebrate empathy through literature and connecting lives to stories: https://www.empathylab.uk/family-activities-pack 

 

Life Stories

Untwisted by Paul Jennings (Old Barn Books, 2021)

Paul Jennings' writing always wins. 

Having spent the majority of my teaching career working with older junior children, every one of those classes has had me read at least one Jennings story to them. It's usually Spaghetti Pig Out (which works particularly well straight after lunch) or The Strap Box Flyer (which usually ends up with me staring out after the last line is read at a sea of completely shocked faces), though, truth be told, many of the tales from the 'Un-' books have been massively enjoyed. Being the curious type of reader, I've often wondered what makes them so good and also so loved: Immediacy - yes. A plain-talking prose style with often clear-cut sentence structure - yes. Surprising twists - ohhhhh, yes! But ultimately, I can't work out what it is exactly. Jennings is a kind of magician and as with the best of magic tricks, you want to know how he did it whilst at the same time keen to leave the actual mechanics in a kind of mysterious haze. 

Then along came Untwisted. This unique hybrid of a memoir-writing guide - like all those short stories - kept me entertained and completely transfixed throughout: although this is not a book for children, the same clarity and affective qualities of his writing for younger readers is there still. In short vignettes that dart back and forth from his earliest memories to just a few years ago, Jennings spins the yarns that share very similar, equally incredible scenarios with his fiction - a house that is cut in two and transported to the middle of nowhere being just one of these! The storytelling has that companionable tone that you might easily mistake for listening to an old friend telling you a story in the pub. The reading of this book becomes compulsive: like all good tales, you can't wait to discover how it all turns out. 

But there is so much more to this book. As a Writer-Teacher, I kept getting distracted by the fascinating insights into Jennings' development as a writer and his generous - almost throwaway - gems of writing wisdom: 

"A children’s author has fewer words to choose from than one who writes for adults, and these words need to be relatively simple."

It sounds maybe obvious, but when placed in the context of Jennings' own life-stories we see where his approach really comes from. When he was at school, his class was asked to write on a given subject. What Jennings ended up writing was particularly short (ahem!) - but clearly incisive, as his teacher declared: 

"Jennings has answered the question as well as anyone else but he has done it in half the number of words."

These kinds of stories about the learning of his craft shows how closely life and writing are interwoven. Important lessons (but maybe not the one the teacher intended!) were learned from direct experience: words matter; meaning matters; clarity matters.

Later he writes:

"My feeling is that children’s authors need to be able to put themselves into the world of kids and know what fears, hopes and experiences they face."

Again, it perhaps appears that this should of course be the case, but the overall impression of the whole book is that Jennings is showing us how life and writing are the one and the same. So the act of writing becomes the act of sharing, a yearning for connection through words between writer and reader. Jennings, whose life has been devoted strongly to the power of reading and in particular to those children who struggle, has created in Untwisted a testament to that very central importance that reading and writing has in all of our lives. It's more than just words.

Of course, reading Untwisted added more than a little to my enjoyment of the conjuring trick that is this writer's particular genius; but more than that, I came away more deeply appreciating what reading and writing can do. Jennings reveals that the life of his stories are absolutely 'the stories of his life' - just as our own, surely, are to each of us. 

***

Untwisted is published on 3rd June 2021. With grateful thanks to Ruth Huddleston of Old Barn Books who provided me with a proof and the photos (taken from the book) for this blog.