ACHUKAblog
Nicolette Jones in her Easter roundup of the season’s best children’s books includes this praise for Running On Empty by SE Durrant
Lyrical, moving and realistic, SE Durrant’s Running on Empty (Nosy Crow £6.99, 8-11) is about the struggle of an 11-year-old carer who is starting secondary school and wants to run like Usain Bolt. With a rich and diverse cast, it sings.
Times Children’s Book of the Week 10/02/2018
Little Mouse is not your average risk-averse child. “Don’t go and play in the wood,” warns Rabbit. “It’s frightening there and full of big, scary animals.” “Nothing frightens me,” says Little Mouse. “I may be small but I’m not scared of anything!”
And into the dark trees he marches in his socks, gloves and striped tail-warmer (at least he wrapped up). So far so intrepid, as Horacek — the master illustrator from Prague whose use of bold colour and cut-outs makes him a cut above — shows our baby rodent leaping from toadstool to toadstool. Alex O’Connell The Times
Children’s Book of the Week
The Light Jar by Lisa Thompson
This psychological fantasy of imaginary friends, survival, a mysterious girl and a treasure hunt, sustains anxiety while not losing heart, and finally reaches the hoped-for new start. Written with clarity and tact, it is pitched for the young despite having a serious theme, frightening circumstances and a sinister threat.
NICOLETTE JONES
How good to see the TLS giving some space to children’s books and this piece by Imogen Russell Williams, in which she picks out and makes enthralling commentary on the best illustrated books of the year, is a cut or two above most seasonal roundups.
As introduction she warns overzealous parents, “A frequent casualty of the utilitarian focus on advancement and sheer length is illustration, and the reader’s respect for it. The children told “You’re too old for picture books” are not only banished abruptly from an enchanted kingdom. They are also held back from winkling out images’ stored secrets of detail, and from learning the artist’s language of window-frame, colour, light, shade, emphasis, the single line that communicates mood, or loss, or season – everything we mean by “visual literacy”. Sophisticated, demanding concepts may also be communicated, via illustration, to readers unable or unwilling as yet to parse the complex language required.”
I pick out just one of the books she recommends, to give a flavour of the quality of her commentary:
While illustrated books for teenagers remain sadly scarce, the best young adult literature is reinvigorating tired tropes, scrutinizing and dissecting cliché and demanding its readers’ alert attention. In Nick Lake’s Satellite(Hachette), a timeworn science fiction scenario is brought back to full brightness, aiming its tight-beamed questions with the intensity of borrowed light. The narrator, Leo, a child born in space, and his companions, Orion and Libra, are almost due, at fifteen, to come to Earth for the first time – a “home” they have never seen or set foot on. Living all his life in the orbiting space station Moon 2, Leo has longed for years to meet his grandfather, and to achieve the familial closeness his mother – an astronaut who occasionally visits – has never offered. The green-blue beauty of the distant planet, however, heralds danger as well as welcome – and conceals some shattering secrets. The book’s depiction of an Earth both familiar and strange (and a satellite in which engineered sterility is pervaded by tenderness), its thrilling, audaciously unlikely denouement, and its ethical and philosophical conundrums are all communicated via Leo’s truncated, syncopated diction. While not as rebarbative as that of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, this voice is initially startling, even irritating – gradually, however, it reveals itself as the perfect means of signalling an existence analogous to that of its earth-bound counterparts, but inevitably and perpetually different. Leo’s care to note mots justes throughout also focuses the reader’s mind on both language’s power and its shortcomings – as when he first sees a sleeping puppy on his grandfather’s ranch:
i stand & stare, just stare, at this little black-&white shape, knotted on itself, only 1 ear visible, chest rising & falling as it breathes. It makes me think of the word compact & it makes me think of the word perfect & it makes me think of the word life.
Here’s a list of the other books she recommends. Follow the link for the full piece (highly advised):
>>> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/buzz-saw-imagination-illustrations/
This roundup by Sara Keating mentions several books on the theme of migration, including
The Mediterranean by Armin Greder (Allen and Unwin, 8+, £12.99) looks at the idea of migration through the lens of the current refugee crisis. Do not be deceived by the fact that Greder takes a picture-book approach: he paints a harrowing picture of the reality of forced migration. The almost wordless story opens with a lifeless body floating in the water. In a series of rubbed charcoal drawings, full of smudged faces and oppressive landscapes, Greder brings us on a circular journey that reveals the world of war and poverty that forces millions of people every year to flee their homes. The darkness of the theme notwithstanding, The Mediterranean opens up an opportunity to have deeper conversations with a child about the current global political landscape.
Highly recommended:
Leonard S. Marcus on four new picture books, in the New York Times
While some sea stories are mainly good for a pirate-y thrill, others take young readers a bit deeper. The vast scope and power of the high seas makes the world’s oceans a dramatic setting for stories for those just getting their sea-legs as thoughtful, feeling, capable humans. Four new picture books leave dry land behind to reflect on the rewards and perils of friendship, empathy, courage and more…
The 4 titles reviewed by Marcus are
from ghoulish goodies to clear-sighted feminine analysis, in Imogen Russell Willaims’ latest roundup for The Guardian:
…more clear-sighted feminist analysis (and many more belly laughs) in Holly Bourne’s latest young adult novel, It Only Happens in the Movies (Usborne). Audrey, weathering the aftermath of a big break-up, declares war on the cliches of romantic comedy while simultaneously trying to hold notorious charmer Harry at arm’s length. It doesn’t help, however, that they are co-workers at an indie cinema, or that film-mad Harry is attempting to shoot his first zombie feature. Boasting emotional depth and believable heartbreak alongside such memorable lines as “frostbite of the bumhole”, this is Bourne at her outrageous, courageous, necessary best.
via Children’s books roundup: the best new picture books and novels | Books | The Guardian.
Pullman himself is a woodworker, artist and calligrapher; his tradecraft aligns him with another important strand in the sensibility of Victorian Oxford and American transcendentalism: the independent-minded, visionary Henry David Thoreaubuilding his cabin, William Morris with his ideals of beautiful handmade things, and John Ruskin, who shared those dreams. Pullman has come to resemble the Ancient Mariner, shaking hoary locks, demanding we pay attention to the calamities gathering on all sides. The radiant devices and other wishful dreams of alternative futures have rather faded from view in this new book, and the child heroes are beleaguered and alone in their valiant struggle against huge, massed forces of harm.
The tension in Pullman between deep attraction to magic and fierce atheistic pragmatism resolves itself into a commitment to art – especially shipshapeliness; this is a properly Romantic attitude. Just as his concept of daemons owes a lot to Coleridge’s ideas about inspiration, and his absolute trust in imagination rings with the hopes and beliefs of Keats and Shelley, so the commitment to the making of things as well as possible in the here and now expresses his faith that a well-made story, like the small, well-trimmed boat that carries the children on their long, dangerous journey, will offer shelter in any storm.
Philip Womack on La Belle Sauvage:
Pullman’s imagination is so enticing that any new window into it is welcome; and to connect once more with a fictional universe of such great power is a delight. Though La Belle Sauvage does not quite attain the fiery, magnificent heights of its predecessors, I’m certainly eager for the next two parts of this new trilogy; there are, after all, many more worlds to conquer.
https://www.ft.com/content/bc5117a8-b3ef-11e7-8007-554f9eaa90ba
WILD THINGS
The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult
By Bruce Handy
Illustrated. 278 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.
In “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult,” Bruce Handy does as his title promises, proceeding through children’s literature like someone determined to cook every Julia Child recipe. But since, of course, the number of children’s books out there far exceeds the number of Child’s soufflé and marbled steak dishes, Handy selects a few titles to represent each age, from babydom on up to whatever it is children become before they become us. Some of these are from his own childhood, some are books he read to his (still growing) children, and some seem chosen to answer a curiosity about what so-called girl books really are. This not-quite-method leaves the book occasionally feeling dutiful — but mostly not. “Wild Things” doesn’t have much of an argument to make other than its premise that we should take children’s literature seriously, which I think many people already do, and yet the book succeeds wonderfully, not so much as an argument but as an eccentric essay, and an emanation of spirit.
The trivia alone offers quite a bit of joy. Maurice Sendak altered his original plan for “Where the Wild Horses Are” because he lacked proficiency in equine anatomy. Also: L. Frank Baum’s first publication was a guide to breeding Hamburg chickens. Margaret Wise Brown of “Goodnight Moon” fame gave just one piece of visual instruction to her illustrator, Clement Hurd — a photograph of Goya’s “Red Boy.” And Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) not only worked on the screenplay for “Rebel Without a Cause,” but also tried, early on, to make his fortune with an invention called the Infantograph — a machine that used images of prospective parents to predict what their offspring would look like.
full review via A Grown-Up’s Travels Down the Rabbit Hole of Children’s Literature – The New York Times.
