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The Boy Who Made Everyone Laugh by Helen Rutter

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 1 Apr 2021
Cost Book Awards 2021 Shortlist

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A laugh-out-loud, against-all-odds triumph of a story.

Billy Plimpton is an eleven-year-old boy with a big dream. He wants to be a stand-up comedian when he grows up, delivering pinpoint punch-lines and having audiences hang on his every hilarious word. Surely an impossible ambition for a boy with a stammer. How will he find his voice, if his voice won’t let him speak?

The idea for this story came from Helen Rutter’s son, who has a stammer: she wanted to write the book that he would love to read, starring a child like him.

You may also be interested in this recent picture book about a boy with a stammer: I Talk Like A River an ACHUKA Book of the Day in January 2021.

Wolf Girl by Jo Loring-Fisher

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Sophy doesn’t know how to fit in. She tries to talk at school but the words get stuck in her throat and everyone laughs and whispers behind her back. But one day, an extraordinary thing happens…

Sophy is whisked away to a magical snowy land where she meets a wolf and her cub. The unlikely trio roll, run and howl together, playing happily in the snow. Sophy has found friends and nothing can ruin her day… until a big, angry bear appears. But Sophy finally finds her voice and finds the courage she’s been looking for all along.

This is a story of overcoming the isolating feeling of being shy, finding friends and most importantly, finding your voice.

I Talk Like a River by Jordan Scott ill. Sydney Smith

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 22 Jan 2021

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“This poetic and deeply memorable picturebook has a quality that stops you in your tracks and pulls you in… …a lyrical and intensely visual exploration of how it feels to struggle to speak out.” BfK 5 STAR review

After a day of being unable to speak when asked, and of being stared at, a boy and his father go to the river for some quiet time. “It’s just a bad speech day,” says Dad. But the boy can’t stop thinking about all the eyes watching his lips twisting and twirling. When his father points to the river bubbling, churning, whirling and crashing, the boy finds a way to think about how he speaks. Even the river stutters. Like him. “I talk like a river,” he says.

Lyrical, painfully acute language and absorbing, atmospheric illustrations capture, with startling clarity, this school-age child’s daily struggle with speech. Free verse emulates the pauses of interrupted speech while slowing down the reading, allowing the words to settle. When coupled with powerful metaphors, the effect is gut-wrenching: “The P / in pine tree / grows roots / inside my mouth / and tangles / my tongue.” Dappled paintings inspire empathy as well, with amorphous scenes infused with the uncertainty that defines both the boy’s unpredictable speech and his melancholy. KIRKUS

An incredibly moving picture book that offers understanding rather than a solution, and which will resonate with all readers, young and old. Masterfully illustrated by Sydney Smith, winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal.

Follow the illustrator on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sydneydraws/

Rosoff’s Hard-Hitting Acceptance Speech

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While accepting the internationally-recognised £430,000 Astrid Lindgren Memorial award for her writing in Sweden [yesterday] Meg Rosoff denounced the government’s exam-heavy approach to education, its dismissive attitude towards books, art and music and for the wide-scale closure of libraries under its watch.

David Cameron’s government’s approach to young people is tantamount to an “assault on childhood,” Rosoff declared.

Speaking at a ceremony in Stockholm, she said: “I have met too many children who cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, who suffer depression and anxiety, who believe what the government tells them – that nothing is more important than exams. That art and music and books will not help them make money. That it is OK to close libraries and do away with librarians.
 
“It is no wonder that teachers in the UK are quitting in record numbers. It has become a joyless profession. Learning has become joyless as well, and students are not able to quit. In Britain we are experiencing, quite literally, an assault on childhood.”

via Rosoff slams government for 'assault on childhood' | The Bookseller.

Terry Perkins and his upside down smile by Felix Massie – ACHUKAreview

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Screen Shot 2015-09-03 at 14.30.02

I sat down this morning with my 11 o’clock espresso and spent some time browsing through the Autumn Catalogue of the Quarto Publishing Group. When I came to the section for Frances Lincoln Books I stopped on p80 and thought to myself, “Ooh, this looks interesting – hope I’ve been sent a review copy.” So up I get and look at my pile of recently received picture books. Yes! It was there. And what a wonderful debut it is.
Felix Massie is a London-based award-winning animator and illustrator. He designed the short, animated trailer for the book:

Massie’s illustration style is disarmingly simple, but perfectly suited to this rhyimng tale about a young boy who is fine, until he starts to speak, when all his words come out garbled, as if they have been written upside-down. The doctor recommends a straightforward remedy to Terry’s mother. Turn the boy himself upside-down and then the words should come out the right way. Which they do. But all is not well. Now he can talk. But can’t walk. He has to be pushed around in a trolley. He is teased mercillessly at playschool. Then a girl called Jenny befriends him at a playground. She is hanging upside down on the monkey bars, and when she means to say “Boo!” it comes out as “Poo!”and Terry finds himself laughing for the first time since being turned upside down.

It’s an amusing story about being different and will be especially helpful to parents of young children who have speech difficulties.

Massie is already signed up to create a second picture book for FL which will be called George Pearce and his Huge Massive Ears.

http://www.achuka.co.uk/reviews/?p=597

Ursula Le Guin: “The name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.”

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A highly recommended Guardin feature on Ursul Le Guin and an extract from her acceptance speech:

As Ursula Le Guin receives the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards, she talks to Hari Kunzru about alternative fictional worlds

via Ursula Le Guin: ‘Wizardry is artistry’ | Books | The Guardian.

 

Ursula Le Guin speaking at the National Book Awards presentations:

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

That speech I gave in full… – Patrick Ness – Diary

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In the wake of the discussion provoked by his and other authors’ speeches at the launch of the Imagine Festival, Patrick Ness has decided to publish the full text of his speech on his website. I quote only from his intro, leaving you to click through to transcript itself:

I wasn’t going to publish this anywhere, because a speech is a speech, not an essay. You publish it and it loses all intonation, tone, improvisation, jokes, etc.  But as the discussion about the speech I gave Monday to open the Imagine Festival keeps coming up (along with certain folks reactions to it), I give it to you here without comment (except to say that Putin line is, let’s call it, “satire”).

 

http://www.patrickness.com/2014/02/that-speech-i-gave-in-full.html

Susan Cooper: libraries are the frontline in the war for the imagination

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Full text of speech given by Susan Cooper to the recent YLG (Youth Libraries Group) conference…
Highly recommended read

These are the two closing paragraphs:

The lucky child has a parent who reads to him, the lucky child has books on her shelves. All children should have the luck to have a public library, filled not only with information and computers but with books, and book people. In America, the book people are battling for this just as you are here. I haven’t yet seen a library closure total to compare with the 201 libraries closed here in 2012, but in that year 93% of American libraries reported cutting their staff, or their hours, or both.

Here’s the way I ended that talk that I gave 23 years ago: “We’re fighting a battle, you and I, every day, a lot of little guerilla skirmishes in the underground war to preserve the imagination. That’s what this weekend has been all about. We write the books, but you people, out there, have more influence than anyone over our readers. Without the channel that you keep clear, between the private worlds of the child who became a writer, and the new child out there reading, there would be no point in children’s literature at all.

via Susan Cooper: libraries are the frontline in the war for the imagination | Books | theguardian.com.

BookBrunch – Children’s books and reaching beyond

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Have just come across the full text of Nicolette Jones’s keynote speech at the Eleanor Farjeon Award presentation:

Circumstances have changed a good deal since I began to review books for the younger market. Bookshop chains have come and gone; marketing and advances can be in a different league; online coverage has boomed; libraries have become idea stores; books take a variety of forms, are not always on paper, and can come with all kinds of digital enhancements; festivals have proliferated; authors are more directly connected in many ways with their readers than ever. But through all this there is no doubt that this has been a golden age of children’s books. Every year there are writers and illustrators who make my heart sing. Some of them are in this room. New talent is being found, and published well. Established authors continue to surprise and innovate. Books have got if anything more beautiful and imaginative, against the competition from other media. The classics are still available, being regularly injected with new life by new illustrations, introductions, and jackets. If there are those in this country who do not enjoy reading, it is not a consequence of what books are published. I believe there is truly something for everyone. And the book is as alive as ever.

I may sound Pollyannaish about this; there are of course still things that should change. Public libraries must be defended and promoted, and all the good work being done in them made universal. All schools should have properly stocked libraries, and whole books need to be read in classrooms, and teachers trained about children’s literature, including picturebooks, which I would be very glad to see on the art A Level curriculum. There are opportunities not being taken for using television to enlighten people about children’s books – where is the magazine programme that reflects the variety and excitement of our lives in children’s publishing? Even newspaper coverage, despite new online opportunities, misses stories all the time about children’s books that are worth telling just from a journalistic point of view. And the potential of all kinds of reading to make a difference to those recent sobering literacy statistics has yet to be realised.

http://www.bookbrunch.co.uk/article_free.asp?pid=childrens_books_and_reaching_beyond

STOP testing Our Children Into Failure, Says Carnegie Winner

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In her Carnegie acceptance speech, Sally Gardner speaks about her own experience of school and then turns her attention to current education policy.  “STOP testing our children into failure.”

The link contains a full audiofile of the Medal announcement followed by acceptance speech.

 

http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/2013awards/media_ceremony.php?file=2