Midwinterblood : Marcus Sedgwick

Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The darkly poetic prose that beats at the heart of Midwinterblood is something that took me quite by surprise. I’ve known of Marcus Sedgwick and I’ve known of his work for a fair while now but never quite got down to it. That’s a shame, because this book, this curiously weird and haunting and viciously moving book, is quite something.

It opens with Eric Seven, a reporter visiting Blessed Island. What unfurls there is a series of stories, echoes almost, which reverberate over thousands of years. That’s almost too simplistic a description for the circular, curvaceous, back-tracking narrative at the heart of Midwinterblood. Perhaps a better way to describe it is to describe it as a Moebius strip of a book, constantly shifting and with a different orientation each time you look at it. But even that’s wrong, a poor way to describe these strange stories that stand separately and fit sequentially and then make you flick back and forward and leap from page to page as you discover the connections that make you pause, make you shiver and make your heart break just a little bit more.

So that’s a thing right there isn’t it? A book that cuts different wherever you cut into it. A book of such profound structure and art and grace that it makes you slow down in case you miss something. A book that makes you look twice at what you’re holding. A book that doesn’t really feel like a book at all. A book that sort of feels like it’s holding everything that you’ve ever needed to know about things.

It’s a strange, unsettling, and brilliant experience, this.

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Children’s Literature Studies : (eds) M. O. Grenby & Kimberley Reynolds

Children’s Literature Studies: A Research Handbook by M.O. Grenby

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the book I’d have wanted before I did my MA in Children’s Literature. That’s not to cast aspersions on my MA (which was, to be brief, one of the best accidents that ever happened to me), but rather to illustrate the differences that occur when researching children’s literature as opposed to, say, interrogating Romeo and Juliet.

Split into six parts, with several chapters in each, this book covers a substantial amount of ground. It discusses children’s literature research skills, looks at how to best utilise and find resources in libraries and archives, how to work with and manipulate visual texts, how to carry out historical research before delivering a penultimate introduction of key theoretical concepts and summing up with a brief but potent section on the changing form and format of children’s literature which is, as Reynolds states, “potentially the area where the greatest change in what constitute’s children’s literature will in the next decade” (206).

That quote is a particularly useful one to frame discussion of this book due to its awareness of the malleability of the nature of children’s literature. It’s spectacularly necessary for researchers who are beginning to work in an area, whatever that area may be, to understand the context of their creative practice. We stand on the shoulders of giants in whatever we do, and you need to know and to be able to comprehend and to rationalise where your point of view fits into this world. That’s something this book does very well; it introduces and frames a fluid, changing world, one that changes substantially depending on whichever reader may read the source text, and it also validates the necessity for us to engage in that dialogue.

There’s an inevitability in the world of research to see reference to the books of Judith Bell for research guidance. Whilst something like Doing Your Research Project: A Guide for First-Time Researchers in Education, Health and Social Science certainly helps to prepare you for the experience of research and dissertation / thesis writing and does so with classiness and verve, the generalistic nature of it cannot hope to address the subject specific nuances of children’s literature. As this book states: how do you transcribe a quote from a picture book? How do you reference a cut out teddy-bear? How do you rationalise the adult vs child reader and how do you understand the role you play in both instances?

It may not have all the answers here, but it helps you in figuring out how to frame the question. And that’s one of the greatest skills you need when you start to question and look at children’s literature, you need to be able to understand what and why you’re doing what you’re doing. Children’s Literature Studies : A Research Handbook is an excellent start in that process.

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Ella’s Big Chance : Shirley Hughes

Ella’s Big Chance: A Jazz-Age Cinderella by Shirley Hughes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s a richness to everything Shirley Hughes produces, and it’s this richness which comes to the forefront of Ella’s Big Chance. This, as the front cover, states is ‘a fairy tale retold’. It is a retelling of Cinderella, set in ‘the jazz-age’. And it is practically glowing with riches.

Cinderella is such an archetypal story that it needs very little precis. It is the story of a girl, her wicked stepmother and a night on the town that Cinderella will never forget.

In this story, we meet Ella, the daughter of Mr Cinders. The two of them run a dressmaking shop ‘in a quiet but elegant part of town’. There’s an air of faded gentility from the start as the sun eases through the windows to illustrate the shop – the colours, living, under the touch of Ella and her father.

Ella herself is something particularly glorious. Drawn as a sort of Gina Lollobrigida meets Sophia Loren hybrid both facially and physically, her hair close cropped into a wild bob, she’s an all too rare and incredibly beautiful creation. I loved her.

As ever in a Hughes book, there’s a deep awareness of time and the experience of the reader. She’s never selfish in her illustrations, there’s always some sort of – look at me – moment to every scene. The majority of the pages are constructed in a half and half scenario, a white block of text playing next to, or opposite a full colour image. What’s particularly interesting in these pages is that the majority of the text sections have a sort of ‘transitory’ image in pen and ink. These simple black and white moments carry a lot of the book until the ball, and they do so because of their elegance. They transition the reader from scene to scene, joining the story together in a sort of visual stitching. Hughes is very skilled at not letting you go once she has you.

When we reach the ball scene, which is something we’re always waiting for in a Cinderella story, it is not disappointing. Hughes goes for it and produces images that are just – richness. They are luscious and edible and dreamlike all at the same time. She balances the vivid intensity of the moment with human touches. When Ella arrives at the ball, walking down the stairs in her silver dress that is visually stunning, Hughes throws in moments all over the scene. A gentleman at the edge of the far page has eyes for nobody but Ella even though his partner is talking; a group of women stare in shock and distaste at this competitor, whilst another woman serene in her duties as host holds out her arm to greet Ella who pauses, so very briefly, at the stairs to close her eyes and savour the moment.

It’s worthwhile to note that in this book Hughes designed all of the dresses. So when you read it, remember this and note her use of colours and shapes. See how Ella in her black shift dress is the centre of the picture, always, linked by the black and white images that thread through this book and yet somehow, always in the shadows, her dress blurring into the darkness of the shop and the cellar. Watch the peacock nature of one of Ella’s step-sisters, posing in her vivid red dress, uncaring that she blocks up half of the image and steals focus from her sister. Look at the way Ella’s ball dress is conjured from the night and the stars and the silvery magic of her fair godmother.

Look a this book, and treasure it, and take your time over it. And then do it all over again. It’s a book that rewards slow, leisurely, indulgent reading.

(And it gives you the most perfect, perfect of conclusions).

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Two Sams at the Chalet School

Two Sams at the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Two Sams at the Chalet School is a book of peaks and troughs and near-unbearable coincidence. So the same old thing really.

Samantha Van Der Byl and Samaris Davies are two new girls at the Chalet School. Although they’re different ages, and in different forms, they’re drawn into being friends with each other FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON. It’s sort of glorious the way Brent-Dyer can’t resist going THERE’S A CONNECTION CAN YOU GUESS WHAT IT IS with them, and then when that connection is revealed it’s sort of glorious how a little part of me dies each time.

Two Sams is also full of some nicely telling ideological moments representative of the series as a whole. I’m always pleased to see the recurrence of Nina Rutherford who is a bit of a fascination of mine, and it’s fascinating to see that the issues Brent-Dyer previously had with writing her are still in situ. I don’t think she ever quite found the same level of comfort with Nina and her ‘extreme’ genius, as she did with somebody like Margia Stevens say, and so Nina remains an awkwardly drawn, and very stiff character.

It’s also interesting to compare and contrast the treatment of Nina in this book with the treatment given to Con Maynard. Con is one of those characters who is never quite allowed to live in the way she’s been written to be. I’ve written more about this here.

As a whole though, Two Sams suffers from a lack of focus. I’m never really sure who we’re meant to root for, whether it’s a good thing that THE MYSTERIOUS CONNECTION is what it is, and whether we’re really meant to care. There are moments when the old Brent-Dyer skills shine (say, with Phil in particular) but as a whole it’s a written by numbers affair. One for completionists and not to be read after Adrienne and the Chalet School otherwise you will collapse from coincidence-overload.

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Kite Spirit : Sita Brahmachari

Kite Spirit by Sita Brahmachari

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As you may gather from this, I am a fan of Sita Brahamachari. I think Artichoke Hearts and Jasmine Skies are two of the best, most perceptive and impressive books I’ve read for a long time. She is an exciting and brilliant writer.

Kite Spirit opens with Kite discovering that her best friend has taken her life. Struggling to cope with her grief over losing Dawn, Kite is taken away to the countryside to help her recover.

The main thing to note about Brahmachari is that she writes with an incredible grace. She is very, very good at getting to the truth inside her work, be that the emotional heartache of Mira in Artichoke Hearts or the near-incomprehensible pain of Kite in Kite Spirit.

So why does Kite Spirit lack a star? It lacks a star, and it pains me that it does, but it lacks it because I longed for this book to be written in the first person voice. It opens in that, spilling the bright lovely Kite onto the page and then retreats into a third person narration for the rest of the book, only descending into first person intermittently. I struggled with that shift, wanting (so much) for the wild grace of Brahmachari’s more experimental prose to sing and for that perceptive, sympathetic elegance of her writing to be given full sway. Telling Kite’s story in third person just didn’t work for me, despite the intensely glorious nature of the story itself.

Essentially I wanted more, because I know Brahmachari is capable of that. She’s so very capable.

But the thing is, despite that probably quite personal reservation of mine, there’s a magic about Kite Spirit that can’t be denied. Reading a book by Brahmachari is a very precious thing indeed. And Kite Spirit is a more than fitting tribute to one of the best writers to emerge on the scene in recent years. It’s a book that is packed full of truth, sadness and a very quiet humanity.

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