I have read a death

I have read a death, and I am falling, failing, falling. I am living this life, this life already and never lived, and I am living it as my own. It hurts - 

- I have read a death. I am holding her, wishing I could hold her, and yet still so far away. She is touchless, locked from me. Lost inside me. Lost from me. Outside, inside, never quite there.

I have read a death. I have read it a thousand times before and yet each time it comes to me new. It comes without warning, and it comes with knives, sharp and ready to cut me open.

I have read a death, and I am lost. I am caught in the shadows, the rising darkness that pulls me to the edge and makes me see the nothingness beyond it.

I have read a death. I will never be unable to unread it. I will never be able to take it back. I will never be able to stop this from happening. I will never be able to just – be – with this person. I will never be able - 

I have read a death.

And I am blinded by it. 

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

I think about things, probably much more than I should, and sometimes the expressing of things is difficult. That’s life, I suppose, that tongue-knot that comes when you least expect it. But it’s how you deal with it, that’s what matters. It’s how you learn to speak, to write to express yourself even through all the boundaries you place in your way.

And that’s why I love blogging. I love the freedom of it, the way the space can be constructed as however you wish. I love the way that by engaging in it, you’re engaging in,  well, everything. You’re throwing out little hooks into society and every now and then you’re meeting somebody who just blows your mind. An anchor. Somebody to hitch your colours to, somebody who speaks about the things you believe . Somebody who says what you want to say, what you want to be said.

Books have done a lot for me. They’ve given me power and words for the darkest darknesses. In a way that’s why I write – I want to share that power with others. I want to pay it forward. I believe in the transformative power of literacy. I believe in books.

And I believe in people. One of the greatest joys of doing this blog has been finding my anchors. People such as Ali from Fantastic Reads, Zoe from Playing By The Book, Melanie from Library Mice and Anne-Marie from Child-Led Chaos. People such as Yvonne from Babbleabout, Megan and Claire from Women Write About Comics, Saranga from New Reader’s Start Here and Carmen Haselup. There’s  more, of course there’s more, but I’m moments from typing in all of the lyrics to ‘The Circle of Life’ so I’m going to stop it there.

The thing about this community (am I calling it a community? I think I am. That’s kind of splendid) is that there’s so much here.So much skill, knowledge and passion. So many genuinely fascinating people doing genuinely fascinating things, pushing, prodding and examining children’s literature be that examining the representations of female animal characters in children’s literature, running edible book festivals, reviewing forgotten classics and giving voice to the great unsung stories that deserve to be sung about that little bit louder.

And I think that’s a bit amazing and should be a little bit recognised. Hence this.

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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Confessions of a book nerd – those moments when you know you’ve got issues…

1. When a famous lady writer comes into your library and asks for a new library card. Process new card. When famous lady author says, “How much do I owe you?”, just burble slightly in response and go “OH FOR YOU NOTHING I LOVE YOU BY THE WAY.” And then ignore your boss behind you who says, ” £1.50 please.”

2. When somebody gets to the Chalet School section before you, picks up the book you’ve been hunting for for years and then goes “Oh what’s this old thing?” , you stand there and mutter: “YOU’RE NOT WORTHY!”

3. When you rearrange the bookshelves in your local shop so that all your favourites are face out. And you have to be dissuaded from standing by the section and talking to random shoppers. All day.

4. When you see the price that your local specialist is selling “The Giraffe, The Pelly And Me” and you phone your parents and ask them to take your childhood copy out of direct light.

5. When you take an hour bus ride to visit other libraries in your area because you’ve checked out their catalogue in advance and know that they’ve got the missing editions of the X-Men multi-volume you’re desperate to read.

6. And then you get the same bus back because you’ve got your books and it’s six hours until the next bus. Making your trip to the town last a princely total of twenty minutes.

7. When you meet one of your favourite authors. Or, well, don’t actually meet. Just stare at them lovingly in the distance because you know if you get any closer, you will cry at the wonder of being close to somebody who is this perfect with their words. And also, because at some point, you know you’re moments from going “CAN I – TOUCH – YOU?”

8. When you get into a lift with one of your favourite writers, stare everywhere but at them before suddenly saying “WHY DO YOU KEEP WRITING THINGS THAT MAKE ME CRY?”

9. And then staring at the floor and feeling the shame that comes when the doors open and said writer legs it.

10. When you meet somebody who you really admire and they discover you’re a book nerd. And then they ask you for a recommendation and you clutch the first book that comes to mind, be that Jamie’s Fifteen Minute Meals or Fifty Shades of Grey, and regardless of how you feel about the book all you can say is, “BECAUSE – IT’S – GOOD?”

11. When a writing conference is held where you work, and it’s full of the most wondrous writers who you adore, and every now and then one of them walks past your office door, and all you can do is make the 1st of 3938384 trips to the toilet that day just in the tenuous hope that one of them asks you for directions. To the place that they’re already at.

Obviously, I’ve never done any of these. Ever.

(And obviously, that’s a total lie)

The Chalet Girls in Camp : Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

The Chalet Girls in Camp by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If there was anything that Brent-Dyer was particularly good at, it was shifting tone. She had a skill whereby the farcical could be transferred to the heartbreaking, often within moments on the same page. Whether it was from the Robin singing one of her Raising-Lazarus-esque songs or to Joey hiding behind a curtain in Penny Rest, Brent-Dyer was not afraid of wholeheartedly making her point.

The Chalet Girls In Camp is one of those points. It is fat and round and glorious, glowing with the smile that still echoes in my mind from the toddlers I saw bouncing along the road this morning with their mother. I love this book. It’s one of the most evocative ones she ever wrote, set during a period where the Chalet Girls decamp (badumtish) from the shores of the lovely Tiernsee and head up to the hills to camp in the equally lovely Baumersee.

As it’s still so very early in the series, Brent-Dyer is on fire. She is painterly at points, drawing her landscape with conviction and with passion. There’s moments from this book that live with me forever; the ‘JUST KISS’ moment where Simone whips up a sexy little omelette for her beloved, the moment where Rufus is awesome, and the part where Cornelia goes wood gathering.

It’s books like this that build a series, that pull you to them like moths to a flame. It’s books like this that left me convinced of the cannibalistic nature of Pikes, of the need to loosen guy ropes in the rain, and of the need to not, er, annoy the local insect life.

And it’s books like this that leave me in love with Brent-Dyer and leave me desperate, so very desperate, to go and sing songs around a campfire in the middle of Austria.

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Textual transformations in children’s literature : adaptations, translations, reconsiderations – (ed) Benjamin Lefebvre

Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations by Benjamin Lefebvre

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Textual Transformations is a collection of chapter long essays dealing with diverse aspects of ‘textual transformations’, that is to say a certain form of ‘transforming’ of an original source text to something ‘other’ be that a mashup of Pride and Predjudice with Zombies, a sequel to Peter Pan, through to fanfiction based on the Chalet School series.

Of particular interest in this volume are chapters by Malini Roy, Lisa Migo, Nat Hurley and Maria Nikolajeva. Roy’s chapter focuses on the work of ‘Campfire’ – “the first (and probably only) graphic novels catering to young people in contemporary India” (p21). Migo discusses the route of the Chalet School series from “bookshelf to blogosphere and back again” (p73). Hurley’s chapter discusses the queering of Alice in Wonderland, discussing the reinterpretations of the Alice story with particular reference to Alan Moore’s ‘The Lost Girls’. Finally Maria Nikolajeva provides a closing chapter on the nature of “multivolume fiction for children” (p197), examining the motivations and rationale behind multi-volume publishing and the contradictory / complimentary nature of sequels to the original text.

There’s an issue with books of this in that, quite often, there’s a limit on how far contributors can go within such a limited space. This is something that happens all too often in this collection and I’d welcome more work from Roy and Migo. Roy’s chapter in particular is one of the most interesting in the entire book and I’d love more work from her on this. Her discussions of the nature of cultural memory and how the graphic novels published by Campfire were perpetuating a certain notion of this was fascinating.

I also wanted more from Migo’s chapter on the Chalet School as I felt this ended just as it was starting to becoming fascinating. In particular I’d welcome more work addressing the contradictory nature of the Chalet School fandom whereby a fan can appreciate both the brilliance and the banalities of the original series without losing their love for the series as a whole. (And on a separate note, I repeatedly have a yen to collate a fan journal of Chalet School critique by some of the excellent bloggers I read due to the acuity of their work and also because of the scarcity of academic literature discussing the series)

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The Weight of Water : Sarah Crossan

The Weight of Water by Sarah Crossan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Weight of Water is a book written in blank verse and it is a very beautiful thing. When books are written like this, when the words are pared back, right back to the bare minimum of what they are and what they need to be, everything feels like it matters just that little bit more. The words. The punctuation. The space. When it’s all so exposed, there’s nowhere to hide.

In this story of an immigrant mother and daughter living a new and far too often awful life in England, we are exposed to the barest and baldest of emotions. It’s brave, firstly. I like books like this – books that demand to be told in a particular form and don’t fold and try to be something that they’re not. Kasienka’s story is one that thrives in the spaces, in the silence.

The Weight Of Water is awfully acute at certain moments. It’s a relatively quick read, but it’s one that I think benefits from rereading. When you return to the words and the silence and the beats in between her beautifully constructed sentences, you learn an awful lot about Kasienka. And sometimes, when she says the smallest of things, this is when you learn the most. You learn her kindness, her pain, and her intensely sharp and yet still somehow naive and innocent humour:

‘Mama says, “Don’t worry, Kasienka,
They have summers here too.”

But I don’t know
About that”

I love this. I have a lot of time for books that make me – just – feel – like this. Like there are stories in this world that are just waiting to be told once we find the right way to tell them.

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