The Island : Armin Greder

The Island by Armin Greder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s a difficulty sometimes when considering picture books and that difficulty is this: they are inescapable. There’s always a level of semiotic interpretation that occurs with a sign, be that sign a word or an image, but I think that the breadth of interpretation narrows when we think about images. If I write the word “cat” for example, what do you think of? A kitten? An adult cat? Sleeping? Jumping? Eating? And what colour is it? Is it alone? With a family? Being stroked?

Now, if I show you a picture of a cat I am showing you something that you cannot easily shift into another context. I am showing you the cat that I see when I write the word, I am showing you my cat. Of course you can then take that image and lay it on top of your image of cat, but I am dictating, however briefly, what I want you to see.

And that, all of that, is something which struck me when thinking about The Island. It is an inescapable book.

It starts with the front cover, that oppressive, dark block of colour, rearing away from you. It’s perspective, yes, but it’s also something else. It almost doesn’t want you to touch it. It is a book that comes with a built in recoil.

Ironic, really, when we finally open it up and see what’s inside. It is the story of a man who is shipwrecked on an island. The pages are full of white space, rolling acres of it that in this case act as a focaliser. There is nowhere else for us to look so we look at the man. The man who “wasn’t like them.” We look at him, his silent nudity, and we try to find this difference that is written in the text in him.

It is not there.

And so, as we realise the intense futility and awfulness of this story and what is about to happen, we are locked in the role of passive onlooker. We cannot change what is about to happen, we cannot tell the islanders to stop – being – so – wrong – and we cannot do anything but watch. And we can’t walk away. That’s the thing about this book – it doesn’t let you go. It is the most uncomfortable and inescapable and brilliant of things.

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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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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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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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