Under My Hat : ed. Jonathan Strahan

Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron by Jonathan Strahan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a smart, stylish collection of witch stories all based around the starting point of a tall black pointy witch hat. The hat may be real, metaphorical, allusive, and the witch – well, might be anything.

I really enjoyed this. It’s a collection of some stunning names and I was excited to see Peter S. Beagle and Frances Hardinge in the mix alongside Holly Black. Garth Nix and Neil Gaiman.

The joy of a short story collection is that you can flip back and forth in it and wholly skip stories that aren’t working for you. Following the sensitive and astute introduction by editor Strahan, we slip straight into a stunning opener by Diana Peterfreund and this was probably one of my favourite stories in the entire collection. All of these stories are written with vivid skill but something about Peterfreund’s really hit home.

I also had a lot of love for Hardinge’s contribution. She’s an author I need to read more of and on the basis of this, will definitely be doing so.

There were stories in this that didn’t quite work for me but there were so many that did. This is a really clever, unusual, and occasionally very dark collection of stories that reward the reader hugely.

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Mezolith : Ben Haggarty & Adam Brockbank

Mezolith by Ben Haggarty

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s hard sometimes to review something which wholly and completely leaves you breathless. Mezolith is that something.

Part of the increasingly impressive DFC imprint, it’s a collection of several short stories delivered by the dynamic team of Ben Haggarty and Adam Brockbank. It’s a match made in heaven; Haggarty’s short, elegant and terse stories play against the rich restraint of Brockbank’s artwork to stunning effect.

Mezolith is scary, and it’s genuinely so. There’s an awareness of the form they’re working in, an adept handling of comic structures and pacing. The use of frames, splash pages, and pageturns is something quite superb in this book. It’s not one to be read late at night! There’s a tension in nearly every frame, a sort of balancing on the edge of this world and the next that’s quite something. Stories, back at the dawn of mankind, were stories that were borne from truth and it was a truth more immediate than anything we could maybe imagine nowadays. Things like Red Riding Hood, the old woman being a witch, or the wicked stepmother, they all have their basis in fact and the society of the time. This is something that Mezolith handles very, very well. It balances on the edge of stories, using young warrior Poika to explore the shadows that form the barrier of our world and the beginning of the next.

I can’t get over how impressive this is and it’s something quite unique. It’s bold, dark, and painted in shadowy, scary, earthen shades. I’d recommend giving it a read yourself beforehand as the impact of this book is substantial and, for the more imaginative soul, could prove quite genuinely scary. Just don’t let any of that put you off. This is stunning, stunning work and it’s a book that deserves a whole world of attention.

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A Monster Calls : Patrick Ness

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Monster Calls is, quite simply, extraordinary. The original idea came from Siobhan Dowd and following her untimely death was carried to fruition by Patrick Ness and Jim Kay.

Ness is outstanding. It is so awfully beautifully written. A Monster Calls has an unreal feeling of being ahead of its time and a classic in the making. It is superb. Ness writes with a sympathetic, warm, dagger-sharp clarity and it is a joy – a near privilege – to be able to read this book.

Visually, A Monster Calls is beyond magnificent. It is painfully perfect. The illustrations by Jim Kay are stunning and add so much to this story. Frankly a good amount of them, if not all, can be described as genuinely breath-taking. Sometimes with a heavily illustrated book, the use of illustrations can be somewhat arbitrary and lose their impact. That’s not the case here. A Monster Calls has the strange, almost elemental quality of word and images which seem to come from the story and are not “imported” to it. It’s hard to define what I mean. I think the best analogy I can give is if you consider something like the Mona Lisa. It’s an image we’re able to see pretty much anywhere – postcards, tea-towels whatever – and accept it. The imagery in A Monster Calls is so palpably connected to the text that you can almost see its umbilical cord. The two of them are symbiotic. They need each other to live.

Books like this are not easy to read. Thematically A Monster Calls goes hard and it goes deep. When you read this, and the illustrations take you, and the prose breaks you, and you fall inside this awful brilliant book, you realise just how outstanding children’s literature can be. If this book does not live for years upon years then it will be a travesty.

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A trio of picture book reviews

There’s Going to Be a Baby by John Burningham

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s Going To Be A Baby is a quietly lovely little book. There’s a gorgeous intimacy about it which envelops the reader from the front cover image of parent and child trustingly holding each other. I loved this. It’s just lovely. Lovely. (It was very good)

Drawn in a clear and concise style and mainly structured in a text / picture (verso / recto) style, there’s a delightful warmth about the artwork. You can see the mother’s pregnancy developing the further you go through the book and there are some very nice touches about how she’s presented throughout. I particularly enjoyed how she quietly shifts through a whole range of emotions from fatigue through to utter contentment. It’s a very sympathetic book which sat well with me.

From a textual perspective, it’s fascinatingly evocative of a small child’s fractured speech and sparky thought process. It is very well done.

Or, to put it another way, it’s lovely.

Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Guess How Much I Love You is one of those books which, Gruffalo-esque, has firmly rooted itself into popular culture. This review specifically relates to the pop up version from Walker Books (2011).

God I love pop up books. I really really do. A lot of this is due to Huck Scarry’s Looking Into The Middle Ages which I read at an early age and have remembered for the past twenty five odd years primarily because of the fact it had POP UP FREAKING HORSES which frankly would endear anything to me regardless of literary value.

The pop up version of Guess How Much I Love You moved me to incredulous tears. It’s beautiful. Pop up, when done well, is breathtaking. This book is gorgeous. It is worth noting that a few of the more elaborate settings may be slightly difficult for smaller fingers to manipulate and that the book as a whole may not be the most robust. But regardless of that, it is worth persevering to deliver the full effect of the pop up as it’s very much worth it.

And jeepers but the last double-spread is beyond lush.

Chilly Milly Moo by Fiona Ross

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Chilly Milly Moo is one of those books that took me by surprise. With a distinct artistic style, both in palette and use of line, coupled with a pleasing story about accepting difference, it’s a pretty unusual book.

Chilly Milly Moo is the story of Milly – a cow who can’t produce milk. We eventually learn that she does have her own special skills that make her pretty damn cool (no pun intended) to have around. There’s an allusion to bullying (there’s a crowd of three “normal” cows that engage in an occasional dialogue with Milly) but this is fairly subtle and may require a rereading to pick up.

I had a little bit of difficulty with the colour story. It’s a fairly muted palette of earthy tones – browns, greys and the occasional washed out pastel background. There’s a lot of intriguing subtlety in this book that may be missed in a traditional classroom context. I felt it would work stronger in smaller groups and one-to-one settings in order to allow more interactivity with the text.

Behemoth : Scott Westerfeld

Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Acting as the sequel to Leviathan, Behemoth tells the story of Deryn and Alek and their role in an alternative version of world history involving war, revolution and fantastical machines. Elements of their journey are joyous and the illustrations in this book are worth a star in themselves. The impact they add to the text is near unquantifiable.

I would say that you need to read Leviathan beforehand or at least be acquainted with the steampunk genre. There’s a lot of world here to comprehend and whilst that detail is entrancing once you’ve got used to it and understand the world, it can equally act against your initial comprehension of the book. Despite that there’s still a lot to comprehend in Westerfeld’s use of language; he’s able to elaborate in great detail where necessary and yet also dial it back.

Behemoth is a beguiling tapestry of a book. Full of richness and detail, it’s one that will reward repeated reading to pick up the finer points of an intricately crafted universe.

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