Book Maven

Attractive teen heroes

2012-01-28T01:01:00.002Z

(I am actually on a plane to Denver today so have scheduled this post in advance - on 2nd February Michelle Lovric will be my guest here on the publication day of her Talina in the Tower)

This post is inspired by the publication (2nd February in the UK) of the mass market paperback of my novel, David - only £6.99 full price. It's about the young man who posed for Michelangelo's iconic statue in Florence. Nothing is known about the model, or even if there was one, so I have invented him! Obviously he has to be spectacularly beautiful, so Gabriele is. But he must also appeal to the reader, which got me musing on what teenagers, especially female ones, find appealing in a hero.

I remember my English teacher at school being very fed up with my tutor group because we liked the “wrong” characters in our set books – Hal rather than Hotspur in Henry lV Part One and Edmund in preference to Edgar in King Lear, for example.

We seemed to prefer villains to heroes and shady characters to upright ones. Perhaps we were Emos before our time?

But isn’t that bad boy image what attracted women readers to Heathcliff and Mr Rochester? (It didn’t quite work for me because once I discovered Heathcliff had hanged Isabella’s dog, I went right off him).

I had a couple of older sisters so I was reading their library books when I was still pre-teen – authors no-one reads now, like Mazo de la Roche and Ursula Bloom. But the ones I did pick up and remember were novels by Dorothy Sayers and Georgette Heyer.

Lord Peter Wimsey would surely not appeal to many teenage girls today, with his monocle and his flaxen hair like Andrew Aguecheek’s, all smoothed down – probably with brilliantine – and his vacant aristocratic manner?

But it was all a front, you see for a brilliant mind and when he fell in love with Harriet Vane, he said incredibly sexy-sounding things to her in French, like “tu m’enivres.” (I knew the text of Busman’s Honeymoon by heart I had read it so often).

And in Georgette Heyer’s Devils’ Cub I found the hero of my dreams, the dark and dashing Dominic, Marquis de Vidal. I loved that book so much that as soon as I finished it I had to start reading it all over again, because I could not bear to leave its world.

Later, when I discovered Jane Austen at school I much preferred Mr Knightley to Mr Darcy, Henry Tilney to Edward Ferrars – I liked the men who kept their women from the excesses of their own foolishness, who were strong and kind but capable of issuing a good telling-off.

I suppose if there had been literature aimed at teenage girls in my youth, as there is in abundance today, I might have fallen for the sexy vampires and devoted werewolves, the broken angels and redeemable demons. But I was spared them.

In recent online surveys about crushes in YA fiction, the two Twilight Alpha males, Edward and Jacob, vampire and werewolf respectively come out top but with Peeta from The Hunger Ganes giving them a good run. And there are many fans of the Harry Potter characters, especially the Weasley brothers and even Draco Malfoy (though his father Lucius has almost as many fans). I think these choices must be influenced by casting in the films – those marmalade-cat twins and Jason Isaacs. But I can’t take them seriously as crushes myself.

My teen heroes were all in adult books when I was a teen myself but now that I read and review a lot of Young Adult (YA) Fiction and write it too, I have developed a sophisticated taste in hot young men all over again,

Not for me the ones whose rippling six packs are described in loving detail by their over-heated authors (always female) who are as smitten by their own heroes as ever plain and dumpy Dorothy Sayers was bowled over by her pale blond Lord Peter.

(My own most-admired creation of Lucien/Luciano in Stravaganza is hardly described physically at all. He has dark curly hair and a nice smile; that’s about it. Yet fourteen-year-old girls love him.)

I think I still like them a bit angsty and tortured; I don’t even mind if they look a bit girly, as long as they are strong-minded. (Always preferred Geeks to Jocks).

So here’s my list of the hottest heroes in books read by teens, whether intended for them or not (in no particular order):

1. Howl in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Conceited, petulant, arrogant, immature, Howl nevertheless steals every scene he appears in. It helps that he’s a wizard and that the sorely-missed Diana Wynne Jones was something of a witch, making wickedly funny scenes out of Howl’s many discomfitures at the hands of heroine Sophie.

2. Per Sterkarm in The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price. It’s pronounced “stark-arm” and is the name of a family of 16th century border bandits. Per is the only and most beloved son, whose pretty face gets him the nickname of “the May” or maid. But he’s a useful man in a battle, a lusty lover and one who inspires devotion in everyone from his father, to his hounds, to the 21st century time-traveller Andrea.

3. Seth McGregor in Firebrand and its sequels by Gillian Philip. If I tell you Seth is a fairy, don’t run away with the wrong idea. He is one of the Sithe, both a sixteen-year-old and someone who has lived four or five hundred years. Sexy, violent and devoted to his half-brother, Seth is hero to make the heart beat faster – or to break it.

4. MCC Berkshire is the extraordinary hero of Geraldine McCaughrean’s extraordinary A Pack of Lies. It won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize over twenty years ago. MCC has a passion for cricket, second-hand books and is a mesmerising storyteller. My kind of guy. He gets under the skin of Ailsa Povey but what happens in the end is much too good to give away.

5. Sorensen Carlisle in The Changeover by Margaret Mahy. One of my all time favourite YA novels, it’s subtitled “a supernatural romance” – and it came out in 1984! Sorensen (Sorry, as the heroine, Laura Chant calls him) is a witch, living with his mother and grandmother. He wears a black caftan at home and antique rings and has silver eyes. Eat your heart out Edward Cullen!

6. Aragorn in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Long before Viggo Mortensen did his turn for Peter Jackson as the stubbly ranger who was a king in waiting, he was my hero. He had all those names, for one thing – Strider, Elessar Elfstone and so on. It was a bit of a shock to discover he was eighty-six; I don’t think my teenage crush quite recovered from that. But there was always Legolas (though he was seven thousand years old) and Elrond in the elf department and lovely Faramir, the human hero.

7. Icarus Ocean Tompkins in Annie Dalton’s Out of the Ordinary. A flute-playing busker with a beautiful but “unreliable” smile. He got his names from his parents in their hippy phase. We don’t meet him till about 80 pages in but from then on he helps Molly Gurney save her mute foster brother from an evil Magus.

8. Fox (David Stone) in Exodus, Zenith and Aurora by Julie Bertagna. In a drowned world of the future, Fox is the rebel grandson of the man who has founded the city of New Mungo. We don’t know a great deal about what he looks like but he’s the Han Solo and Luke Skywalker of his world rolled into one and his love story with the heroine Mara Bell, is more than poignant.

9. Leonidas in Halo by Zizou Corder. OK, he’s a Spartan at the time of Pericles, so not the most up to date of heroes and he practises the cruel military arts he’s been taught in the Spartan army. But he keeps saving Halo’s life and eventually she saves his. What could be more romantic?

10. Alistair Windlass in Castle of Shadows and City of Thieves by Ellen Renner. This one shouldn’t be an attractive hero at all. For a start, he’s not a teenager but one of the adults – he is Prime Minister even! And morally, he’s as suspect as Zaphod Beeblebrox, calculating and sinister. BUT there is something very beguiling about him.

So how about you? Tell me your favourite YA attractive heroes and maybe we'll get enough suggestions for a poll!

Re-telling

2012-01-21T16:19:00.000Z

I've been busy preparing PowerPoints for my trip to Denver in a week's time and one of the talks I'm giving at the teachers' conference for the Colorado Council of the International Reading Association (CCIRA) is about picture books and retellings. I discovered I'd written and published 24 of the former (one of them a re-telling) and 14 of the latter (not counting the one that's a picture book).

Here are some of them:

The stories of King Arthur told from the point of view of the women: Guinevere, Igrayne, the Lady of the Lake, Morgan and so on. I loved writing this. The stylish pictures are by Christina Balit and it was published by Frances Lincoln.

This was the first of two collections of myths and legends from all round the world, illustrated by my friend Jane Ray and published by Orion. The other was Sun, Moon and Stars and they were both gorgeous books to work on. Jane and I had several meetings where we made heaps of ideas, images, stories, cuttings and then I had a first stab at the text and Jane came up with her stunning pictures. Then we modified the text for any changes the artwork had suggested might be improvements. This one won a prize: The Primary English Award.

This was a Frances Lincoln book too, a collection of animal stories from around

the world. The fabulous illustrations were by Jan Ormerod. I hadn't seen her animal paintings before we started the collaboration and was blown away by her lions and tigers, her pelican and gold and pink fish and her mud-spattered Native American hero and his pony.

It's always a thrill when the artwork comes in on an illustrated book and especially when it's a re-telling, because you are both re-interpreting a story that preferably is already known to you.

Though when I met Julie Downing, the American artist for A First Bible Story Book (Dorling Kindersley) she told me that the stories were all new to her, apart from the very well-known ones, like Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark. And that's a very good reason for re-telling any story, if it's fading from general knowledge. (After I met Julie in San Francisco, she told a friend "I had coffee with the person who wrote the Bible - and it was a woman!")

So how do you re-tell a story as well known as Cinderella? I've done it twice.
The first was in this Dorling Kindersley collection of Fairy Tales, illustrated
by Julie again. I had very few words, because it had such a lot of pictures
and the typeface was large. But it covered all the basic elements and got the job done.

The second version, written almost in parallel, for the Macmillan Treasury of Nursery Stories, gave me far longer to expand on how nasty the sisters were and how magical the transformations wrought by the Fairy Godmother. The delightful pictures were by Anna Currey, whom I met for the first time only last month, years after we did the book.

So what shall I tell my audience about re-tellings next week? I isolated four vital components of a re-telling:

• First, and perhaps, most important, you must actually LIKE the stories you are re-interpreting for a new generation of readers.
• Second, you can't change the basic plot. Cinderella has to marry the Prince. If she doesn't, that's not a re-telling but a whole different ball-game (in which I am also interested!)
• Third, while keeping the basic plot, the re-teller needs also to re-imagine the story, so it sounds as if they've just made it up.
• Fourth, give your sources. It might not matter to the child reader/listener but it shows you have gone back to the original and any interested adult will be able to see what you have added or taken away.

Just last week I was asked to do another re-telling. It isn't definite yet, but it's a story I have always loved and there is a set of illustrations already waiting. But I won't be writing glorified captions; I will be putting myself into it, giving it a few touches that can make it my own. And yes, I've already re-told it a couple of times!

Dickens on the Box

2012-01-14T21:27:00.000Z

OK, I did warn you there might be rather a lot about Dickens this year! This is Pip (Philip Pirrip) in his latest incarnation, Douglas Booth, in the recent BBC adaptation of Great Expectations. Too pretty, do I hear you say? A lot of people thought so, by which I mean people of my acquaintance, both in reality and in those parallel versions of it on Facebook and Twitter.

In fact, someone on Facebook was un-gallant enough to ask "Should Pip be so much prettier than Estella?", which was actually a fair question in the circumstances, since an unaccountably plain young woman had been chosen for that role.

And casting for Dickens is so much about looks. I had worried that Gillian Anderson was far too
beautiful to be Miss Havisham but actually found her performance quite wonderful. I hope she wins a Bafta.

But then, although I don't remember much about the old black and white film, I do carry memories of the equally marvellous Martita Hunt. Not that she wasn't beautiful too in her way but it was closer to the feeling that the book gave me of the decaying and derelict jilted bride. Though how much of that was costume and sets, it's hard to say.

I mean, look at that chandelier! Woman, cake and light fitting are as one. Apart from the actors' looks, I found several things to admire and enjoy in this adaptation and it did well by one of my favourite characters, Joe Gargery. It got me thinking for this post about my favourite Dickens' novels too.

One of them is his last, the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood and by great good fortune, this was also adapted by TV, in two installments last week.

I have on my shelves a "complete Edwin Drood" with an ending written by the late great Leon Garfield, which I doubt could be surpassed. The Gwyneth Hughes version for TV made so many changes that I feel I really must read the book again to see how much of it was justified by the portion Dickens had written before death prevented his completing it in 1870.

Here, as always, it seems really to be the mystery of John Jasper, played in this version by a suitably brooding Matthew Rhys. But the minor characters of Mr Grewgious (Alun Armstrong), Canon Crisparkle (Rory Kinnear) and his mother (Julia Mackenzie) were all beautifully rounded out.

So, my favourite Dickens novels are:
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Little Dorrit
Dombey and Son
Our Mutual Friend
Edwin Drood

And my favourite characters:
Joe Gargery
Dick Swiveller (The Old Curiosity Shop)
Betsy Trotwood (David Copperfield)
Mr Twemlow (Our Mutual Friend)
Mr Wemmick (Great Expectations)
Mrs Plornish (Little Dorrit)
Flora Finching (Little Dorrit)

What are your favourite books and characters of Dickens? And what are your favourite film and TV adaptations?

Sherlock vs. Holmes

2012-01-10T01:01:00.033Z

I wasn't a huge fan, though I read them all as a kid. I think the character is better than any of the stories he appears in. You might think this would make me a purist about portrayals of the Great Detective, but I'm not.

I liked the Jeremy Brett interpretation on the TV (much later I learned that my father-in-law-to-be had been script editor for that series). I liked Robert Stephens in the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. I enjoyed the late Michael Williams on the radio (even though a dog was addressed as "Cerebos" - so you had to take it with a pinch of salt). I am too young for Basil Rathbone

I watched the first Guy Ritchie movie on DVD at a friend's home in Venice and QUITE enjoyed it but couldn't help wondering why you would take a detective best known for his cerebral (Cereboral?) skills and change him into an all-action hero.

But the reinterpretation I've liked best, nay, LOVED, is Benedict Cumberbatch in Stephen Moffat's and Mark Gatiss's television Sherlock.

Yes, the Chinaman episode in Series one was c**p, yes, A Scandal in Belgravia was a bit sex-stereotyped and yes, Moriarty sounds like Graham Norton and looks as frightening as an animated haddock. But it really is fresh as well as funny, smart as well as sexy, and it has the wonderful Una Stubbs turning Mrs Hudson into a real character, in spite of Conan's Doyle's unpromising creation.

And they're right "brainy is the new sexy." Did you SEE BC in Starter for Ten? The transformation is astounding. You can keep your dishevelled, stubbly, quick-to-punch Robert Downey Jr. (and many of you will want to). He may have his disreputable charm but he just isn't Sherlock Holmes.

And why set it in period if you think the Savoy would have let in said stubbly, bruised and cut, tie-less diner?

BC on the other hand really is credible as the "high functioning sociopath" a combination of autistic savant and 21st century geek.

I've now seen two episodes and really enjoyed them both, even though they are getting a bit self-referential with all the "cheekbones" stuff and the endless harping on about Holmes and Watson aren't in a gay relationship.

But people I love and respect have not liked them at all.

Where do you stand on the Moffatt/Gatiss vs Ritchie issue? Or Cumberbatch/Downey Jr one? (Or even Freeman/Law if you like)

Christmas haul

2012-01-03T12:31:00.001Z

Books do furnish a room, don't they? (Except when they are on a Kindle, but that's another blog post). This was what I got for Christmas (and not all my presents were books, so I am a lucky girl).

BOTH new biographies of Dickens, which will be appropriately read this bi-centenary year. Two beautifully-produced titles - The Dud Avocado and A Boy at the Hogarth Press (Have to share this one with husband).

Also shared and and my proudest book moment yet, Anne Rooney's The Story of Physics, IN WHICH I GET AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT! Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. An acknowledgment in a Physics book, when I have not had one Physics lesson in my life. Admittedly it was more for general encouragement than science but I glow with pride every time I look at it. And of course I shall read it and then know some Physics.

I also have the letters of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who wrote The Leopard (IL Gattopardo) one of my favourite books and made into a pretty decent film too.

The seventh is Girl Reading, a very clever find by husband, in which the first chapter is about Simone Martini's Annunciation, my favourite painting in the world.

I'll report back as I read them and certainly have already good material for another booky year. But first I must finish reading Bill Bryson's wonderful At Home, about the history of domestic houses, rooms and household management, which immensely more interesting even than it sounds. About to read 34 pages on the fuse box!

Happy New Year to you all and good reading.

My year of books and book-matters

2011-12-20T12:04:00.002Z

It has been a real year of books for me, written, published, read, reviewed, researched in, awarded prizes and celebrated with other readers. It began in January at Oxford Town Hall, listening to Philip Pullman's impassioned speech in defence of libraries. By February my local library that was the most under threat, Bampton, which is in the village filmed for Downton Abbey (the library is the cottage hospital) had an action group in place and we had a brilliant Save our Libraries day with local celeb, Kirsty Young, Linda Newbery and me reading from loved books.

It was in February that Martin Amis said he would have to be brain-damaged before writing a children's book.

March was the first World Book Night and I stood in Trafalgar Square listening to Mark Haddon, Dvaid Nicholls, Philip Pullman (again!) and the wonderful Lemn Sissay, before giving out my WBN choice - Fingersmith - in Bampton library. Because of a bit of a mix-up I ended up with extra copies of Fingersmith, which meant I could launch my own book group.

We are the Nordic Readers, not because we specialise in Scandinavian crime but because it grew out of the Nordic Walking group I am part of. We've read half a dozen other novels since, our favourite being Kathryn Stockett's The Help and the one we liked least Christian Tsolkas' The Slap.

The spring took me back to the Bologna Book Fair as usual and I also made it to the London Book Fair. The two are so very different, but I'm determined to crack how to "do" the London one properly in 2012.

In April, a group of seventeen writers of historical fiction gathered in Michelle Lovric's fabulous Thameside apartment to talk about a mad idea I had. By the beginning of July we launched as The History Girls. We get the most wonderful posts from twenty-eight writers for children, teenagers and adults and in six months we have had nearly 60,000 hits and gained over 200 followers.

Something that had been started rather selfishly by me to promote my novel David, has become a terrific resource in its own right and next year we'll be having guest posts from Kevin Crossley-Holland and Hilary Mantel among others.

So David came out at the beginning of July and I did a Blog Tour with thirty-two stops! All were scheduled in advance but for two of the four weeks plus, I was in different cities in Italy, without WiFi, and had to rely on my daughter Rhiannon Lassiter and my good friend Anne Rooney to make sure they were up on the right day.

Promoting one book while writing another sounds like one of the silly games on British radio's "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue." And I certainly don't recommend it, but Stravaganza: City of Swords got handed in on time at the end of July and will be out next year.

August found me in Venice, at a "Writers' Boot Camp" on the Grand Canal, working on the adult novel I've written and am now restructuring. There's nothing like swapping ideas with two other writers over prosecco and olives on a terrace overlooking that green water and spotting egrets.

Caroline Binch and the Book Maven

In September Grace at Christmas was published and we had a party to celebrate twenty years of Grace in December.

October was a bit less literary as our middle daughter got married (in Bampton) in a heat wave but November took me to Somerset for another writing retreat, this time with other members of the Scattered Author's Society (SAS). I was able to do almost all my City of Swords edits there. We drank hot chocolate in the woods but failed to see badgers.

I've also joined a literary salon, about which my lips are sealed, but I have goggled at the amount of talent around the dinner table, combined with the warmth and friendliness of the other writers.

My books of the year

I bought a Kindle last year and the first book I read on in this year was Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. This would be a book of the year for me whatever format it was read in but this was convenient to hold in bed and on public transport. The others were all read conventionally on dead trees: Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, Edmund de Wahl's The Hare With Amber Eyes and Tea Obrecht's The Tiger's Wife, which won the Orange Prize, most deservedly. (Actually maybe I should have put the Hare on my Kindle since the Faber paperback fell apart as I read it). My non-fiction favourite, which I'd been waiting to get in paperback, was James Shapiro's Contested Will, about who wrote the plays known as by Shakespeare. (He thinks Shakespeare and so do I!)

My Children's Books of the Year

The best picture book was for me Penny Dale's Dinosaur Dig (Nosy Crow), brilliantly combining two elements endlessly interesting to small readers. For juniors A Dog and his Boy by Eve Ibbotson was perfection. For older children, Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls(Walker Books), based on an idea by the late Siobhan Dowd, will win prizes for sure. The most interesting teenage read was Sally Gardner's The Double Shadow (Orion) (I hope my Guardian review of it comes out before Christmas).

Departures

Three great children's writers died this year: Diana Wynne Jones, Eve Ibbotson and - just recently - Russell Hoban. I am a cover-to-cover reader of DWJ, though my favourites are Fire and Hemlock, Howl's Moving Castle and A Tale of Time City. She will be much missed. I haven't read as much Eve Ibbotson as I should but after A Dog and his Boy and The Secret Countess, I know I'll follow up on the others.

My daughters were brought up on Russell Hoban's Frances the badger books and phrases from them have entered family vocabulary. But in his adult novel, Turtle Diary, a writer is haunted by the children's books she has written about an insect and I wonder if he hated being remembered for Frances rather than his many fine adult books.

Arrivals

Sadness at losing these great writers can be tempered by noting that Tea Obrecht is only twenty-six and The Tiger's Wife her first novel. There were four débuts on the Man Booker shortlist too, though a veteran, Julian Barnes, won. New children's writers were Miriam Halahmy, whose Hidden was published by Meadowside, Sita Brahmachari, whose Artichoke Hearts (MacMillan) won the Waterstone's First Book Award and Candy Gourlay, whose Tall Story (David Fickling Books) was truly original.

The Book Maven wishes all readers a happy and bookfilled year in 2012

Know Your Reader’s Inner Synaesthete by Nicola Morgan

2011-12-09T01:01:00.008Z

Book Maven is happy to welcome Nicola Morgan today for a guest post on her Blog Tour. Mondays might be red but this makes Friday a Red Letter Day. Thanks, Nicola.

Mondays are Red was Nicola Morgan’s debut YA novel, published in 2002. Nicola is now delighted to be producing the ebook, with a new cover and brand new extra material, including creative writing by school pupils inspired by the book. For details about how to buy (price around £2.23) See here

About the book
When Luke wakes from a coma, his world has altered. Synaesthesia confuses his senses and a sinister creature called Dreeg inhabits his mind. Dreeg offers him limitless power – even the power to fly – and the temptations are huge, but the price is high. Who will pay? His mysteriously perfect girlfriend, with hair as long as the sound of honey? His detested sister, Laura, with the wasps in her hair? When Laura goes missing, Luke realizes the terrible truth about himself and his power. His decision is a matter of life and death, and he will have to run faster than fire.

Thank you, Mary, for letting me invade your excellent blog today. I am honoured! You said you’d like me to talk about synaesthesia and because there’s so much to say about it, I’ve paired it with Lucy Coats’ blog. So, Part 1 – the facts and how to tell if you have the condition – was there and Part 2 – about what it means for writers – is here.

Synaesthesia, in short, is when two or more of the senses are “crossed over”, so that the person experiences colours when hearing sounds, or tastes when feeling shapes, or coloured shapes when smelling something. Days of the week, letters and numbers can have colours, and the sensations are always automatic, not deliberate, and remain identical over time. (More factual stuff on Lucy’s blog.)

It’s my belief that, although true synaesthesia is rare, the vast majority of people can “do” synaesthesia. We almost all have an inner synaesthete. I also believe that understanding this gives writers an incredibly powerful tool – a much more powerful tool than true synaesthesia, an experience which most people don’t share. (A true synaesthete’s sensations are effectively random and will sound surreal to the rest of us, whereas the normal reader’s synaesthesia is connected with meanings, semantics, emotions, things we all share.)

I think it’s about time I explained. Or, more appropriately, showed.

Imagine the sound of a violin, the high, shrill notes. Now tell me which of these three colour groups you think most suit that sound: 1) pale lemon yellows and lime greens, 2) bright reds and orange, 3) dark blues and purples. Around 5% of you will have said 3. 10-15% of you will say 2. And at least 80% of you will say 1. And that’s a conservative estimate. How do I know? Because I used to have a game on my website and I collected hundreds of responses to these and similar questions; I also do this when I talk about Mondays are Red at school events, and the proportion of responses vary little.

Here’s another question. Think of the low sounds of a cello or bassoon. Which colour group? 95% will say 3. Around 4% will say 2 and almost no one will say 1.

Imagine two fish. One is thin and spiky. The other is round, fat and smooth. One is called a Baroom. The other is called a Kikxis. Which is which? Around 90-95% of people will say that the spiky one is the Kikxis. (Fewer if I’m talking to teenagers because they like to be provocative.) There isn’t a correct answer, by the way – the fish are invented.

Why? Well, the fish thing is obvious. The letters – shape and sound – in Kikxis are spiky and sharp; the letters and sounds in Baroom are round and soft. The music-colour thing seems obvious to me, too, but may seem less so to others. But when you think properly about the ways in which we naturally describe sounds, it’s not so surprising: a voice, for example, could easily be sharp, thin, thick, rounded, soft, hard, light, heavy, dark, warm, cold, rich, bitter. And many words can be attributed to different sensations. “Sharp” can be taste, shape, or touch, for example. Extend this to describing a voice (as I do in Mondays are Red) as buttery, melting, or tasting of apple-purée and it’s not much of a stretching of the imagination.

Part of this – as writers recognise – is because any word comes with a load of secondary attachments. So, apple-purée is more than mashed apple: it is warm and thick and sweet and soft, rolling on the tongue, slipping down the throat. It is not dry or dusty or icy or blue or spiky. In Mondays are Red, the girl with the cinnamon skin has “hair as long as the sound of honey”. Well, honey may not have a sound but it is thick and moves slowly and if dropped from a spoon is long and straight and golden and full of goodness. And that is what her hair was like. It’s not beyond the bounds of imagination to feel that it could have a sound, too. Violin sounds are lemon-sharp and lemon-yellow and lime-tangy, thin, sharp, bitter, stringy. All these words bring with them more than a single literal meaning.

And that’s what we harness when we write. We join our wordsmithery to the shared meanings and emotions and experiences in the mind and heart of our reader. We cross the void between two minds and truly connect. When we recognise the inner synaesthete in ourselves and our reader, and harness it, there’s no limit to the power of language. And that, in a nutshell is what Mondays are Red is “about”, as Luke discovers the infinite power of language.

Thank you, Mary, for allowing me to come and sound off on your esteemed blog! I hope your readers will give Mondays are Red a try and see more of what I’m talking about. http://www.nicolamorgan.com/author/books/mondays-are-red

Thank you, Nicola, for stopping by on your tour. Now you can relax on the sofa with a glass of something seasonal, as this is your last stop!

Charles Dickens and me

2011-12-01T22:03:00.000Z

Over the years, when I've been asked "Who is your favourite writer?" I have often answered "Charles Dickens." And sometimes added that a lot of people say that without having actually read many of his books, while I have read them all.

And that is approximately true; I think I gave up before finishing quite all of the essays on America and Italy but I've read books like Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop and the "big" novels many times. My favourites are Our Mutual Friend, which has now become quite popular, Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son.

But why do I like him enough to read and re-read him? We have had a long relationship, Dickens and I, but one thing I have always liked about him is that his dates are so easy to remember: 1812-70 and I have real trouble with dates, which is a drawback for a History Girl. I know things like the deposition of Richard 11 (1399) and Battle of Bosworth Field (1485) but that's really because of an obsession with Shakespeare (1564-1616) and currently the Plantagenets.

If you ask me even Jane Austen or J.S.Bach, I have to look them up - or ask my husband which is quicker because he has real penny-in-the-slot recall for facts of that kind.

Anyway, born 1812 means a big anniversary next year and the biographies are already coming out, with Claire Tomalin's having been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. It is being read on radio 4 currently and a fact I learned this morning interested me very much. Apparently Dostoevsky said that Dickens told him (imagine - Dickens and Dostoevsky having a chat!) that all his villains came from his own inner demons and all his "good" characters from the way he tried to live his life.

So Quilp, Mr Squeers, Bill Sykes, Mr Murdstone - what a wealth of villains there are! - were all aspects of Dickens' own personality. And why not? If Freud reckoned every person and thing in a dream is an aspect of the dreamer, that works just as well for writers who dream on to the page all day long.

When I was a child, my parents had a complete set of Dickens' novels bought through the Daily Express I think. They had a red binding and as soon as I was old enough I devoured them. When I left home I bought a similar set from a secondhand book shop. I have the Oxford complete set now, a present from the encyclopaedic husband, and the cheap ones are up in the attic but still on shelves, not hidden away in boxes.

They have been companions and friends, read while ill in bed, on long train journeys, on evenings without a TV, when I lived in London and the man I was to marry lived in Cambridge one long year.

And the reason? Because Dickens is such a generous writer, so prolific in his ideas, so prodigal with his plots and characters. I have always believed that he could have written a full-length novel about any one of his minor characters. And the physical descriptions are so memorable: Mr Vholes scratching with black-gloved hands at his pimples, Lady Tippins with her face like a reflection in a spoon, Mr Twemlow from the same novel, who is like an extra leaf in a dining table, inserted on certain occasions to make the dinner go more smoothly.

My late father-in-law disliked Dickens intensely and thought him a bad writer - "so crude." He preferred Flaubert. His privilege, but I think what he saw as crudeness, expressed after reading Hard Times, is what I think of as the energy and vigour. No, the prose is not refined, but the sheer inventiveness is a gift made freely to the reader.

So many favourite characters: Dick Swiveller, Betsy Trotwood, Flora Finching, Peggotty, Mr Jingle - every book yields up a gem or two. There are maddening ones too, like Dora Spenlow and Tiny Tim and Little Nell, where the popular taste for sentimentality knocks Dickens temporarily from his splendidly keen observational perch.

There is also always a murder or violent death somewhere in all those hundreds of thousands of words. And those are the passages Dickens loved to read aloud at the personal performances which might have shortened his life, so physically exhausting were they. It reminds us of what he said to Dostoevsky; he had a strong sense of the potential for evil in himself, in every one of us, as I do.

In the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, a foul murder is suspected and the main suspect is John Jasper. The late great Leon Garfield wrote a splendid completion of the book - utterly convincing - which I keep beside the collected novels. If that wasn't how Dickens was going to end it, it should have been: the convicted man waiting in his cell for the 8 o clock of his last morning on earth, knowing that there will be no reprieve and no spangly Christmas fairy coming down with a wand to make all things well.

I think we don't need another biography to tell us that Dickens did not live up to his aim of living "like his good characters" - though I shall certainly read Claire Tomalin's. But it is never a good idea to let the life dictate how the reader feels about the writer, or the composer or painter, come to that.

The Complete Works of Charles Dickens was one of my first purchases on my Kindle, along with Shakespeare and Jane Austen. With so many ways to read him, in and out of the house, there will be no excuse not to make 2012 the year of the Big Re-read. I can't wait!

Who owns morality?

2011-11-03T01:01:00.084Z

By the time you read this, it will have been announced that The Great Big Book of Families has won the Under-7 category of the School Library Association's inaugural Information Book Awards.

This is naturally a great honour; writers and illustrators love winning prizes. But I have two special reasons for being pleased about this one. Firstly, it comes from an organisation close to my heart. For six years I ran a campaign to support and promote School Library Services in the UK. So I am very happy that an award given by the SLA has gone to my work.

Secondly this book sums up a lot of what I think about children and books. I had wanted to write something like this for a long time, ever since a girl of twelve wrote me a letter thanking me for helping her learn to read and mentioning that her family consisted of her "my mum and my budgie."

I have felt for ages that children's picture books lag far behind children's reality in depicting the wide range of what constitutes a definition of "family". And reflecting children's own experience is one of the two most important things a book can do (the other of course being to introduce them to ideas way beyond their experience).

I'd done what I could in the past with books about Grace, who lives in a family of three generations of women, with an absent father, and in stories like My Grandma has Black Hair, Nancy No-size and The Colour of Home, in trying to widen the portrayal of families in picture books. But I wanted to tackle the big idea that "families come in all shapes and sizes" in one book. And I wanted to do it with Ros Asquith.

I honestly believe that if Ros hadn't been taken with the idea, The Great Big Book of Families, would not have been written and published; I certainly told my editor at Frances Lincoln, Janetta Otter-Barry, that if Ros said no, I might not write it.

So I was thrilled when Ros did like the idea and wanted to illustrate it. From the small acquaintance I'd had with her before and my knowledge of her cartoons, I just knew she would understand "where I was coming from" politically with this book and would not need elaborate explanations. Over a couple of lunches in Gloucestershire and North London, we talked about exactly what the book was about and for and then I took the plunge with a draft text.

It changed of course when Ros's glorious pictures came in. And we worked on it as a very committed quartet: me. Ros, Janetta and the Art Director, Judith Escreet. It was published in the UK in April 2010 and in the US in 2011. Pleasingly, it has already picked up foreign editions in double figures but we always knew that there would be an issue in some countries with one spread.

On the second opening, headed up just "Families" I wrote, among other text, "Some children have two mummies or two daddies." Ros illustrated this statement appropriately. This seems to me to be incontrovertible fact, at least as far as the western world is concerned. The book has had three starred reviews in the US, which is where you might have expected a book containing this statement to be not so well received.

But I had to turn down an edition in an Arab country which would have involved removing those words and those pictures. My publisher was very understanding, even though no publisher likes to give up a foreign rights deal.

In the last couple of weeks, I have seen two conflicting reactions to the book. The first was a review on amazon.com, which Ros emailed to me (I make it an iron rule never to look at Amazon reviews or rankings so had missed it).

This one-star review was headed up "Lacks morality" and included the words: "For those who think "this looks like a cute book", think again. I checked this book out at the library and actually had to have a discussion with my kids about why we don't marry people of the same gender. As a Christian with high moral standards I don't have to teach my kids that such things are acceptable. It is not acceptable to God and it is not acceptable to me. I hate it when people are so concerned with "political correctness" that they worry more about offending people than offending God."

I have learned over the years to mistrust the term "political correctness," even though it refers to something I have been thinking about for around four decades. I prefer words like "inclusiveness" and "diversity" because in my experience, PC is only ever used by people who are against those things. Take the reviewer above. S/he says my book "lacks morality" when s/he means "does not share my morality." And "we don't marry people of the same gender" when clearly we do. At least we do in nations from Argentina to South Africa, as well as in 20 European countries and 13 American States.

S/he also has a hotline to the Almighty about whether such unions are "acceptable." Something, I as a professed though uncertain Christian do not share.

I was not upset by the review - the less so as a few days before I had received an email through my website from a teacher in the US who said, " Sadly, there are many parents in my school community that do not believe their students should be learning about people in the LGBT community....It's people like you who make families with "two moms" the norm, that keep me going." I think my correspondent meant "normal" rather than "the norm" but I really appreciated the email.

There will always be people who don't understand what I am getting at or do understand it and don't like or approve of it. Every time writers publish a new book, they are putting their heads on the block. It would make for a quieter and easier life just to stay schtum.

That doesn't appear to be an option for me. So it is especially pleasing to have a book that means so much to me acknowledged with a prize. Thank you SLA!

Writing up and down with A.S.Byatt

2011-10-18T22:20:00.000+01:00

Last weekend I appeared at the Cheltenham Festival, talking about David on a panel with H.M.Castor (Vlll) and Pauline Francis (Traitor's Kiss), very ably chaired by Nicolette Jones. It's the third time I've "done Cheltenham" which is only down the road from me and I always enjoy it. The sun always seems to shine, the Green Room is the BEST (beating even Edinburgh's Yurt) and the other events are always interesting.

And this time my book was actually set in the same century as the other two writers' - namely the 16th.

After our session, I went to hear A.S.Byatt talk about her latest book, Ragnarok, which is in the Canongate Myths series. I've always loved the Norse myths best of all - Balder the Beautiful was the first story I can ever remember being told - so I was specially interested in how she might have treated it.

Wagner's Gotterdammerung, which I was pleased she didn't dismiss, is sometimes translated as Twilight of the Gods but can mean Death of the Gods.

What Antonia Byatt wanted was a really bleak ending in which the black waters cover the earth. She was being interviewed by Libby Purves, who is a bit too perky for this subject. But then I remembered they had both lost a son, so maybe she had some empathy with her subject.

What struck me very forcibly was that Byatt said she would not any longer be able to write novels about characters who were much younger than her. I think that's a shame. But I understand what she means, though in her case it's about the technology as much as the moods and emotions.

So I hope she will reconsider. There is a character in Ragnarok called The Thin Child in Wartime and Byatt could write about her because she is really the author herself. The child who was moved out into the countryside from Sheffield in the war.

She would finish her work ahead of time in the small rural school she attended and then be allowed to browse in the book collection, which was where she discovered the Norse myths.

About ten years after her I was doing the same in my Secondary School Library, while bunking off games. Balder was speaking to both of us and the bleak beauty of the downfall of the gods.

What do do if you win the Lottery

2011-10-10T19:37:00.000+01:00

If you should ever be so ?lucky as to win millions of pounds, you might wish you had read this latest book by Keren David. Her heroine Lia finds herself the surprised owner of £8m after her best male friend buys her a lottery ticket for a birthday present.

David has already made a mark on the children's book world with When I was Joe and its sequel, Almost True. It must have been a relief after those novels featuring knife crime, witness protection and life on the run, to turn to champagne, designer handbags and luxury hotels.

But although there are a younger sister with longings to go on Britain's Got Talent, love interest in a mystery boys and some delicious side swipes at the fashion for Paranormal Romance for teens, this is not a frivolous book.

Lia is flung up against some quite hard problems straightaway. What is the morality about keeping all the money? Should she give half to Jack, who bought the ticket? Buy a flat and go and live on her own or help out her struggling baker father and buy her family a new house? Should she stay on at school and take her exams? Lia is only sixteen and doesn't have all the answers.

At first, she doesn't come across as very likeable; in fact when we meet her, she is being thrown out of the house by her mother for being rude and obnoxious. And she does seem to me rather young for her age; more like a fourteen-year-old. But you have to be sixteen to play the lottery and that's the donnée of the book.

Later on it's important that she is sixteen for another reason.

Perhaps we all dream of winning large sums of money? I know I do (though it's offset in my case by only once ever having bought a lottery ticket!) It's difficult enough to be sure we'd use it wisely even if we are quite grown-up and sensible. For a sixteen-year-old the whole story is full of pitfalls.

All sorts of people come out of the woodwork claiming to be friends (= worthy to be bought expensive presents) while Lia's two real best friends both have problems with accepting anything from her. Jack wants a motorbike but his mother is terrified he'll have an accident when he gets it. And Shazia is made to return a few gifts because her father disapproves of the gambling represented by the lottery. Actually so does Shazia, when she comes to think of it, because she is a devout and serious girl.

All of which gives Lia food for thought. And then her little sister seems to be in danger.

It's an exciting read with plenty of surprises along the way. But a one-off, I think. I believe David will be returning to gritty adventure with her next book, a third title about Ty, the protagonist of the first two books.

Ah well, you only win the lottery once I suppose.

Who owns the virtual teaset?

2011-10-06T12:59:00.001+01:00

A few months ago, I started a book group with some friends. Yesterday we met to discuss the fourth and far and away the most popular title so far: Kathryn Stockett's The Help. In fact, so much did we like it that we've made a date for us all to go and see the film together next month.

For anyone who has been living at the bottom of a hole for the last two years, The Help is a first novel by White American Kathryn Stockett, who was brought up in the South, largely by Black maids. It is set in the early '60s and features one brave young White woman who has lost contact with her Black maid in mysterious circumstances, which no-one will explain to her.

Skeeter wants to be a writer and has a slender contact with a publisher in New York City; all she has to do is come up with a commercial idea. Gradually a project grows of getting the Black maids in Skeeter's community to talk about their lives. The "book within a book," called just Help, has to be published anonymously, or the maids would certainly lose their jobs. But the truth begins to leak out.

It's a wonderful book, told in the first person by several voices, prime among them Aibileen Clark. It was an instant hit on both sides of the Atlantic and very popular in book clubs. Then one Ablene [sic] Cooper, who is the maid to Stockett's brother's family, took out a lawsuit against the author, claiming she had stolen her name and appearance. You can read the Controversy about The Help.

But the case was dismissed in August because of the statute of limitations. Cooper was very upset, calling Stockett a liar and saying "she knows she did it."

This is reminiscent of the Bookseller of Kabul controversy although that book was presented as non-fiction by author Asne Seierstad.

What is so awful about this case is that the character in the novel, Skeeter, knows she has no book without the testimony of the maids and pays them an exact equal share of the advance she gets and any future royalties. Ablene Cooper must have brought her $75,000 compensation case at least partly because no such arrangement was made with her. (I assume).

It leaves a bad taste even though I still love the book.

So what has this to do with tea sets? It got me thinking about who owns the events in someone life. Margaret Drabble and her sister A.S.Byatt famously have not got on very well for many decades although there has been a certain civilised rapprochement in recent years, with Drabble attending Byatt's 70th birthday celebrations.

But something that seems to have fuelled their mutual animosity was An argument about a tea set
I have another writer in my family, my daughter, Rhiannon Lassiter We are both as parasitical and predatory for stories as any professional novelist but we have a gentlepersons' agreement to check with one another about who uses what.

Many is the time she has told me a story about someone and I've said, vulture-like, "Can I have that or are you going to use it?" The answer is usually no but that's fine.

But should I be asking the person who experienced the event, owned the tea set, as it were? Neither Drabble nor Byatt owned the real set; it belonged to their mother. But she didn't write about it. Both sisters owned the memory of it, different memories, as were those of their mother. So who had the right to write about either?

In my view, anyone who can! As it happens both of these women are expert novelists and writers of non-fiction and their contrasting viewpoints would be of interest to their readers. In the novel, The Help, it is obviously that the maids would never have dreamed of writing their stories, had no publishing contacts and there would have been no Help without Skeeter. And yet she was scrupulous about dividing her profits with them.

Does it matter that the fictional Skeeter was writing reportage and the real Stockett was writing fiction? These are murky waters.

I have one writer friend who suggested once we should have a writers' exchange of family stories so that those who used them in novels would not be identifiable as sources by said families. We haven't done it but it's an interesting idea.

And I have a hunch that Cooper will get her own book deal and that the product will sell. I'd be interested to read it. But will it prove who owned her story? We shall see.

Shedding some light

2011-09-14T21:45:00.000+01:00

For a small establishment, this building has generated a lot of heat in the last two days. Know what it is? Roald Dahl's writing shed. It's not looking so good these days apparently. It is going the way of all sheds, when the Ronseal eventually fails to preserve them. Wood, like flesh, in the end will rot.

It's in the news because Dahl's granddaughter Sophie, the supermodel, appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme and explained that the contents of the shed needed to be moved to the Roald Dahl Museum nearby in Great Missenden, to be preserved and exhibited as her grandfather left them.

So far, so mildly interesting. But what has caused the Twitterverse and Blogosphere generally to explode is that she said this archiving and preservation (of the contents, not the building) would cost £500,000. She then seemed to be asking for contributions from the public.

This is it: all there is. And it got me thinking. I'm not a big Dahl fan but many, many people are and doubtless would like to visit what will be a
facsimile of the interior you see here. So I asked myself if I would go and if I would be willing to contribute hard cash to a project to preserve the working space of a writer I did admire. Calvino, say, or Joyce, or Terry Pratchett.

I have visited Jane Austen's house at Chawton and the Haworth Parsonage, wondered at the smallness of the rooms in comparison with the largeness of the works written therein. And been mildly interested to see pens and inkwells, tables, beds and chairs.

The last famous person's home/museum I visited was Gustav Holst's in Cheltenham. It really was quite interesting, especially the kitchen of the period.

But it satisfies an idle sort of curiosity. It doesn't even begin to compare with reading Emma or Jane Eyre or listening to The Hymn of Jesus (better yet, singing it). It's part of the passion for biography which now seems to be an accepted way of shedding light on the works of a creative person. I read them just as much as anyone else does and sometimes I wish I hadn't. I could have done without knowing that Proust drive long pins into live rats - the only fact that sticks in my mind from George Painter's biography.

But if you read James Shapiro's excellent Contested Will, you discover that biography is a very young branch of the literary arts, and reading someone's life into their work even younger.

Philip Pullman wrote in a shed, before his huge success with His Dark Materials enabled him to buy a house with an indoor study. Many of my writer friends have sheds; Linda Strachan calls hers Tuscany. When Pullman moved house he gave his to a writer-illustrator friend, who demolished and reconstructed it in his own garden. It even still had plot post-its adhering to the walls.

One practical writing space practically handed on to another creative person. Not magic, not biography, not - heaven preserve us - "inspiration." And certainly not requiring half a million pounds. I imagine a pint changed hands in an Oxford pub or perhaps a bottle of wine was given. I like that story better.

Women's fiction is dead!

2011-09-08T16:05:00.000+01:00

At least in WHSmith. I heard this item on Woman's Hour this morning:

The term ‘Women’s Fiction’ will no longer be gracing WH Smith’s shelves after two customers complained to their chief executive Kate Swann, appealing to her ‘in sisterhood’ to remove the term. Teacher Julia Gillick and policy advisor Claire Leigh complained to WH Smith after spotting a stand branded ‘Women’s Fiction’, which they felt was outrageous and offensive. So, is the term Women’s Fiction offensive and demeaning to women or is it a handy label for shoppers to find books they like? (Taken from BBC website)

There was a delightful irony in hearing this discussed on a gender-labelled Radio show but it's a real subject and one that greatly interests me. I don't know exactly which titles WHS used to stock under this label but I note that many literary agents use the term to clarify what kinds of books they do, or don't represent.

We are used to terms like ChickLit and ChickFlick, and they usually seem to be more about who wouldn't like the work described rather than who would. Men are supposed to like thick bricks of books, with tinfoil on the covers, written by ex-SAS men or Navy SEALs, while for women something that hints of shopping (especially with shoes involved) is supposed to press the right buttons.

At the movies, the testosterone-filled want exploding cars and gunfights, while the oestrogen brigade need kisses and tears: The Bourne Ulitamatum vs How to Make an American Quilt. But how did we reach this ridiculous situation? My husband can't be the only red-blooded male who enjoyed I Capture the Castle, Sense and Sensibility, The King's Speech and the TV adaptation of Ballet Shoes ("Why did no-one tell me about this book when I was a child?" "Because you were a boy!"). But I can't put the other side of the picture by being entertained by bloodshed and torture (although I do watch Torchwood, albeit through interlaced fingers).

But I like my fiction a lot more muscular than most of the books that would probably have made it on to WHS's shelf designed to appeal to my sex. The Lacuna, for example, is by a woman - Barbara Kingsolver - but it never occurred to me it might be for women. It's about Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and McCarthyism in America. And what about books like The Hare with Amber Eyes? Not fiction I know but equally appealing to both sexes I would have thought.

What is gained by this rigid assumed division of gender tastes? One of the contributors on Woman's Hours - Claire Leigh, I think - asked why not group books under genre: Romance; Historical fiction etc as is done with Crime/Thrillers, Horror or SF/Fantasy. A very sensible suggestion I thought.

But the rot has set in LONG before anyone is old enough to choose an adult book in a bookshop or Stationers. Girls brought up on a diet of Rainbow Fairies and similar series would have no problems with a section labelled "Women's Fiction." In fact, you might as well call the shelf "pink books" and be done with it! Likewise, boys who are encouraged to read only titles like Beast Quest, will have no trouble avoiding the books provided for Sisters once they are grown men.

Perhaps this is another area where e-readers will liberate people who are worried about being judged by the cover of the book they are reading? The reading preferences of anyone holding a Kindle remain a secret.

Two sequels

2011-08-20T19:03:00.000+01:00

Writing a sequel isn't easy and when it's the middle book in a trilogy or longer sequence it's especially hard.

I've chosen two books where the authors have carried it off - and I speak as someone who has always liked best The Empire Strikes Back in the Star Wars films (original trilogy obviously) and preferred the Two Towers to the other two books and films in Lord of the Rings.

(And I've written two trilogies and a sextet so far, so know some of the pitfalls.)

First, Pat Walsh, whose The Crowfield Curse was a runner-up in the Times/Chicken House Children's Books Competition in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Waterstone's Children's Fiction Prize when it was published in 2010. It told the story of William an orphan boy taken in by a monastery in the 14th century and befriended by a Hob, a friendly nature spirit. They discover after a complicated plot, a buried Angel in a place avoided by locals and monks alike. And it is - terrifyingly - still alive.

This time it's an altogether more sinister being which is struggling to get free of the bonds that constrain it and is pulling down the Crowfield Abbey chapel in the process. Young William is now bound to a mysterious and powerful fay with a scarred face and silver hair and it takes both of them and the Hob and the good Brother Snail to find out what is going on and prevent the spirit worshipped by the evil Dame Alys and her pet white crows from coming back.

Raum, or Belinus as Alys calls him, is a crow-headed demon with blood-red feathers and even the local alchemist can't circumscribe or dispel him. There is a thrilling return of another character at the end and promise of much to come in the next book.

Gillian Philip's Firebrand was my favourite book of last year, introducing Seth McGregor, another fay or fairy who is as much like the little winged folk as David Starkey is like Camilla Batmadjeli.

There are going to be four books all together in the Rebel Angels sequence and Bloodstone, the second, is just out. many female bloggers have waited, hearts a-flutter, for the return of Seth and tend to fall into rather overheated descriptions of his appeal so I am going to be restrained.

Seth and his brother Conal are not immortals but are immensely long-lived and have now arrived in the 21st century in our world. They are searching for the bloodstone, an apparently impossible task set by Kate NicNiven, the Queen of the Sithe, and have been doing it for centuries. But Seth is still a teenager with an admired older (half)-brother.

That's clever, because boy readers can identify with him and girl readers lust after him and he is still one of them yet with a wealth of experience and a long history behind him, which makes him as cool as he is hot.

It's a complicated plot and the McGuffin of the stone is well-disguised. Unlike Pat Walsh, Gillian Philip has a harsh approach to the recap and I was floundering fora while about when and where we were. But it is a legitimate approach, given that neither writer would want us to start here.

My only cavil about Seth in this book is that he seems to have learned so little in four hundred years, not about the stone, but about himself and his own temper. This leads to a bit too much unsconsidered bashing for my taste.

But there are some heart-stopping scenes and one that will break your heart.

And if I don't quite love either of these sequels as much as the original books it is not a comment on the writers' skills; more an acceptance that once you know the worlds and the characters, you settle into quiet and satisfied recognition rather than being knocked out by the shock of the new.

Normal service Resumed

2011-08-07T21:18:00.000+01:00

Well, the David Blog Tour is over and I now know how perhaps a very small Rock band feels, after 32 stops in as many days.

There is a tiny coda over at Katherine Roberts' Reclusive Muse Blog tomorrow, about who or what is my Muse. I wonder if you can guess.

Then I'll be back to the old kind of Mavening. There are several books coming up for review so watch this space.

BLOG TOUR day 32 Mars and Venus

2011-08-04T01:01:00.001+01:00

The last day in my full month of dragging David round the world with me and we are with my good friend Lucy Coats talking about Mars and Venus. Are men and women really from different planets?

BLOG TOUR Day 31 My 5 favourite things to eat in Florence

2011-08-03T01:01:00.003+01:00

By chance and coincidence I should actually be in Florence today, while simultaneously telling Dwayne Without a Bookshelf my favourite things to eat there. With luck I'll be having some of them!

BLOG TOUR day 30 Do people still care about Art?

2011-08-02T01:01:00.001+01:00

I'm with Sarah Baker today What Sarah Reads wondering if people care so much about Art these days.

BLOG TOUR day 29 Two Bonfires

2011-08-01T01:01:00.002+01:00

And two sets of martyrs, some would say. Heaven, Hell and Purgatory seems an appropriate place to be!

BLOG TOUR Day 28 -an ideal dinner

2011-07-31T01:01:00.000+01:00

Do you like imagining the guests you'd have at a fantasy dinner party? I'm telling Jenny Sharp about my five ideal Italian ones today at: Revolving Papyrus

BLOG TOUR day 27 Versatility

2011-07-30T01:01:00.000+01:00

By the wonders of 21st technical brilliance, I am simultaneously in Italy, Australia and wherever you are when you read this blog post! But David is definitely with Pat Pledger at Read Plus where the subject is the plusses and minuses of being versatile.

BLOG TOUR day 26 Invented characters

2011-07-29T01:01:00.000+01:00

It's a great pleasure to be visiting my old friend Saviour Pirotta today and talking about mixing historical and invented characters in a novel. Swords and Sandals

BLOG TOUR day 25

2011-07-28T01:01:00.001+01:00

Today I am at A Dream of Books, talking about my five favourite places in Italy. Tomorrow I'll be off to visit some of them!

BLOG TOUR day 24 The Shadow of Death

2011-07-27T09:36:00.002+01:00

Some cheery reflections today over at Books for Teens where Jesse Owen gave David a very nice review yesterday

BLOG TOUR day 23 More Italian favourites

2011-07-26T13:33:00.000+01:00

I'm with Karen meek today, choosing some more Italian favourites: Reading Teenage Fiction

BLOG TOUR day 22

2011-07-25T10:34:00.000+01:00

is at Floor to Ceilling Books a state I can easily identify with. Find out my Five Favourite Places in Florence.

BLOG TOUR day 21 What if?

2011-07-24T01:00:00.001+01:00

So sorry about yesterday's late posting of Liz de Jager's review at My Favourite Books. She had terrible technical problems. And I was on the road and in the theatre and didn't know!

I am definitely today at The History Girls talking about how pondering on what ifs is a way into historical fiction writing.

BLOG TOUR day 20

2011-07-23T09:48:00.001+01:00

Today I'm the guest of Liz de Jager on My Favourite Books as part of the month celebrating fiction for under 14s (July 2011).

BLOG TOUR day 19 Writer as Sculptor

2011-07-22T09:57:00.000+01:00

You can find me here today: Mostly Reading YA thinking about how writing a complex novel is not so different from excavating a figure from a block of marble.

BLOG TOUR day 18 From Concept to Copy

2011-07-21T10:43:00.002+01:00

David's "bookends": from the "light-bulb moment" to holding a finished copy. You will find us at Anne Rooney's Stroppy Author blog

BLOG TOUR day 17 Republican or Medicean?

2011-07-20T10:20:00.000+01:00

I'm back at one of my old haunts today: Armadillo blog talking about what appeals about the Republic of Florence and what about the family of de' Medici.

BLOG TOUR day 16 Art vs Life

2011-07-19T13:10:00.000+01:00

Am over in Bath, or in the bath, today at Carly Bennett's tub.

BLOG TOUR day 15 Inspiration

2011-07-18T10:18:00.000+01:00

I'm talking at The Bookbag today about the inspiration for David

BLOG TOUR day 14 Celebrity

2011-07-17T11:08:00.000+01:00

I'm at a virtual Festival today with Bec Kavanagh: A Thousand Words, talking about celebrity and how it was different 500 years ago.

BLOG TOUR day 13 Michelangelo and Monna Lisa

2011-07-16T11:43:00.001+01:00

You can find me back in Australia today - my, how this boy David gets about! - at teamouse books: http://www.teamousebooks.com

I am speculating about whether there was a history between the great sculptor and the model for Leonardo's famous portrait.

BLOG TOUR day 12 Why 1st Person?

2011-07-15T08:00:00.000+01:00

I feel right at home today over with my friend Ann Giles, the Bookwitch,, where I talk about why David is written in the First Person: http://bookwitch.wordpress.com

BLOG TOUR day 11 Renaissance rivalry

2011-07-14T08:00:00.005+01:00

Leonardo and Michelangelo are such giants of the Renaissance they have TWO posts today: http://falcatatimes.blogspot.com and http://tattystreasurechest,blogspot.com

BLOG TOUR day 10 Handsome is as Handsome does

2011-07-13T08:00:00.003+01:00

I am at Fluttering Butterflies today with that hunk of marble, David: http://www.fluttering butterflies.com

BLOG TOUR day 9 My favourite Histfic writers

2011-07-12T08:00:00.005+01:00

Read all about it at http://bestfriends-books.blogspot.com

BLOG TOUR day 8 What got me started

2011-07-11T08:00:00.003+01:00

... on Historical Fiction? Find out at http://daisychainbookreviews.blogspot.com

BLOG TOUR day 7 My favourite works of art

2011-07-10T10:33:00.002+01:00

I'm in Australia today at Words on Paper:http://wordsonpaperya.blogspot.com

The wonders of the Internet!

BLOG TOUR day 6 What’s the attraction of the Renaissance?

2011-07-09T10:14:00.002+01:00

Today Mary is blogging at Love That Book about the attraction of the renaissance.

Meanwhile the Renaissance Woman is herself in Italy, so this is her daughter Rhiannon Lassiter posting on her behalf.

BLOG TOUR day 5 Why Italy?

2011-07-08T10:10:00.000+01:00

On Friday Mary guest blogged at The Bookette about her long love affair with Italy.

(Rhiannon is posting this on Mary's behalf because she is... guess where?)

BLOG TOUR day 4 Why Florence?

2011-07-07T10:00:00.000+01:00

I am over at Kirsty Conner's Overflowing Library blog today talking about one of my favourite places.
www.overflowinglibrary.com/2011/07/blog-tour-david-by-mary-hoffman.html

BLOG TOUR day 3 Why David?

2011-07-06T10:28:00.001+01:00

I'm over at http://yabookreads.com talking about "Why David?"

BLOG TOUR day 2 Finding his marbles

2011-07-05T13:25:00.000+01:00

Today I am over at Katherine Langrish's wonderful Seven Miles of Steel Thistles blog http://steelthistles.blogspot.com/2011/07/fanfare-for-david.html talking about marble.

Blog of Blogs

2011-07-03T20:19:00.001+01:00

It's publication day tomorrow and you must allow me a little gloat here about this fine young man. So far I've been interviewed on Radio 4's Open Book, by the Oxford Times and the Oxford Mail, who married me off to Ross King! (I had a hard time explaining that one to me husband).

Have also had two nice reviews in print (Saturday Times and Financial Times on 2nd July) and the first one, online, was a corker from the Bookbag: http://bit.ly/lLK959

But the real business starts tomorrow, with, TARAAA! The David Blog Tour. You can see the banner with the lsit of dates and places where I'll be for the next month (yes, month!) on the right, a page under Home. Many thanks to Emma Bradshaw at Bloomsbury for helping to organise it and to Anne Rooney for making the banner.

The tour begins, appropriately enough for publication day, at the Blog home (one of them) of Nicola Morgan, whose book Write to be published came out last month. Now, I can't write an unbiased review of this indispensable work, since I urged her to write it and have a quotation from me on the back.

It is the distillation of all her words of wisdom - and how many of them there have been and still are - on her Help I Need a Publisher blog: http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com
If I as the author of over 90 published books find useful stuff in here then you can see how invaluable it is for a beginner.

Anyway, Nicola, thank you for starting the ball rolling for my first Blog Tour.

And while we're on the subject of Blogs, I've started a new joint one, with 25 other writers over at The History Girls: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com If you like historical fiction, do drop by and take a look.

Aurora dawns

2011-06-20T19:06:00.005+01:00

This lovely lady is Julie Bertagna and she is my special guest today. The reason is that after a long wait by her fans, the third book in Julie's trilogy has just come out.

I didn't read Exodus when it was first published but came across it when I had to review the second book, Zenith, and realised I really needed to do my homework before I could possibly do justice to the sequel.

Since then I have joined the ranks of "anxious awaiters" and was not disappointed when I read Aurora. Julie very kindly agreed to answer the questions I had in mind when I finished the book.

BM: There have been long gaps between the three books, published 2002, 2007 and this year, 2011. I'm sure the many fans will just be delighted to have the third episode but do you think there will be any problems with readers not remembering all the details from the other two books? Or are they just such avid re-readers that they remember even better than you do!

JB: New editions of all three books of the trilogy have been re-issued with fantastic new covers so I think there will be a whole new generation of readers coming to them afresh. For other readers, I took care in Aurora to explain things as much as I could as I went along, but in a way that didn’t interrupt the momentum of the story - just enough that would make sense, hopefully, for anyone who might be reading Aurora first or who hadn’t read the other books in a while. I always re-read books I liked when I was younger, and the feedback I get from readers tells me they do too. But to recap everything would have made for a very stodgy story. Often readers have picked up on details I’ve forgotten and asked questions that I haven’t thought of and it’s been very helpful!

BM: There is also a time lapse of about fifteen years between books two and three in the action of the novels. This is quite a risk to take with readers who have been on a cliff hanger for four years about Mara and Fox. Can you explain why you took this bold step?

JB: I think you should take risks as a writer. That’s part of the reason I’m writing YA fiction. I think it’s my job to take readers places they might not have expected or thought they wanted to go. Books would be very dull if authors were continually asking themselves, will the readers like this or is it too risky? Should I just play safe? I moved the action forward because, quite simply, it would have been a lesser story if I hadn’t. It would have been limited to one generation when this is a big epic tale that spans generations, different worlds and lives. Some people have been hooked and intrigued straight off, others have said, ‘Oh, I didn’t want to go there and make that jump in time but then I got lost in the story again...’ I’ve often had exactly that reaction when reading a book, but the challenge is worth it as I love big stories that take you on unexpected journeys.

BM: Would you yourself describe these books as "dystopian"? It seems to be the current buzz word but was new in 2002. Perhaps Exodus was an early example of dystopian YA fiction?

Dystopian seems to be an umbrella word for anything futuristic right now. Exodus was out on its own when it was published as there was really nothing else like it, and it felt like a risky book to write, so it’s strange suddenly to be part of a ‘hot trend’. The sky city empire in the Exodus trilogy is a dystopian regime which has shut out the refugees of the flooded world, but the rest of the novel is apocalyptic. So maybe my trilogy could be described as ‘Dystopalyptic’ - there, I’ve just invented a new buzz word!

BM: It's really a very political book or books, with the widening post eco-disaster gap between the haves and have-nots. Are you also telling us something about the present?

JB: All the ideas for these books have come out of the real world - from my first inspiration of the Kiribati islanders struggling to survive on scraps of land amid rising seas in the Pacific, to the boat camps of flood refugees and rampaging gypsea pirates, the bio-architecture of the sky city towers, and the walled cities in a time when we are debating the problems of mass migration into ‘Fortress Europe’. Speculative fiction about the future has a big punch when you can feel its roots stretching back into the real present, and see reflections of your own world in the imagined future of the story. But these books don’t preach - it’s up to readers to take what they want from these stories. I do find that they spark great debates and questions and opinions.

Just the other day I did an event in a library where I was talking up the need to keep our libraries open and one of my young audience said, ‘This fight for libraries is kind of like Fox’s revolution to keep the world’s lands free for the boat people.’ That was not a parallel that had ever occurred to me, but I liked it!

BM: I don't want to give any spoilers in this interview but do you think your readers will be satisfied by the ending of the story between Mara and Fox?

JB: One thing I’ve learned about my readers is that a whole lot of them would be insulted by an obvious, trite or sentimental ‘Hollywood’ ending - and so would my characters! I’ve had so many emails and there are debates on my talk forum on all kinds of reasons for and against Mara and Fox ending up together - everyone disagrees with everyone else. It’s great fun and I could never please them all.

I wanted to write an ending where you couldn’t just turn to the back page and find out what happened (as I can be shamefully guilty of doing). All three books of the trilogy end with a surge of forward momentum. There are rewards for careful readers - for example, Exodus opens with ‘once upon a time’ and Aurora ends with the same words. These words also link Mara and Fox and this theme - the power of stories - is at the heart of the books. I wonder if anyone will spot the elements of the ‘stone-telling’ prophecy in Exodus hidden in the ending of Aurora. That’s the kind of subtle detail that my readers seem to enjoy.

I love evocative endings that leave space for the reader to imagine. For me, the most powerful stories are the ones where the imaginations of the writer and reader work together. The best books I’ve ever read, the ones that have stayed with me, have left me haunted, provoked, infuriated, driven me crazy, left me wondering and imagining, sometimes for years...whereas ‘satisfying’ crowd-pleasers, cut and dried happy-ever-afters, have long vanished from my mind.

The ending of Aurora is a whole new beginning and that’s why it ends with ‘once upon a time’.

BM: I must ask because people always want to know: is this the end of the story?

JB: I’m working on a big new book called ‘Riven’ - it might end up as two - about a very different future and it’s very exciting so I’m all caught up in that. Maybe one day I will return to the world of the Exodus trilogy but that’s it for now.

A little bit more about Julie:

Julie Bertagna was born in Ayrshire and grew up near Glasgow. After an English degree at Glasgow University she worked as the editor of a small magazine, a teacher and then a freelance journalist. She has written many award-winning novels for teenagers and younger children and speaks in schools, libraries and at book festivals across the UK. Her books have also sold all over the world. Exodus, her first novel for Macmillan, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and was described by the Guardian as ‘a miracle of a novel’. Julie writes full-time and lives in Glasgow with her family.

www.juliebertagna.com

Deadly Desperados

2011-06-16T20:55:00.000+01:00

It was such fun having Caroline Lawrence drop by last Sunday to talk about the background to her new Western Mysteries series that I ran out of space to review the first book!

And I really wanted to tell you about it because it's quite a remarkable book with an even more remarkable hero. Looked at one way, the book seems like a locus classicus for every theme and incident you ever heard about the Wild West:

Saloon bars; card sharps, mining claims; Indians, scalpings, sharpshooters, men in buckskins. It reminded me a bit of watching Roy Rogers at Saturday Morning Pictures - something Caroline is too young and too American to know about.

But wait, the scalpings haven't been done by Indians, our hero has lost all four of his parents (biological and foster) so is a double orphan and the card sharp is one of the most honest characters in the book. It is as if Caroline Lawrence has collected all the clichés and stereotypes about the West and then polished them to a bright new shine, like the silver in them thar hills, so that we meet them newly minted.

Which is of course what a child reader will do.

And that hero, P.K.(Pinky) Pinkerton is not like other boys. Caroline never uses the word "Asperger's" but the clues are there: P.K. does not like to be touched, can't easily read other people's faces and doesn't express emotion on his own. (This makes him an excellent poker player potentially).

He wears a lot of disguises and there is even what I thought might be going to be a Tyke Tyler moment of revelation towards the end but the author keeps us guessing. So, P.K., who had almost witnessed the murder of his foster parents and holds an important McGuffin (the apparent letter of deed to a silver mine) has to evade and outwit three horrible pursuers, including Whittling Walt, so called because he likes to cut small bits off people while questioning them.

P.K. gets tricked easily and is far too trusting, but he does meet Mark Twain in the newspaper offices and Poker Face Jace in the saloon, who are both genuinely helpful. Still at the climax of the chase, only P.K. can save himself.

My only concern is where can the series possibly go next - hasn't Caroline Lawrence used up all her possible plots in one book? But this was the author who wrote 17 Roman Mysteries in her earlier series and P.K. wants to be a detective, so I'm guessing there will be lots more mysteries for him to solve. And in P.K. I think his creator has invented a true original.

Romans 17, Cowboys 1 (but rising)

2011-06-12T08:00:00.035+01:00

The Book Maven is delighted to welcome Caroline Lawrence, who is stopping off for a metaphorical slug of liquor and plug of baccy on her demanding blog tour for The case of the Deadly Desperados. And here she is, for once not dressed in a toga or full set of buckskins!

WESTERN vs ROMAN

For most of the past ten years I've had a fabulous time writing a history-mystery series for kids set in ancient Rome.

My main motivation for writing is to transport myself to another place and time. I write about places Id like to have lived; civilized towns with a hint of danger and unpredictability, and populated by intriguing historical figures. While writing my Roman Mysteries, I have met Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, the Emperor Titus and his brother Domitian, the astrologer Ascletario, the orator Quintilian, and Suetonius biographer of the Caesars when he was twelve years old.

But now I've turned my eyes to the west, the Wild West. So how did I get from first century Rome to nineteenth century America?

It was HBO's Deadwood that rekindled my interest in the Western genre. When I saw the first episode of this TV series in 2005, I had a eureka moment: THAT's what it would have been like! Grimy, grubby & unglamorous. No swinging saloon doors, no shootouts, no glossy saloon girls in ruffles. Instead writer David Milch and his crew gave us canvas pest-tents, knifings, and sorry-looking dope addicts. It was full-frontal, profane, and violent, sometimes almost too violent to watch. This is a shame, because the producers did such a marvellous job of recreating that look and feel of a mining camp in the 1870s.

Deadwood sparked my interest in Westerns because I wanted to see more of this world, which was the world of my own heritage. I had abandoned the US a few decades previously to study in the UK, and ended up settling here. But now I wanted to read about my ancestors: grizzled men, gutsy women and pioneer children. I craved big skies, sage-dotted deserts and shadowed canyons. I started to re-watch Westerns I hadn't seen in years. After Deadwood, most of them seemed laughably clean and unrealistic, but a few were as fresh and vital as the day they had first been screened. I was entranced by Eagle's Wing, Little Big Man, The Outlaw Josie Wales and Dances with Wolves.

Then I saw The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, a spaghetti western from 1966. I remembered it as being rather silly, perhaps because of its famous theme song. But as I watched the remastered extended version I was amazed at how good it was. Exciting, clever, surprising, and blackly funny. And, like Deadwood, it got the look exactly right: grubby, dusty and sweaty. I fell utterly in love with this film. When I went to IMDb viewers ratings, I saw I wasn't alone. Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo -- its original Italian title -- has consistently held a place in the top 5 films of all time.

Around that time a friend gave me a copy of Charles Portiss' True Grit, which I adored. I also started reading Larry McMurtry and Robert B Parker's Appaloosa series. All three authors employ wonderful dialogue and turn of phrase, but use such plain prose and clear vocabulary that a middle school child could easily read any their books, were it not for the content.

Another eureka moment came a few months later when I was visiting my mother in Northern California, sitting in a sunny outdoor cafe on a university campus. I suddenly thought, Why am I not writing a series of books set here? At that moment I resolved to write a new series based in the American West. Like the Roman Mysteries, it would be history-mystery, and like them for the 8 - 12 age group.

The only problem was exactly where and precisely when to set it? The West is so big, and the scope of American history so vast, but for time travel to work you need to be specific.

The following week found me in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. I went for an early morning walk and discovered a National Park. I didn't have time to do any hiking, but I came away from the ranger station clutching a map dotted with wonderful names like Mt. Disappointment and Hard Luck. An idea was taking shape in my head. As soon as I got back to my room, I wrote the first few pages of what was to be the first Western Mystery. Here is the original first line of those original first pages:

"My name is Pinky, and I was born in Hard Luck, not far from Mount Disappointment. That pretty much sums up my short and miserable life. Which is anyways soon about to end."

That was in October of 2006, five years ago. In that early version the character of P.K. (Pinky) Pinkerton emerged from my subconscious pretty much fully grown. All the essential elements were there: an enigmatic and slightly dysfunctional hero who is half white and half Indian, deadpan humour and an air of excitement and threat.

I had my guide. Now I needed my setting. The San Gabriel Mountains, while beautiful, didnt feel right. I then toyed with the idea of setting the books in San Francisco during the gold rush. Then I discovered something I hadn't known: Samuel Clemens lived in the west for a few years as a young man. His worked as a reporter for a two and a half years in Virginia City, Nevada during its most exciting period: the silver boom years. It was there that he first used the pen-name Mark Twain.

I had my third eureka moment. For my Roman Mysteries, the eruption of Vesuvius had given me a place and a time: 24 August AD 79, and that series lasted for the two and a half year reign of Titus. For my Western Mysteries, the arrival in Virginia City of Mark Twain would gave me not just a place, but a very specific time: Friday 26 September 1862, and my series could last for the two and a half year reign of Twain.

In researching my new series I have been to the Melody Ranch, California where Deadwood was filmed and also to Virginia City, Nevada. My husband, my sister and I have done a Civil War tour, an Arizona Dude Ranch and a Death Valley road trip. I am learning about 19th century American music, theatre, photography, clothing and tobacco. I'm getting to know Mark Twain and some lesser-known but equally-fascinating sage-brush writers such as Dan De Quille, Joe Goodman and Alf Doten. I've also met some gutsy gals and pioneer kids. Virginia City and the area around it will be a great place to spend the next decade. An interviewer recently asked me this question: If you had a time machine, would you go back to ancient Rome or the Wild West? I couldn't answer her, because I am so passionate about both periods.

Five connections between Ancient Rome and the Wild West:

1. Both were horse-powered societies.
2. The state of medical knowledge was about the same.
3. The best westerns were made by a Roman director, Sergio Leone.
4. David Milch only conceived of the Deadwood after being thwarted in his hopes to do a series about Nero's Rome.
5. Samuel Clemens claims to trace his family line back to Flavius Clemens, a relative of the emperor Titus.

Biography:
Caroline Lawrence writes historical novels because nobody has invented a Time Machine. She writes for kids 8 - 12 because that is her inner age. Caroline divides her time between 1st century Ostia and 19th century Nevada. In a manner totally befitting a split-personality Gemini, this Californian Londoner has two websites, one for her Roman Mysteries and one for her Western Mysteries.

www.romanmysteries.com

www.westernmysteries.com

There are two more stops left on Caroline's blog tour:

Mon 13 June http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/blog – Caroline Lawrence on tips for writing historical fiction
Tues 14 June www.westernmysteries.co.uk – Inhabiting the West

Dissing Dystopia?

2011-06-06T13:51:00.002+01:00

The Web is buzzing with the sound of trapped flies again. This time it's a journalist called Megan Cox Gurdon, writing in the Wall Street Journal, causing the vibrations:
here

Admittedly, her reference points are American, as you would expect, but I have some thoughts - indeed experience - to share on this. For a start, that word "dystopian", which Ms Cox Gurdon doesn't actually use but which is lurking behind her article. It was coined by those who mistakenly believed it was the opposite of "utopian." They thought that Thomas More's "Utopia" was a mistransliteration of the Greek for "good place", with the prefix "eu" (as in "euphony" or "euphemism"), whereas the first letter actually represented "ou" or "not."

Therefore Utopia means "the nowhere place" not "the good place" and "dystopia" is not its opposite. Glad we got that cleared up.
The journalist is not very knowledgeable about children's books, saying that "40 years ago, no one had to contend with young-adult literature because there was no such thing." Maybe it's her Maths that is off, because I make that 1971, the year before my first book was published. No such thing as young adult literature? It wasn't called that and it might not all have been "dystopian" but it was certainly there.

Alan Garner's The Owl Service was published in 1967, Paul Zindels' The Pigman and My Darling, My Hamburger a few years later. Peter Dickinson's Changes trilogy was from the same period, beginning in 1968; John Christopher's Tripods series began at the same time. And this was also the period when novels originally ostensibly for adults, like Lord of the Flies (1958) and Catcher in the Rye (1951) were being given to teenagers to read because of the age of their protagonists.

But let that pass. Is there anything in the writer's main contention that the basic material for YA literature today is overwhelmingly bleak? Well, perhaps. To take speculative fiction first, there is no doubt that ever since Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, the latest trend in YA has been towards the dystopian: Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy, Philip Reeve's quartet that began with Mortal Engines, Julie Bertagna's post eco-disaster trilogy (Exodus; Zenith; Aurora); William Nicholson's Windsinger trilogy; Cassandra Clare's really rather bad "City of ..." novels ... the list could go on and on.

But it followed the previous bestselling trend of paranormal romance, set off by Stephenie Meter with her ridiculous vampires and werewolves and though not as child-friendly as Harry Potter (which certainly had its darker aspects) was hardly corruptingly evil.

I think the journalist is thinking more of books like Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, though she doesn't mention it, perhaps because it's by an Australian and this is a US-centric article. Or Tabitha Suzuma's Forbidden, a brother-sister incest novel about to be published across the pond.

Self-harm especially exercises this author:
"it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care."

This interests me because my current protagonist is a self-harmer and since the book I am writing is sixth in the Stravaganza sequence, there is a mixture of "real life" events and something more speculative as the heroine of City of Swords has the uncommon experience of travelling to a time and place where cutting with sharp weapons is about to become commonplace as a city experiences civil war and siege.

I don't see it, as Ms Cox Gurdon expresses it as bulldozing coarseness and or misery into children's lives. YA readers in my experience are very good at ceasing to read material that does not interest them, without the intervention of parents. But teenagers have a very wide experience of ways of being unhappy; in my books I try to help them come to terms with those, specifically to understand that hard times do not endure forever.

I think Ms Cox Gurdon is right in a way about vogues. A particular genre arises as a trend out of one or two bestselling titles then settles down to being just one of a range of possible genres. the next after dystopian will probably be "historical" something you couldn't sell for love nor money "40 years ago."

A perfect picture book

2011-05-25T14:52:00.000+01:00

They don't come along very often: the Ahlbergs' Each, Peach, Pear, Plum; Jez Alborough's Where's My Teddy; Margaret Mahy's Jam; Emily Gravett's Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear - each of these is for me a perfect picture book. So what do they have in common?

Not necessarily having the same illustrator as writer, as the list shows. Or being for one age group or audience. It is the combination of words and pictures which gives total satisfaction.

I have long been an admirer of Penny Dale, since I first saw Once there were Giants (Walker Books). (Actually that book could make the above list too). But with Dinosaur Dig, she has excelled herself.

Let me count the ways: Dinosaurs - tick; Diggers - tick; counting - tick; proper story - tick. And here's the bonus point: endpapers where the front one gives all the dinosaurs their proper names and the back one ALL THE DIGGERS!

Elementary, you might say. Yeah? Then why hasn't anyone else done it? The combination of all these elements makes something more than the sum of its parts. I shall, with great reluctance, part with it to my nephew this weekend, who is about to be four. And I know he's going to love it as much as I do.

Bracelet of Bones

2011-05-23T21:52:00.001+01:00

Quercus has just won the Bookseller Publisher of the Year Award. That might have something to do with the huge success of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. But I'd like to think their quiet crescendo of excellent children's books might have contributed to their success.

Grgeory Hughes' début novel Unhooking the Moon won the Booktrust Teenage Book Award last year and is on the shortlist for the Branford Boase Award, where it shares the honour with editor Roisin Heycock.

More and more these days when you hear of a good YA novel, it seems as if it will have come from a small independent press, often Quercus. And now the treat of a new novel from Kevin Crossley-Holland, first in a series of Viking adventures.

My first glance at the cover of Bracelet of Bones, showed me a girl in a modern raincoat and I couldn't quite get that out of my head. Difficult to know what a Viking teenage girl might have looked like but not quite this. Closer inspection showed my mistake but the damage was done.

No matter for the writing soon corrects any misunderstanding. Solveig is being shown a battlefield by her father, Halfdan. As it turns out, it is his farewell gesture because he is leaving to join Harald Hardrada in Constantinople but he doesn't tell his daughter.

From the moment she discovers his departure Solveig determines not to stay with her stepmother but to wait for spring and follow Halfdan on this enormous journey. All she has to offer are her skills as a carver. There's a handy map tracing her passage from Trondheim in Norway across seas and down rivers to what the Vikings call Miklagard.

It was here a few years ago that Kevin Crossley-Holland found carved into the stone of Hagia Sophia, in Viking runes, the name, Halfdan, and that is how the story began. Solveig's journey is made mostly by ship and the skipper of that ship is the trader Red Ottar. We gradually get to know the other people on board - Torsten the helmsman, Vigot, the handsome but cruel mercenary, Edith, Ottar's English Slave and the terrifying cook, Bergdis.

A lot of "difficult" names for the 11+ reader the book is intended for but there is a useful cast-list at the beginning along with the map. The reader sets out on the journey of the book rather like the passengers on the ship but with these navigational aids you have a literary chart and astrolabe to orient yourself with.

It's a book that grows gradually on you and you realise that you have come to care about the characters. Solveig's single-minded determination to find her father is respected by many but there are others willing to take advantage of the ignorance of this fourteen-year-old adrift in the world. The hardships of such a journey are not played down and nor is the conflict between the old gods and the new Christianity that some, like Edith, practise.

There is a strong awareness of moral ambiguity; people are not easily classifiable and even a mostly bad man is capable of a good act. Kevin Crossley-Holland is very good at showing you the complexity of human nature and there is nothing like the closed community of life aboard ship to bring this out.

A book for a thoughtful early teen. Like Solveig in fact.

The tale of a talisman

2011-05-15T17:40:00.002+01:00

In each of my Stravaganza novels (five so far) the teenager from our world who travels in time and space to 16th century Talia does so by means of a talisman. So far there has been a marbled notebook, the model of a flying horse, a blue glass bottle with a silver stopper, a leather-bound spell book and a red velvet bag of silver mosaic tesserae.

The Stravagante in City of Swords is Laura, a self-harmer. I knew from the beginning that her talisman would be a paper-knife in the shape of a small sword with a cross-piece; I had it vividly in my mind's eye and all I had to do was find it.

For each of these books I have tried to find a representation of the talisman to show them on school visits and photograph them for PowerPoints etc. They're not all perfect but close enough to what I imagined. So I thought it would be easy to find what I was looking for this time in Italy. But no luck. After searching the shops and the markets, I came home in April talismanless.

But at Easter, which was close to my birthday this year, my sister, after giving me lots of lovely presents remarked casually that she had something else for me. "I think you said you were looking for a paper-knife like a sword?"

And there it was! The one I had held in my mind all that time - not an invention but a memory. I used to holiday with my parents in Spain when I was a young teenager and apparently they had bought two such paper-knives. They have been dead many years now and my sister had kept both of the little weapons. "You can have this one if you want it," she said, holding out my perfect talisman for City of Swords.

So thanks, Mum, Dad and Big Sis; now Laura can get where she needs to go.

Let's improve our Royal Wedding vocabulary

2011-04-29T15:01:00.001+01:00

Well, I watched it. Always meant to and did. Was fascinated by the Abbey cosmati floor, the liturgy, the visiting dignitaries, the hats, the lot. What annoyed me is the very low standard of blather we get from broadcasters. Huw Edwards read out bulletins about the principals' outfits as if he was doing it phonetically from a script written in Martian and couldn't tell the difference between sky and powder blue (Carole Middleton).

Now as for Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Martian would have been very appropriate. Who advises those poor young women on what to wear? Fergie? Mr Blobby? Perhaps nice Mrs Middleton could have a new career within the Firm - or even that Mrs Parker Bowles, who is now Auntie Camilla?

No wonder words failed in some of the commentary. But even when faced with lesser challenges, the broadcasters did no better than the vox pops - fantastic, stunning, brilliant, beautiful - they all said the same until I thought I would scream if I heard "down-to-earth" again. Even HRM the Queen apparently said it was "amazing!"

Here's a competition: describe William and Kate's ceremony, clothes, relationship without using any of the above adjectives or phrases - and I mean positively. No Republican snideness here - this is an exercise in extending the range of words that could be used without sending the 2 billion or so viewers into a coma.

The prize? Just the satisfaction of knowing you did better than the BBC.

When a Monster called

2011-04-17T15:13:00.001+01:00

Every now and again a book drops through my mailbox with such a pedigree it becomes quite hard to write about it. One such is A Monster Calls. There has been a lot of publicity lately for The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, published after his death and leading to much talk about whether it is right to finish an author's final work.

Well Siobhan Dowd's book was not so much "unfinished" as "unstarted." The central idea was there: a boy, whose mother is dying of cancer (the words "dying" and "cancer" are not used in the book) is visited by a monster - a kind of Green Man - who is going to tell him three stories. In return Conor has to tell him one. Siobhan had not written down what the stories were.

In choosing Patrick Ness to bring this book to birth, Walker were making a bold leap into the almost dark. Ness has received many plaudits and prizes for the books in his Chaos Walking trilogy. (The final volume, Monsters of Men, is on the shortlist for both the Carnegie Medal and the Arthur C. Clarke award). No doubt then about his credentials but he has not exactly written in anything like the style of Siobhan Dowd, who died in 2007 of breast cancer.

But Patrick Ness was very keen NOT to write pastiche Dowd. And the result doesn't sound like either of them - at least not the way they have sounded up until now. The writer I was most reminded of was Ted Hughes.

It's a beautifully produced book. In fact for me, particularly at the beginning, it felt a bit OVER-produced. I did not want to move from a page printed black on white to one printed white on black; it felt fussy and distracting from the story. This is not to detract from the cover and decorations by Jim Kay, which are suitably sinister and apt to the theme.

Every night Conor wakes from a nightmare he can't bear to finish. A monster in the shape of Yew tree holds no terrors for him worse than the fears he is living with day to day. His mother's treatment (understood to be chemotherapy) is not working, his dad lives in America with his new wife and baby, his grandmother is someone he just can't get on with. At the back of everything is the horror of what Conor can't let himself think about.

And to add to all that, he is being bullied at school. Conor almost welcomes the brutality of Harry and his two cronies (Linda Newbery pointed out to me once that bad characters always have cronies; only good ones are allowed friends. Though to be fair I don't think Patrick Ness uses that word). It feels good to be beaten because Conor WANTS to be punished. He can't bear it when the Head refuses to exclude him when he finally lets the monster have his way.

For yes, this is an allegorical monster. He is not just Green Man, Herne the Hunter etc. Not just the berry-bearing saviour whose derivative (Tamoxifen) might save Conor's mum. He has something in common with William Mayne's A Game of Dark. When Conor trashes his grandmother's living room or beats his tormentor, he believes the monster is doing it.

The monster does tell Conor the three stories and very satisfying they are, though Conor doesn't think so. And then it's Conor's turn; he has to see the story of the nightmare through to its very bitter end.

It's a book to make you weep and a towering achievement; I read it at a sitting. My only tiny reservation is about who is going to read it. The adult gatekeepers will - and it does deserve every plaudit and prize it gets. But to which young reader would you give it? A child whose parent is dying? A child whose parent isn't dying? Either way it's terrifying as well as healing.

I don't know the answer to this question. I only know that Patrick Ness can be very proud of what he has done. Even though injury prevented his running in today's marathon, to raise money for Breast Cancer.

A long way from Italy in Earls Court

2011-04-14T14:42:00.003+01:00

It's only the second time I've ever been to the London Book Fair. I went once decades ago under the impression I'd been asked to do an event. It was chaotic, with no-one expecting me and I found the whole experience daunting, exhausting and off-putting. And that was when I still lived in London, too.

So why was I there again this Tuesday? Well, I had been invited by the Nordic Ambassadors to a reception at the Danish Embassy on the Monday night, in honour of the London Book Fair and I thought it might be a bit off to attend it without going to the Fair itself.

I didn't expect to see anyone at the reception I knew but in a Ferrero Rocher-free environment at the top of a building in Knightsbridge, with a wonderful terrace, I spotted Shirley Hughes straightaway. And later my Swedish publisher. Shirley and I agreed we must have been invited because we were both ALMA nominees ( and every pleased to be so.)

Anyway, I have the use of a room in middle daughter's north London flat so I stayed over and made my way to Earls Court in the morning. I'd bought a Fair ticket already and registered and had decided to go to a couple of seminars on children's books in the morning. In the event, because of a breakdown on the Piccadilly Line (the train's - not mine), I rushed into the seminar on children's book prizes at the last minute when it was standing room only.

So, this very distinguished panel of Beverley Naidoo, Piet Grobler, Julia Eccleshare and Philip Pullman were trying to talk about the significance of book prizes and no-one could hear them properly because of the utter incompetence of whoever was in charge of the sound system and whoever had decided to hold the event in an open-plan "room" with no ceiling and just a few screens. Do better next time LBF!

Anyway, Beverley was pleased with her Other Award for Journey to Jo'burg, which came before her Carnegie Medal. I was an Other Award judge and was pleased to have it name-checked. (Rosemary Sutcliff always mentioned her Other Award for Song for a Dark queen alongside her Carnegie).

Philip Pullman said you can't compete for a book prize. You have to regard them as the random kindness of providence - which is a very nice thought. Julia Eccleshare thought that the danger of tagging authors as prizewinners sometimes means other deserving books don't get enough recognition. And that there should be a prize for authors "in mid-career."

This is the illustrators' Café right next door, whither I repaired between seminars. They are not in this photo but I overheard a hilarious pitch from an American agent trying to sell to a VERY literary editor a whole bunch of commercial but truly dreadful sounding books.

I was joined by Lucy Coats an we had lunch together too, lamenting the fact that her copy of Mslexia hadn't arrived, though mine had (there's a lovely interview with me by Lucy in the current issue). And I managed to see briefly Anne Rooney, Miriam Halahmy, Malorie Blackman and Tricia Adams.

But it felt weird being at LBF. It's not like Bologna, not by a long way. Everything is in the one massive hall (with the Agents upstairs) and children's, adult, academic and all other kinds of books are all in together - though children's has its own section.

The second seminar was about Interactive Reading Communities for Young People and Julia Eccleshare said that the new Guardian Children's Books website already had 850,000 users after less than three weeks. Keith Grey doesn't even have a website but was Scottish Booktrust's first Virtual Writer in Residence. M. G. Harris, on the other hand, whose hero of The Joshua Files has a blog, wrote his posts on a special website.Anna Rafferty, Head of Puffin Digital, made the excellent point that what children like is not digital for its own sake but social.

And someone said that most teenagers don't begin their Web searches on Google but on YouTube. Good thing I'm getting that video camera this month!

I'm going to get better organised for next year and meet lots more virtual friends from Facebook and Twitter (I wrote a book called Virtual Friend once - prescient). Now that I've been to Bologna so many times, I'm no longer scared of big halls. The weather was quite Mediterranean but Earls Court needs to work on the coffee a bit - two and a half times the price of the Bologna brew and much less good.

Discovering a voice

2011-04-12T08:00:00.002+01:00

Nearly two years ago now, I got in my car and drive north to an unfamiliar venue in Staffordshire, to be guest speaker at the SCBWI retreat. If you are not familiar with this almost unpronounceable acronym (Scooby, Skiboowy, Skibwee), it stands for Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. The great thing about it is that, unlike the Society of Authors, for which you need a book contract to join, it is open to unpublished writers.
Now, if this sounds like a gathering of wannabes, think again.

The thing about SCBWI is that there is a very high standard of commitment and professionalism. People being kind to aspirant writers often refer to them as the "pre-published" which presupposes that anyone who wants to will make it as a published author one day. It's well-meaning but inaccurate.

Lots more people want to write, especially for young readers, than have a chance of ever being published, especially in these difficult times. And many of these talk in vague terms about things like "inspiration." They are far less like to complete a book, let alone find a publisher for it, than those who do their homework by joining SCBWI.

They have 19,000 members worldwide, who form a support and friendship group; there are conferences and retreats where agents and editors come to give one-to-one sessions and there is the marvellous anthology idea Undiscovered Voices. There have been two of these so far 2008 and 2009 and 13 of the featured authors - more than half - have gone on to be published or are contracted for publication.

At the retreat I went to in 2009, I met three authors who have gone on to be published (and many more who have become Facebook friends!) One was Candy Gourlay, who was an "undiscovered voice" in the first anthology of 2008. Since then, her first novel, Tall Story, has been published by David Fickling Books and shortlisted for Waterstone's Children's Book Prize, Blue Peter Favourite Story Prize, the Leeds Children's Book Prize and the Hillingdon Secondary School Book Prize. It has been nominated for the Branford Boase, the Redbridge Children's Book Award, the UKLA Book Award and the Carnegie Medal.

Candy is from the Philippines and half the book is set there, alternating with what is going on in London. It's a highly original story, with memorable characters and a touch of magical realism. It's a 9-12 story, with strong themes of family, responsibility and difference. Oh, and basketball.

Another person I met on the same retreat was Jonathan Mayhew, who had a three-book deal under his belt already, with Bloomsbury, two of which have since been published.
The first was Mortlock, a grisly piece of junior fiction for lovers of horror, with some terrifying aunts who are half human and half crow, and some real deaths.

That too was shortlisted for the Waterstone's prize and nominated for the 2011 Branford Boase Award. And Mayhew's second book, The Demon Collector, is just out.

So you see, these SCBWI-ers really do have a high success rate.

A third writer I met in Staffordshire was Miriam Halahmy and her first book is so recently out that it hasn't had time to be put on any lists but I'm sure it will. Hidden is the only one of the three aimed at teenagers and is set on Hayling island, a location Miriam knows well. When I first heard that, I thought it might involve sailing but it doesn't. It's about illegal immigration, prejudice, ignorance and the gradual growth of trust, respect and tolerance. Apart from the arrival of Mohammed by sea, hit over the head and dumped in the water by unscrupulous people-smugglers, the plot that unwinds could take place anywhere in the UK.

Alix is a 14-year-old girl living with her single mother on Hayling island and sympathetic to Samir, an Iraqi boy who has achieved legal refugee status. They are walking on the beach when they find Mohammed, half-dead and seriously wounded, both by the smugglers and torture he has undergone in Iraq.

Halahmy knows a lot about family life and customs in Iraq because she has been married to an Iraqi for more than thirty years and that experience makes her book all the more authentic. She has also addressed an increasingly common situation about which most teenagers know little and has cast an uncomfortable spotlight on their reaction to the strangers in their midst.

SCBWI are now accepting submissions from members for the 2011 Undiscovered Voices anthology - see www.undiscoveredvoices.com for details.

The judges have been announced - including agents and editors - and the Chair is Malorie Blackman. But for all who don't make it into the anthology, take heart - Jonathan Mayhew and Miriam Halahmy were not in the two previous ones.

Bologna images

2011-04-04T21:27:00.000+01:00

This was the picture of the Nosy Crow stand I couldn't upload before.

You can see how it now fits right into the Bologna pattern.

Below is a cowgirl I happened to run into at the Orion stand. It was a fabulous outfit and I realised immediately that it must be the author of The Western Mysteries, Caroline Lawrence. She was happy to pose for her own "Wanted" poster and is very much alive.

You see, writers have to work really hard nowadays, not just producing books but getting out there and promoting their wares. It got me thinking about how I could dress for David but that's a bit of a problem since he wears nothing, is very male and about seventeen feet high.

Still I'll add a solution at the end. Caroline, you have given us all a hard act to follow and I'm sure your publishers are very pleased with you.

There were no cowgirls or Romans in togas at the IBBY press conference. Just the exciting news that the 2012 Congress will be held in London at Imperial College 23-26 August. The theme is: Crossing Boundaries: Translations and Migrations.

One of the confirmed main speakers is Shaun Tan, who won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award at the Fair, so the IBBY organisers are right on the button.

This is my promotional shot for David. We went on to Florence for a few days after the Fair and I just had to show him the jacket (though it was actually wrapped around another book, proof copies being in short supply).

This is not the "real" David of course, because that is in the Accademia. Or in my book, if you like.

One thing I know, I am not stripping for my art, so this will have to do.

Another year, another Fair. Lots of prosecco, pasta, ice-cream and pizza. Quick swigs of espresso, queues for the loo, restaurants and bars mysteriously closing down, appointments made or missed. Next year ... I'll be back.

Bologna 2011

2011-04-04T20:52:00.001+01:00

Well, there I was again. My eleventh Bologna and beginning to feel pretty seasoned at how to "do" the Fair. I have two goals: one is to meet my foreign editors and I hope experience a rapport with them so that they will feel a warm fuzzy glow when offered another book by me.

The other is to identify trends and just see what's about. So I have a mixture of set meetings, which usually last half an hour, plus time to walk up and down the four aisles each of Halls 29 and 30 and the two of Halls 25 and 26.

"Tough on feet and tough on the causes of feet" is my Bologna slogan. Rights people work harder but don't walk as far.

It made this weird orange sofa on one of the stands look very appealing every time we passed it.

Then of course there is the social side, dinners with editors, publishing parties, "Drinks on the Stand" (usually Prosecco). But by far the most fun part is bumping into people unexpectedly as you rove the aisles.

At long last paranormal YA fiction has stopped dominating what is on offer, though there are still a few demons and angels lurking about, the last to leave the party. "Dystopian" is the new buzzword, after the huge success of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy.

Barry Cunningham of The Chicken House claims he was offered "dystopian dogs" but that might be apocryphal.

There was certainly no one big "book of the fair" as there was last year with The Emerald Atlas. Just a steady and quiet atmosphere of thoughtful deals being done. Not so much a feeding frenzy as a civilised banquet of goodies.

This is the Bloomsbury Rights Manager selling (I hope!) my new novel, David, which you can see on the top shelf behind her. And this is what working at Bologna looks like.

It was also fun to meet Kate Wilson and talk with her about Nosy Crow, which went to the Fair last year with nine titles and now has fifty!

Kate had also delivered the keynote speech at the Tools of Change conference held just before the Fair, because her company (with Camilla Reid) has been at the cutting edge of developing picture book apps - such as the Three Little Pigs - and making all their fiction titles available as e-books.

Last year they had a corner of the Publishers' Association stand and a banner; this year a whole big stand of their own. I took a picture, which Blogger is refusing to display. Perhaps I have used up my quota for this post.

Templar are publishing some very nice books, including The Pendragon Legacy sequence by Katherine Roberts, about King Arthur's daughter Rhianna. And VIII (pronounced "Eight") by Harriet Castor. I'll give you a clue: think Jonathan Rhys Myers!

There's lots more to tell you and more pictures so I'll do another post.

Queen and Huntress

2011-03-26T20:48:00.000Z

I am off to Bologna tomorrow and will report back from the Fair on my return. I was going to blog about the Michael Gove's "50 books" farrago but something happened today that knocked that off the top of my list. Early this morning I got an email telling me that Diana Wynne Jones was in a hospice and fading fast. By then she had already died, as I found out in seconds from Twitter.

So this blog post is dedicated to Diana - like her Roman namesake, fearless, peerless, worshipped and unpredictable.

I think I first came across her work when my oldest daughter, Rhiannon Lassiter discovered it. Knowing what I like almost as well as I do, she told me to read Archer's Goon. I did and then I think found my all-time favourite, Fire and Hemlock, before starting on the Chrestomanci novels, Howl's Moving Castle and the hilarious Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

What an output! Eight Days of Luke, Dogsbody, The Homewardbounders ... anyone would be proud to have produced just one of these. And she had a way of getting under your skin and into your everyday life. I still say under my breath at bus-stops, "Hathaway send a bus," a habit developed when the children were young, because Hathaway "farms" transport in Archer's Goon. And we have a cat that says "Wong" just like Throgmorten.

I was thrilled when she reviewed my fantasy novel Special Powers for the TES, less so when she didn't much like it! Sarah Prineas was luckier with The Magic Thief and got a splendid puff from this generous older writer. But all was made better when the three of us shared a panel at the Bath festival a few years ago.

In the green room before the event, where Diana arrived a bit flustered after a bomb scare on her route, she spontaneously told me she had read and enjoyed The Falconer's Knot and that there really was a friary where I had invented one, between Gubbio and Assisi.

I got her to sign my copy of Fire and Hemlock and she did the same for Rhiannon's A Tale of Time City - that's another wonderful book. Her signing queue after the event went on and on ....

I was furious that it took a revival of interest in wizards after a certain Hogwarts pupil to bring some of her books back into print; they should never have been allowed to disappear in the first place. But Diana's fans were loyal, all over the world, and they had the satisfaction of seeing the re-jacketed Harper Collins versions spreading the word to lots of new readers.

She had an extraordinary childhood, was wildly anarchic in her use of themes and ideas, was always generous to new writers and to critics and was by all accounts a splendid person to know and work with. Imagine having her for a grandmother!

Diana Wynne Jones was taken far too soon, while she was still full of ideas, and had to suffer far too much. But the creator of Chrestomanci, Howl, the Goon, Mr Lynn and Christopher Chant and many others was so prodigal with her genius that she has left much to remember her by.

I hope she is now in one of the parallel universes she so richly imagined, laughing and free from pain, and able to read the countless tributes on the Internet and enjoy the fact that her name was trending Worlwide on Twitter. I think that would amuse her.

Sent to Coventry

2011-03-20T12:34:00.001Z

You may not know that I am a member of the SAS. It's the "other" SAS = Scattered Authors Society and every now and again, it un-scatters and gets together - some of it - to talk about writing, publishing, editors, agents, book tours, blogs etc.

Above is a picture of some of us hard at work talking about such things in Coventry last weekend.

There was an ugly moment on Sunday morning when at 11.30am. 35 authors found there was no coffee, but here is a picture of happier times.

After introductions, including from a lot of new members, we discussed what publishers consider hot currently in children's books, historical research, people's working methods, political correctness, independent booksellers and forging connections.

I cunningly left before the part where people volunteer to organise next year's conference but I believe we do have two noble members who stepped forward. It's always fascinating to hear what other people are writing, what hassles they are experiencing, what changes of direction, what shortlistings and awards they have had. It's such a generous bunch, always ready to celebrate colleagues' successes and mourn one another's woes.

And a wonderful joint repository of information and help. Long live the SAS - Who Shares Wins.

Troll in one

2011-03-09T07:29:00.001Z

The Book Maven is delighted to welcome Katherine Langrish as a guest to the blog today. Katherine (Kath to her friends) is doing a blog tour to talk about her “Trollogy” – a bind up of her first three published books, with the evocative title West of the Moon.

Yesterday, on the Bookwitch’s blog, Kath mentioned coming to meet other authors at Charney Bassett and feeling an “interloper” because she hadn’t had a book published yet. Well, I was one of those authors at Charney who had heard of this “new girl” being secured a big advance by hotshot agent Catherine Clarke and was intrigued to meet her.

Her modesty, charm and intelligence won everyone over and she is now the person whose Charney Quiz Team everyone fights to join, because they always win! Her knowledge of children’s books and of myths and legends is unrivalled.

I asked Kath to write something for us about what had attracted her to the idea of trolls and Vikings in the first place. You can find the next stage of her tour tomorrow at MGHarris’s blog

I don’t have a resident photographer of the calibre of Helen Giles, so I have purloined an image from elsewhere.

Why Trolls? Why Vikings?

To answer why I wrote three books about trolls and Vikings, I have to go back a bit. I loved stories even before I could read. (When I was about three years old my big sister drew a cartoon of me, wandering around with a book in my hand wailing, “Read me my bookie…” )
As I grew beyond picture books, some of the stories I loved best were myths, legends and fairytales from around the world, and my favourites were the ones from the North – stories about the Norse gods like Odin and Thor. I like history, too, and the Viking Age is the story of an extraordinary people – the inventors of the world’s oldest continuous democratic parliament (the Althing in Iceland); voyagers, adventurers, poets, warriors, craftsmen (and women) – a strange and colourful mix of cruelty, superstition, open-mindedness, plain speech and independence of spirit.
‘Troll Fell’, the first volume of my ‘Troll trilogy’ (now published for the first time in one volume under the title ‘West of the Moon’), began with a picture in my head of a Viking boy living beside a fjord, who I thought would have adventures involving some of the Norse gods. I called him Bjorn. He had a family – a bluff, cheery father called Ralf, a hard-working mother called Gudrun, a feisty little sister, and an old grandfather. I loved writing about them, but somehow the boy wouldn’t come to life. So I sent him off up into the mountains, where he got lost in a snowstorm and met Odin – and then I got stuck. Utterly, hopelessly stuck, with no idea what was going to happen next.
I stayed stuck for years.
The story got stuffed in a drawer. Every so often I’d find it, read it (all twenty pages) and think, That’s not too bad – I wish I could think of a way to go on with it… But I was still stuck, so I would put it away again.
Eventually two things happened.
First, I realised what should have been obvious – Bjorn was boring. I was much more interested in his family than I was in him, and especially in his little sister, Hilde, who was brave and confident and fun and full of life. So I got rid of him. I would concentrate on Hilde, and she wouldn’t be little, she’d be the same age as her brother had been – twelve or thirteen.
That helped. And the other thing that happened was that, at a church bazaar in France, where we were living at the time, I picked up a shabby, brown, battered little book and looked inside to see what it was. It was called “Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology”, and it was printed in the year 1850. It was stuffed to bursting with stories I had never heard of, folklore and legends about trolls and dwarves and supernatural creatures from all over the world, especially Scandinavia, and I bought it for two francs.
I took it home, thrilled – and suddenly the penny dropped.
In the long ago past, the past I was writing about in my story, people had really believed in these creatures. They believed trolls lived in caves under the mountains. They believed in water spirits who lived in ponds and streams: nixies and neckans and fosse-grims who would pull you under if you got too close. They believed in ghosts – not floaty, wispy, see-through creatures, but ghosts that were more like horrible walking corpses. I could get rid of the Norse gods (who weren’t co-operating) and put these other things in their place. In a sense, it would be historical fiction almost as much as fantasy: history with the supernatural dimension put back in. Because that’s what folk-lore is: the stuff ordinary people believe, and tell stories about.
I got back to work. Clinging to the slopes of a dark and sinister mountain, Hilde and her family lived in a turf-roofed farmhouse. On stormy nights they huddled around the fire while trolls prowled in the dark outside. But an element was missing. I needed a boy in the book as well as a girl. And so he came – a stranger, an orphan boy who’d been brought to work on this remote mountain. A boy damaged by loss and ill-treatment: an anxious, self-doubting, highly-strung but determined individual whose name absolutely wasn’t Bjorn. Names in books are important, and this boy couldn’t be Bjorn. I borrowed his name from the Norwegian folk hero and mischief-maker Per Gynt (it’s pronounced ‘Pair Gunt’, but my hero became ‘Peer’, which is the more common English mispronunciation). Peer met Hilde and it was the attraction of opposites. And then…
The book took off. I got to know and love Peer and Hilde so well that it was easy to write a second book about them; and finally a third. In each volume, the characters grow older and the story becomes darker, till at last they set off together on a Viking ship, sailing to North America – as the Vikings actually did, a thousand years ago – and meet creatures out of Native American folklore and stories, just as they had encountered trolls and other creatures from Scandinavian legends in the earlier books.
It took many months to do the research. I explored the culture and folklore of the Mi’kmaq people of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. And I went to Roskilde in Denmark to spend one midsummer week out on the fjord learning how to sail a reconstruction of a Viking age ship – possibly the best fun I’ve ever had. The weather was great, wind and sun and clear water. We were a crew of eight. We rowed, we hauled up the heavy square sail, we learned how to steer, and when we had nothing else to do we sat in the clutter of the open deck and told stories, just as the Vikings themselves must have done.
Put together, the three volumes of the trilogy ‘West of the Moon’ chart the lives of two young people living in a dangerous, colourful age in which adventures wait for the humblest villager if he or she is brave enough to set out into the world. Sounds like a fairytale? Yes, for fairytales reflect the chances – the luck – of those who leave home. How can you be lucky unless you risk something? What can be riskier than to set out into the North Atlantic in a sixty-foot wooden ship?
Some people always ask: But what’s the point of fantasy? Isn’t it all escapism? Where’s the relevance of a book about the Vikings (especially one with trolls)? Can we believe we have anything in common with those shaggy-bearded marauders of a thousand years ago? Men who were outspoken in word and deed, who never forgave a slight, who would kill without hesitation or pity and crack a joke as they lay dying? The old Icelandic sagas are full of people like that: people you wouldn’t want living next door.
If the Vikings were impressed by bravery, so too are we. A sword, when it’s pointing at you, is no romantic object but a brutal tool for killing, frightening as a gun. The Viking sagas – full of heroism and murder – pose implicit but deliberate questions about the nature of true courage which are well worth pondering today. Peer’s opponent in ‘West of the Moon’, young Harald Silkenhair, looks every inch the hero – brave, handsome, charismatic. He’s even gifted and cultured enough to make poetry. But he’s also cruel, quarrelsome, violent and deadly. How on earth is Peer to deal with him? What or who is a hero? What is true bravery?
Do we have anything in common with the Vikings?

Oh yes, I think we do.

Katherine Langrish’s Troll Fell, Troll Mill and Troll Blood (HarperCollins) were recommended in the ‘Top 160 Books for Boys’ compiled by the School Library Association. “A splendidly imagined fantasy written in impeccable prose” (Carousel). Her writing has often been compared to Alan Garner's.

Katherine describes her books as ‘history with the beliefs put back in’. Her novels, which have been translated into nine languages, are based in the 10th and 12th centuries, but also include fantastical creatures such as trolls, ghosts, house spirits and water spirits, taken from the folklore and legends of the era. Her most recent book apart from West of the Moon is Dark Angels (HarperCollins 2009), published in the US as Shadow Hunt in 2010.

Kath’s own wonderful blog is Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

World Book Night and Day

2011-03-06T18:27:00.001Z

Well, that's been a week and a half and no mistake!You'd have to have been living in a hole in the ground not to know that yesterday was Book Book Night. It was preceded two days before by World Book Day, which has been running for many years now as a way of promoting children's books. As a special treat for this year the Guardian has started an online Children's books resource run entirely by young readers
here Brilliant idea!

I didn't do any gigs this year but wrote most of chapter three of the current Stravaganza novel, which was an acceptable alternative, I hope.

On Friday I was in Trafalgar Square for the pre-World Book Night bash. The photos were done in the dark in a crowd on my iPhone and only a few came out well enough to use. It was a bit like a more sedate version of a rovk concert, with Jamie Byng coming out and waving, "Hello, London!" Indeed there were some rockers reading too - Nick Cave from Lolita, ad Suggs from a very gloomy John Betjeman poem.

It was well compèred by Graham Norton and there were lovely distinctive voices from Philip Pullman (growly bear Iorek), Alan Bennet (Nation's favourite Teddy bear), Margaret Atwood, Tracy Chevalier, Rupert Everett - heavens, too many stars to name. And Boris Johnson.

But when Sarah Waters came out to read from Fingersmith, which was the book I had chosen to give away and asked who was giving that title, I yelled "me, me!" in a very noticeable way, so I'm glad the picture of Sarah reading from her book came out.

The stand-out performance for me was Lemn Sissay, who read Tennyson's Ulysses virtually by heart with such passion and involvement and intelligence, as well as being really rather gorgeous, that I won't forget it in a hurry.

I had asked Margaret Atwood on Twitter to wave to me and she did indeed give some very good waves - surely one of them was for me?

I had to get back to Oxfordshire that night and go to pick up my books next morning before giving them out at Bampton Library. Which did not leave me much time for filling in the numbers in the back of the books. But I managed it. And got given a book myself! (All Quiet on the Western front, which I had never read).

I checked on the list and I have read 12 of the 25. Hearing the readers made me want to read 2 more, there are 5 more I already wanted to read and 2 I wouldn't touch. Which leaves a few I have no strong views about. I wonder what next year's list will be like?

I'd certainly be up for doing it again but next time I will also follow Nicola Morgan's amendment. While not knocking the WBN idea, she suggested that people might like to buy an additional book, preferably from an independent bookshop and give to someone appropriate, with the note in the front, "Given in the spirit of World Book Night by ... and bought from ..."
I think that's an excellent idea. There have been so many of them this week.

Posts to come

2011-02-27T18:04:00.000Z

I'll be in Trafalgar Square next Friday night, listening to Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman, et. al.and then back down to Oxfordshire to give away my 48 copies of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith at Bampton library, to continue to highlight the threat to that and other libraries in my county. So watch out for a report on that on Saturday night on Sunday.

And then, on 9th March, I'll be welcoming a special guest to the Book Maven. Kath Langrish will be answering the questions "Why trolls, why Vikings?' as her West of the Moon bind-up is published.

And if you can't wait till then (I wouldn't blame you) you can meet her over on Katherine Roberts' Reclusive Muse blog on Monday.

"The anchovies are restless"

2011-02-17T20:36:00.036Z

To see the video of Margaret Atwood's highly entertaining talk at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York City this week: http://www.toccon.com/toc2011/public/schedule/detail/17569.

She used the anchovy image in answer to a question from the floor. Writers are the anchovies; I am an anchovy.It's something to do with being very low down in the food chain in a world where there are some very big whales around.

(I think maybe we are krill or plankton, really, but I can live with anchovy)

She also said that we are a "primary source" like a dead moose feeding 30+ species and that it was unwise to eliminate your primary source in any industry. Only 10% of writers make their living solely from writing (nice to find myself in the same ten percent as MA, who is a bit of a heroine of mine).

What this was all about was how new technology was changing publishing and how little writers made on each ebook sold. A week or two back I had quite an argument with one of my publishers about how little he was making on each ebook, or would be. He told me off for saying how much I loved my Kindle, so I was relieved that Atwood said she had two ereaders, to use on planes.

She also commented on how when mass book publishing started there was the author plus the printer/publisher/bookseller - before those roles were separated out and then literary agents were added to the mix. Or became partakers of the pie. She wondered whether we would go back to a 19th century model of publishing and I have wondered that too.

It was a witty talk, full of epigrams but I particularly liked one image: every tool has three sides, the good side, the bad side and the stupid side. A hammer can be used to build a shelter for the homeless (good) or to murder someone (bad) but you can also inadvertently hit your thumb with it (stupid).

It seems to me we are in some danger from the third (stupid) side of some new publishing tools. "Not all change is good" said Margaret Atwood, illustrating this thought with her own cartoon of an alive person changing into a dead person. But nor is all change bad. (I immediately starting thinking how the dead person could be an evil dictator, an abusive partner etc etc.)

Personally I love new technology and social networking but it is not so for every writer and we must not get stuck with a single model of publishing that could exclude good writers. Whether that is the old model or the new.

The brilliance that is Bampton!

2011-02-06T19:30:00.001Z

We had a superb "Save the Library" Read-in at Bampton yesterday. It is one of the 20 out of 43 up for closure in Oxfordshire. I rang the librarian a few weeks ago as soon as I knew about the 5th February national day and offered my services. At that point,they didn't have a support group. And by yesterday they had a loudhailer, stewards, bunting, clipboards,a rota, home-made cakes, a celebrity and lots of willing readers.

As soon as I parked up by the church (which you might have seen in Downton Abbey)I knew it was all going to be a resounding success. The little Cotswold stone building (which featured as the cottage hospital in Downton)was draped with bunting made by the local Primary schoolchildren. By the time I got to the entrance, the demonstrators had arrived from the Market Square and were being addressed through the loudhailer.

That was then handed to our celebrity, Kirsty Young,who is really engaging with village life. She did the first reading: Each, Peach, Pear, Plum by the Ahlbergs, which was enthusiastically joined in with by children of all ages.

During my stint, I urged users to follow the national advice for everyone to use their library cards to take out their full complement of books.The librarian (I had of course checked with her) had said that was twenty each. You can see how enthusiastically some of the teenagers took up this idea.

Apparently there were approximately 500 of us at the protest. 25 new members joined and they took as much in DVD fees as they normally do in a month. Lots of people read poems, including my friend Linda Newbery who is a new Oxfordshire resident. She read one about libraries written by schoolchildren in a workshop she had run.

At the end of the morning we joined hands round the building. The last time I did this was at the Albert Hall, Miss World ?1972! And I felt the same life-affirming spirit of solidarity behind a cause.It helped to know that events like this were happening all over the country.

And I shall be giving out my 48 copies of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith at Bampton Library on 5th March, World Book Night - watch this space!

A Cat and Mouse post

2011-01-31T20:20:00.000Z

Mati, the Tygrine Cat, exploded on to the children's book scene a few years ago, whiskers twitching, tail lashing, golden eyes aflame. And now he's back, in Inbali Iserlis' sequel The Tygrine Cat on the Run (Walker Books). I must admit a prejudice favour of this magnificent animal and his stories: Mati is an Abyssinian and I've had two of those. Sadly both my handsome boys had short lives but I can still appreciate such a fine figure of a cat.

The premise behind the books is that when all cats were created, there were two rival tribes.The Sa Mau were the killers and the Tygrine the playful ones. But all modern cats have both instincts and Mati must do much to hold both traits together.

We meet him still with the colony of cats at Cressida Lock but soon aware of an approaching danger worse than any they have faced before: he has to conince the cats to leave and find a new home and not all are convinced. It is a book in the fine tradition of animal stories for children and young readers and one that no cat-lover will want to miss.

The boy in Penny Dolan's book really is a boy and not a mouse, fortunately since I have brought him into such close proximity with the Tygrine Cat.It's rather a treat to have found two good junior novels to blog about. And A Boy called M.O.U.S.E. is a treat in itself. It's a chunky read at nearly 450 pages but will suit just the right child reader - as well as me!

And it's beautifully designed and decorated, which makes it easier to handle the long and complicated story in the kind of book that used to be described as "picaresque". Mouse is the grandchild of Epsilon Epton, an aged and rich man. But the intervening generation - Mouse's parents - has been wiped out in a shipwreck and his Uncle Scrope is casting evil looks at his vulnerable baby nephew, the rightful heir to the Epton fortune.

Mouse is whisked unexpectedly out of danger but ends up in an institution that owes a lot to Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby. But it's not just the school that conjures up Dickens. The Punch and Judy man, the teeming streets of London and especially the backstage cast of characters at the Albion Theatre - all recall the Victorian master of the rags to riches story.

Once we get to London it's a thoroughly enjoyable romp of villains and comeuppances, hide-and-seek and illusions, theatrical plots and cunning plans, sharing unlikely friendships and dodging enemies. And, like Dickens, Dolan gives us a really rousing ending with all the ends tied up.

Libraries again - the Oxford Movement

2011-01-21T17:42:00.001Z

Last night there was a meeting organised by the Oxfordshire Anti-Cuts Alliance (OACA)specifically about libraries. Conservative-run OCC is planning to close 20 of its 43 branch libraries - or rather to withdraw funding from them and offer them the opportunity to be run by volunteers. Last week I talked on Radio Oxford's Breakfast show with Julie Hayward of the Headington Library support group and Keith Mitchell the OCC Leader about the insult to qualified librarians and users this proposal represents.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have been a campaigner for libraries for over twenty years so will hardly be surprised that I was there. And it did this old campaigner's heart good to hear the passion of the debate and the excellence of the arguments offered.

This is what happened: The first speaker on the panel was Stephanie Kitchen a library user, new to campaigning but having done her homework, who said that the library budget represented less than 2% of the Council's budget. Then Steve Squibbs, a UNISON steward from Hampshire libraries and a Library Assistant himself, told us about the situation there, where, for example 9 out of 11 libraries on the Isle if Wight were up for closure.

Andrew Smith, the Labour MP for Oxford East said, as did many later that the Central library in Oxford's Westgate's Centre, designated as a Hub library, was not a convenient or affordable alternative for many users. He has called for a Commons debate on libraries next Tuesday, at which he will speak. He quoted the 1964 Museums and Libraries Act of 1964 " It is the duty of the Secretary of State to superintend, improve and promote the public library service in England and Wales."

Jeremy Hunt had responded to Smith that the closure of public libraries does not automatically breach the Act. But these closures were just announced on 26th November, with no consultation.

The fourth speaker was Philip Pullman and as usual he delivered a corker of an address, dealing elegantly with a loud heckler in a black hat. He reminded us that it is Keith Mitchell's job to protect services and added that the volunteers idea was patronising rubbish.

Anyone who has the time, the energy, the expertise and the will to offer their services as volunteer is already doing so. Which of the voluntary tasks they were undertaking would Keith Mitchell like them to stop doing in order to run libraries? Pullman spoke about "the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism" that does not understand anything that doesn't work for profit, including libraries.

He spoke about the way in which that had infected publishing and bookselling and he refuted the idea that he and other writers spoke out for libraries only because they were feathering their own nests. He was doing it not for money, but for love, and no-one who heard it could have doubted that.

There were over 300 people at the meeting and it seemed as if all of them wanted to speak. Neil Clarke of the newly-formed Save Botley Library Campaign said 400 people had come to a meeting where Keith Mitchell was ridiculed. After the Leader left, the group rejected completely all suggestions of bidding to run Botley library with volunteers, but that hadn't stopped Councillor Mitchell writing on his own blog that they had spoken favourably of doing so.

John Power urged us to get hold of a "corporate complaints form" from Council offices because each complaint had to be logged. A library user from Bampton, a village near me, had made the very sensible suggestion to David Cameron - her MP and mine - that there should be higher Council Tax bands for houses like the one just sold there for nearly £4m. He ignored it as he did her poinmts about cracking down on tax evasion and avoidance.

Linda Hayward pointed out that the only consultation that was going to take place would be after February, when the decision would have been made and would be only about the process of bidding to keep libraries open with volunteers.

Jonathan Neale of the University and College Union thought we were facing a turning point. He had marched with his own students and been moved by their banners claiming their right to learning. UCU will go on strike if the cuts go ahead, with support from the NUT and Civil Service Unions.

Sarah Bentley of "Our Woodcote Library" said the Central library Hub would be useless to her users since there was no bus from Woodcote to Oxford.

There were far too many contributions to record and my apologies if I have spelled anyone's name incorrectly. But these are the main messages for campaigners:

• Stick together and oppose all the cuts; the case has not been convincingly made that there is need for any cuts in Oxfordshire, which had a 17% increase in its allocation from government.
• Never be drawn into the argument about what could be cut in order to pay for libraries.
• Have no part in the bids for Council support to run the libraries on a volunteer basis; they have not thought through the problems with privacy issues and the Data Protection Act, let alone the Safeguarding implications about volunteers working with children.
• Support qualified librarians, whose skills are being trivialised by the volunteer suggestion.
• Share information, ideas and contacts across all library groups.
• Support the National Library Read-in protest on 5th February organised by Alan Gibbons: http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk/wordpress/?page_id=802
• Come to an organising meeting, also at Oxford Town Hall, on 1st February.
• Lobby the Budget meeting of Oxfordshire Council at County Hall at 8.30pm on 15th February.
• Join the Demonstration against the cuts on 12th February - Assemble 11.30am Manzil Way East Oxford and march to Bonn Square.
* Join the National march for Jobs, Justice and Growth on March 26th in London (phone 07503169657 to book a place on a coach)

I shall be reading and speaking at Bampton library on 5th February at 10am; Philip Pullman will be at Central library at 12 noon and there will be read-ins at Littlemore (10 am), Blackbird Leys (11am) and Botley (11.30am)

If the Council and on the wider scale the coalition government could understand just how unpopular and - more importantly to them - vote-losing these measures are, THEY WILL REVERSE THE POLICY, as they did with the funding for sport in schools and the Booktrust bookgiving initiatives.

And I had last night the wonderful feeling that Oxfordshire people would play a really big part in this.

Ghost of a Chance

2011-01-10T16:10:00.002Z

It is very unlucky to sit down thirteen to dinner, particularly if you are the thirteenth diner, as Eva Chance is. But it is particularly unlucky not to have a place laid for you or any food served to you – because no-one can see you are there! So begins Ghost of a Chance, the new novel by Rhiannon Lassiter, published by Oxford University Press.

It’s not too much of a spoiler, given the book’s title and the cover tagline, “How do you solve your own murder?” to reveal that Eva spends a lot of the book trying to find out who is responsible for her death.

Rhiannon Lassiter got her first, two-book, contract when she was nineteen and I know this because it was just a year after we had delivered her to Oxford University. Rhiannon is my daughter and is just seeing her fourteenth book published. It is a tribute to her writing that I forget this fact after a paragraph or two and just read her books as if they were by someone I had never met.

Of course there is the odd detail that reminds me: a fascination with peacock feathers, which I share, and with extremely dilapidated houses, which I don’t. Bad Blood, her previous spooky novel, was inspired by a friend’s house we had stayed in up in the Lake District, but Rhiannon made it much shabbier than it really is, with a kind of creeping decrepitude that gave the novel its original title of “Blight.” The last time we stayed in the Lake District house it had been given quite a makeover and was really impressively smart.

It would take a lot of time and money to do that to where the Chances live – the building always referred to as the House, with a capital H. Eva’s ancient grandfather, who has brought her up after the suicide of her teenage mother sixteen years earlier, has lost what control he ever had over the fabric of his home. Not only is it subject to the normal ravages of time; the malevolent presence of several vengeful ghosts ensure additional difficulties: indelible bloodstains at the foot of the stairs, recurring grime and cobwebs in the Solar, nameless forces that make thorny branches wound the gardeners.

And Eva, who has always been able to see ghosts, knows several of them by name or appearance: pathetic lonely boy St John in the nursery, spiteful Maggie the chambermaid, the Stalker, who is heard but not seen, and the terrifying Witch in the cellar. (I remembered briefly that Rhiannon believed as a small child that a terrifying Witch haunted our cloakroom that had the high level flush). Perhaps the saddest ghost is that of Adeline, Eva’s mother, occasionally glimpsed rowing a wooden boat on the lake like Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott.

To the dinner party at the beginning of the book come the three aunts, Cora, Helen and Joyce, the last two with partners, Cora with her cat. The discussion is about how to make the House profitable again and someone suggests Ghost Walks. From then on the climax of the story is inevitable, with the hastily spruced up House invaded by unwary members of the public.

Peacocks scream, accidents happen - some serious, people go missing, murders are attempted or achieved and Eva is no nearer to solving the crime of her own death. Her grandfather and Cora are in hospital and her only allies are unlikely ones: the local twins, Kyra and Kyle and the spiteful ghost Maggie. They, with very little help from outside, are pitted against the evil of the Witch-ghost and of a very flesh and blood human murderer.

It is a fusion of several genres - ghost story, crime novel, psycho-horror – all satisfyingly woven together at the end. And although I had read it before as an emailed File, I still stayed up till after midnight to finish it.

I asked Rhiannon to comment for me in my capacity as Book Maven, about how this book came about.

Rhiannon said:

For many years I've wanted to write a book set in a stately home but didn't have the right idea for it. Country houses are full of history but I prefer to write in modern (or futuristic) time periods. Towards the end of working on Bad Blood I started sketching out the very bare bones of a stately home story but in those first few chapters Eva was an ordinary girl with siblings, parents and friends.

I was thinking towards some sort of mystery or murder and somewhere during the first 10,000 words I had a sudden insight "what if she's the victim in this murder story?" Then I had to go back and rewrite (the first of many rewrites!) and reshape Eva's character and background. With one fell swoop siblings, parents and friends vanished – and so did Eva, becoming an invisible and ghostly denizen of her family home.

Ever since that crucial insight I thought of the book as half ghost story, half crime novel. After the more mystical mysterious magical happenings of Waking Dream and Bad Blood, I wanted to write a book where the supernatural elements ran in tandem with a physical action plot.

So in Ghost of a Chance, Eva and the ghost world exist on the other side of the looking glass to the Strattons and the murder investigation. The challenge for me was to have those two strands twining around each other while retaining certain points of mystery up until the very end.

I learnt a lot writing this book and it was tough work living up to the challenge I set myself. I think a lot of things about plot and action crystallized for me during the writing of this novel and I hope that readers will get the benefit of that. I'm excited to see what people think of the new book.

Books - can we trust the government?

2010-12-31T12:20:00.000Z

Hot on the heels of the library cuts debate came to threat to cut the government subsidy to three Booktrust bookgifting schemes: Bookstart, Booktime and Booked Up. This is spite of the fact that Booktrust generates £56m against the £13m given to them.

I have been busy writing letters to the press and MPs, including mine, the PM, for weeks it seems. But the absolute Yuletide biscuit has to go to Ross Clark (who he?), writing in the Times on 27th December. In case you missed it, and of course you can't read it online without being a Times subscriber, he had the nerve to say that children's writers speaking out in support of the Booktrust schemes, such as Philip Pullman, were just lamenting another chance to line their pockets.

Yes because writers for children are all as rich as JK Rowling, I suppose? It was a phenomenally ignorant column and I wrote a furious letter. They did publish it on 29th, but since they cut the last two sentences, I reproduce it in full here:

"What planet is Ross Clark living on? (Thunderer "Booktrust funding is just an enormous bung for authors" 27.12.2010) One where nurseries and schools are "awash with books" and children's authors "have grown fat" on proceeds of Booktrust's bookgifting schemes is much more of a fantasy than the world he posits where there are "fountains of free soup."

Mr Clark dares to impugn Philip Pullman's good faith in calling for the government not to cut funding to Booktrust's schemes (a decision which has fortunately been reversed). When I heard about the plan to cut the bookgifting schemes, I and many other children's authors wrote to the press to complain, with no idea whether my books were used in the schemes or not. I doubt that Philip Pullman checked on whether his books were included either because that is entirely not the point.

Doesn't Mr Clark know how many homes in the UK are without books? Or how many school and public libraries have been closed and are threatened to disappear under the coalition's proposed austerity measures? And how many librarians will lose their jobs?

Another fact he might have wanted to check on is how much on average children's authors earn per year. In the survey I published in 2006 and others carried out by the Society of Authors it was around £5K. Unless Mr Clark is similarly poorly rewarded for his writing, I suggest he donate his fee for that outrageous column to the Royal Literary Fund's benevolent scheme or, better still, use it to buy some books for his nearest poor school.

Though I suspect it will be a long taxi-ride away from Planet La-La".

Happy New Year!

Have yourselves a Merry little Christmas

2010-12-20T14:53:00.000Z

This is my annual picture of what the front garden looks like but I promise this is not a recycled photo; it took it on Saturday .

exactly one week before Christmas. Who knows where we shall all be by then? Our own plans all involve driving: Winchester, Eastleigh, Eastbourne, Henfield then back here, so everything depends on the snow and the roads in Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Sussex.

But these are minor problems compared with families stranded at Heathrow and other airports or people in Scotland who have had it like this for weeks and are running out of oil.

If it looks too bad, we won't travel on 22nd (our Wedding Anniversary) but will hibernate here with log fires, cats reprieved from cattery, and the two crackers left over from last Christmas! There's plenty of food in the freezer, logs in the woodstore and wine in the garage.

And we have books! Boy, do we have books! I hope you do too, wherever you are and however improvised your Christmas ends up being. May your Amazon parcels arrive on time, may you make it to your local indy and cheer up their seasonal; sales figures, and if you have an e-reader I hope it has been well-laden with titles before you travel.

A very happy Christmas to all my followers, fellow-bloggers, writers and readers everywhere.

And to the Scrooges who want to close our libraries, may your baubles drop off!

Three great picture books - one publisher

2010-12-12T14:12:00.000Z

It was only when I came to think about what were the loveliest picture books of the year that I realised they were all published by Macmillan. So stand up and take a bow, editors and art directors at Macmillan, alongside your hugely talented writers and artists, you have produced three of my favourite picture books of this year.

First up is The Wychwood Fairies. Anyone who knows me will be rather surprised by how much I like this book, given my propensity to rant against anything remotely "girly" or pink. But this book by "Harriet Everdene" and Faye Durston is an explorer's manual, not a soppy airy-fairy story about bland squirrel-stroking sprites.

Harriet is an Official Fairy Researcher at Wychwood, a magical area not far from where I live, as it happens. She sends letters and postcards to her niece and nephew, all of which you can read in this delightful feat of paper-engineering. The look is very reminiscent of a Templar "-ology" book and will bring just as much pleasure to anyone who unwraps it under a Christmas Tree.

Macmillan have put together two great talents in the persons of Julia Donaldson and Emily Gravett, who combine to make Cave Baby irresistible. Two cavepeople have an artistically-minded baby who wants to decorate the walls of their home. Cavemother does not appreciate his efforts, much like a more evolved parent, but a woolly mammoth captures the baby and takes him on an exhilarating and a bit frightening ride through the night to another cave.

There the baby happily splashes around with paint to produce some wall art that the mammoth family admire. There's a touch of Where the Wild Things Are about it as the contented baby dreams of primary-coloured wild creatures on the final spread. Lovely.

Emily Gravett strikes again with The Rabbit Problem. This paperback edition has a discreet hole through one side, which means you could hang it on your wall and use it as a calendar, but I don't imagine it would stay so out of reach for long. Lots and lots and lots of rabbits multiply through its gloriously drawn pages as one lonely rabbit in Fibonacci's (!) Field, finds a mate and the inevitable glut of bunnies ensues.

This perfect book for lagophiles, which even includes carrot recipes, ends with a heavenly pop-up explosion of rabbits leaping out of the last spread. Heavenly.

I hope lots of children get one of these in (eek!) less than two weeks' time. Preferably all three.

Are you sick of hearing about libraries yet?

2010-12-06T11:32:00.001Z

If the answer is "yes,' then tough! I have a lot to say about libraries. The first one here is Lavender Hill, Battersea, and we lived up the opposite hill, St.John's, when I was a child. I went there every Saturday, with my father, to take out our quota for the week.

My dad, having been taken out of school at fourteen by his father, was an auto-didact and borrowed mainly non-fiction. My choices were Worzel Gummidge, Dr. Dolittle and Mary Poppins (libraries are perfect for books that come in series). Later there was The Lord of the Rings.

I loved Lavender Hill library because the cone-topped turret made me think it was a fairy castle, a belief I still think not far from the truth. We didn't have all that many books in our flat in St John's Hill. It was a "railway flat" because my dad worked for the Railways at Waterloo (no-one said British Rail in those days). We had the complete works of Dickens, which I later devoured.

I won an LCC scholarship to an independent girls' school, James Allen's in Dulwich, something that would not have happened if Lavender Hill hadn't encouraged me to be a bookworm. At JAGs there was a well-stocked library, where the qualified librarian turned a blind eye when I bunked off Games to read Greek Myths.

I wouldn't have moved on to my next library without the JAGs one.

This was at Newnham College, Cambridge. I was in Clough Hall where the library was. Every week I competed with nine other young women to borrow the texts and critical books needed for our weekly essays in English Literature. Recently I went back to that college to give a talk and a workshop. There is a new library, unrecognisable, which contains some of my own books. That would have been unimaginable when I was a student.

Spool forward ten years or more and I am living in Crouch End, raising young children. This less than beautiful building is Hornsey Library, where we took our little girls every week to get out their books, just as I used to with the grandfather they never knew.

They know this building as a friend, from teddy bear's tea parties when they were little till the oldest was taking out books on the Russian Revolution for her A level History.

Then in 1990 came a bombshell: Hornsey was scheduled for closure by Haringey council along with several other libraries. Yes, you didn't read the date wrong: I HAVE BEEN CAMPAIGNING TO KEEP LIBRARIES OPEN FOR TWENTY YEARS! No apologies for shouting. It makes me want to shout, nay, scream. It's not as if it's all been plain sailing since then either.

I was elected Chair of the Hornsey Library Campaign and ran successful events there for three years, supported by local celebs like Penelope Fitzgerald, Tim Pigott Smith and Buchi Emecheta. We kept all the libraries open. And again when Hornsey's music library was under threat, we saved that too. My little girls, bigger now, got used to marching on demos with placards saying "Save Our Libraries" and "Closed libraries = Closed Minds" which I see are being recycled now.

We became adept at doorstepping councillors as they went into meetings at Wood Green Civic Centre and thrusting leaflets into their hands. We recognised them from their mugshots in the local papers.

In 1993 I added to my campaigning by starting CENTRAL, a support group for School Library Services, which I ran for six years.This task has now been ably taken up by Alan Gibbon's Campaign for the Book.

Write about what you know, some people say, so in 1997 I published a novel called Special Powers, in which the heroine, Emily fights to save her local library. She is helped by a family of extra-terrestrials who have a personal agenda for wanting to keep it open: it is a gateway to the other world they have come from and their route home.

We had no aliens with special powers to help us save Hornsey and the other libraries but sheer people power did it and it seems we will have to do it again. The government has announced it is withdrawing finance from 50% of the libraries in Oxfordshire, the county I live in, including ones in impoverished areas like Blackbird Leys. They think they can be kept running by volunteers, an example of David Cameron's Big Society.

Well, David Cameron is my local MP and he will be getting a letter, as will Ed Vaizey and the imaginatively re-named by James Naughtie this morning, Jeremy Hunt Culture Secretary. Re-phrasing their heroine's famous dictum, I shall tell them "there is no such thing as Big Society"!

When Emily in Special Powers hears that her library is under threat of closure, she thinks, "It was like someone saying there weren't going to be any more Fridays or that red had been outlawed."

That's how it feels when you hear something so impossible and wrong. I came from a lower middle class family where no-one had been to university but where books and learning were respected. I know for sure that I would not be a writer of nearly a hundred published books if it had not been for the libraries - and librarians - of Lavender Hill, JAGs, Newnham and Hornsey.

I salute them and I will do everything I can to make sure that generations of children to come have the opportunities - and delights - that I did. Please join me by writing to David Cameron, Ed Vaizey and Jeremy Hunt. They've had to re-think the school sports cuts; let's make them do the same for libraries.

My YA Novels of the Year

2010-12-01T11:06:00.010Z

These are the books I have already blogged about this year or have had guest posts for: When I was Joe, The Enchanted Glass, Castle of Shadows, Wasted, Dead Boy Talking & Almost True, City of Thieves, The Mourning Emporium.

What a year! And that's with my having to take time out from reviewing YA fiction from May to September because I was a judge for the Booktrust Teenage Book Prize. Then, once I was reading books that fell outside that time period, I could write about novels again.

And there are others, that were part of our longlist or shortlist that I couldn't mention at the time, so I'm now going to rave about a few more! The Prize was given to Gregory Hughes' striking debut, Unhooking the Moon, but that were some other corkers on the shortlist.

I particularly liked Halo by Zizou Corder, an unusual story about an orphaned girl brought up by Centaurs in ancient Greece. I thought it full of unexpected events and plot developments and interesting characters. Sarra Manning's Nobody's Girl was a perhaps more usual teenage girl fare but I so loved the way the heroine got her revenge on the mean girls and their Queen Bee that it stood out for me.

There were several books on our longlist that I really rated too - Keren David's When I was Joe (see above), Tamsyn Murray's quirky black comedy My so-called Afterlife and Marie-Louise Jensen's Daughter of Fire and Ice, to name but three.

And since the judging ended I read, reviewed and drooled over Gillian Philip's Firebrand, which is my Book of the Year in this category. Published by a smallish independent, Strident (who also published Linda Strachan's Dead Boy Talking and her earlier Spider, which just won the Catalyst award) Firebrand has already re-printed and is moving off the bookshop shelves faster than you can say "paranormal romance."

I said in my review for the Guardian that I hadn't enjoy a book in this genre so much since Susan Price's The Sterkarm Handshake, which leads me to two pieces of good news: Firebrand is the first in a trilogy and - pause here for a roll of drums - Susan Price is well stuck in to a third novel about the Sterkarms.

I can't wait for all these and many other great books in the coming years. And I hope to review them all here.

The Joy of Sequels by Michelle Lovric

2010-11-17T11:57:00.004Z

This is the first in an occasional series of guest posts from other children's writers. I'm delighted that my first guest is Michelle Lovric, whose anthology Venice, Tales of the City, I read years ago. Since she has been writing children's books, we have become friends, drawn together by a love of Italy and and a passion for words and colours.

I wrote about The Undrowned Child last year and have just read The Mourning Emporium, both published by Orion, which features some of the same characters. I thought it would be the ideal opportunity to ask this prolific and talented writer to muse a little on producing a sequel. It's something I have wrestled with myself, as the author of a "sequence" (currently five books with a sixth waiting to be written). How much do you recap and where? How many new characters do you introduce and how many carry forward? So I was fascinated to read this. Thank you, Michelle!

You’d think writing a sequel would be as comfortable as sliding into as a pair of pre-loved slippers, wouldn’t you?

You’d think – Characters created? TICK. Background established? TICK. The rules of this particular world? SORTED.

In fact, however, a sequel kicks a whole new team of problems into the writing game.

The first issue is the one that makes publishers worry about sequels. They are afraid that people will not buy the second book if they think they must also invest in the first. So you have to write a certain amount of back story in, just to make the new book comprehensible to your virgin reader.

But how much can you safely tuck in, without patronising your established fans? Where exactly do you insert it? Early on, in a lump, to get it out of the way? An indigestion of factlets threatens. Or do you drip-feed droplets of information on a need-to-know-now basis? This can sound very stagey, and could interrupt a crucial scene just when the page needs to be turned urgently.

Then you must decide which characters shall re-occur – including those you apparently destroyed – and which can be allowed to lapse.

One of the hardest things about a sequel is that you have to write its bones before you even put its predecessor to bed. So, in The Undrowned, I had to make sure that when Bajamonte Tiepolo, the Traitor, is swept away in a whirlpool, no-one actually sees him die. Nor do we know if every last Vampire Eel has perished. I planted a burden of guilt in my heroine Teo, because she cannot force herself to finish him off with a curse, despite his reign of murder and destruction in Venice. And nor has she the courage to tell anyone about her lapse.

So The Mourning Emporium starts with Teo encountering a Vampire Eel, who winks at her from under the ice that has started to strangle Venice. Instantly, she knows that Bajamonte and all his evil henchcreatures are back – and that this dreadful fact is no-one else’s fault but her own.

I raised Bajamonte from the apparently dead, but regretfully left The Grey Lady buried in the garden of the Venetian archives that this redoubtable cat used to run. But The Grey Lady’s mortality left me free to create a new feline for The Mourning Emporium. This is the equally impudent Sofonisba, the ship’s cat aboard the Scilla, a floating orphanage that will carry my characters from Venice to London and back again. I also ‘disappeared’ The Key to the Secret City, a magical book that delivers Teo into a different world in the first volume. In the sequel, she has to rely on her own wits much more, as becomes a developing character who is nearly 18 months older than she was in book one. I did not, however, get rid of my foulmouthed curry-swilling mermaids. They were the ‘hit’ of the first book, but, even more than that, I simply could not bear to be without them myself.

In planning a sequel, I’d also had to embed the potential for rendering Teo parentless yet again, thus freeing her to disguise herself as boy and join the crew of the Scilla. So, at the end of The Undrowned Child, Teo’s adopted parents are appointed the directors of a new museum of lagoon life. This means that at the beginning of The Mourning Emporium it is easy to stage their kidnapping from the island where they work all hours studying obscure ocean arthropods and their means of locomotion … all of which might make them very useful to a foreign power trying to create a new form of submarine.

It’s vital to avoid a sense of ‘more of the same’ in a sequel. So it can be very useful to move book two on geographically. So half The Mourning Emporium takes place in London – much of it in the street where I live. The change of location also gifted the story with terrifying sea journey, involving mutiny, sorcery, a Colossal Squid and near starvation. (In fact, even within my adult books I actually prefer to take two-city breaks: The Remedy takes a Venetian to London, and a Londoner to Venice. The Book of Human Skin girates between Peru and Venice.)

I wouldn’t enjoy writing for children – just as I couldn’t write for adults – unless the story gave me an issue or a theory to explore. In The Undrowned Child, the twin themes are identity and self-sacrifice. You are, I suggest, what you are prepared to die for. Teo doesn’t know at first that she’s a Venetian, but soon she’s risking her life to save the city. But then, for The Mourning Emporium, I needed a new idea for the old characters, something to test them further, something that would exploit their flaws and their talents to make a dynamic, individual storyline, one that could be lived only by them.

For me, the central idea of The Mourning Emporium is the care and feeding of children – in both the emotional and culinary senses. The book contains two characters who represent the extremes of evil and good in this department. The first is Miss Uish, a sociopathic female who seizes control of the fates of a dozen Venetian orphans, without caring if they live or die. Her counterpart is a London bulldog called Turtledove, who cherishes, adores and spoils his ‘childer’. The whole book, in a sense, builds up to the final and violent encounter between these two characters.

So will there be a sequel to the sequel? Well, there is a third book commissioned but it doesn’t follow directly on The Mourning Emporium. In fact, now I am going fifty years into the past, before some – though not all – of my original cast were born. And herein lies more joy … but that’s another story, and another blog.

Does anyone else have sequel joys or tribulations to share?

Michelle Lovric lives in Venice and London. She’s the author of four adult novels set Venice and an anthology, Venice, Tales of the City. Her third novel, The Remedy, was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her fourth adult novel, The Book of Human Skin, came out with Bloomsbury in April 2010. Her first novel for 9-12-year-olds, The Undrowned Child, tells what happens when science meets baddened magic in Venice in 1899. Two brave and clever children must save the city from the vengeful spirit of the Traitor, Bajamonte Tiepolo, returned from the dead after 700 years. The Mourning Emporium, the sequel, was published on October 28 and transports us from a frozen Venice to a grieving London, where Queen Victoria lies dying, and a massacre of innocent mourners is the object of a dreadful conspiracy between Bajamonte and an unscrupulous Pretender to the British throne. All that stands between the forces of evil and their success are two Venetian children, a hundred mermaids, a talking bulldog, some pumpkin-sellers and a devastatingly handsome circus master

Michelle Lovric and over fifty other writers appear in City-pick Venice, £8.99 paperback, published by Oxygen Books on 4 November 2010.

We will remember them

2010-11-11T12:43:00.001Z

I have been wanting to blog about this for some time and today, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, seems right . I should warn you that this is a more personal post than usual. My daughter is one of the producers of the play based on Sebastian Faulks' best-selling novel. Consequently I have been hearing a lot about this production over a long period of time.

That doesn't mean my critical faculties have been disabled but it does mean that the following account is my own specific take on the venture rather than an outsider view.

The book has many fans and, as I found out when I first told friends about the play, equally vociferous non-fans. I made a point of reading it before going to the première. So I knew what to expect. But somehow that did not protect me from the full force of the depiction of that "hell within a hell" that was the little-known World War One setting of the sappers in the tunnels in acts two and three.

At the end of the play, when the audience spontaneously rose to its feet, I couldn't join them. Not because I didn't agree with their assessment but because I was too distraught. I don't think I have ever shed tears in the theatre before, although I have, being a huge Shakespeare fan living within an hour's drive of Stratford, seen many tragedies.

But it was many minutes before I could recover my composure. What really got to me, in the scene where Stephen is rescued at the last minute by the German soldier and told the war is over, is that the two men embrace and say "Never again." (The soldier is a Jew). I just kept thinking, "Will no-one ever learn? Not only did it happen again, it's happening right now."

Some reviewers have liked the play better than others. Several made allusions to a television series that reminded me of the definition of a cultured person as "someone who can hear the William Tell overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger." I would now change that to "someone who can see depictions of British soldiers going 'over the top" and a field of poppies without referencing Blackadder Goes Forth"!

I still don't know whether what I saw was a play. I wouldn't for example tell someone to read Rachel Wagstaff's playscript, good as it was, in preference to the novel. But I will say it was one of the most powerful theatrical experiences I have ever had. And I thought of it again during the two-minute silence this morning. Stephen Wraysford and Jack Firebrace and all the others are fictional characters but they helped me to remember men I never knew. And I shall not forget them.

Book Trust Teenage Prize

2010-11-03T10:46:00.002Z

The culmination of, for me, eight months reading, arguing, advocating - in a word, judging - came this week when the winner of the Booktrust Teenage Prize was announced. This was Gregory Hughes' début novel Unhooking the Moon (Quercus).

Unfortunately for us, Gregory was in Canada at the time of the announcement but his prize was collected for him by Roisin Heycock, the editor of this unusual book. Apparently he wrote it in Iceland in eight months in "a room so small he could touch both ends ... while standing in the middle."

Hughes is English but has spent a lot of time in Canada, where the book begins. It's a "road movie" of a novel in which reliable older brother Bob, accompanies his little sister, "The Rat," on a quest to New York to find their uncle, after their father's sudden death.

They get caught up in petty crime, a virtual kidnap, a paedophile ring and the life of a successful rapper. The book stands or falls through the character of the Rat (real name Marie-Claire) and here Hughes treads a fine line very delicately. Is she an annoying brat or a brilliant, unusual, credible eccentric? Definitely the latter but it's a close thing.

It was a fresh voice on a very varied shortlist encompassing quasi-zombies, centaurs, brutal racism, a pacifist's dilemma and a "girly" book that wasn't remotely pink. And that was just the shortlist. Our longlist also featured some wonderful books, like Marie-Louise Jensen's Daughter of Fire and Ice, Keren David's When I was Joe, Tamsyn Murray's My So-called Afterlife and Mary Hooper's Fallen Grace.

The judging process was fascinating. Five of us: myself, Tony Bradman (Chair), librarian Barbara Band, journalist Barbara Ellen and impressive teenager Claudia Freemantle, faced up to the challenge of reading 120 books submitted by their publishers. At our shortlisting meeting (which was in my opinion far and away the hardest one), we sorted this monumental quantity of YA reading into three piles: Yes, No and Maybe.

The No pile was for unanimous negative response from all five judges. If one of us loved it, it was put in Maybes. It is not breaking any confidences to say that Unhooking the Moon went straight into the Yes pile from the beginning.

Once we had our shortlist - agonising for me because I should have liked our longlist to be our shortlist, if you see what I mean, but we HAD to stop at six - we had to re-read them and were joined in this by four more teenagers, whose ideas I certainly had not predicted. But I must say, if these are our future, the country is in very safe hands. Here's a photo of them with the shortlisted authors who could be present, taken by the official Booktrust photographer:

Claudia is one the far right and the teenager third from left is not a judge but a writer: Isabel Adomakoh Young is half of Zizou Corder, whose Halo was on the shortlist.

As well as lacking the winner, we also missed Marcus Sedgwick, who was on a plane to Switzerland. His Revolver was a shortlisted title. Charlie Higson (The Enemy) is 4th from right, next to Sarra Manning (Nobody's Girl) and Louisa Young (the other half of Zizou Corder). Between Isabel and Louisa is Jason Wallace, another début author with Out of Shadows.

It was a day of celebration but now I have a word of rebuke and it is for the editors of a large proportion of the 120 books we read. This was remarked on by our teenage judges in particular so is not the embittered rant of an older generation stickler! Here, at random, are some of the things I found in published, not proof, copies:

"clashing symbols;" an address printed on the cover different from the one inside the book, "slithers of ice;" a country's Latin motto incorrectly translated; "sight" for "site;" "I sunk into a chair;" "pour over their relationship;" "the baby laid in her buggy" and a definition of "déjà vu" so bizarre that one can only assume neither the writer nor editor knew what it means.

Too numerous to mention were the instances of the "lay" for "lie" confusion and the use of "I" as an object as in, for example "He looked at X and I." And that was just the grammar and vocabulary!

Claire Armitstead, the Literary Editor of the Guardian, had some harsh words for editors recently when judging their First Novel Award and she was talking about content rather than syntax or word-use. Sadly, that was also evident in the books I read. I can honestly say there were some, including by very well-known names, that should not have been published, let alone submitted for an award.

No names, no pack drill but why is this happening? And why does no-one understand that "Wherefore art thou Romeo?' does NOT mean "where are you, Romeo?" but "WHY are you Romeo?" (If Shakespeare had meant "where" he would have said it and added another syllable in the line so as not to bitch the rhythm. That is the speech that contains "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" after all).

Is it that editors don't go on courses any more? Or that proof readers are less capable than they used to be? I can't believe that. Answers, please, in Comments.

A Tale of Too Many Cities

2010-10-24T19:34:00.001+01:00

This is not a comment on the excellent City of Thieves, reviewed below, but a long wail about why so many books are called "City of ...." I have perpetrated five such books myself in the Stravaganza sequence with another to come (City of Swords) in 2012.

But it's not just me. Cassandra Clare has written four so far: City of Bones, City of Ashes, City of Glass and City of Fallen Angels (I'm not sure about the order since I stopped after the first one - Bones, I think.) But John Berendt wrote City of Falling Angels about Venice and Paul Auster's New York trilogy also features a City of Glass.

Confusing, isn't it?

St Augustine wrote City of God so maybe we should blame him.

Anyway, City of Thieves is a very good book and a very good sequel to Castle of Shadows. (It has an equally gorgeous cover, which doesn't reproduce adequately, with gold foil and shiny black birds in full flight against the darkening blue sky.)

At the end of Castle of Shadows, Charlie (Charlotte) has lost her father, found her mother and become Queen of Quale. And she's still only twelve. The new book turns the spotlight more intensely on to Tobias Petch (Toby), Charlie's friend and fellow-adventurer. The two of them thought they had conquered Alistair Windlass, who killed the king, Charlie's father, but turned out to be Toby's own parent.

City of Thieves opens with Toby looking forward to seeing Windlass hanged. And this is just one example of Renner's clear-eyed and uncompromising approach to family. Toby hates his biological father, was horribly beaten by his late stepfather and is horrified by belonging to the Petch family who are all professional thieves. Charlie finds it hard to forgive her mother for her desertion in the first instalment.

But worse complications are to come. Toby's mother helps his father to escape the noose and just when Toby thinks he is going to be able to track the villain down, he is captured by his step-uncle, Zebediah Petch, who wants him to become his apprentice lock-picker, safe-breaker and general burglar.

The sections in which Toby is trained and his will subdued through beatings and other forms of bullying is horribly convincing. And the character of Alistair Windlass - who inevitably comes back into the story - is endlessly fascinating. In Windlass, Renner has created that rare thing in a book for children: a truly morally ambiguous character. He has killed more than once and is limitlessly ambitious (he used to be the country's Prime Minister, after all). But he has some of the qualities of timeless heroes too.

He is as fastidious about his appearance and dress as Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci, as clever in anticipating others' actions as Sherlock Holmes and as ruthless as Che Guevara.

Charlie's mother (the oddly-titled "Dowager Queen" - should be Queen Mother, surely?) is a scientist, a pretty hotshot physicist and chemist, who has accidentally invented a lethal weapon. And it's the plans for that which form the McGuffin of this story - the thing that Windlass must gain at all costs.

But Toby is a bit of a McGuffin himself, wanted equally by Windlass, Zebediah and by Charlie and his other friends at the castle. It's a thrilling read, that keeps you on the edge of your seat till the end but is also full of unexpected aperçus about the nature of monarchy, weapons of mass destruction and political bargaining.

My only beef is that, having put her readers through the wringer, Renner leaves us wanting and waiting for volume three. Please, Orchard Books, tell us it's coming soon! You can even call it City of Something, as long as I can find out what happens to Toby, Charlie and the rest before too long.

People Love Reading or Please Listen - Reconsider

2010-10-15T21:01:00.001+01:00

OK, guys; time to take to the streets again. In yesterday's so-called "Bonfire of the Quangos", Culture Minister Ed Vaizey announced the abolition, not of Public Lending Right itself but of the body that administers it and has done so admirably for the last 26 years.

There is so much wrong with this decision that it is hard to know where to begin. I could start by saying that the PLR Office is not a Quango in any meaningful sense. It's not like The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) for example, which decides which drugs to fund or The Audit Commission with investigative powers.

PLR does what it says on the tin: it establishes by the use of rolling samples of borrowings from Public Lending Libraries, how many loans have been made of which titles and recompenses living British authors of those books at a few pence per loan (currently around 6p). No-one says "well that author or that book is more deserving of payment than this.": it's a straightforward computational job.

If you have registered your titles, they qualify, assuming you are eligible in the first place: i.e. you are alive, British and have your name on the title page.

But although the principles are simple, the proportions and percentages have to be agreed among all contributors listed on the title page, the samples have to be carefully taken and the extrapolation done. Amazingly the outstanding current Registrar, Jim Parker, does this with a staff of nine, covering something like 133 million titles

There are surprising results among the most borrowed: J. K. Rowling at 96; Philip Pullman at 221; Bill Bryson at 246. You'd expect them all to be higher, except that their fans probably prefer to buy their books.

Can you imagine that this scheme will be more efficiently or cheaply run by any other body? (currently the rumour is that this function might be taken on by the Arts Council). Any additional costs to set up the running of it differently will come out of the pot of money allocated to writers. Nor could it possibly be "more transparent and accountable". The Registrar is accountable to the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (DCOMS), currently Jeremy Hunt. The loans are listed as transparently as they can be on every printout made by every registered writer.

This sum of money, received every February is a lifeline for writers at a time of recession when we hear of books cancelled, advances slashed. For many writers PLR is their sole or substantial portion of their income. Writers like the late great Brigid Brophy and other members of the Writers' Action group, fought for a decade to get this payment on the statute books; she would be turning in her grave to see what is happening to it now.

Yes I know the PLR itself has not been abolished - only the Office. But does anyone really believe it will survive after the four years the current agreement has left to run? Please write to your MP, Jeremy Hunt the Secretary of State and Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, urging them to retain the Registrar and the PLR Office.

In hard times, people need to be able to borrow books for free and writers need some compensation every time they do so. 4,000 of us signed the petition; we need the support of all readers. Dust down your old placards and banners or PLR aged 26 will die aged 30.

Last week was about book-banning

2010-10-03T17:02:00.006+01:00

Now censorship and book-burning are two different things in the way that eggs and mayonnaise are two different things, so I make no apology for using an image of one to illustrate the other.

The week just finished was "banned books week." Rhiannon Lassiter blogged about it with many useful links
here.

And Lucy Coats wrote bravely and movingly about her own experience of assault here.
It really hit a nerve, as she got 44 comments and numerous private emails and DMs, not to mention over a thousand visits to the blog in a very short period of time.

Such blogposts were inspired by an American Professor's attack on the novel "Speak" by Laurie Halse Anderson, published in 1999. It is about the horrible subject of rape and a young woman's reaction to it. I haven't read the book but I will now. Professor Scroggins from Missouri thinks it's pornographic.

This led to widespread Twittering using the hashtags #speakloudly and #bannedbooksweek. In fact I read so many lists of books banned for so many reasons that my head began to reel. My friend Anne Rooney wrote an article in New Hunanist here.

In it she writes about a children's book illustration of a female anthropomorphised mouse who was sitting with her hands in her (clothed) lap. It had to go because someone thought the mouse might be seen as masturbating!

Has the world gone mad?

I have experienced some censorship in my time. In a non-fiction series about animals, illustration by photographs there was one slide of an elephant which the US publisher wanted us to change because it showed the bull's penis. It was so gigantic none of us - five of us looked at the slides together - had noticed it, thinking it was a leg!

Just in case you think these things always originate in the USA, I also had a book banned from Islington libraries once. It was a picture book called Nancy No-Size and the librarian objected to a page in which three siblings compare skin colour in a bath and the text reads "she wasn't dark like her big sister and she wasn't fair like her baby brother. So she wasn't dark and she wasn't light: she was no colour at all." (I quote from memory but am no expert on the books of Mary Hoffman).

Taken out of context, it looks bad but a/ it was about a mixed race family, like mine and b/had been preceded by pages in which Nancy thought she was 'no size at all"and "No age at all" because she was a middle child: equally nonsensical statements.

Actually everything in this story came from my own family. It was dedicated to my middle daughter of three, who was sometimes one of the two big girls and sometimes one of the two little ones. My girls had two female cousins with whom they shared a bath on visits, who were the same racial mix as them. One was dark like them; the other fair like her red-headed English father. They would compare skin tones and comment on them.

I was banned for "racism" but I think it would have been more racist to leave out skin colour in a book about finding your place in the family when you are not sure if you are short or tall, old or young.

Anyway, it's not pleasant to be banned and criticised for something the opposite of your intentions in writing a book and I feel for Halse Anderson. But I thank Professor Scroggins for drawing my, and many other people's, attention to her book.

Why Waterstone's has done the right thing

2010-09-24T12:32:00.000+01:00

I just heard through my Bookseller Bulletin that Waterstone's Piccadilly has opened a separate section for teen books. You can read more here:
http://bit.ly/943Ykp

What a brilliant move, I thought, and then, "why hasn't it been done before?" If you think of teen books as Young Adult, you can see straightaway that the emphasis should be on the "adult" rather than the "young."

No self-respecting 13-year-old and up wants to be seen in the Children's section amid the picture books and novelties. Better by far to have their own section, which will also include books written for adults but thought to have teen appeal.

So three cheers for Waterstone's and may all book shops with enough space follow suit.

Grabbing the ones in the middle

2010-09-20T19:04:00.000+01:00

In any literate culture you will find people who love books. The bookworms are a given, across history and geography, and I bless them every day. They read, re-read, write passionate emails to their favourite authors and sometimes even fan fiction. They use libraries but books, new and secondhand, borrow recommended titles from friends and some of them review their favourites on blogs.

They may have learned to read early or late, through reading schemes, real books, or newspaper headlines (as I did). They are not bothered about whether the books come in paper or electronic form and might well own both.

This post is not about readers like them.

Then there are and always will be a whole group of people who, for whatever reason, don't read books. Some can't read but that's not usually the main reason. They will read newspapers and magazine perhaps but never a book. One is Victoria Beckham.

I'm not really talking about them either.

Then in the middle there is a huge third group who are not avid readers nor non-readers and those are the ones I want to get hold of and influence. Preferably while they are still children.

The world is so full of wonderful books and all it takes to get someone hooked on this huge lifelong pastime or passion is introducing them to the right book at the right time. Traditionally this has been done by parents, teachers and librarians. And for the last very many years by writers going into schools.

But libraries are closing, School Library Services are under threat and schools budgets are so tight that many author visits that might once have taken place will just not happen. What will happen to "the ones in the middle" then?

Books are like ice-cream

2010-09-16T10:44:00.001+01:00

A couple of days ago I was idly semi-listening to Radio 4's The Food Programme. It was about ice-cream.

Now, I don't consume much of the stuff, except when in Italy, because I rather not have any at all than have poor quality. This is NOT how books are like ice-cream, because I have to be reading something all the time, even if it's rubbish. Even if it's train time-tables or ketchup labels. There are lots of people like me - logophiles? Anyway, addicts of the written word (and the spoken, come to that).

Ice-cream comes in lots of flavours but I have my favourites - coffee, gianduia, nocciolato to name but three. But that's still NOT how books are like ice-cream, because although I have my favourite writers and genres, I like a wider range of kinds of book than I do of ice-cream flavours.

No, what caught my attention was that big companies like W***s will give retailers a freezer in which to display ice-cream in but then the shopkeeper is obliged to stock a hefty percentage of the supplier's products in that freezer.

That made me think about the kinds of promotion that publishers pay booksellers for - inclusion in the Books for Giving Christmas catalogue, table position, window displays. Isn't it a bit similar?

OK, the ice-cream manufacturers are giving something away and the publishers are paying but the end result is the same: the customer buys what they see.

Now there might be gorgeous ice-cream made in the traditional style by Yum Yum Cottage*, on a farm with Jersey cows and soft fruit picked from a poly-tunnel that morning, but what are the chances of finding Yum Yum Cottage ice-cream in enough shop freezers, in the limited space allowed by Messrs W***s** et. al. and competed for by everyone else to make that a known brand?

What are the answers? Yum Yum can't afford to hand out free freezers any more than small publishers can afford to pay the promotional prices asked by bookshops. Nor can big publishers afford to pay the "added value" mark-up on every title they publish. I heard over ten years ago from a major publisher who did not want to be quoted that this could amount to £1 per copy.

Please suggest answers in comments.

What I can tell you is that the result is the same. People buy what they see and what they have heard of even what they can't see and haven't heard of may be better. You can't blame them. Just think of the best-selling ice-creams in the country and compare the flavour, ingredients, appearance with that of any really good ice-cream you have ever tasted (e,g. Brivido on Nanni's in Siena or Vivoli or Festival in Florence) and reflect.

Now think of the best-selling books. THAT is how books are like ice-cream.

* Fictional brand
**Not fictional brand

The knives are out

2010-09-07T21:15:00.000+01:00

Today the Booktrust Teenage Prize shortlist was announced. See http://tinyurl.com/32j8wlp Oh and some other literary prize put out its shortlist too but we needn't concern ourselves with that.

Coincidentally I can review the two teenage books here because they are in next year's judging period, when someone else will take over my duties on the panel.

You might think "Oh no, not more knife crime books!" but I urge you to think again. Yes, there have been a lot of those books about and one of them was the precursor to one of those reviewed here.

Anthony McGowan's The Knife that Killed me was on the Guardian shortlist and I don't need to tell you just how many prizes Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go has won.

Dead Boy Talking by Linda Strachan and Almost True by Keren David are both strong books with striking covers. The title of the first makes its point economically and the second is the sequel to When I was Joe, which is on the shortlist for the North East Teenage Book Award. Strachan's earlier title for Strident, the equally disturbing Spider, was also shortlisted for a prize - the Red Award, appropriately enough! (Though that one was about "twocking" not knife crime).

Actually neither of these new books is about knife crime; they are about the experiences of one main character caught up in circumstances that have been made a lot more dangerous by the presence of knives.

Dead Boy Talking opens: "In 25 minutes I will be dead .... they say it takes about 25 minutes to bleed to death." It takes a little longer to read the book but not much as its breathless style and urgent plot make you read quickly, eager to find out how it ends. And it's only 168 pages long.

We know from the beginning that Josh has been stabbed, the day after accidentally knifing his old friend Ranj. No spoilers in telling you that. The story unwinds quickly in alternating chapters of third person narrative flashback interleaved with even shorter italicised chapters showing Josh's present rapidly-changing situation. (So there are similarities to Anthony McGowan's book). But - and here IS a spoiler - the ending does validate the title, though Strachan gives us some hope at the very end too.

It is a powerful and disturbing book that just might save a reader's life.

Almost True is almost a stand-alone but a reader would get much more from it after reading When I was Joe. For newbies, the hero is not called Joe, though he is sometimes thus referred to among other names. He has reverted to Ty, his real name before he and his mum entered the witness protection programme, after Ty witnessed a stabbing in the park.

As the two books have developed we know there was more to Ty's involvement than he at first admitted and although he is a witness he might also be charged. The book opens with a chapter I had already read because it was (to me annoyingly) printed at the end of the first book. So I knew that mum, Nicki, has just seen her new boyfriend shot in mistake for her son. The witness protection isn't working too well.

This is a much longer book - 437 pages - and is less focussed on the one central incident. Ty has a lot of adventures, both connected with the first book and new ones. One of the book's strengths is that both his very flawed parents are fully realised as are many supporting characters - something you don't always get in an "issue-based" title.

There is hardly any of the gansta talk that marred the first book for me, though there is a bit too much about Twilight, which will surely date it? (And I'm a bit disappointed that Claire, Ty's love interest and a strong character in her own right, likes it so much!)

But these are minor blemishes. You do care very much what happens to Ty and his family because David makes you care. And that is surely the mark of a compelling writer.

The future of the book (or Cake in a Digital Age).

2010-09-02T14:25:00.002+01:00

The first was the weighty title of a panel discussion hosted by The London Review of Books at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The chair was Nicholas Spice, LRB's publisher and the panel was Mary-Kay Wilmers, its editor, American academic James Shapiro (of whom more anon) Andrew Franklin, the founder of Profile Books and Andrew O'Hagan, author of The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe.

As recent background Spice cited Amazon's announcement that for the first time sales of ebooks were outstripping those of hardback titles and the fact that America's bookshop chain Barnes and Noble seemed to be in trouble.

James Shapiro said that the University of Michigan Press would in future produce only ebook versions of their titles. And that American literary book reviewers were all applying for Law School. He was also scathing about Wikipedia and the fact that students turned to it first for their research. And apparently 40% of US students admit to cutting and pasting from the Net in their essays.

O'Hagan lamented the Google settlement as "an act of pure exploitation" and Spice worried that the loss of printed books would lead to "the amateurisation of critical discourse."

So far so dismal. It was enlivened by Mary-Kay Wilmers' wildly indiscreet remark about the quality of Cambridge University Press books. And Andrew Franklin thought there could be a role for literary magazines and publishers. Shapiro thought they would be needed as "gatekeepers", a remark which incensed one member of the audience heard hissing on the way out about "middle class white self-appointed gatekeepers."

Perhaps "signposters" would be a better term one listener suggested.

The LRB also runs a cake shop and café, leading to Spice's memorable remark that "the future of cake is secure in a digital age."

But only Andrew O'Hagan was careful to distinguish between the book as content and the book as format, referring to "the disembodied book."

To be honest, I didn't come away from this session feeling any the wiser about what might happen to the "embodied" book. I wanted to know if EIBF would in future be ebf and how an author might sign an ebook. The truth is that everyone has an opinion on this issue and there seem to be very few answers backed by anything other than hunches.

Edinburgh Book Festival

2010-08-18T16:46:00.000+01:00

If I ever stop sneezing and coughing long enough to get up from my sickbed and pack, I'll be off to Edinburgh on Friday for the Book Festival. My event is on Saturday, by which time I hope to have a voice. I've even made a PowerPoint presentation.

But what I'm really looking forward to is other people's events. On Friday night we are going to the London Review of Books on "The Future of the Book" - an old warhorse which has gained some shiny new e-spurs recently.

And Saturday pm there's James Shapiro talking about his latest Shakespeare book, Contested Will. His previous book, 1599, was absolutely excellent, so I'm hopeful. There's a clash with my timings which means I can't get to Nicola Morgan's session but I hope to meet her in the Yurt. Ah, the Yurt! Worthy of a whole post in its own right.

It's a tent where writers, their partners and publicists can drink coffee or beer or whisky and eat sandwiches or buns and I am relying on it for Saturday sustenance. But it is so much more than a tent - more of a Bedouin mirage in the middle of Charlotte Square. It's one of the few places in the world where you feel you are living the writer's life that non-writers believe goes on every day.

In the evening it's Michelle Lovric and Katie Hickman on "Fictionalising Venice" - something I have been known to do myself from time to time. I don't know Katie Hickman's book but have read Michelle's absolutely remarkable The Book of Human Skin.

I'm sure there are all sorts of other delights I'll be missing but after two nights in an Edinburgh hotel, we're decamping to Linda Strachan's house. Then home via York, where we'll visit Shandy Hall. Now there was a writer whose festival sessions I'd have paid good money to attend.

And I think Laurence Sterne would have felt right at home in that yurt.

Just one more and then I'll shut up about it

2010-08-07T19:44:00.001+01:00

How many agents does it take to launch a paperback?

Or it's my party and I'll smile if I want to.

In this picture, three from Rogers, Coleridge and White. Patricia White, on right, has been my agent for over 25 years and we are good mates.

Next to her, her assistant Claire Wilson, then moi, then Catherine Pellegrino, who is also at RCW. They all came to support me at Bloomsbury for the launch party of the Troubadour paperback.

It was a very nice party and I wish I had remembered earlier that I had my camera with me. Then I could have shown you my editor Emma Matthewson, who made a very nice speech and has edited all seven novels so far that I have written for Bloomsbury, Ian lamb, who organised the party and all my publicity and Susannah Nuckey, head of Children's Marketing, who surprised me with the lovely poster that has Troubadour on one side and all the Stravaganzas on the back.

So you just have to imagine those guys. And the lovely librarians, booksellers, journalists and book bloggers who came. Not to mention my family, who put up a good showing.

Normal non self-promotional service will be resumed in the next post - till another book comes out!

Troubadour giveaway

2010-08-02T12:04:00.000+01:00

The paperback edition of my historical novel Troubadour comes out in the UK tomorrow with this rather gorgeous image on the jacket.

Bloomsbury are kindly offering ten free copies, which I shall sign, to the first ten people to comment on this blog. UK only I'm afraid and you do have to be a Follower.

If you don't score one, or even if you do, you can get a rather fine poster of the jacket, with all the Stravaganzas on the other side from susannah.nuckey@bloomsbury.com

Sentenced to read

2010-08-01T19:08:00.000+01:00

For nearly twenty years a scheme has been quietly growing in the US called "changing lives through literature." You can read about it at www.cltl.umassd.edu

The Guardian ran a piece about it recently:
http://tinyurl.com/34wmb46

It offers those who have repeatedly committed crimes the alternative to a prison sentence: they can instead join a reading group and discuss books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. Robert Waxler, whose original idea it was, reports a high success rate in terms of low percentages of re-offending.

What a splendid, humane initiative!

It just reinforces what we all know: that books really do make a difference. But I do wonder what it means for those who join reading groups voluntarily. If it can prevent people from re-offending what can it do for those who have never offended? Answers on a postcard please.

Infamous Five: it's all very strange

2010-07-25T20:52:00.000+01:00

Not for the first time, publishers are tinkering with Enid Blyton's texts, to bring them this time into the 21st century.

Here is the link to the Guardian's coverage and Zoe Williams' comment:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/23/enid-blyton-famous-five-makeover

My question is: why bother?

There are so many better writers for children who have been at work in the last sixty years that to faff about changing "fellow" to "old man" and "it's all very peculiar" to "it's all very strange" seems like a perverse rearranging of the literary deck chairs on a recession- hit publishing Titanic heading towards a very big iceberg with "e-books" written on it.

As a child I read everything by Enid Blyton that I could get hold of; in fact I probably learned to read IN ORDER to read her. (After the age of seven I had the added incentive that my appendix had been taken out by her husband and he had given me her autograph).

Ah, that autograph! (see above). Probably one of the first, along with Captain W.E.Johns) examples in publishing of brand recognition. And she is still one of the top ten children's writers being borrowed from libraries - at least partly on the strength of it.

But what did she mean to me once I had left childhood behind? I felt no guilty affection as I did for J.R.R.Tolkien or happy nostalgia as I did for Gwyneth Rae (author of my favourite Mary Plain books about the little bear from Bern). Nothing but boredom and embarrassment.

I don't want to ban her and of course it's wonderful that lots of children (including me) have in the past been turned on to reading by her books. But I think it's time quietly to let Enid Blyton die a natural death. No amount of tinkering will make her read like a writer writing today and she just isn't that good.

Let them read Holes, I say, and the wealth of other excellent writers that awaits them. As for Enid, it's time the Famous Five Went on a Very Long Holiday.

Break in service

2010-07-21T10:42:00.000+01:00

Aaargh! Sorry for the gap in blogposts. My computer, a MacBook Air, died suddenly aged 2 years and 11 months. Have bought a new one and a 3-year warranty!

So I'll be back in business soon.

Football on and off the page

2010-07-02T18:11:00.000+01:00

Well, I had been waiting for the latest Terry Pratchett Discworld novel to become a paperback, with some trepidation. It's about football, you see, which doesn't interest me at all. But I've read all the other Discworlds and we were at the airport about to fly to Italy for two weeks' holiday and there it was in WHSmith, Heathrow Terminal Five.

And my holiday reading had needed to include three books to be read for the Booktrust Teenage Book Prize, so a bit of distraction was deserved.

Then there was the World Cup. We were on holiday with a daughter who was quite interested and her partner, who was very, there was Satellite TV at our apartment and it rained quite a bit the first week. So real life football was had.

I remembered that what occurs in my novels is not necessarily what they are about so started Unseen Academicals. It's not really vintage Discworld, not up there with Reaper Man, Guards, Guards or Witches Abroad. Not even as good as Going Postal, which had a very successful TV version last month.

But it was very acceptable and the football wasn't a problem. I suppose as usual it's partly about tolerance and doing the right thing and also about teaching baddies a lesson - though I didn't like how that was done this time. And there are some good jokes.

The curse of the sequel

2010-06-13T18:03:00.000+01:00

I am about to go to Italy for two weeks - a holiday, yay!
But also research for Stravaganza: City of Swords in Lucca and David in Carrara and Settignano. Tax deductible, as always.

Anyway, one of my pre-leaving jobs is always "answer fanmail" and TWO people had written on the same date, from different countries to ask if I would write a sequel to The Falconer's Knot.

Now, I am very fond of The Falconer's Knot. It was my first "proper" historical novel, commissioned by Bloomsbury, shortlisted for the Guardian Prize, winner of the French Prix Polar Jeunesse and now shortlisted for another French prize (it is called "Rouge Crime" in France).

But it is complete in itself. There are, if I remember rightly, five murders, the culprit(s) revealed and two couples get together (OK three if you are being technical). What could a sequel possibly be about?

It's OK when a book has been conceived as a trilogy or longer sequence but tacking on "book two" as an afterthought is something that happens far too often, IMO. Same with films: did we really need Back to the Future 2 and 3, when the original film had a well-crafted plot and satisfactory ending?

And I'm QUITE sure we don't need Avatar 2, even though we are going to get it. Fans and sometimes publishers are very keen on sequels but they sell less well, get fewer foreign editions, are not so often shortlisted for prizes and certainly get fewer reviews than their originals.

So, no guys, I am NOT planning a sequel to The Falconer's Knot!

Back after the holidays

Salome on a doughnut

2010-06-07T20:35:00.000+01:00

This was one of my mother's more incomprehensible expressions - used, I think, to mean something overdressed. She would not have been able to use it about the Oxford Playhouse version of Oscar Wilde's play, Salome, I saw last Friday.

It is possibly unstageable. I read it as a teenager, which is when when should read all those decadents like Huysmans and Wilde and look at Aubrey Beardsley's magnificently over-the-top illustrations and pine for a life that is gloriously fin-de-siecle.

It is the basis of Richard Strauss's fine impressionist opera of the same name, where you would certainly learn that the name was pronounced SAHlomay and not, as in my mother's phrase SahLOHmee.

Wilde wrote it in French and got his boyfriend, "Bosie", to translate it into English but Lord Alfred Douglas wasn't quite up to it and Wilde had to tidy up his version. It is very rarely performed.

So husband and I took the chance to see both the play and the opera in subsequent months and have been to see the play. A sign in the foyer said in contained "Adult themes". I wanted to cross out "adult" and substitute 'puerile" in marker pen on the way out.

For yes, you've guessed it, the production was of the "pee, po, belly, bum, drawers" school immortalised in Flanders and Swann's "Let's talk rude" or, in this case "let's act rude." Will blogger let me say it was a w***fest? Am putting asterisks in case it won't.

Let's get one thing clear: I was not shocked. I was BORED! I never again want to see on the stage the manic crotch-grabbing, groin-thrusting, unimaginative "business" that passes for a directorial vision in so much theatre. For goodness' sake, Salome, who is supposed to be a fifteen year old virgin, sticks her fingers inside her knickers and gives them to the chained prophet, Jokanaan, to sniff! He meanwhile writhes in frustration.

There is a difference between erotic and pornographic, between suggestion and in-your-face (literally I'm afraid) explicitness. The modern dress, which was combat fatigues for everyone except Herodias, meant you couldn't tell who was a Jew, who a Syrian. If there had been an interval, I would have left during it.

Roll on July when nothing can spoil the divine music of Richard Strauss's version. And if the dance of the seven veils is performed by a bottom-wiggling tart with a removable bikini under her fatigues, I can at least close my eyes and hear something subtle and nuanced by someone who, like Oscar Wilde, understood the difference between decadence as an art movement and the sleaze of a provincial lap-dancing club.

Walker Canongate YA books

2010-05-30T11:06:00.000+01:00

In an inspired new venture, two independent publishers have got together to produce the best of adult books that they think teenagers would enjoy. A sort of reverse crossover, if you like.

I've read two out of the four launch titles and think they've made some really good choices.

Not only did The Life of Pi win the Booker Prize, it's an enjoyable, reasonably challenging read and a good introduction to the idea of the "unreliable narrator."

And Niccolò Ammaniti's I'm Not Scared is a terrific choice. I haven't read the Canongate translation but "Io non ho paura" was a set book on my Italian Literature course a few years back and I also saw the very good film made of it. I think it's Ammaniti's best book - possibly even the best book he'll ever write.

Four titles will be released in July this year, the other two being Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters and Matt Haig's The Radleys, with new covers like the ones above. It will be interesting to see how they go down with a new audience.

Why I can't review YA books for six months

2010-05-19T19:14:00.000+01:00

It's been killing me not to tell you but I am one of the judges for the Booktrust Teenage Book Prize this year. In a funny kind of way, I have become Neil Gaiman. He won last year's prize with The Graveyard Book (Bloomsbury) and it's traditional (as on the Guardian Award) to invite one year's winner to be next year's judge. But since the great Neil lives in the USA, this is not practical (think of the expenses claims for attending judges' meetings) so I'm deeply flattered that they have asked me to stand in.

BUT! Firstly I have to read and absolutely ginormous number of titles before I go on holiday mid-June (yes I know that's in three and a half weeks - eek! But I have been reading for weeks; it took rather a long time for the judges to be announced). Worse, for me is that my hands are tied when it comes to blogging about individual YA titles if they are on the list submitted by publishers.

And there are books I'm dying to talk about.

The Chair of the judges is Tony Bradman and the other judges are journalist Barbara Ellen, librarian Barbara Band and a teenager Claudia Freemantle. Once we have a shortlist we will be joined by four more teenage judges and I shall find all their views most interesting. I have a hunch there will be a core of titles both age groups enjoy but another tranche that is liked more by one lot than the other.

And the agony is I won't be able to say a word about it! Ah well, after November 1st I'll be free to talk about YA fiction as much as I like.

Meanwhile I'll have to try to look a lot more like this chap on the right. It's going to be a tough call. I just hope some of his stardust rubs off on me. (See what I did there?)

Just hope it's not the graveyard slot.