Showing posts with label children's books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children's books. Show all posts
Saturday, March 17, 2018
Monday, July 3, 2017
Grief, gladness, and a worthy heroine: The Elephant, by Peter Carnavas
Olive, the star of the story, is a true heroine. She's bright, intelligent, and thoughtful, and she just knows that if she works hard enough and finds the right spark of joy, she can scare away the lumbering grey elephant that follows her father around, weighing him down and making him too heavy to see the wonder of the world around him -- or, indeed, the wonder of the tiny world in front of him in his daughter.
Olive explains it to her friend Arthur, whom she likes "most of all because she [can] tell him anything":
"See, my dad has this really big sadness. He's had it for a long time. And I imagine the sadness is like a big grey elephant following him around. That's what I see."
"Like an imaginary friend?" Arthur asks.
No, Olive tells him, "Like an imaginary enemy."
Arthur is intrigued, and offers Olive a glimmer of hope: if she can fix her dad, he'll be really her dad again. So that's what Olive sets out to do. She's helped in her efforts by her Grandad, who lives with Olive and her father, and helps fill some of the hug-holes in Olive's life. But he's not her dad, and he can't see the elephant. Only Olive can.
Olive's attempts to make her dad happy are told in exquisite phrases, the kind you want to roll around and taste on your tongue. Olive's imagination is vividly alive; she sees "milkshake clouds", a bike that "must have been something wonderful when it was young, when it was alive." Her grandad looks like "a skinny scarecrow, his old straw hat full of holes." Alongside the word-pictures are joyful, beautiful line drawings that add a further layer to the story and help build towards a final gentle surprise.
Olive's story offers a hopeful ending, but it also paves the way for discussions about the loved ones who may not find easy answers for the elephant that dogs them, people who cannot be made happy again. While never using the words "depression" or "grief", The Elephant nevertheless manages to explore these concepts through a story that is beautiful in its simplicity yet never dumbed down. It depicts self-comfort and a believable coping mechanism in a way that's full of gentle revelations. It manages to be childlike but never cloying or saccharine, full of Australian sensibility but universal themes. This book is a rare treasure.
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Belonging and bravery: The Boy and the Spy by Felice Arena
Antonio is a rota -- an unwanted baby deposited in a wooden wheel tied to the wall of the convent in his Sicilian hometown. The name is a slur that Antonio just can't seem to shrug off; it carries with it the constant reminder of rejection. Antonio's only family is Mamma Nina, a widow who took him into her home. But Mamma Nina is sick, and Antonio worries for her. However, his everyday battles get thrust to the background when Antonio discovers an injured American soldier hiding out in a sea cave. If the soldier is found by the Italian army, he'll be shot. But if Antonio keeps the soldier a secret, is he a traitor to his country?
Inspired by author Felice Arena's family connection to Sicily, the story evokes a rich sense of place. Words in Italian and German, sprinkled judiciously throughout the text but never so much as to slow down a voracious young reader, help build a sense of a multilingual Europe, huddled together in wartime yet separated into allies and enemies. The Sicilian coastline, finely drawn, is almost its own character -- rich and wild and very clearly beloved.
Honest about the darkness, grief, and complexities of war, yet never too gritty or raw for young readers, The Boy and the Spy manages to hit the magical sweet spot of middle grade fiction. It asks thoughtful questions -- Is it okay to lie to save someone's life? -- and deals with ideas of loss and belonging in a way that is warm, kind, and engaging.
It's lively historical fiction with all the charm and adventure of The Secret Seven. What more could a kid want? And it's the perfect jumping-off point for incorporating WWII history into a vivid and compelling English unit. The teacher in me is delighted.
The Boy and the Spy
Felice Arena
Published April 2017 by Puffin Books
164 pages
Saturday, July 9, 2016
The week in books: The Island Will Sink and a contemporary Emma
Episode 1: the one where I finally get my reading mojo back
Winter has been a stingy beast. She promised books, blankets, and steaming mugs of cocoa, but so far all she has delivered is a six-week long flu. So my winter has felt mostly like a cycle of working, sniffling, coughing, sleeping, headaches, working. But in between, a few bookish snatches. And – joy of joys – I spent last night and this morning entirely at home, doing nothing but catching up with family, sleeping, eating, and reading.
Last night, I finished the final pages of Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma, a contemporary take on Austen’s classic of the same name. With its at times condescending and unsympathetic heroine, I feel like Emma is perhaps Jane Austen’s most contentious story, but it’s one I’ve always loved because of its humour and the fact that Emma develops and grows throughout the novel. As a love story, it feels healthy and right, because Emma is loved for who she is in spite of her flaws, and yet the man who loves her hopes for growth and carries an expectation of great things. Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma failed to capture that for me. Here’s what I shared on Goodreads (slight spoilers ahoy):
I only recently realised that this version of Emma is one book of the four-book Austen project, which includes other contemporary reimaginings of Austen stories by Val McDermid, Joanna Trollope, and Curtis Sittenfeld. I’ve been seeing Sittenfeld’s Eligible (a Pride and Prejudice story) around bookstagram a lot lately, and am keen to give it a try. But I have to say that this version of Emma left me a little less enthusiastic about exploring an Austen retelling.
The book I finished this morning, on the other hand, left me far more satisfied. The Island Will Sink is a debut novel from Australian author Briohny Doyle, and also represents literary mag The Lifted Brow’s first foray into book publishing. The Island Will Sink is out next month and I feel it will meet with a wonderful reception. Why, exactly? It’s hard to put into words.
The Island Will Sink is at once intelligent, challenging, and yet accessible. The story is beautifully-paced, unfolding with a process that feels both literary and cinematic, filmic and immersive in a way that compellingly mirrors the story – that of a filmmaker who creates immersive cinema. Max Galleon processes the world through the language of film, and it is through this language that we meet with Max’s world, a near-future landscape of a culture bent on obliterating its environmental footprint and concerned with optimising the physical and mental health and wellbeing of its inhabitants. Enhanced surrounds provide personally-tailored feeds for information and entertainment, virtual reality is the standard plaything of pre-teens, and individual monitoring systems report on, archive, and even edit personal experience and memory. Everything is within reach – and at the same time, nothing is.
Max is a man in crisis mode, obsessed with his own amnesia, neglectful of his family, and stuck in creative block as he plans his next blockbuster disaster film, the latest in a long line of films to plunge their audiences into a simulation of total annihilation. The timing of Max’s film project coincides with the accelerated sinking of Pitcairn Island into the Pacific Ocean, an environmental disaster which would signal the beginning of a new age.
The story builds with a sense of quiet foreboding, a subtle suspense heightened by the fact that Max, in his state of confusion, is an unreliable narrator. In fact, his whole world is unreliable, because when memories can be erased and rewritten, reality is a constantly shifting thing. The gaps in Max’s knowledge become gaps in the reader’s knowledge as the threads of narrative come apart and then together again.
The story plays out with a cool sterility reminiscent of films like Equilibrium, a grand sense of opera as in Tree of Life, and deliciously-balanced surrealism (think Inception). Beautifully written and even darkly humorous in places, it puts speculative fiction, often considered the domain of a specific readership, within the reach of anyone. I want to read it again and pull together the threads I might’ve missed, and I can’t wait to read others’ reviews of this one as it meets with audiences. A very impressive debut.
Finally, last night I began CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, which I’m buddy-reading with my sister Andrea. It’s her first time reading and my first-time-in-a-long-time after devouring it many times in childhood. Already the story is rushing back to mind, along with those childhood feelings of wonder and fear. It’ll be so much fun to read and chat about this with my sister as we go.
How was your week in books?
Winter has been a stingy beast. She promised books, blankets, and steaming mugs of cocoa, but so far all she has delivered is a six-week long flu. So my winter has felt mostly like a cycle of working, sniffling, coughing, sleeping, headaches, working. But in between, a few bookish snatches. And – joy of joys – I spent last night and this morning entirely at home, doing nothing but catching up with family, sleeping, eating, and reading.
Last night, I finished the final pages of Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma, a contemporary take on Austen’s classic of the same name. With its at times condescending and unsympathetic heroine, I feel like Emma is perhaps Jane Austen’s most contentious story, but it’s one I’ve always loved because of its humour and the fact that Emma develops and grows throughout the novel. As a love story, it feels healthy and right, because Emma is loved for who she is in spite of her flaws, and yet the man who loves her hopes for growth and carries an expectation of great things. Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma failed to capture that for me. Here’s what I shared on Goodreads (slight spoilers ahoy):
Because I had friends who had already read this one and were all unimpressed, I went into it with very low expectations. Then, as often happens, my expectations were so low that they were exceeded, and at first I had a lot of fun reading this retelling of a classic Austen tale. But about one third of the way through the book, things began to drag. What had seemed fresh and funny at the beginning simply didn't develop into anything more. The characters felt one-dimensional and boring. There was little to bring sparkle to the story. And worst of all, Emma -- already a challenging character, but with enough wit and warmth to get her by in the original Austen -- is frankly unlikeable in this story. She is selfish, entitled, narrow-minded, judgmental, and incredibly idle. Even her kindness is an act of condescension. The original Emma got herself into strife by being too interested in others' affairs. McCall Smith's Emma isn't really interested in... anything.
And this aspect of her character doesn't change throughout the story. In fact, by the end of the book, the vibe was still an introductory one, as if the pace hadn't quite picked up from the opening scene-setting. The conclusion felt hurried and unsatisfactory, a hasty declaration without any evidence of a genuine relationship behind it. What's more, there were some odd moments of sexual confusion for Emma that lent nothing to the story and, in fact, felt like a tacky attempt on the author's part to use the briefest of references to sexual diversity as a trite way to be relevant or contemporary (while still sounding quite the opposite).
I like you, Alexander McCall Smith, but I did not like this book. At all.
I only recently realised that this version of Emma is one book of the four-book Austen project, which includes other contemporary reimaginings of Austen stories by Val McDermid, Joanna Trollope, and Curtis Sittenfeld. I’ve been seeing Sittenfeld’s Eligible (a Pride and Prejudice story) around bookstagram a lot lately, and am keen to give it a try. But I have to say that this version of Emma left me a little less enthusiastic about exploring an Austen retelling.
The book I finished this morning, on the other hand, left me far more satisfied. The Island Will Sink is a debut novel from Australian author Briohny Doyle, and also represents literary mag The Lifted Brow’s first foray into book publishing. The Island Will Sink is out next month and I feel it will meet with a wonderful reception. Why, exactly? It’s hard to put into words.
The Island Will Sink is at once intelligent, challenging, and yet accessible. The story is beautifully-paced, unfolding with a process that feels both literary and cinematic, filmic and immersive in a way that compellingly mirrors the story – that of a filmmaker who creates immersive cinema. Max Galleon processes the world through the language of film, and it is through this language that we meet with Max’s world, a near-future landscape of a culture bent on obliterating its environmental footprint and concerned with optimising the physical and mental health and wellbeing of its inhabitants. Enhanced surrounds provide personally-tailored feeds for information and entertainment, virtual reality is the standard plaything of pre-teens, and individual monitoring systems report on, archive, and even edit personal experience and memory. Everything is within reach – and at the same time, nothing is.
Max is a man in crisis mode, obsessed with his own amnesia, neglectful of his family, and stuck in creative block as he plans his next blockbuster disaster film, the latest in a long line of films to plunge their audiences into a simulation of total annihilation. The timing of Max’s film project coincides with the accelerated sinking of Pitcairn Island into the Pacific Ocean, an environmental disaster which would signal the beginning of a new age.
The story builds with a sense of quiet foreboding, a subtle suspense heightened by the fact that Max, in his state of confusion, is an unreliable narrator. In fact, his whole world is unreliable, because when memories can be erased and rewritten, reality is a constantly shifting thing. The gaps in Max’s knowledge become gaps in the reader’s knowledge as the threads of narrative come apart and then together again.
The story plays out with a cool sterility reminiscent of films like Equilibrium, a grand sense of opera as in Tree of Life, and deliciously-balanced surrealism (think Inception). Beautifully written and even darkly humorous in places, it puts speculative fiction, often considered the domain of a specific readership, within the reach of anyone. I want to read it again and pull together the threads I might’ve missed, and I can’t wait to read others’ reviews of this one as it meets with audiences. A very impressive debut.
Finally, last night I began CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, which I’m buddy-reading with my sister Andrea. It’s her first time reading and my first-time-in-a-long-time after devouring it many times in childhood. Already the story is rushing back to mind, along with those childhood feelings of wonder and fear. It’ll be so much fun to read and chat about this with my sister as we go.
How was your week in books?
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