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Ruth Starke

Bird by Sophie Cunningham

by
July–August 2008, no. 303

Get out that DVD of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Locate the scene with Marilyn Monroe in the pink satin strapless number, singing ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’. Study the dancers and find that statuesque blonde in the black bustier posing as a human candelabrum. That’s Anna David. (Her best friend, Eleanor Phillips, is one of the all-American girls with pink roses in their hair). It wasn’t Anna’s first film – if you’re very alert you can spot her in All About Eve – and it wasn’t her last. Hitchcock cast her as Kim Novak’s double in Vertigo, and Tippi Hedren’s in The Birds.

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Miss McAllister’s Ghost by Elizabeth Fensham & Take it Easy, Danny Allen by Phil Cummings

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June 2008, no. 302

Childhood is full of revelatory moments; sometimes shocking instants of understanding that people, events and relationships are not as they seem. They can happen in adulthood too, but those in childhood can have an intensity that makes them deeply formative. They might be subtle eye-openers or life-changing epiphanies, but they all cause a shift in perspective that changes one’s perception of the world. These six new books contain transformative moments for their protagonists, from the realism of family secrets to the fantasy of high-adventure mysteries.

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Lifelong love of books

Dear Editor,

Ruth Starke’s review of my book Stories, Picture and Reality: Two Children Tell (October 2007) is a competent, even enthusiastic, summary of the book’s main points, with emphasis on its uniqueness (starting with infants and books, and including siblings). She notes that no other male child has been studied in this way.

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Does any male under thirty not employed in the English department of a university really like Jane Austen? At least Shakespeare wakes you up now and then with a spot of violence and bloody murders.

This literary gender divide is at the heart of Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight (Penguin, $19.95 pb, 244 pp), Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow’s funny story about a male and female student writing a story together, inspired, as an author’s note informs us, by an Internet story about a male and female student writing a story together. Very metafictional.

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Virginia Lowe has carved an academic career in the area of ‘childist criticism’ based on the responses of very young children (particularly her own) to books. Shortly after their daughter, Rebecca, was born in 1971, the Lowes began to read to her. Virginia recorded the process in a daily journal. Three years later, when their son, Ralph, was born, she recorded his reactions as well, and continued the journal in detail for about eight years. It comprises some 6,000 pages covering almost 2,000 books and the children’s engagement with them, and it formed the basis of her PhD thesis, of which Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two Children Tell, is a reworking.

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Humour sells, and it is no coincidence that the best-selling authors in children’s fiction know how to tell a funny story. It can be pure escapism of the silliest sort or the kind of humour that helps us to cope with life’s disappointments, hardships and embarrassments. Most childhoods contain plenty of all three and thus provide rich material for writers, and none has pushed the boundaries further than Morris Gleitzman. Walking a fine line between what is funny and what is painful, he has successfully employed humour to explore such subjects as euthanasia, homosexuality, cancer and birth control, and the result has been books that have made thousands of readers laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously. But the proliferation of recent titles featuring worms, toads and nostrils as protagonists has left me unmoved, and I feel lukewarm at best about those children overboard, underground or hiding from Nazis. Often the humour has seemed forced and contrived.

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Life’s not easy when … (fill in the blank according to your main story issue). It is a line that appears frequently on back covers and in press releases for junior fiction. But life is getting a lot easier for parents and teachers of reluctant readers who would far rather race around with a ball than curl up with a book. With the arrival of the sports novel, they can now read about somebody else racing around with a ball – or surfing, swimming, pounding the running track, wrestling, or cycling (the genre covers a wide field). Balls, however, seem to predominate. And problems. Life isn’t easy for publishers without a sports series. Hoping to emulate the success of the ‘Specky Magee’ books written by Felice Arena and Garry Lyon, publishers have been busy throwing authors and sport stars together, one to do the creative business, and the other to add verisimilitude and sporting cred.

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Stella Lees

Philip Reeves’s Infernal Devices (Scholastic) is the third part of a quartet about cities on wheels trundling about a future Earth. It has action, irony, intertextuality and flawed characters – some with dark agendas – and displays an original and startling imagination. Number four will complete the best fantasy since Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. On a smaller scale, and closer to home, Runner (Penguin), by Robert Newton, brings Depression-era Richmond alive. Young Charlie is employed by Squizzy Taylor, until the boy realises he’s doing the devil’s work. Newton’s wit lightens a tough tale with the inventive and laconic speech of Australian battlers, so that, when you’re not blinking back a tear, you’re laughing aloud.

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These titles are aimed at a primary school readership, yet there’s a wide gap in both ability and life experience between the emerging readers at one end and the almost-teenagers at the other. Some novels successfully bridge that gap, but I’m not sure The Reef (FACP, $14.95 pb, 128 pp) is one of them, despite the publisher’s classification that this is ‘for children aged 8–12 years’. It is certainly an exciting story of suspected murder and missing silver coins, but consider some elements of the plot: Tom, the young protagonist, is menaced and harassed by two nasty out-of-towners who threaten him with death and so terrify him that he has nightmares; while swimming, he’s pursued and threatened with a speargun; later, he’s assaulted and kidnapped, a sack is tied over his head, and he’s taken out to sea and thrown overboard in the expectation that he’ll be battered to death on the reef.

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Sherryl Clark

Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants (Scholastic), by Louise Rennison. With all the serious young adult books around everyone needs a dose of Georgia Nicolson’s confessions. Between the Sex God, the troublesome cat and life at school, Georgia’s diary is full of deep meaningosity – not! Life on a small farm in 1906 is beautifully portrayed in Jennifer Donnelly’s A Gathering Light (Bloomsbury). Mattie longs to be a writer, but it seems impossible when her father won’t even let her work at the Glenmore Hotel over summer. Everyone wants Mattie to do things their way and the strength of the story lies in her quiet persistence and honesty. Historical description creates a believable world without ‘teaching’. Dragonkeeper (black dog books), by Carole Wilkinson, deservedly won a CBC Award this year. Ping’s travels with a dragon follow the idea of the quest, but the setting and detail bring ancient China to life for readers of all ages.

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