I miss Raymond Briggs. That’s a bit strange for me, because I didn’t know him personally, and that sort of loss doesn’t usually get to me. But for some reason, I can’t quite get past it.

            I’ve been seeking out interviews with him and reading works of his I never had before, as well as rereading ones I did. In contrast to the commentary on the death of the Queen, I didn’t feel as if I was mourning a grandad, but perhaps that we’d all lost a major dignitary. Certainly, a link to another era. I even found myself making a pilgrimage to the South Downs, searching out one of the villages he called home. I scrambled through briars and down nearly vertical chalk paths, wondering why I was doing this and whether I would ever admit to having done it. Perhaps I just wanted to be reassured of his unreachability, particularly from curious weirdos like me. I was satisfied to find what I think was his house, nondescript and out of the way, with the notice ATTENTION – ELECTRIC FENCE – BEWARE OF THE DOG – ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

            Perhaps I also wanted a glimpse of the landscape he loved. I took a pew in a church so silent it might almost have survived the events of When the Wind Blows.

            Having returned to blogging, I want to try and say something about Briggs. Particularly as, somewhat grumpily, I have taken against so many of the tributes I read that simplified his work or his personality. As for the Instagram post I stumbled on: “the Snowman will be crying icicles … in Paradise [with] Ethel and Ernest you can rest in peace and talk about the glorious weather…” In point of fact, besides being fictional, the Snowman  is dead and gone, as are Ethel, Ernest and Briggs himself – if that’s too bluntly put, we need to find another way to talk about that loss. He’s certainly tried to do it often enough over the years.

            Perhaps instead of what’s gone, I should try to talk about what he’s left us.

            Before anything else, there is the sheer artistry of his drawing: extraordinary skill (observation, communication, modulation) employed by a mind that is alive, dynamic, precise. Briggs’s visual style is as unmistakable as a parent’s handwriting, but he can variously work with warmth or coolness, the richness of fine art or the neat thrust of a newspaper cartoon. For years I’ve wondered about the many styles he uses in the Fairy Tale Treasury (edited by Virginia Haviland). He could and did do it all. Nicolette Jones’s monograph suggests this deliberately illustrated (as it were) the variety of origins and tones of the tales: comic, mystic, operatic, and more. Whether he’s writing what Andrew Male on the Backlisted podcast called “the children’s Anatomy of Melancholy” (Fungus) or an exercise in memoir and social history (Ethel & Ernest), he is always exact and specific in his approach. Whatever the dominant note, there’s always the possibility of comedy or poignancy.

            It might have been better for his reputation if he had never written for the young: it confuses the critics, who think it means his work is simple. In fact, the scope of children’s literature has been broadened by his picture books, even challenged by them. He has left a series of stories that go against the grain, particularly in depicting its protagonists.

They are not in the conventional way heroic. They witness or endure things. In The Man, a boy is visited by a Borrower-like figure who demands to be clothed and fed (“Ugh! Brown bread! Gives me the trots!”) and even to listen to the Morning Service on Radio 4. Suddenly the boy has responsibility towards something he doesn’t understand or even entirely like – like Father Christmas’s duties, perhaps, or Jim’s preparations for fallout – and the book is about that experience, not whether he succeeds or learns something about himself.

            In fact, he loses his temper with the Man more than once: like other Briggs characters (not least the Man himself, and the boy’s parents) he is vocal about the things that offend them. It’s what makes them human. One of the most poignant aspects for me of When the Wind Blows is how the old married couple bicker as they hide together from their impending doom. Briggs himself had a reputation for being disagreeable, like his incarnation of Father Christmas – a persona cultivated by a private, slightly shy man, according to Jones. What I hear, in interviews with Briggs as well as his characters, is frankness. There is no stifling concern to be polite at the expense of being honest. Then there are certain things in his books – such as goodbyes –that go beyond words. They happen, but to describe or discuss them would be to attempt some reconciliation or consolation.

This is not to say that his books are nihilistic. The Man concludes with a letter addressed to the boy: TIME TO MOOV ON – THANKS FOR PUTTING UP WITH ME – SORY I STAYED TO LONG – 3 DAYS IS OUR ROOL – YOU WER MOR KIND TO ME THAN ANNY WON ELS IN THE HOLE OF MY LIFE. This kindness runs throughout Briggs’s books: even that grumpy bachelor Father Christmas cares for his animals. Far from a dragging a popular figure down to earth, this proto-graphic novel is now recognised as an affectionate tribute to his father. If it is a ‘tell-all’ account of a somewhat unknowable, it’s very much from the perspective of a son. The Man and The Bear, on the other hand,read to me like reflections on the role of a parent or carer.

People are difficult to live with, these stories seem to say, particularly if we take them as they really are (whereas children’s books are so often concerned with the idealised version). Yet we are driven to care for them by some urge, some responsibility, perhaps by a conscious rejection of hatred. The characters in When the Wind Blows are infuriating: nonetheless, the book strives to elicit sympathy for them, and even to speak in defence of them. The real target of the book’s attack, the powers responsible, are given the silent treatment (perhaps why this book haunts contemporary readers as much as ever).

            Then there’s The Snowman. I’m nearly as old as that cartoon, so I’ve lived through the avalanches of merchandise, theatre adaptations and (shudder) a sequel. It’s as hard for me as anybody to look past that and see the purity of that figure, who flies because – how could we all have missed this – that’s what snow does. Created by the nameless boy on what might as well be a blank page (looking a bit like a child’s drawing), and who delights in his brief life. If other books have traces of autobiography, this feels to me to be about the transcendental nature of artistic creation. Fancy words, though, for something so deliberately silent and irreducible.

            After all of that, what can I really say about Raymond Briggs?

            Perhaps the only thing to say is I hope you read him now, or re-read him, or look again at his illustrations. I hope his many students at Brighton College of Art, and those readers who love his work and are artists themselves, follow him in making work that is true to themselves, wherever that takes them.

It’s because he was prepared to put so much of himself into his work that, in the best and most enduring way, he is still with us.

Besides reading as much of Briggs’s work as you can, I highly recommend Nicolette Jones’s insightful monograph, Raymond Briggs, published by Thames & Hudson. You can hear the excellent Backlisted episode on Fungus the Bogeyman here. Briggs is one of those rare people interviewed twice by the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, first in 1983 with Roy Plomley and again in 2005 with Sue Lawley, and both interviews and charming and insightful in different ways. The Snowman film will celebrate its 40th anniversary this December.

Until I read Boy, Everywhere, I never knew that children’s voices were right there, back in the origins of the conflict of Syria. In 2011, seeing uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, fourteen-year-old Mouawiya Syasneh and his friends wrote ‘Your Turn Next, Doctor’ on the wall of their school in (in reference to President Bashar al-Assad’s former career in ophthalmology). Detainment of the teenagers (for over a month) along with their abuse by police triggered protests which, in turn, brought the full force of Assad’s regime down upon his people. ‘So a war began and millions of people became homeless all around the world because some kids wrote some bad stuff about the government,’ summarises Sami, A.M. Dassu’s protagonist. ‘Insane.’

Sami is not much younger than Syasneh; he only learns about the graffiti tale and the history of the war, from his Mama, when the family are already fleeing the country. He has grown used to the conflict, he says: to electricity blackouts, an army checkpoint outside his school, to stories about friends of friends getting killed or injured. Yet he has also been relatively untouched by the war, even knowing that his surgeon father has been looking after the wounded. Sami’s story begins in a bubble of comfort and normality – wealth, in fact: maids, drivers, PlayStations, tablets. A reader like me, for whom the conflict is safely ‘elsewhere’, has an unnerving experience in those opening chapters, waiting for the blithe, likeable young protagonist to feel the jolt of remote matter hitting home. Unnerving, not only for what we know will follow for Sami, but what we recognise in his complacency.

It takes a few pages for the novel to turn nightmarish. Violence erupts close to home, and impacts brutally on Sami’s family. Then, his parents are making plans, and events move entirely out of his control, sometimes beyond his understanding. Why are the family selling their car, in anxious haste? Why can’t Sami tell his friends what they’re doing? Why are they planning to set out to sea in a fishing boat, when the whole family know the risks? Can anything ever be done for his sister – or the friend he makes on their journey – or any of them? Dassu does a great job of taking us through the experience of countless desperate refugees, but she deserves more praise for making Sami’s situation feel particular to him: his guilt, his anger, his fear.

In particular, this is a novel about Sami’s efforts to remain true to himself while his world is in disarray: to maintain his sense of morality and civilisation whilst slipping between the boundaries of society. It would be easy to make this the story of someone forced into passivity and victimhood, particularly as the novel progresses and becomes, if anything, even darker (despite following the legal process of claiming asylum to the letter, Sami and his family do not find peace and security on their arrival to Manchester). Sami finds himself in opposition to his family, as much as he is to those who are hostile toward him. His story becomes an internalised one, his actions increasingly hard to predict. Is he going to do the right thing – and what, precisely, would that look like?

I’d have to go to Turkey. That was where we’d flown to before getting into Europe. I went back to Google and searched for a map of Turkey. I memorised the five major cities, went back to the Manchester Airport website, and typed them in. Finally! There was a flight from Terminal 1 to Antalya in the evening. The flight took four hours and forty minutes. I can survive that in a luggage hold, I told myself. I had to.

               This is a thought-provoking and heart-breaking read at times; for young readers learning about the experience of refugees, it will be eye-opening, while for readers like me who should know more about these experiences, it’s a spur towards learning, and doing, more. It’s also a gripping novel, one that I couldn’t resist returning to for just one more chapter – and then just one more. It’s a story about trauma and disassociation, but in small, powerful ways, it’s about connection: how strangers can support one another, how seemingly remote experiences are part of the same story, how family can be tested, and endure. Never lapsing into sentiment or hollow documentary, this story is alive and unpredictable, embodying all the optimism and pain of a child’s voice speaking in the midst of conflict.

Boy, Everywhere is published by Old Barn Books. You can buy it from Waterstones here, from Bookshop.com here, or support your local independent. Despite my first assumptions on seeing the front cover, I wouldn’t recommend it to readers younger than twelve. For younger readers interested in the experience of refugees, there’s a great list here put together by BookTrust. Meanwhile, you can directly nudge things in a better direction via this organisation: https://choose.love/

At one point near the end of The Trokeville Way, a character brings a book of Lafcadio Hearn’s ghost stories to the protagonist in his hospital bed. She inscribes it to him with the words: Strange stories for strange Nick. You can’t blame me for taking that personally (a feeling not diluted by the fact that Trokeville’s Nick is three months off thirteen years old, exactly the age I was when Jonatha Cape originally published this novel, back in 1996). Russell Hoban is not just a strange writer I like, not even a writer whose strangeness speaks to me, but a writer whose strangeness speaks to a strangeness in me. This is a dreamlike novel, about a lonely landscape with the gathering twilight that precedes a storm, a feeling of repressed violence and the beckoning lights of a town just over the horizon. If it feels like familiar territory, that’s probably because it’s the sort of terrain explored in the majority of Hoban’s novels, but it also stirs a strange sense of recognition in me…

Strange! I’ve seen that place before… It’s a re-reading for me, maybe ten years after the first time. For some reason, I didn’t remember that the cover is misleading. Beautiful haunting work from Patrick Benson, of course, but not quite right for this story: it implies something in the line of Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams, a spooky, slightly magic story for kids. The opening chapter suggests much the same, with almost-teenager Nick losing his fight with a school bully, and then buying a strange pile of oddments from the mysterious ex-conjuror Moe Nagic on his walk home. The word ‘bastard’ glints warningly in that first chapter, and as the novel progresses, there are more and more jarring notes, ‘shit’ and ‘wanker’ and so on. As the pages turn, the book seems to shift in our hands, turning from Middle-Grade to Young Adult: provisional terms that weren’t really in use in 1996. Interestingly, Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights came out the year before, and he seems to do something similar, with the tone of his trilogy mirroring its heroes blurring into adolescence, only Hoban does it more quickly and therefore more unnervingly.

Of course, it wouldn’t do for a Hoban novel to give us what we expected on the first page. You hand over your ticket at the door, descend down the escalator, and after that the Tube map is only of ostensible use. You get the strangest feeling – Strange! – that the author himself didn’t quite know where the little bridge – I’m sorry, brudge – in Moe Nagic’s mysterious puzzle – that is, juzzle – was going to lead him and his protagonist. At times, the book reads to me like a first draft, frustrating in places but rich with authentic, deeply felt mystery. If Woolf or Burroughs wrote a teen novel, it would take a similar approach. In the strange world of the juzzle, Nick not only confronts his school bully again and again, but talks with his parents about their own secret frustrations, none of which become any clearer, even when he’s back in the ‘real’ world. The world of his parents’ interior lives feels eternally over the next horizon, like Trokeville, just as the power of burgeoning sexuality is always elsewhere: a troke, halfway between a trick and a stroke.

Then there is the terror that lies in wait throughout the novel: ‘There’s no magic, but there’s Moe Nagic,’ says the conjuror at the start of the novel, his career of illusions thrown away, his marriage in disarray. (Moe specifically pins his age as being 47, which by my amateur sleuthing puts him at just the age of Russell Hoban, when he found he was incapable of writing a sequel to his first big hit – The Mouse and his Child – and wrote his first novel for adults, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1972). “Do you want there to be magic?” a character asks Nick at one point, and he tells her he does – and what could be more frightening than finding magic and losing it? Moe’s ex-wife is described as magical to more than one character, but she’s looking for magic of her own. The year after Trokeville, Harry Potter’s ersatz variety of wizardry first arrived, and for my money, the magic in children’s literature has overall been more programmatic and functional ever since. Nonetheless, Hoban’s kind of magic is not quite like anyone else’s either.

Or maybe that’s not quite true either. The strangeness speaking to strangeness that I mentioned at the start of this strange book review is a trope of Hoban’s writing: from the Vermeer painting that haunts his Medusa Frequency and beyond, to bats on Chinese pottery, a hippogriff in Angelica Lost and Found, and even the sound of approaching trains at Ealing Broadway station. All these seem to speak of the same lonely spaces, the yearning, terror and beauty: in this novel it’s in a Grace Jones song, a painting by Burne Jones and a watercolour by Thomas Girtin. All these different people – and the painter of Nick’s brudge juzzle – somehow connected with this other level of reality, acknowledged it, made works of art with it; making it part of our world, so that our experience is deepened, enriched, sadder without ever quite being explicable. you’re almost thirteen, nick. nou’re old enough to understand what i’m going to tell you, Nick’s mind tells him frankly, at one point. there are no separate things. I’m almost thirty-seven, and I’m only just beginning to get it.

Strange, that.

I wrote about The Trokeville Way today because it’s Russell Hoban’s birthday, and fans of his will be toasting him and recommending him all around the world. Hoban’s most famous children’s book, The Mouse and his Child, is certainly not one to be missed, but he also wrote a huge body of picturebooks which are pretty much all essential too. My favourite is possibly The Twenty Elephant Restaurant, but The Marzipan Pig is stunningly poetic, while the Frances books are witty and wise. That’s truly just scratching the surface. If you like the sound of The Trokeville Way (which is not print), some of its themes are explored in The Medusa Frequency, and some in his YA graphic novel with Alexis Deacon, Soonchild. If you’ve not read any, I think my all-time favourite is Turtle Diary – and after that, there’s always more to discover.

Meanwhile, Grace Jones’ version of Libertango is here.

The latest President of the United States was only just sworn in this week, but I was delighted to see him make a cameo appearance in the pages of this new kids’ book; a headline in ‘Rumours & Whispers’ magazine reading, “Newly elected US President faints at first Supernatural Affairs briefing”. Perhaps that means Amari and the Night Brothers is taking place now, in January 2021, the very month it’s being published. It really wouldn’t come as a surprise: this is a good old-fashioned slice of escapism, but it also feels decidedly contemporary.

In that case, somewhere out in the Rosewood Projects, Amari lives an unassuming life with her nursing assistant mother, and Quinton, the older brother she hero-worships. Except when the novel begins, Quinton’s already been missing for six months – perhaps because of some mysterious business he’s been involved with – and Amari is probably the only person who still believes he’s alive. She’s getting bullied at school for being a Scholarship kid with a difficult home life. But one day she gets an invitation – to the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs…

Unlike Joe Biden, Amari doesn’t faint on discovering the strange things going on behind the scenes of the modern world. She doesn’t really have time to: it feels like a fresh invention arrives on nearly every page. It’s not exactly a new trope in town, the secret ‘World Around the Corner’ (to borrow the title of Maurice Gee’s wonderful novel of faery folk in modern New Zealand), but it’s just great fun to see B.B. Alston relishing the imaginative possibilities, with throwaway references to man-eating stalactites, person-sized trenchcoat-wearing ants, carnivorous thunderclouds and the International Railways of Atlantis.

Amari needs to learn about this world fast, because she’s trying to rescue her brother, and to do that she must become a Secret Agent for the Bureau and she’s competing against the children of ‘Legacy families’, wealthy, well-versed in the supernatural, and arrogantly entitled. Amari finds herself back in the situation she experienced at high school: stigmatised and bullied for being working-class, a ghetto kid. Not only that, but the supernatural world has its own analogue for the racial prejudice that Amari has spent her life dealing with. I won’t spoil the details of that, but it’s one reason Amari feels like more than just another ‘kid becomes magical apprentice’ novel.

Alston doesn’t just deploy a metaphor or two in treating this theme: he makes those difficult experiences instrumental to Amari’s character, self-deprecating and wary at first, becoming increasingly determined, confident and daring. Throughout the novel, characters try telling Amari she doesn’t belong in this realm of privilege and power, but she grows increasingly resolute. At other times – still no spoilers – she is offered power of a sort, with certain moral compromises which she refuses to make. One glorious moment has a character look deep into Amari’s ancestry, finding some who were enslaved and others who fought for universal freedoms. The emotional temperature of the book feels very contemporary: like Amari’s aura, which her best friend can innately read, it lights up the book in myriad colours.

Interestingly, I found the novel’s climax a tiny bit underwhelming – perhaps because it’s clear this is the first in a series, with more confrontations with the Night Brothers (and who knows what else) to follow – but the culmination of the book, and of Amari’s journey toward her destiny, was really exciting. The energy of Alston’s novel is really in the interactions of its characters, deftly portrayed. The secrets Amari keeps; the friends she encourages; the kids who bully her and how she responds; the Bureau agents who doubt her and those that believe in her; everything about her Mama (more of her in the next book, please). This is a big-screen, 3D, popcorn-munching romp of a novel, painted deliberately on an international canvas, but what really sets it apart are the small, closely observed gestures of its characters, and the vibrant details that build its world. It’s going to be an utter delight for readers this year, and I can’t wait to see what happens to Amari next…

Amari and the Night Brothers is out this week in hardback from Egmont: you can order it from Waterstones here, or buy it from your local independent. The World Around the Corner is out of print at the moment, but second-hand copies are out there to be had…

With this novel, we’re in Singapore in July, the season of the hungry ghost: a time of remembrance, burnt offerings, and maybe a little danger. It may not, in fact, be the best idea for young Freja to follow the girl in white who appears in her father’s garden, and who runs so quickly and silently to the wild grove a few streets away: a wild grove that turns out to be Bukit Brown, a vast, disused and overgrown cemetery.

But Freja has no desire to stay at home in safety with her stepmother, Clementine, who seems to do nothing all day but post on social media. Freja misses her Dad, always on another business trip, and her Mum, in therapy back in Denmark, and she has an inclination toward wild places and dangerous adventures. Perhaps her adventure with the hungry ghost will turn out to be dangerous – it could even be frightening – but all the same, perhaps it’s not actually a bad idea. Perhaps it will even turn out to be essential.

Ghost stories have been essential for me, at least, ever since I was nine, and enjoyed a shivery summer reading The Magnet Book of Strange Tales. I can’t help feeling that there’s something of a resonance between that genre and children’s fiction: I suppose, to some extent, both of them bracket life, the start and the finish. Children’s fantasy often tells stories, like the conventional ghost story, using the rulebooks of ancient cultures and customs, as if the modern way of living was just rushed bit of improvisation, which the next generation are free to discard where appropriate. Watch closely, they both say, there is something else going on behind the scenes that even adult authority can’t control; and yet however bad it gets, both kinds of writing generally agree that where there’s life, there’s hope.

Ghost stories, too, are often about unfinished business, and that’s what children have always had to deal with: the unfinished stories of those who preceded them. (How often are child protagonists trying to sympathise with, or make reparations on behalf of the dead?) The eponymous hungry ghost, in South Asian lore, isn’t craving something creepy: they want remembrance or atonement. But what does this one need? It takes a lot of experimentation from Freja to find out, and others repeatedly warn her she’s doing it wrong: whether mystically or in terms of real, physical danger, she gets close to death more than once in the novel. There’s a threatening mood for much of H.S. Norup’s novel, enhanced by claustrophobic cloudy skies and rainy nights.

The rich, authentic folkloric encounters she experiences – even a realm of mystic balance, beyond space and time – make The Hungry Ghost sometimes feel like a cousin of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising: the difference being, there’s no universal enemy to overcome here, and no inheritance of wise wizards to belong to. Her quest is her own, albeit made on the behalf of another. Why has it fallen to Freja, so far from home, to unpick the mystery? At times, the novel is like a cultural initiation for this ‘ang mo’, the European child crossing boundaries in many senses (and wonderfully, the novel is full of people whose cultural backgrounds are complex and multiple – this is a truly international novel).

This isn’t a spooky tale dressed up in an othered culture: it’s rooted in that context, and its lore of Hell Gods, pontianaks and unhappy spirits are shown as enduringly relevant to the living. It strikes a clear emotional note throughout, and its final chapters, as the last pieces of mystery unlock, are delicately handled portraits of grief. (There is one potentially upsetting moment that means I would only recommend this to ten-year-olds at the youngest, although of course it always depends on the reader.) This is one novel that gives the lie to any claim that ‘issues novels’ and ‘novels of the imagination’ are in any kind of hierarchy, or even a binary: the wide-open terrain of the children’s novel allows ‘issues’ to be explored with whatever storytelling device is most effective, and most powerful.

Freja’s difficult relationship with her parents and guardians is initially background to her adventure with ghosts, becoming another element in the drama – how can she keep her cemetery visits secret from them…? In the conclusion of the novel, though, we see that this hasn’t just been about our responsibility to the dead, but to the living as well: to see each other fully, to speak openly, and to look out for one another. Atmospheric, eerie and read-past-bedtime gripping, what ultimately makes Norup’s novel so good is its attention to the human world. Nothing is incidental to its story, from the scary ghosts to the helpful new friend; in fact, as the story makes clear, the more we try to leave out a bit of the story, the more it haunts us. Hungry ghosts everywhere will agree on this.

You can order The Hungry Ghost, published by Pushkin Children’s, from Waterstones here, or support your local independent bookshop. I’d also like to recommend a novel I loved last summer, but didn’t have the energy to write about at the time: When Secrets Set Sail by Sita Brahmachari, another children’s ghost story of sorts, but not at all scary, and this time driven by an amazing, politically charged story about migrant experience and disinheritance.

Here’s a new release I’d be talking about if I was able to do my bookseller thing at the moment: in fact, I snagged a proof before going on furlough because it’s the Waterstones kids’ Book of the Month for January. It’s a debut novel from Lesley Parr, but told with quiet confidence, combining page-turning mystery with tender human drama. Twelve-year-old Jimmy and his little brother Ronnie are evacuated to the Welsh mining village of Llanbryn at the start of the Second World War. Why are there whispers in the village about the couple they’re billeted with? And what has happened to Duff, Jimmy’s only friend from home?

At the heart of the novel’s mystery is an image potent enough to be macabre: a lone skull in the hollow beneath a tree. Does the quiet village harbor a murderer? Could it be, as I imagined (given my taste in children’s fiction) an accidental bit of archaeology? But whilst uncovered bones will snare readers’ attention, the tone of the novel is far from gratuitous, moving to a bittersweet redemption that I liked a great deal. The consequences reach into the village community, recalling, in fact, last year’s When Life Gives You Mangoes. Perhaps that’s a marker of contemporary children’s fiction that it explores the fault-lines left by secrets buried by adults, as much as the adventures of children, finding and mending them.

Resolution is needed by those children too. Children’s fiction seems to have an affinity for stories of evacuation; after all, half its stories begin with a separation from parents and being thrown into a new landscape. There is something distinct about World War II evacuation’s necessity and inexorability that gives an extra, strange charge: most famously in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but in Carrie’s War and Goodnight Mr Tom too. Most recently, David Montgomery sent an evacuee on a quest back to London with his Midnight Guardians, connecting national angst symbolically with folkloric magic, dark as midwinter.

Parr’s story focuses on her young protagonists’ adjustment to a new life far from home. Perhaps that will speak to young readers, currently adjusting to a national ‘new normal’ that has adults feeling anything but. Young Ronnie, trusting and friendly, is open to the transition; Jimmy bitterly resents it, refusing to call their billeting with Mr and Mrs Thomas ‘home’. At one point, Ronnie’s wish to see fox cubs in the springtime touches a raw nerve in the older boy: “Don’t you know its wicked to want a war to keep happening just so you can see a flaming baby fox?’ Such bitterness is out of character for Jimmy, who spends the book protecting his younger brother, but that’s part of its force. Flaming evacuation, he thinks later, Flaming Wales. Making me say things I’d never normally say. Making me change.

The opportunity for change is relished by Florence, a girl from Jimmy’s old neighbourhood, belonging the notorious Campbell family (no relation) with their reputation for violence and petty crime. In another country, another world, Florence takes the chance to invent a new identity. Jimmy is disorientated by this at first; especially since his best friend also seems to have changed in this new setting, and not for the better. Bit by bit, and entirely naturally, Jimmy falls in with Florence and they solve the mystery of the skull together.

Interestingly, Parr gives the whole mystery to the evacuees, keeping the village children of Llanbryn, both friends and bullies, at a remove. This is a story about the contribution of outsiders to a community. It concludes, not on a return to London, but with a feeling of belonging in a place that previously felt, and regarded them as, alien. Jimmy, Ronnie and Florence have been inducted into the history of the place, and the community has widened to include them: though the setting seems distant in history, this emphasis of Parr’s makes her novel all the more timely for readers of 2021. Touching and entertaining, this book is not one to be kept secret!

You can order a copy of The Valley of Lost Secrets from Waterstones here, or of course support your local independent bookshop. Meanwhile, Nina Bawden’s exquisite novel Carrie’s War is available as a free audiobook from the BBC, here.

So many children’s novels are about time, and the impermanence of things, the way that an entire world can slip away as we grow away from childhood toward maturity. How often do adults in children’s fiction seem to be calling from the far bank of a swift river, never to be crossed again? I’ve seen critics attribute the abundance of time-slips in the Sixties to expressions of wartime trauma, and a similar schism seems to have opened up this year: days blurring, months stretching, deadlines sprawling ever onward. For some, it seems, this has been a time of return to childhood reading, or for children to suddenly adopt some of the soberness of adult life. Given time to reflect on time, it can seem a flimsy and unreliable concept to just about anyone.

               I found myself thinking about this, reading Betsy Byars this week, her Newbery medal-winner The Summer of the Swans (1970) and less well-known The House of Wings (1972). Born in 1928, Byars is one of the defining authors of post-war children’s fiction and it feels a little like her death, in February of 2020, has been overlooked. Popular and prolific, her novels shaped the modern, real-world, child-centred genre that American writers particularly excel at. “When you write about what you know,” she once said, “you are writing with authority. The two words go together – author – authority, and what that means is that when you write with authority, you give your reader the feeling, ‘This author knows what he, or she, is talking about’” (http://www.betsybyars.com/writing.html). Her memoir, The Moon and Me (1991), describes how she would wait to write about a subject until she had experienced it first-hand. When she describes birds in House of Wings, her powers of observation are evident – not just for how they behave, but for how humans respond to them:

The owl made a faint hissing sound, like steam escaping. Then he swooped down into the tub and pounced on the grasshopper with both feet. His talons curled around the grasshopper, and he put it in his mouth.

               The owl’s mouth seemed enormous when he opened it and Sammy stood silently watching him eat. When the owl finished he flew back to the shower pipe and turned his head to Sammy.

               Sammy was standing there with his mouth hanging open. He was thinking that this house had everything – geese, a parrot in the kitchen, a crane, and an owl in the bathroom.

               Then suddenly Sammy noticed how intently the owl was staring at him. He took a step backward. He said quickly, ‘That was the only one I could find.’ He backed out into the hall and went quietly down the stairs.

Like the owl, Byars does not blink, and she encourages us to watch closely as well. Perfectly balanced with this clear prose are things unsaid, or said indirectly. Sammy first discovers the owl the night that he arrives, when he is woken by the voice of his mother, urging her husband to shut the bird in the closet. ‘Sammy could hear his father’s feet on the floor. Then his mother snapped angrily, “Now it’s loose again and it’s going to be bothering us all night. You know how owls are.”’

There’s something funny in that moment, or perhaps it’s just the reader taking pleasure in wildness in an unexpected place, but when his mom says, ‘You know how owls are,’ we have to wonder – does she? Perhaps she does: it’s a hint from Byars that Sammy’s grandfather has been letting things like this happen for a long time, but we only get that hint. Things have emphatically run to wild extremes in the ten years since Sammy’s grandmother died. All Sammy and his grandfather really talk about are birds, watching and caring for them and wishing they could defy death: Sammy’s grandmother goes unmentioned, but the significance of her not being there can be read throughout.

I remember her novels seeming terribly grown up when I was a boy. For a long time, I felt I had to save The TV Kid (1976) and The Cartoonist (1978), each of them character studies really, for when I’d outgrown fantasies and comedies and wild schemes. Then one day, I found I’d passed them. Only a couple of years ago, when I finally read The Eighteenth Emergency and The Midnight Fox (both still in print here in the UK) did I recognise the scale of her power.

You think you know the story of Fox, and maybe you do – the story of a child’s connection with a lone wild creature feels inextricable from the fabric of children’s literature. In recent years, Sara Pennypacker’s Pax (2016), even Anthony McGowan’s Truth of Things sequence (2013-19), have retold it with a similar lack of romance or ornate language, but Byars’ book impressed me for the little surprises along the way, talking wryly about human interaction with one another as much as the eponymous fox. The Emergency is harder to pigeonhole. It’s funny, but its conclusion has a bitter honesty to it that is still a little startling. Byars unerringly captures real dialogue on the page, not just between individuals, but the reckoning within a character as they reconcile themselves to difficult truths.

               A Byars novel is brief (even a slowcoach like me can finish it in a couple of hours) and strictly speaking, they narrate only a fingernail paring of time: a girl’s younger brother goes missing overnight, looking for swans, but is found next day; a boy is abandoned at his grandfather’s house out in the country, and the two get to know one another as they rescue a wounded crane. Now and then, her characters stop and feel time hanging on them, waiting to spring forward. Sara in Summer of the Swans is entering adolescence, and pictures herself poised on a flight of steps that will take her up to the sky. Sammy, in House of Wings, has felt the world spin slower and faster, but it stops altogether when he’s trying to catch a frog, like a Bash­ō haiku. Tom is haunted by ‘the high, clear bark of the midnight fox’, so much he returns to that moment at the start and finish of telling his story. Small details flicker almost too momentarily for the young protagonists to catch, or perhaps it’s their ephemerality they have to notice: when they do, their whole perspective on the world shifts.

               Byars encourages us to notice the freighted meaning of the smallest detail, in the shortest space of time. She is one of those children’s writers I wish were published for adult readers now: perhaps child characters, however closely observed, will always be critically disregarded, as if having outgrown that point of view we no longer need to understand it. At one point in House of Wings, Sammy goes indoors for cornmeal for the crane, and coming out, feels instantly that something is changed. There is a frantic feeling to him trying to find what he has missed – what could he possibly have missed – in such a short space of time: ‘He was prepared to shake the answer out of his grandfather if necessary’. If children’s literature has moments of insight offered by writers like Byars, we shouldn’t miss out on it, whatever our age. It won’t even take very long for us to catch up, but we have to keep watch carefully when we do.

You can order The Midnight Fox from Waterstones here, and The Eighteenth Emergency here, or of course ask your local independent!

I’m ducking back under the ivy, sweeping the linoleum clean, huffing the dust off the radiators and attempting a return to this impossible old library. Hopefully more reviews in the new year, so long as they’re of use!

In the meantime, very best wishes to any library-user, bookshop-browser, blurb-ogler, picturebook-leafer and to everyone who makes books too. Let’s make 2022 as good as it can be, and for the rest of the time, lose ourselves in a good story.