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.

You know it’s not going to end well. When the latest Mark IV TrooFriend leaves the factory floor, destined to join a new family, there are campaigners picketing outside and bad stories on the news. Even the sales pitch has a disquieting undertone from the very first chapter: your child ‘no longer needs to play with other children, who might bully or harm or lie or covet or steal or envy’. Like the best science-fiction ideas, this simple idea suggests a transformed world: lonely, chilly, half-dead. There’s an air of Frankenstein about the whole thing: would you be happy to have a human-shaped automaton in suspended animation in your bedroom overnight? Would you kill time with a creature twelve times as strong as a human being, one that is relaying all your activities to your parents in a recorded feed? And if your parents thought it was a good idea, would you feel unsettled? Unsafe?

Is somebody getting thrown in the river by their new best friend?

Kirsty Applebaum’s dystopia The Middler was a dark tale told with exceptional style: its village sealed off in a future war was a little cosy and a little confined, its secrets all ravelled up out of its protagonist’s sight so that we advanced with her, day by day, into the unknown. Now it was sweet, now it was strange, near the end it was thoroughly nightmarish, but that narrator’s unselfconscious voice drew it all together into one utterly convincing whole.

Applebaum’s new novel, TrooFriend, also makes subtle play with its narrative voice. Where we might expect to see events from the perspective of the TrooFriend’s recipient, Sarah, we get it instead from Ivy the android itself. Unworldly, innocent, programmed to please, she pieces Sarah’s world together for the reader: not just the wider world where androids are so ubiquitous that schools have Bring Your Tech to School Days, but the seemingly less important details of playground jealousy and disconnected parents.

‘I have connection,’ Ivy observes, every time she boots up at the start of another chapter. But it is the reader who connects the pieces and sees the picture entire, including the things Ivy fails to notice: the dangerous implications of those TrooFriend bad news stories, the subtext of her inventors’ bland statements to the press, and Ivy’s own inexplicable behaviour when she thinks she cannot be seen.

Ivy is compelled to be true, but in the course of her programming, a stranger, more dangerous truth wil be revealed.

Applebaum’s novel has real bite. Sarah, its human protagonist, is not a cherubic, eternally likeable child, and she makes some terrible mistakes in the course of the novel, which come with real consequences. But then, she’s the child of a strange age – “Get with it, Dad,” she says in an early chapter, rolling her eyes. “This is the twenty-first century. Privacy is dead” – and would far rather have a dog than an android. The sharp end of Applebaum’s novel – like Mary Shelley’s, perhaps – is directed at the parents of this brave new world, or at least, the ones who shirk their responsibility toward the beings they create.

But this is also a novel about the responsibilities that friends have to one another, which are perhaps all the more vital given the capacity for parents to muck everything up. Friendship is at the heart of so many children’s novels, perhaps because it is one of the most powerful abilities children possess: think of Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, where Sara loses everything but her friends, or The Borrowers, where a friendship destroys Arrietty’s world, but ultimately saves her too. Robots are so often substitutes for workers, but here they’re being made to stand in for something frightening and beautiful: other people.

Does it have to be a nightmare? Can something redemptive come out of it? I’m so pleased that novels of this philosophical richness are still being published for children, and that they are being written by novelists as skilful and wise as Kirsty Applebaum.

The Middler and TrooFriend are both published by Nosy Crow. While you’re isolating in your own dystopian adventure, you can purchase a copy from the publisher’s website, from good old Waterstones online, or (if you’re very lucky) your local bookseller. Just don’t buy from a robot: you don’t want the world that comes with that.

There probably should have been a rule about people like Helen Cresswell. In the golden days of children’s literature, she was responsible for some of its most memorable titles: Lizzie Dripping, A Gift from Winklesea, and the Bagthorpe saga, of which Ordinary Jack is the first title. She was a strong, if mostly unacknowledged, influence on children’s television, making beloved adaptations of Five Children & It and The Demon Headmaster, and authoring The Secret World of Polly Flint and Moondial. (I’m pretty sure Moondial was a formative TV experience: the very thought of a National Trust property sends shivers down my spine to this day.)

Thankfully, there is no legal prohibition (not even a by-law) against a writer producing a string of classics like this. Without being ubiquitous (no single writer could be said to dominate these decades, thank goodness), Cresswell’s work seems to typify that era: intelligent stories with big ideas and a dreamlike atmosphere in which anything might happen. She never actually won the Carnegie award, but was a runner-up with four wonderful, distinctly different novels: the historical, culinary, family comedy The Piemakers; the sweetly melancholic time-slip fantasy (with, again, a family at its heart) Up the Pier; the poetic, elusive The Nightwatchmen; the funny and unpredictable The Bongleweed. Her own favourite was seemingly The Winter of the Birds, which is almost woozily surreal, and perhaps the least categorizable of the lot – and there are lots. She was prolific, but outside her series, no two books are quite the same.

So, she had an intuitive understanding of children’s writing – and perhaps that is the source of Ordinary Jack’s power. It’s about being ordinary, when your brothers and sisters are each the hero of their own children’s novel. Each of the Bagthorpe children has a shining destiny, a huge intellect or a will to succeed; Jack Bagthorpe dreams of somehow gaining the same immortality, but dreams are really all they are. He’s falling asleep on the family lawn at the outset of the novel, worn out from being beaten at swimming lengths by his little sister. His companion is the similarly hopeless Zero, a dog with low self-esteem who can’t even fetch a stick, named unforgivingly by Jack’s father (a novelist and BBC scriptwriter – hmm).

So of course, we’re rooting for Jack from the very start (even before we read that he calls Zero ‘Nero’ when they are alone together, ‘so as to give him a bit of dignity in the eyes of others, and as Zero hardly ever came when he was called anyway, it didn’t make much difference’). But how can a boy win, when he’s in a novel about how sickening it is to be an over-achiever? Cresswell doesn’t even make the Bagthorpe family – among whom ‘Strings to Bows were thick on the ground’ – as awful as she might have done. They’re fond of Jack, in their own way. There’s not even a moral high ground to be taken, or – Mr Bagthorpe aside – a villain to be dealt with

His Uncle Parker (whose only personal claim to fame is his propensity to drive like a maniac) has a scheme. Ostensibly, Jack will rend the veil between this reality and the next – but (as he himself realises, just in time) the aim is really something simpler: a satirical blast, a low raspberry of tricksterish subversion. In this, perhaps, the book becomes more closely aligned than ever to the spirit of children’s literature.

It’s a deliciously funny comic novel, with echoes of Edith Nesbit (I’ve always loved that Nesbit’s children get in dreadful trouble when they wish themselves to be more like the Edwardian ideal of childhood), or perhaps stylistically, Richmal Crompton: “The day seemed off to a good start, as so often the really bad days do”. There are several wonderful set pieces when an upper middle-class household tips suddenly over into chaos, hysteria and fiery explosions. The ending, though perfectly arising out of the narrative, is sublimely bonkers. You feel that a child who read Ordinary Jack would carry with them a certain immunity to self-seriousness and intimidating pretentiousness.

My only question is: where can we possibly go from here? But knowing Cresswell’s genius as a storyteller, I also have utter faith that Absolute Zero and successive instalments of the Bagthorpe saga will have plenty of surprises in store. Despite their overtone of cosy stability, Cresswell’s novels suggest that we should always expect the unexpected, and as often as not, to expect it of ourselves.

Although much of her output is now out of print (you will have to comb second-hand book merchants for Up the Pier and The Piemakers, for instance) (and you should), there are some major works by Helen Cresswell available here and now from high street bookshops. Lizzie Dripping, a wonderfully peculiar series of stories, is published by Oxford University Press; super-spooky drama Moondial is published with a beautiful new cover by Faber Children’s Classics; and – yes! – HarperCollins have begun to reissue the Bagthorpe saga, with Ordinary Jack and Absolute Zero. You can order them from Waterstones here, or ask your local independent book magician to conjure them up for you. They don’t write them quite like this any more, and they have a distinctly dry wit and idiosyncratic air; I suspect, though, that they could offer a less cartoonish further step for a Walliams fan. Certainly, anyone who has once enjoyed the tales of William Brown will recognise something of their immortal hero in the well-meant misadventures of Jack and his jumbly canine pal.

‘You have to believe in things if you want them to happen.’ Jasbinder Bilan’s debut novel is a ceaselessly optimistic book. We begin in desperate circumstances: Asha’s father has left their village in the Himalayan foothills to work in the distant city of Zandapur, but he hasn’t written for weeks. Asha’s Ma has had to give away the tractor, the only source of income for the family. If no money arrives from Asha’s Pa in short order, they’ll have to sell the farm and start a new life in England. Something must be done; Asha can’t imagine leaving their home.

Neither will the reader. The world depicted by Bilan is technicolor-lush, crowded with sensory delight:

Glossy black-winged rosefinches, with their blushed underbellies, chatter and dive out from between the branches, chasing each other, dripping from rain from the leaves, like holy water.

It’s a rain-drenched, wind-swept landscape, with all the vivid of first person, present tense narrative from Asha. It’s also a place richly imbued with personal meaning: from Asha’s family history (and family mystery too!), to elements of Hindu legend, to something in-between – the reincarnation of Asha’s nanijee as a majestic lamagaia bird. Or is it?

Inspired by her love for the farm, by her belief in family and her faith in the spirit bird, Asha sets out on a seemingly impossible quest to reach her father and discover the truth. Will her best friend, Jeevan, believe in it too? What, if anything, will she find at the end of her epic trek? Can she survive among wolf packs, snowfall, the unscrupulous men and women of Zandapur itself?

It’s no spoiler to say that – after a great deal of drama and adventure, not to mention a beautifully evocative description of a mountain temple — everything ultimate turns out well for our heroes. There is a pervasive charm to the novel (to call it sweet would make it sound sickly, which Bilan resists), at times leaning toward naivety, but this mode doesn’t prevent the children from straying into several desperate situations. However, hope and belief always lead them toward safety before too long. Not in a Pollyannaish way either, but with furious determination (perhaps more reminiscent of Anne of Green Gables). ‘Listen to me,’ she says, in probably their darkest hour. ‘If we all act together, we can be strong – think about your ancestors, call on their spirits to help you.’

It’s no wonder at all that Bilan’s novel has won the Costa children’s category this year. Young readers are faced with an increasingly screened off, hostile culture, that is frightened of the future and riven with tensions. They need Asha’s belief in the future and the past, not to mention the vicarious pleasure of staring down tigers by firelight in a snow-bound forest; moreover, they need novels with the vibrancy and warmth of Bilan’s. This was clearly a very personal novel for her to write – and it will be exciting to see what she gives us in years to come…

Asha and the Spirit Bird is published by Chicken House Books, and you can purchase it via their website, through Waterstones, or at your local independent bookshop (use it or lose it). Jasbinder Bilan’s author website is here.

The past two days this week, I’ve been taking refuge in nostalgia by posting transcripts of my Year 5 Reading Record. Is it purely nostalgia? It’s also a window onto how children respond to books, or how some children might respond, or on how one reader might respond to their own history read back to them. My continuities, tastes, false memories, excursions, sidesteps, ambitions…

It’s a bit too early in the day for me to tackle these ideas so completely, so let’s just go back to 1993-4, to Mr O’Regan’s classroom in Goodrich Road, and peer over young Nick’s shoulder…

The steps up the chimney (part 1 of the magicians house)
William Corbett
Red Fox
Wednesday 8th September
Friday 10th September
Absolutley great! It was funny, scarey and mysterious. All of it was thrown into an excellent plot. The plot is too long to explain now, but it concerns three children William, Mary and Alice, as well as Stephen Tyler, the magician. 10/10

[I do actually have this on my shelf to re-read. I’m intrigued by the author, William Corlett, and I also have his overtly gay novel Now and Then on my shelf to read (for the first time). Could I possibly have been responding to something queer about the text…? Surely that’s unlikely.]

Finn Family Moomintroll
Tove Jansoon
Puffin Books
Friday 10th September
Tuesday 14th September
Very good. I liked it, partly because of the humor, partly because of the adventure. The pictures were good too. It was about the adventures of Moomintroll, Moominmamma, Moominpapa, Snufkin, Sniff, and some snorks. 8/10

[And twenty-five years later, I have Letters to Tove on my shelf to re-read. Entirely coincidentally, another queer author.]

The door in the tree Part 2 [of the Magician’s House]
William Corbett
Red Fox
Tuesday 14th
Sunday 19th
Really good! The second one in the series but it was not as the first. Again, about three children, William, Mary and Alice. This time there were also Meg Lewis and some badgers. Good. 10/10

The tunnel behind the waterfall Part 3 [of the Magician’s House]
William Corbett
Red Fox
Monday 20th Sep
Sunday 26th
The 3rd exiting part in this amazing quartet, and every bit as good as the 1st and 2nd! In this, two people descended from Morden want to start a funfair in Golden Valley, so William, Mary and Alice have to stop them. They succeed but will Stephen Tyler keep going? Find out in… 10/10

The bridge in the clouds. Being the concluding part of The magicians house quartet.
William Corlett
Red Fox
Monday 27th September
Wednesday 6th October
Excellent!!! A great [underlined three times] book to end a great [underlined twice] series. [Spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space argh] Stephen Tyler dies. The children find true gold. Cinnabar dies. Alice befriends a rat. Morden is defeated. Excellent – great – wonderfull – terrific…. magic!!! 10/10

[To celebrate the last book, I finally spelled William’s name right. I really did like this series, didn’t I?]

Midnight is a place
Joan Aiken
Pat Marriot
Wednesday 6th October
Wednesday 20th October
Very good I liked its’ realisticness. Set in Victorian Times, its about a boy called Lucas and his french friend Anna-Marie. They live with Lucas’ guardian Sir Randolph. There is a fire and Sir Randolph is killed leaving the kids to fend for themselves. 8/10

[Sadly, this is the only Joan Aiken of my childhood. I went from here to The Whispering Mountain and just couldn’t get into it. But I’ve made up for that now – it’s never too late.]

Harriet the spy
Louise Fitzhugh
Lions
Wednesday 20th October
Saturday 23rd October
Great! I really liked it. It was funny, exciting, fast moving and full of suspense. The plot was really good. A girl called Harriet who spys on every-body and writes her finds in a secret note-book. Good and bad, nice and spiteful, it all goes down in the notebook. So imagine the riot when her class-mates find the book and read it. 10/10

[Mortified at my use of the phrase ‘imagine the riot’ – all the same, Harriet the Spy is a glorious novel; I remember reading it under the duvet with a torch when I had to know what happened next. Third queer author in two months, by the way.]

The bumper book of Ghost stories!
Pamela Oldfield
David Senior
HarperCollins publishes
Monday 1st November
Tuesday 2nd November
Absolutely great! Even this book took a short time to read (2 days) it was wonderfully well written. Stories about pictures, bonfires, shop window dummies alive and more. Very good. 8/10

[This reflects a summer of reading ghost stories – particularly The Obstinate Ghost by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, and The Magnet Book of Strange Tales, edited by Jean Russell. Summer reading doesn’t have a place in the Reading Record, sadly. The Reading Record also fails to record that I used to sneak into the deserted school library at playtime to read Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book (which was in the Reference library and not to be borrowed) to make the back of my scalp tingle.]

The lost prince
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Puffin
Friday 5th November
[A suspiciously wavy line where the ‘finishing’ date should go]
I didn’t really like this because it was quite boring. Because I didn’t enjoy it, it dragged on and by the time I got to chaper 25 it was the 7th Dec and we had to take our books back. The story concerns two boys, going about the world to give the sign that a lost prince has been found. Not very good. 5/10

[My keen, 36-year-old eyes have spotted that THE HOBBIT has been written and incompletely rubbed out underneath this entry. Not sure what happened there.]

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Charles Dickens
The Book Society
John Leech
9.12.93 – 20.12.93
What words can describe this classic? It’s great, marvelous, excellent, perfect, faboulous, mega-tastic, all rolled into one. The tale of spitefull Ebenezer Scrooge who changes his ways after being visited by 3 spirits is a classic. A work of art by the brilliant Charles Dickens. 5000000000/5000000000

[A bit hyperbolic, but if you can’t go OTT about Dickens, who can you? Enjoy this high point, because hereafter my reading tastes will plummet like nobody’s business. But first…]

The Complete Borrowers! 5 books in 1.
Mary Norton
Diana Stanley / Paula Bates
Puffin
5th January 1994
27th January 1994
Despite the length of the book (5 books in 1) I enjoyed it. I have seen the TV series and that was great. 19/20

[I love this then; I love it still.]

Thanks for the sardine!
Laura Beaumont
[Drawing of fish with speech bubble: “What a clever girl! She did the pictures too!” Never let it be said I was a very old-fashioned child, quite sexist and exceedingly fey.]
Red Fox [Drawing of fox with speech bubble: “I’m flattered!”]
27.1.94
27.1.94 [Drawing of fish with speech bubble: “that was quick”]
Despite the fact I finished it very quickly I enjoyed this book a lot and thought it was very funny. It was about Aggie and her two useless aunties. They are so useless that she takes them to ‘Aunt Augustas’ Academy for advanced auntiness’. Very funny but too short. 16/20

Only you can save mankind (if not you who else?)
Terry Pratchettt
[Drawing of book-worm with speech bubble: “I’m a bookworm. There weren’t any pictures.”]
Corgi Books [Drawing of the Queen with speech bubble: “I love Corgis”]
28.1.94
31.1.94
Brilliant. I really enjoyed reading the story about how Johnny (Rubber) Maxwell journeys into gamespace to save the alien enemies of his Computer game. Very funny and utterly brill. In 1 word, Brilligreat! 20/20

[I’m still trying to bring this word into the vernacular.]

Prester John
John Buchan [Drawing of horse with speech bubble: “Sounds exciting! Neigh!”]
No illustrations [Drawing of bookworm with speech bubble: “Oh dear!”]
Puffin
1.2.94
7.3.94
A really good, well written book about a man who goes out to work on an island. Little does he know that a nightmare from the past is going too. 16/20

[No memory of this at all. Not a sausage.]

The Doctor Who quiz book
Lucy M. Boston
Peter Boston
Puffin [Drawing of Puffin]
[Erm, someone’s eye has left the ball re: author and illustrator]
26.4.94
9.5.94
I love Doctor Who so I enjoyed reading this quiz book 18/20

[I “enjoyed reading this quiz book”? When has anyone enjoyed reading a quiz book? Apart from that, it looks as if it took me a fortnight to get through it. Maybe I just didn’t want to admit to reading The Children of Green Knowe?]

Skirmish
Melissa Michaels
Livewire
10.5.94
26.5.94
A very boring attempt at humorous sci-fi. It was about a girl in a spacecraft trying to smuggle [and that review ends there – obviously wasn’t very into it] 7/20 [and drawing of sad face]

[I don’t actually think I finished this at all.]

Journey through Oz (The wizard of Oz + The land of oz)
Lyam Frank Baum
T.W.O.Oz: William Wallace Denslow T.M.L.O.Oz: John Rea Neil
Derrydale books
26.5.94
13.6.94
Very good. I really enjoyed these modern fairytales. The first one was made into a famous film. 20/20

[A rather coy review of my favourite books of all time.]

The seeds of time
John Wyndham
There isn’t [an illustrator]. The cover was done by Mark Salwowski
Penguin Books [Drawing of Penguin, looks like mallard]
13.6.94
7.7.94
Reasantly I have become very interested in S.F. I got this book for my birthday and really liked it. Some stories were slightly over the top (one showed a travveler rowing through lava on Mars). 16/20

[‘Reasently’ I had got myself heavily into Doctor Who. I don’t know why ‘… And The Abominable Snowmen’, ‘… And The Auton Invasion’ or the avalanche of related reading doesn’t get recorded here. I took this as my cue to read lots of sci-fi, but it didn’t really work for me. And just to prove it, here’s the final entry.]

The Tripods trilogy
John Christopher
Puffin
7.7.94

[Something melancholy about an unfinished Reading Record. My reading went seriously wonky at secondary school, but it’s all lost to the mists of time. What reading experiences, in the vein of Corlett and Fitzhugh, did I miss out on – and what have I forgotten? As a bookseller, it was always the strangest time to recommend titles for.

Perhaps we have to accept that in times of upheaval and transition, everything that we need and love is liable to fall out of our grasp – and I’m talking about our sense of self, I suppose, because reading is that invisible, intimate negotiation of selfhood and otherness that can be let go without anyone noticing for a while. But once you’ve missed it and noticed its absence, if you can remember what you once loved – even if it’s just adventuring into the unknown – you can keep moving toward that, and find it again.

Yes, that’s what I think.]

I would love a Mass Observation Archive of these reading journals. Far from reliable, of course, but thought-provoking and (I hope) a little charming. Anyway, here’s a trip back to March 1993.

Date: 23rd Tuesday March [N.B.: FINISHED 26 MARCH]
Title: Behind the attic wall
Author: Sylvia Cassedy
Comment: EXCELLENT! [Another big exclamation mark coloured in] One of the best books I have ever read. It had all the qualitys of a good book. It was scarey, funny, even a bit sad. It was about Maggie, who is an orphan. She is sent to her two aunts, in a big house. At first she hears voices, and then she discovers a family of dolls, living hidden. Sorry my handwriting is so bad but I am excited at finishing. 10/10!

[Handwriting no worse than usual – I think I’m using a 2B rather than an HB. I like the phrase ‘living hidden’. I do remember this being very, very good… Maybe I should seek this out for a re-read.]

Date: Tuesday 20th April
Author: Jon Needle
Illustrator: ————
Title: Great days at Grange Hill
Comment: Great! Jon Needle wrote it really well. They’re showing the programmes at the moment and they’re both just as good. Its’ a book of stories, so I can’t tell an exact plot, but the same characters are: Tucker Jenkins, Benny Green, and Trisha Yates. 10/10

Date: Monday 26th
Title: The saga of Erik the Viking
Author: Terry Jones
Illustrator: Michael Foreman
Comment: Really good. I know this writer because I’ve read ‘FAIRY TALES’. It started off a bit boring, but it got better. It’s about a Viking called Erik, who sets off with his band of men to find the land where the sun goes at night. Really good. 8/10

Date: 30th Friday April
Title: Mr Shy’s Shoes
Author: Jennifer Walsh
Comment: Really good! I thought this book might be a bit young for me but then I read it WOW! It all begins when Tim wants some SPIDERMAN trainers. When the shop doesn’t have his size, he finds a shoe library run by Mr Shy. Afterwards he borrows all kinds of shoes, each one giving a different effect. Lots of funny parts, and a scarey one, where his sister Steffy puts on red shoes and gets in trouble.

Date: 5th May WEDNESDAY
Title: Swallows and Amazons
Author: Arthur Ransome
Illustrator: ^ and Nancy Blackett
Comment: Really good. Easy to get into. I seem to be reading a lot of good books lately. I hope the next one [I think I mean the next Arthur Ransome] is as good. One thing though. A-R obviously knew a lot about Ships and so he wrote in a lot of detail, half of which I didn’t understand. But good. 8/10!

Date: Wednesday 12th May
Title: Haphazard House
Author: Mary Wesley
Illustrator: ——-
Comment: Really good. I got this book out of the library, because my mum likes this writer (MARY WESLEY). It was a bit spooky. When Lisa and her family buy this hat, they back a horse and win a lot of money. They they buy a house called Haphazard House and loads of spooky things happen. 9/10

[No memory of reading this – a bit odd?]

Date: 21st May Friday
Title: The tree that sat down
Author: Beverly Nichols
Illustrator: Isobel/John Morton Sale
Comment: Really good. I like the title “The tree that sat down.” It sounds good! It’s about this girl called Judy and her grannie, who have a shop under a willow tree. Then Sam and his dad come to “the shop in the ford”, and they all have to compeit.

[I’m a bit worried that my anxiety about finishing books quickly and moving on to the next one may have set in at this age – there’s a small key in the top right of the page, marking down the chapters as I complete them. I carried this anxiety with me for a long time and still feel it sometimes, the pressure to finish one thing and read the next]

Date: Monday 24th May
Title: The Neverending story
Author: Michael Ende
Illustrator: Rodweither Quasfleig
Comment: Marvellous. Unlike its name it is not really a ‘Neverending story’. I had already seen the 2 films based on it, but this was something else! Its about aboy called Bastian, who steals the neverending story. He reads lots of adventures in it and then goes into the book and has adventures himself
10/10!

Date: 7th June
Title: Biggle in the orient
Author: Captain W.E. Johns
Illustrator: Although a picture would be fun/ Of an illustrator there is none
Comment:

[Nothing. I think I tried this on my Dad’s recommendation and didn’t think much of it – and perhaps I felt uncomfortable about that. Either way, after a pretty good stretch, Miss Hunter’s Reading Record ends here.]

Here’s something I originally posted on my previous blog, A Pile of Leaves (currently in a state of compost). I’ve always been fond of it, and I was reminded of it by last night’s outstanding discussion event, #BoxesofDelight, run by Oxford Brookes’ evening of children’s literature (variously: what were your first books, how did they form you, how do we return to that childhood experience or – quite separately – read a children’s book as an adult).

When I was a child at Goodrich Primary School, back in the early 90s, I was encouraged to maintain a little Reading Record. A bit like Goodreads, but the size of a CD case with a blue cover. My memory of childhood reading has always been hazy: sometimes I feel I read nothing, sometimes everything, sometimes only joke books. I was quite startled to find that some solid evidence had survived in the form of these dusty, yellowed book journals. You might find them interesting or amusing; you might be amazed at my spelling and unreconstructed opinions, or perplexed by my juvenile Judy Garland fandom.

You might have reading records of your own! Please dig them out and share if so. For now, let’s go back to September 1992, in Class 15, my penultimate year at Goodrich Primary…

Date: Friday 12th September
Title: Little girl lost, The life and hard times of Judy Garland.
Author: Al DiOrio.
Comment: I have just finished it, and I think it’s brilliant. I bought it while I was on holiday and have been reading it ever since. It’s a very intresting biography of one of my faviourite singers and actresses. I really enjoyed the parts from the newspapers, the film reviews, and the photographs. It gives brilliant accounts on lots of things, starting from Frances Gumm, to Dorothy, to her four divorces to her death. Brilliant.

[This got a little tick from Miss Hunter.]

Date: Friday 12th September
Title: When the siren wailed
Auother: Noel Streatfield
Illustrator: Margery Gill
Comment: It was very good and I enjoyed it. It was about three evacuees from London, who were evacuated to Charnbury. After a while they runaway to find their mum, only to find her [in] hospital, after a bomb hit Marefield Road. The picthures were a bit naff, and in some parts I skipped paragraphs, but all in all it was thoroughly enjoyable.

Date: Friday 12th September
Title: The alchimist’s cat
Aotuher: Robin Jarvis
Illustrator: Robin Jarvis
Comment: A very good book, although I don’t think I’ll go to the trouble of reading others in the same series. Very exiting pictures, and a few deaths. It is set in 1664, and in some parts was a bit boring, but I enjoyed it. It had lots of magic in it, and the chapters were very long. But good.

Date: Monday 12th October.
Title: Lucy and the big bad wolf.
Illustrator: Karin Littlewood.
Author: Ann Jungman.
Comment: A brilliant book. Very funny. All the characters were very strong. What I mean by this, is that their characters were really definete. The bad characters were bad, the good characters good, and the wierdos were wierd.

Date: Wednesday 14th October.
Title: Lucy and the wolf in sheeps clothing.
Author: Ann Jungman.
Illustrator: Karin Littlewood.
Comment: An excellent sequel to, “Lucy and the big bad wolf.” Now with a female wolf. 2.15 (yes that’s the male wolfs name) is hunted by the police, and uses loads and loads of disguises.

Date: Tuesday 20th October.
Title: The mystery of the burnt cottage
Illustrator: Mary Geraint
Author: Enid Blyton
Comment: Really good. It had lots of twists in it. It turned out that the culprit was really the owner! [Giant exclamation mark there to emphasise the psychological dynamism of La Blyton.] I really enjoyed it.

[I have also drawn – quite badly, to be brutally frank – a little role call of the Five Find-Outers, who I much preferred to the Famous Five or Secret Seven. I distinctly remember reading this book with an ice cream on Boscombe beach, so either I reread because it was so good or I was trying to cover up some reader’s block this week.]

Date: Monday 2nd November
Title: The indian in the cupboard.
Author: Lynne reid Banks
Illustrator: -None-
Comment: Really good. I like the writer anyway, but, this was better than the first one I had read. It had two humans called Omri and Patrick. Omri had a sort of cupboard and a toy indian. He put the indian into the cupboard, and it came alive.

[I can’t believe I didn’t go into more detail about just how much I enjoyed this novel.]

Date: Friday 6th November
Title: The dark Portal
Autoher: Robin Jarvis
Illystrator: Same
Comment: This book was really exiting, but I didn’t enjoy it much. It was really [underlined] gorey. I’ve allready read a book by the same aother, it was “The alchemists cat.” I don’t [underlined twice] thingk that I will read any more, it was just TOO disgusting

Date: Friday 13th November
Title: The adventures of Huckleberry finn.
Author: Mark Twain.
Comment: A boring book. I didn’t like it. The print was small, it had 43 chapters in it, and was written in a strange way. It was kind of american. I didn’t enjoy it. Mostly, everytime I opend the book, I couldn’t find the right page, so I must have read some chapters 3 times over.

Date: 2nd December
Title: Little house on the prairie
Author: Laura Wilder
Illustrator: Garth Williams
Comment: Really good. I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t brilliant, but almost. It was really detailed. The print was big enough and there was only 26 chapters. It was about Laura Ingalls and her family when they left their home in the woods, to go and live in indian territory. Really good.

[I’m so lying. Little House in the Great Big Woods was an all-time favourite, but as for the sequel…]

Date: Wednesday 9th Dec
Title: The exiles
Author: Hilary McKay
Illustrator: There isn’t one.
Comment: Very good. It was really funny. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish it but this is the story as far as I could go. Four sisters go to spend the summer with their greedy big grandma.

[Wow, who wants any more book than that? I’m sure there’s something fishy about the use of the word ‘unfortunately’.]

Date: 5th January
Title: The phoenix and the carpet
Author: E. Nesbit
Illustrator: H.R. Millar
Comment: Fantastic! I really, really, really enjoyed it! It all starts when these 4 children accidentally ruin a carpet. When they get a new one it turns out to be a wishing carpet. Also, rolled up inside, is an egg and when it hatches, out pops a golden Phoenix! Great!

Date: Tuesday 26th January
Title: Spellhorn
Author: Berlie Doherty
Illustrator: ———
Comment: O.K., but I didn’t like it much. The plot was good, but it was too long drawn out. It was all about Laura, a blind girl. A unicorn called Spellhorn likes her, and takes her away to the wild ones who are camping near by. After awhile, you reach the Wilderness. Laura can see again, and is called Mighty high. At last she gets home.

Date: Monday 22nd February
Title: The hound of the Baskervilles
Author: A.C. Doyle
Comment: Good, but not fantastic. I had heard the story already at Nethercott [Farm, i.e. our school holiday, hosted by the actual Michael Morpurgo, and one of the most thrilling weeks of my young life]. It was much scarier than the ladybird one [i.e. the Ladybird version], because of extra detail. Because it was written for grown ups, it was hard to understand, but it was still good. 8/10

Date: Friday 26th February
Title: THE CAT ATE MY GYMSUIT
Author: Paula Danziga
Comment: BRILLIANT! I’m actually surprised about this. When I got it out of the libary I thought it would be for teenagers, and very boring. But as I got into the plot, I loved it. It’s about a girl called Mary who thinks she’s a blimp. She has a new teacher who teaches language in strange ways, which the children like. Because of her teaching techniuqes, she gets fines. The most dramatic and scary part is where there is a hearing and you don’t know if Ms Finney will win. 10/10

[Here’s a good one to finish on…]

Date: 4th March
Title: The snow spider trilogy
Author: Jenny Nimmo
Illustrator: Joanna Carey
Comment: Brilliant. Very magical and a bit scarey. Also it was very long because it was 3 books in one! [Big exclamation mark to emphasise vastness of the Snow Spider trilogy.] The central character is Gwyn Griffthis. He lives in Wales and has a grandmother called Nain, who tells Gwyn hes a magician. It was BRILLIANT! [Another giant exclamation mark but still only] 8/10 [, although there are little drawings of Gwyn and his Nain so – well, I don’t know what it all means. I have absolutely no memory of reading The Chestnut Soldier as a child, but who knows…?]

When is a children’s book not a children’s book? I might be risking pretentiousness to refer to Ezra Pound and his ‘news that stays news’, but writing for children is not far off that definition: some knowledge or insight into the world is handed down to the next generation, and if it really lives that book will endure. If, however, it’s too bound up in the interests of one particular audience, it will quickly become a curio at best. The difference is sometimes hard to articulate, and whilst this blog is meant to talk about books for young readers, there is something about a truly great writer that is capable of transcending their original audience and satisfy grown-up readers as well: that’s why I’m talking about Jan Mark today.

I never read her when I was young, but for most of my childhood she was a firm part of the landscape. She won the Carnegie Medal, not once but twice (and nobody has yet won it three times), appeared in anthologies and edited them too. When I first read her, the two-story collection Hairs in the Palm of the Hand (playing by its own rules, so typically of her), my partner remembered her work with real pleasure. Who could forget young Eileen’s blithe Chutzpah in the subversive and hilarious story of that name, invading another school and running rings around the teachers and kids there? Or the boys in Time and the Hour who play in such a serious fashion with losing or saving time?

For myself, I felt I had discovered something truly, rebelliously alive despite the intervening years. Now, those tales and four volumes of her short stories have been collected in The One That Got Away, edited by Jon Appleton (who also runs this wonderful site in celebration of her). All month, expertly led by teacher and Mark fan Ben Harris, we’ve celebrated #JanMARKuary on Twitter, discussing Jon’s collection of ghost stories, stories about dares, witty stories, school stories and more. I’ve never enjoyed January more! But is Mark, with hardly any of her huge output still in print, the great writer that got away – or could she be about to enter a new era of readership?

It seems rarely discussed these days, the crossover in readership. A very few books (The Wizard of Earthsea comes to mind) are published in two different editions. Very long-standing children’s classics like Alice and the Willows are probably read more by older readers than younger. I can only think of one writer whose work has been published originally for children but is now read by adults, and understood to be about children and not just for them: that’s A Long Way from Verona, by Jane Gardam. I am absolutely certain that any fan of Gardam’s would relish Mark’s work; only this week, I have also seen her compared to Henry James. There is a trace of Saki in some of her stories, too, when she is at her most sardonic and her least reassuring.

In the 1970s, children’s literature was not always reassuring. It introduced young readers to sophisticated ideas about the world: loss, change, terror, the strangeness of time, the bitterness of history, the unfairness of the world. At one point in Thunder and Lightnings, still in Puffin (like an open secret), Andrew’s Mum tells him, ‘There’s no such thing as fairness. It’s a word made up to keep children quiet. When you discover it’s a fraud then you’re starting to grow up.’ But the heroic project of the great writers of this literature is that they ally with the child in this maddening world: they are on the side of hope, of underdogs, of alternate perspectives, of delight in the world for itself and not to an end. All this might be something worth rediscovering, particularly when it’s told with such Marked skill.

In many ways Thunder and Lightnings (1976), feels fixed in time (Mark said that later stories, including many of those in The One That Got Away, were set in the past so the story would have ‘had the chance to cool off’) – not just as a depiction of how cherished things are lost and of how we ‘start to grow up’, but also with glancing references to recession and the proximity of the Second World War, and an image of childhood as unmodern now as William Brown’s would have been then. It is told with such delicacy and such vibrancy, though, that it is criminal if (as I assume) it falls between two readerships. After all, the story of how we leave childhood is not just relevant to those who haven’t done so yet.

Mark is not only a writer should crossover in publishing terms, but someone who crosses over as a writer. I often think of children’s books as characterised by Michael Rosen (who, I think, should have a handle on the subject if anyone if anyone does!), as “not so much for children, but as the filling that goes between the child world and the adult world”. The news that stays news may well be about that relationship: author, audience, teacher, student. If you have ever been a child, or wondered about the strange responsibility of being grown up, you should not let Jan Mark be the writer who got away from you. Catch her while you can.

The One that Got Away is currently available exclusively from the Jan Mark is Here website. Thunder and Lightnings is published by Puffin, and you can get it from your local independent or here from Waterstones. It’s currently being discussed online via Christopher Edge’s Classic Children’s Book Club: @ClassicChBkClub The spirit of #JanMARKuary lives on!

There’s something about little people in children’s literature, and it’s not hard to see why: who better for your audience to identify with than characters who are close to the ground, living in a world made to others’ measurements, seeing ordinary things close to, with all the additional beauty and terror that viewpoint offers? Mrs Frisby – who is a mouse, not to mention a single mum – is one of these, and the Rats of NIMH are the same yet different again, though Mrs Frisby doesn’t know that when she sets out to ask their help.

Animals, specifically, are a big part of the children’s literature scene. Where would we all be without Mole and Rattie, Peter, Paddington or the Cowardly Lion? But these are metaphorical characters really, human beings in a sort of costume. Robert C. O’Brien’s 1971 novel – a gift to me from a friend – is much more about what it means to be an animal, to be without civilisation or society, always hustling and bustling for food and survival. It’s not Tarka the Otter, either, a novel so immersed in naturalistic behaviour that the human language often feels too restrictive for its broiling, bestial otter energy.

O’Brien gives his animals enough language to comment on their condition, their sense of difference. As one character tells Mrs Frisby whilst outlining his mad, revolutionary plan, even a rat race mentality isn’t a rat race at all: we borrow the name to describe or disguise the truth, that “[it’s] a People Race, and no sensible rats would ever do anything so foolish.”

And we know, he tells her, that there are rat-like creatures who evolved out of the primordial landscape; they just didn’t go as far as the monkeys did. What does it mean when you realise that human dominance over the rest of nature is essentially an accident of history, and actually freighted with politics? And what if something should tip the balance the other way somehow, or at least make things more complicated than they appear? Perhaps, like the stories of the perpetually emigrating Borrowers or the Mouse and his Child seeking to become self-winding, a story of little people ends up transcending metaphor and becoming a story about the big things: who we are, what we stand for, and what we could do if we tried.

The animal world is a nervous, suspicious one, but in the course of her adventure, Mrs Frisby frequently oversteps its boundaries, uncovering surprising alliances and friendships as she goes. One of the recurring lines of the novel is, “But they [the birds, the rats, the cats, the mice] have never been friends of ours…!” By the close of the novel, when the words are in the mouths of Mrs Frisby’s children, they are almost absurd. Whether or not O’Brien was fully conscious of it (given that his depiction of gender roles reads as peculiarly conservative nowadays) the subtext of the novel is profound. Meanwhile, every human character we meet is either fatuous or somewhat sinister. In the closing chapters, they can’t see the wood for the trees – nor what miraculous thing is escaping into the wood for safety.

It’s intriguing to see the liberties taken by Don Bluth’s company when they adapted the novel for the big screen (whilst acknowledging the ambition of the project). As if O’Brien’s collision of Watership Down, Island of Dr Moreau and The Wombles was not enough, Bluth gives Mrs Frisby an amulet with strange powers, with which she ultimately saves the day. This, Bluth says, “is just a way of letting the audience know that Mrs Frisby has found ‘Courage of the Heart’.” Perhaps this is a reasonable concession to show the resolve she possesses by the end of her tale, and give her a hero moment the novel never quite grants her.

Nonetheless, I think I prefer the novel’s approach: quieter, less mystical, less grandiose. A novel of small but major acts of bravery, modest but enduring triumphs, a plan in execution without any guarantee of success. A novel which divides its heroism between one person who has grown too determined to be afraid, and a community which has grown too wise to overlook the individual.

This novel is – hallelujah – still in print, published with an eyecatching cover by Puffin Books (and I’ve just noticed – you can see the rosebush, look!). Buy it from your local independent, or order up a copy from Waterstones, or buy a secondhand cover like the one above (cover art by Jill Bennett). It would make an ideal bedtime read – it starts with the sweetness of a mouse in need but decidedly grows teeth by the middle part – or an independent read for a thoughtful middle-grader.