Tag: Fantasy

Review: ‘Dragon Skin’, by Karen Foxlee

How was she going to know what to do with magic?

She was just a girl from Chimbu Street.

She knew nothing.

Nothing at all about magic. And she was pretty sure magic wasn’t meant to be arrowroot biscuit mushed up in water or dragon vomit in your bed. Not tears on her dirty face or the sorrowful taste of song, that she couldn’t know but somehow knew, sliding off her tongue.

Surely it wasn’t.

Stay calm, Pip, said Mika in her head.

We’re with Pip in a town in rural Australia, where she lives with her Mum and step-dad Matt. Pip’s home is a landscape of identical mining company houses, thrumming with air-conditioner noise and the sound of road trains coming in on the highway – but three streets away is the wild world of the creek, where she used to spend long hours in conversation with her friend Mika. Now she goes there to be alone – but is she, really? Something glints as the light fades, and Pip must make sense of it as best she can.

Fantasy dominates the children’s section, but books like Dragon Skin are rare. The story of finding a magical creature and becoming its carer is the stuff of younger fiction, whether that’s Andy Shepherd’s lightly comic Boy Who Grew Dragons series, or the fifty year-old A Gift from Winkelsea by beloved author Helen Cresswell. Foxlee’s novel is suited to an older child, maybe even someone making that tricky shift into teenage years (not unlike Pip’s method of entering her secret cave, hanging by your fingers and stretching with your feet) when nothing seems right, least of all the books you’re given to read. It’s as much a novel about ‘what to do’ with magic, as an exploration of loss and the difficulty of change.

Cover illustration by Gareth Lloyd

There’s a particularly big change needed in Pip’s life, which Foxlee develops gradually throughout the novel, from the slam of a screen-door – Pip and her mother flinching at it – through glimpses of Matt’s bullying behaviour, till the overt use of the words ‘domestic abuse’ as the novel enters its final flight. And this is certainly a novel that clears the ground and takes to the sky, without ever shrugging off that weight. It’s a delicately freighted construction, underpinned by utterly credible characters, and buoyed with real magic.

I found it reminiscent of another Cresswell novel, The Night-Watchmen from 1969: a mysterious story that is typical of the era of Penelope Farmer, William Mayne and Catherine Storr, in which a lonely boy, recuperating from illness, becomes aware of a deeper significance to the two strangers’ coded chat about ‘night-work’ and the dreaded ‘green-eyes’. Without ruining things by asking too many questions, he longs to go deeper into their world. Cresswell’s fantasy plays with a sense of trespassing on deeper knowledge – what are all those grown-ups talking about all day? – and though different in many respects, Dragon Skin applies an otherworldly atmosphere with the same subtlety to its depiction of childhood, unfathomable to adults. Her friendship with the since-disappeared Mika is full of conversations using the language of folk tale and science-fiction to broach difficult subjects. At dinner with a schoolfriend’s parents, Pip feels the words play date hanging ‘between them at the table like a tacky helium balloon’, and remembers being in the cave, singing to the dragon, tears on her face, and ‘the way the mouth of the cave held them…’ Foxlee evokes child experience perfectly and unsentimentally as full of strangeness, pain and insight; contrasted with adult incomprehension and conservatism (including bleak glimpses of parents scrolling the internet), her child characters have a viewpoint that is able to pierce right through things.

Cover design by Victo Ngal

My first Karen Foxlee novel, Lenny’s Book of Everything, makes similar contrasts, or rather, co-ordinations and orchestrations of worlds. At one point in that novel – in which Lenny’s little brother Davey, through a medical condition, upsets all sorts of models of how children should look and behave – Lenny has an awkward conversation with a grandparent. ‘How are you doing?’ asks Nanny Flora, and Lenny thinks: She doesn’t know me. Perhaps she doesn’t want to know, and can’t be told, about Lenny’s fears, imaginings, secret sadnesses. The orthodoxy is that grown-ups – or most of us – can’t be made to feel uncomfortable, or challenged. Dragon Skin, though, is a hopeful novel. It crosses that impossible gap between worlds that children’s literature promises to bridge but cannot always manage.

I hope you’ll give it a try – I’ve done my best not to spoil the story – and I’d love your thoughts if you’ve read it already (it came out from Pushkin Children’s last autumn).

I wanted to get back to blogging and talking about my favourite books, if only to keep a record of what I loved and why. More and more I notice how my memory blurs away the individual details of things, like waves on a beach. I hate falling back on generalities like “it’s great/lovely/brilliant/fantastic”.

I feel like we often all prey to those generalities when discussing children’s literature, particularly on social media, cover quotes and blurbs.  The other day, I saw title’s illustrations described as ‘stunning’ (by the publisher, on the book jacket), and I thought it was so wrong: those pictures are beautiful, but do they ‘stun’? Do they even try to? If anything, their sketchy, smudgy quality invites us to look closer. Social media, like cover quotes and blurbs, as well as my own declining mental capacity, under-sells children’s literature, shying from its possibility – perhaps because they unsettle our own, grown-up sense of the world.

Certainly, books with the nuance and power of Dragon Skin deserve better than that.

Dragon Skin by Karen Foxlee (9781782692997) is published by Pushkin Children’s, priced £8.99. You can order it from Waterstones here, or your preferred independent bookshop. Pushkin also publish Lenny’s Book of Everything, but you’ll have to go searching second-hand highways and byways for The Night-Watchmen by Helen Cresswell. Good luck!

Reading the Carnegie: ‘The House with Chicken Legs’, by Sophie Anderson

Step inside the house of the title; don’t be alarmed by the fence of human bones, and don’t stop to wonder if this house was even standing here yesterday. Yes, those are great big chicken legs curled up underneath it, and perhaps the house is flexing on them somewhat, poised to move or even defend itself if you prove other than what you seem. A fire is burning, food is cooking on the stove, and a cup of kvass is waiting for you. A mysterious door in the corner of the room remains temptingly shut, but that is for after you have feasted, told your host about your life, and heard a little of hers.

Her name is Baba Yaga. Perhaps you know it already: perhaps you rode with a brave young Prince, in another story, begging for a magic talisman from Yaga to help you track down the fabulous Firebird and win the hand of a princess; or perhaps you arrived by accident at this strange house and helped her daughter to escape, and then were hunted by the witch in her flying mortar, shuddering at every gnash of her great iron teeth. There are many stories told about Baba Yaga, within and beyond the canon of Russian fairy tale.

Jan Pienkowski’s House on Chicken Legs

I have a vague memory of encountering her as a small child, in a picture book of the Firebird? I expect I was inclined towards her because I called Mum’s Mum ‘Baba’ – she disdained ‘Grandma’ because it made her feel old (none of us knew we were using the same name from another culture) – but I found her frightening too. I loved witch-stories from an early age, and I must have responded to Baba Yaga’s unpredictable character: no Glinda the Good Witch, her. She’d help you or devour you on your individual merit. Plenty of ink has been spilled on trying to interpret Yaga’s origins: did she embody a storm cloud, a matriarchal goddess, a lunar goddess, a memory of Persephone?

Whatever her origins, she continues to have a long and varied life. Sophie Anderson’s interpretation – the grandmotherly old woman dishing up steaming shchi from a huge black pot – is faithful both to Yaga’s associations with the dead and her long history of reinventions. This Yaga is a psychopomp (I’ve always loved that word, and get to use it so rarely), guiding the spirits of the dead into the next world. Her house has legs because it covers so much ground, visiting remote corners, where the smell of festive cooking draws ghosts from far and near. Perhaps you hadn’t realised that, seated at this nice table, enjoying the earthly things of the world: you’re being readied for whatever lies behind that door.

Gennady Spirin Baba Yaga

But perhaps you’ve spotted someone else in the house on chicken legs, a girl watching you from the periphery of the scene. Marinka, Baba Yaga’s granddaughter, with a sombre expression. She has never known her parents, only this house and Yaga, and she really should be involving herself more in this process, listening to the specific words, learning the language of the dead, because one day – perhaps sooner than she expects – Marinka will be taking on this role.

But that is there is a problem, one that drives this wonderful novel, pushing its characters to do daring, huge, tiny, impossible, stupid, wonderful, treacherous, human and magical things: Marinka doesn’t want to live this life. She wants to live among people and have friends who are not just spirits on the brink of something else. One day, her Baba will go through the gateway into the land of the dead herself, and Marinka will fully inherit the identity, the history and the responsibility of the Yaga. But if Marinka has her way, she won’t.

Without risking spoilers, it’s worth saying how refreshing it is to see a children’s fantasy novel without a villain. Certain genres and conventions seem unavoidable after a while, and the assumption is often that younger readers demand constant peril and clean moral distinctions. This novel is about a girl whose compass is spinning from the very first page, and we are with her, wishing for some form of escape. We long for her to find a friend or have an adventure that will in some way resolve her anxiety about the future – but every action has a consequence, and this isn’t a story about tidy options. It’s driven by emotion, fuelled by secrets, and its route is unpredictable and bumpy.

The narrative flies along, and Anderson keeps us guessing, but this is also a novel of subtlety, of a sort only a fantasy novel can achieve. When Marinka’s house brings her to a new city, for example, and Marinka throws away her headscarf because it makes her look like a Yaga, or when Marinka agrees to a ritual of formal inheritance while a secret betrayal burns darkly in her heart, complex ideas of cultural difference are being invoked. What might initially appear an adventure about escaeing from a hard life, perhaps with some spooky, Tim Burtonish furnishings, quickly becomes a novel about precisely those details and their authenticity: about how folk and fairy tales like those of Baba Yaga help us grapple with the impossible aspects of the world. It is also about how these tales are an inheritance available to all of us: the House is waiting for you or I to enter, sit down and share our stories.

Ernest Small’s House

Though it carries its character into extraordinary circumstances, their emotional truth is richer for that kernel of folkloric strangeness. Anderson gives the folk tale a cultural authenticity, never simply adopting it for an exotic flavour, whilst also playing about with it making it structurally, even societally meaningful (a whole Yaga culture, with its own rules, stories and newsletters) within Marinka’s world. It’s a deft achievement.

I first read this when it was Book of the Month at Waterstones (in fact, it was launched in our store –three men in red silk shirts playing balalaikas in the history department: it was great). After that it was on the shortlist of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and now it has joined the Carnegie Shortlist (alongside, peculiarly, a number of other children’s novels about grief and death). It deserves all this and a long life too. Not only that, I can’t wait to read what Sophie Anderson writes next.

The Longest Night of Charlie Noon, by Christopher Edge

One question I’m always asking about middle-grade fiction is, where’s the science-fiction: the wild and wide-eyed adventures, and the big ideas about science or sentience or society? That might be starting to change, with Kirsty Applebaum’s gripping dystopia The Middler and Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s moving and funny Runaway Robot both published this year with great reviews.

Christopher Edge, however, has been flying the flag for children’s sci-fi since 2016’s The Many Worlds of Albie Bright: not just redeploying the tropes, but using them to tell philosophically, emotionally rich tales that are distinctly his. The Many Worlds that Albie explores, parallel to our own, are not just explorations of quantum theory – utilising CERN technology and an old banana, in true Doctor Who/First Men in the Moon style – but also a quest for a lost parent that takes us into big questions about character, history and grief. The Jamie Drake Equation is about the heroism of astronauts, the fallibility of parents, messages from distant stars and the Grand Unified Theory that draws them all into one meaningful pattern. The first Edge novel I read, The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, takes readers to the edge of existence beyond. It excites the reader, provokes questions and springs surprises, but it also moves us and, like Edge’s other novels, leaves us on a note of hope.

Holloway image by Stanley Donwood

The Longest Night of Charlie Noon, published this week, is another novel of surprises: nothing is quite what it seems. When Dizzy takes his friend Charlie to the woods, it’s to find who has left secret messages on the path, mysterious signs made out of bent twigs. Is it a spy? Is it a monster? Is there really a wild man hiding out there? Or could it all be a trick laid by Johnny, the toughest kid in school?

Before these questions have been satisfactorily answered, the three realise they are lost. However far they walk, they never seem to reach the edge of the woods. Night falls unexpectedly quickly, and when Charlie climbs an oak tree to look for the North Star, the night sky looks completely wrong. And meanwhile, it seems the children really are being followed.

It’s clear from the opening of the novel that this is a story about time: ‘Can I tell you a secret? Once upon a time doesn’t exist. This story starts once upon a now.’ But what Edge has accomplished here is no straightforwardly sci-fi novel. Though it is clearly illuminated by the science of time – he acknowledges the work of Carlo Rovelli and James Gleick, among several other scientific approaches – what we have here is closer to Maisie Day in exploring the philosophical and phenomenological aspects of his theme. As well as Rovelli, Edge mentions Alan Garner’s collected essays, The Voice that Thunders, and Charlie Noon also reminds me of Garner’s later novels, Red Shift, Thursbitch and even Boneland, except that it’s a great deal more enjoyable and digestible than those. There are echoes of Garner’s contemporary, Penelope Lively, of Astercote and even more of her adult novel Moon Tiger.

Nether, by Stanley Donwood

Garner and Lively are both archaeologically-minded writers, and an archaeological concept appears to inform Charlie Noon in the way that quantum physics did Edge’s earlier novels: deep time, the sense of the world’s ancientness (and vast futurity), in which human beings can appear insignificantly small and agency. It’s a universal theme that nonetheless speaks particularly to children, who are sometimes made to feel just that, pinpricks in the bigger history of their ecology, their culture and their families: look at the framing of their ecological protests in recent months. ‘Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality seems absurd – crushed to irrelevance,’ writes Robert Macfarlane in Underland, but equally, ‘[at] its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy’. It’s a shift in perspective that offers hope when the present moment appears intolerable, as in Charlie’s claustrophobic home life: what seems immovable as rock was once fluid and shifting: ‘There is a way out of the woods.’

Deep time compels us to work our imaginations on scenes and situations that appear unalterable, and show us the life, violence and movement embodied by rock formations and rivers. It makes a wild tempest of the landscape, in which Charlie and the others must become immersed in order to understand themselves and their place in it. Past and future time are part of the storm, too, in ways that seemed particularly alive and pertinent, given this week’s D-Day commemorations. Narrative convention itself is shaken by thunder and struck by lightning: once upon a time doesn’t exist and the future is yours to write. Reading and decoding run through the novel, and for me it chimed with something Michael Rosen said at a Reading for Pleasure conference last month, about reading as not merely an act of comprehension, but interpretation.

The Heart of the Forest, by Denys Watkins-Pitchford (aka ‘BB’)

Comedy, high adventure and stories of personal drama each have an important part to play in children’s reading, but we must also celebrate novels that allow room for interpretation, that leave gaps for readers to bridge, that ask questions without easy answers, that are strange and mysterious and even disconcerting. The Longest Night of Charlie Moon is at times a deeply strange novel, and hooray for that.

From one simple idea, page-turningly linear, told with elegant economy and deceptive simplicity, The Longest Night of Charlie Noon branches out into all manner of subjects, stories and concepts. Like Edge’s earlier novels, it concludes – it feels wrong to say that it ends, after all these non-linear shenanigans – with an emotionally resonant resolution, and on an optimistic note. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that stories of hope are desperately required at this point in history, and not just by the children amongst us.

You might also be interested in my review of The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day on my old blog, where there is also quite a lot about Alan Garner, one of my essential authors.