Reading kids' books

I read kids' books quite often, and by kids' books I don't mean those aimed at any particular age group but ones ranging from delightful full-colour picture books to books that just come in just under the young adults' age range. I've read some YA books too, but usually they're romances or gloomy apocalyptic things, and I'm not so strung out about those.

I had a real go at Diana Wynne Jones' books in 2011, when I read eight of them (they vary in quality but are always imaginative). I read a couple more earlier this year. Her books are in the same kind of fantasy genre as mine, though of course, so far, she's been considerably more successful than me in terms of a wide readership and lots of sales.

However, in the last month I've read a couple of other books I'd like to mention. The first is Speed. Speed is a word with several meanings of course, and Grant uses that ambiguity in her title and in her book. But it's also something of a speed read, because she piles on the angst and the action. I'm not sure if anyone's yet invented an equivalent of the phrase 'page-turner' for e-books, but whatever the correct phrase is, it applies to this book, which I read on my Kindle.

It's probably aimed at young teens: the hero was around 14, if I remember rightly, and proved to be a pretty tough character by the time he'd got himself through dealing with his parents dying and lying policemen and houses burning down. This book is by the Kiwi writer, Dawn Grant (although she writes under D C Grant). It's the first in a series and I wrote a brief review on Goodreads: The book races along at a great pace with the young hero gradually getting himself deeper and deeper into difficulties. Along the way there's a good deal about coping with grief as well as making the right decisions even if they may cost you your life. 

The second book was one I finished today. It starts off a bit more slowly than Speed, is aimed at a slightly younger age range, and is written by someone living here in my home town, someone I haven't met face-to-face but have corresponded on email with. I'd written to her husband on a few occasions - he writes a column in the ODT called WordWays - and it was he who introduced me to his wife and told me about her book. 

This author is called Beatrice Hale, and she's written an exciting adventure called Ice Escape. (You can see my review on Goodreads here.)  This book has two young narrators, both boys, and while initially it's a bit of a puzzle as to why the second narrator is there, it soon becomes evident that the two lads' lives will connect. 

The story is about a family embarking on a long flight together, on a flying boat. It's set in the 1920s and their adventure is meant to take them around the world. Of course, this being an adventure story things don't quite according to plan. The characters are straightforwardly-drawn, and the adventure itself is exciting enough to make you keep turning pages again. But the interesting thing is that a great deal of information about flying, and living in a perilous situation, and being rescued, and working on a fishing boat is included. There's no sense that it's there just because the writer thinks it's interesting, but because it's integral to the story. 

I probably won't write a thriller like Speed or an adventure story like Ice Escape. But each book you read shows you better how to write your own - quite apart from the sheer enjoyment involved in sharing the adventures of fictional characters. As poet Billy Collins writes in One Life to Live: 
...this is the only life I have and I never step out of it, 
except to follow a character down the alleys of a novel...

Faith in fiction revived

I was given Alexander McCall Smith's latest book, Trains and Lovers, to review a few days ago.  I'm a great AMS fan, but not of everything he's written. And unfortunately this book just doesn't cut the mustard. The review will be out in the Otago Daily Times soonish, so you can read what I thought then.

After that disappointment it was great, by happenstance, to pick up Anne Tyler's most recent novel, The Beginner's Goodbye at the Library yesterday. I finished it tonight. (It's just under 200 pages, but this was the hardcover version, making it easier to read.)

What a contrast! Where AMS writes a story that skims the surface, Tyler gives us characters with depth, and the humour is a delight too. The only book of Tyler's that I've read, I think, is The Accidental Tourist, which I really enjoyed. I have a funny feeling there was another one, but I can't remember anything about it, and am not even sure if I finished it. I also think it might have put me off reading any more of her books, which is a pity.

Tyler's story is about grief - the narrator's wife has died recently, and the book is essentially about him learning to move on again. It's a slow process, and the book could have been very gloomy. Instead, Tyler manages to write in such a way that we're fully involved with the narrator, and even though at times he's a bit of a prig, we still empathize with him, and not just because his wife has been killed in a rather odd accident.

There's a great deal of humour and warmth in the book, a delight in life even in the midst of a tragedy, and the very strange 'fact' that the narrator's wife suddenly starts appearing again after she's been dead for a year. Tyler can draw a character in a few words (AMS's characters, in his latest book, are scarcely drawn at all), and she can also keep on adding layers to characters we thought we'd got to grips with.

The story seems to meander, yet every step in the story is in its right place, and everything works together to form a pleasing whole. It's quite revived my faith in fiction!  :)

Out of its tree

We watched the world’s most boring movie last night, always hoping something would move forward, but no.  The Tree, an Australian movie with French co-production, was about a family of four children whose father dies suddenly.  The mother goes into total grief and depression and can’t seem to move forward.  The tree becomes a symbol of the father’s ‘presence’ for the only girl in the family (Morgana Davies) - a precocious nine-year old - and later for the mother also (Charlotte Gainsbourg), but after a while you wonder if it isn’t having a negative effect on them, since neither of them are coping with the change that’s come on them.  The tree is also taking over the neighbourhood, its roots spreading not only through their large property but also through the neighbours' places. The mother meets a guy (Martin Csokas) whom she likes and it looks as though things are going to go somewhere, but when he offers to cut the tree down (after a huge branch has broken off and crashed into the mother’s bedroom, and after the tree has suddenly come into bloom and spread itself everywhere) both mother and daughter refuse, the latter going up into the branches and staying there.  The dead father, seemingly, (who seemed a pretty nice bloke when he was alive) has apparently become malevolent in death.  Exit the new man in the mother's life.

Thankfully, at the end of the movie, along comes a cyclone and knocks the tree over – onto the house, pretty much wrecking it.  The family 'decide' to move - ‘anywhere, somewhere, ’ says the mother - seeming not to have learned a thing, and leaving the bloke behind altogether.   This last scene, between the mother and the man, is played by Gainsbourg as though she had overcome some challenge.  Ah, no she hadn't.

The thing is weird, with a terribly flat performance by Gainsbourg.  You couldn’t tell whether she was just an awful actress (which is unlikely, given the amount of work she’s done) or whether the part (or director?) just didn’t give her any room for contrast.  Her unceasing underplaying of the thing makes her altogether hard to be sympathetic with, and when the little girl becomes harder and harder and won’t break, we lose sympathy with her too. 

Evan Williams, in The Australian, says...'I shall never see a film as lovely as The Tree...comes close to perfection.'  David Stratton, in At the Movies, writes: 'Beautifully made, beautifully acted.'  And Phillipa Hawker in The Age, says 'A visual and kinetic tour de force that has startling impact.'  Which just goes to show you can't go by the blurbs on the DVD cover.  There's little loveliness (apart perhaps from the cinematography), little perfection, little tour de force.  And not much startling impact.  Sorry guys, you got this one wrong.

You wanted to follow for Why?

I've hit the 111 mark with Twitter in terms of how many people follow me.   That may seem a positive thing, until you actually check out who's following you. 

Some are people I follow as well; some are people who know me from elsewhere.  

But some seem rather random in terms of why would they follow me?   It's as if they have some automated system that looks for a key word related to their area of interest.  If I happen to mention that key word in one of my tweets, voila!,  I have a new follower. 

Even then, some of them are mysteries: the 'official tweets for the Olympic Games'?  A stunt actor and fight choreographer.  Someone who's "Sexy, sassy and adventurous."  (She's definitely in the wrong place.)  "DocLocker [who] delivers the ideal combination of first-class maximum security and ease of use."  Someone who has a photo of a collie with boots on as his avatar.  

Someone who has this as their profile: My beloved Nelson died November 6,2009.Memory Eternal.My blog:The Unwedded Widow.Orthodox Christian,hypothyroid/CFS/spoonie,knitter,jobless,navigating grief.  The Brazen Head, that advertises itself this way: Welcome to Ireland's oldest pub, come and experience great music, award winning food & a unique atmosphere!  Terry, who....enjoys Maui sunsets with his wife! Real Estate & Tax Lien Investor. Realtor, Trainer, Speaker for Real Estate Investors. Internet Marketing Consultant.  Carl, who writes: Im married with 2 daughters and have an awesome recipe for chick pea curry. I also lead a UK and increasingly international mens ministry.

An awesome recipe for chick pea curry?   OK, Carl.

Krishna Shanoi

A wonderful online children's book about grief, fathers, sons, a book that will speak to any boy or girl who has lost their father at a young age and never known whether they were loved or not.   It's called Glasses, and it's by Krishna Shanoi

Make sure you view it on full screen....wonderful detailed drawings, and concise, moving text.

Krishna Bala Shenoi is a name entirely unfamiliar to me, and I was only alerted to this book by a tweet from Roger Ebert, the film critic.   Shenoi's website, Artistic Scrapyard. has a wide range of artistic work.  Glasses is finely finished, compared to some of the other material showing, but you might also like to check out the video, Tissue - a love story, which is a video using a combination of animation and live action.  (It also has a surprise ending - and is beautifully matched to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.)

One last piece from Thomas Lynch

And one final extract from Thomas Lynch's The Undertaking. I could include more, but....the book's got to go back to the library.

I often think about this schizophrenia, how we are drawn to the dead and yet abhor them, how grief places them on pedestals and buries them in graves or burns the evidence, how we love and hate them all at once; how the same dead man is both saint and sonovabitch, how the dead are frightening but our dead are dear. I think funerals and graveyards seek to mend these fences and bridge these gaps - between our fears and fond feelings, between the sickness and the sadness it variously awakens in us, between the weeping and dancing we are driven to at the the news of someone's dying. The man who said that any man's death diminishes me was talking about the knowledge at the corner of every obit that it was not me and some day will be. Thus graveyards are a way of keeping the dead handy but removed, dear but a little distant, gone but not forgotten.

Page 133.

It's just a shell

There's this 'just a shell' theory of how we ought to relate to dead bodies. You hear a lot of it from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws - folks who are unsettled by the fresh grief of others. You hear it when you bring a mother and a father in for the first sight of their dead daughter, killed in a car wreck or left out to rot by some mannish violence. It is proffered as comfort in the teeth of what is a comfortless situation, consolation to the inconsolable. Right between the inhale and exhale of the bonecracking sob such hurts produce, some frightened and well-meaning ignoramus is bound to give out with, 'It's OK, that's not her, it's just a shell."

I once saw an Episcopalian deacon nearly decked by the swift slap of the mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, to whom he'd tendered this counsel. 'I'll tell you when it's "just a shell",' the woman said, 'for now and until I tell you otherwise, she's my daughter.'

She was asserting the longstanding right of the living to declare the dead dead. Just as we declare the living alive through baptisms, lovers in love by nuptials, funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. It's how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories.

Page 23, The Undertaking - life studies in the dismal trade, by Thomas Lynch.