Christmas won't be Christmas... Miriam Halahmy

 ...without any presents, “ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

Growing up reading Little Women is one of my most enduring memories of Christmas. My mother gave me her copy when I was nine. It had been a birthday present to her from her siblings when she was a child before the war and I passed it on to my daughter.

Mum’s book even appeared in The Independent. They did a feature on lists by well known people and then invited readers to send in their own. This is mine.

Five things I can’t live without (The Independent 26.8.04)

My polar library

Twice daily reflux pills

Tap water – yes, London vintage

Mum’s pre-war copy of Little Women

with a single black and white plate

him indoors

Which character were you? I was Jo, climbing trees in ankle length skirts, getting into scrapes, reading all day on her bed with a bag of apples, my head full of dreams about becoming a writer. I couldn’t be good little Beth, Amy was far too pretty and spoilt and Meg was a woman!

Little Women were my surrogate sisters. In real life I was the sandwich between two lively brothers. Probably that explains a lot of the appeal of tomboy Jo. I used to follow my brothers up every tree, usually falling on the way down.

At nine I marvelled when Jo was told off for using slang by Amy, “we are a pretty jolly set....” Crikey! But fortunately when Jo and Amy scrap dear sweet Beth is there to make peace. “Bird in their little nests agree,” sang Beth.

I loved the narrator who spoke to us in the voice of a kindly aunt. “As young readers like to know how people look we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled within.” Totally absorbing, I wouldn’t raise my eyes from the page until Mum yelled at me to lay the table.

Little Women takes us gently through adversity, poverty, separation through war, love, friendship, sibling rivalry, sibling loyalty and death. I still remember the first time I read about Beth’s brush with death and of course the terrible death of the Hummel baby. Through it all we learn to be a pilgrim with our packs on our bags. The religious stuff went over my head but I loved the challenge.

And then of course there is the boyfriend - gorgeous, funny, attentive, rich Laurie next door. He even has a piano for poor Beth! I never really understood why he and Jo didn’t get married but of course silly little Amy had to morph into sensible and mature before the dear reader would accept her as Laurie’s good wife.

If you have time over the festive season, join me in Christmas with the Little Women.

SEASONS GREETINGS EVERYONE. HAPPY READING and  HAPPY WRITING!!

 www.miriamhalahmy.com

www.miriamhalahmy.blogspot.com

Dark Lords, Witch Queens, and Snow: Sue Purkiss

It's just stopped snowing. We very rarely get snow in this corner of Somerset; last year was the first time for many years that we'd had more than a sprinkling. Today, it seems we are in what for us is the extraordinary position of having some of the heaviest falls going. I don't think I've ever seen so much - certainly not here; great mounds and billows of the stuff.

A couple of weeks ago, we didn't have much, but it was so cold that what there was stayed on the ground. And then one day there was an amazing hoar frost. The hut where I write was festooned with cobwebs (outside, not inside, I'm happy to say) that looked as if they were made out of silver string. Here's one.

I took our dog, Jessie, for her usual walk up on the Mendips. We went up through the woods, then looped down over the hill, so that we were facing the view which stretches out across the Vale of Wedmore to Glastonbury Tor in the distance. (This is the view that's described at the end of my book Warrior King, through the eyes of King Alfred. The peace between him and the Danes was finalised at Wedmore.) There wasn't so much frost in the woods, but out in the open every tree, every twig, every blade of grass was thickly etched in white; it was magical. The sky wasn't clear, it was a mixture of greys: the sun was a silver gilt disc behind thin pearly grey cloud.

I tried to pick up a stone to throw for Jessie, but I couldn't shift it; it was frozen solid to the ground. It reminded me of The Grey King, in Susan Cooper's series, The Dark Is Rising, where the dog Pen is fixed unnaturally and immoveably to the ground by the power of the Grey Lord, channelled through a warestone, which is also held tight to the earth. I heard crows calling, and took a picture of them when they perched like black cut-outs on silvery branches. They seemed the only things moving in the silent lanscape, and I thought of the title book of the same series, where rooks are messengers of the dark, inhabiting an unnaturally frozen landscape.

There's some sort of link I'm trying to find, something to do with the way snow changes the feel of a landscape, concealing what is normally there and creating something new - between that, and what makes some of the best-loved children's books work. (There's Narnia, too, when Lucy et al first enter it: a glittering forest, enchanted by the witch so that it's 'always winter, but never Christmas.') Snow changes what happens, we all know that: ordinary life holds its breath. You can't work any more, so you might as well play. But there's something else, something much deeper than that. We are taken back to an older time, when we were bound more closely to nature; to a time when people must have wondered if winter would ever end, and if they could possibly survive it even if it did. The children who are the heroes and heroines of all those wonderful books are not just fighting a dark lord or a witch queen - they are fighting the beautiful cruelty of a fierce winter.

And finally, just because I like it, one more picture.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Tiffany-Mae or TM? by Keren David

Mary Ann did it. So did Charlotte, Emily and Anne.  But why do some of us?

Heathcliff, in the new film of Wuthering Heights

Mary Ann Evans wrote as George Eliot. The Bronte sisters adopted male pseudonyms too. They lived in an age where women were denied the vote, were barred from most professions, and, until 1870 if married, could not own property. So it is not surprising that they disguised their gender when presenting their work to the world, especially when the work contains darkly sexual undertones, as does Wuthering Heights.

But now, we’re past all that, aren’t we? Feminism has fought important battles. We’ve had a woman prime minister (soon to be lionised in a new film), we can do any job. We are often the highest earner in the family, we own property, we speak our minds.

Of course there is a long history of authors, both male and female, using pen names and initials, and it was particularly popular in the 1930s,40s and 50s. D H Laurence was not hiding his gender, and nor was C S Lewis.  But the practice waned in the less formal Sixties, and with the rise of feminism in the 1970s, one might expect that it  would die out. It did not.

JK Rowling giving evidence this week

The most famous recent example, of course, is JK Rowling. Read some accounts and her publisher ‘insisted’ that she dropped Joanne or the more neutral ‘Jo’ for JK in order to attract boy readers. Other reports suggest that she and her publisher agreed on the strategy, but again for the same reason. Watching her give evidence this week  to the Leveson  Inquiry, I wondered if there was another explanation. I was struck by her concern, even right at the start of her career, for her privacy and for that of her children. Maybe adopting initials felt like a good way of preserving her own identity, even before her magnificent success.

But the result, I think, has been the growth of a myth that women authors have to ‘do a JK’ to avoid being shunned by boys. I was talking to a YA writer the other day, and she told me that the first ‘boy’s’ book she wrote came with a suggestion from her publisher's marketing department that she adopt initials -  even though her first books were written, very successfully, under her own name. She refused. 

I think she was absolutely correct. What message do we give boy readers when they realise that ‘TM’ or whatever is hiding ‘Tiffany-Mae’. Why shouldn’t Tiffany-Mae be worth listening to? What do real girls called Tiffany-Mae (or whatever) think, when they realise their name is somehow unacceptable?  And do writers called Michael, Patrick or Marcus ever feel pressure to become Michelle, Patti or Marcie?

I am aware that I am preaching from a fortunate position here, thanks to my parents' decision to pick a name for me which baffles many people into thinking I am really Keiran, Kevin or just a spelling error. The masculine surname (changed from the more exotic Buznic by my grandparents in the 1930s) nudges readers away from associating Keren with Karen. Perhaps if I were named Trixibelle Fotheringay -  or even Belinda Buznic -  I might not feel it was the best branding for a writer of urban thrillers.

I hope I’d have the gumption to show that there’s nothing that a Trixibelle can’t do. Trixibelle is worth listening to.  Trixibelle isn't frilly, or silly, because women are just as strong and sensible as any man.

I’d love to know how others have dealt with the same issue. Have you happily adopted initials or a pen name, and felt that MM or Max had more success than Maxine would have? Or did you have to fight for the right to remain an Arabella?

My Enid - by Elen Caldecott

I was charmed and delighted when the Bookwitch reviewed How Ali Ferguson Saved Houdini. She compared it to Enid Blyton, but much better written. I loved the review, but this comment has stayed with me. Is Enid really that bad?
I am sure that we all watched Enid, the BBC4 dramatisation of her life. I watched in shock as Helena Bonham Carter turned a childhood hero into a monster. Apparently, she was self-absorbed, manipulative and borderline abusive towards her own children.
But the critical-rot for Blyton set in much earlier than this drama. For years, she has been dismissed as a writer; not simply for her archaic attitudes (it is always the 'swarthy' character that has to be watched in the Famous Five), but also because of her carbon copy plots, her 2D characters, her wilful use of adverbs.

Even in the 1980s, when I was a child, some of my friends weren't allowed to read her. These same friends were also subjected to such outlandish things as soya milk and yoga, so in my eight-year-old eyes they were already to be pitied. But to be deprived of Enid Blyton seemed especially cruel, because for me, Enid Blyton was so much more than a writer. She was a haven. There were days when I desperately needed to hide and I hid inside my collection of Blytons.

Don't worry, this post isn't the opening of a misery memoir. Rather, I'd like to consider what it was about these critically trashed books that made them so powerful.

I knew that the Famous Five and the Five Find-Outers and the Secret Seven and the 'of Adventure' lot were all the same characters but with different names. I knew that. But I didn't care. In fact, the very opposite. I was glad to see them again in their different incarnations.

And I knew that Malory Towers and St Claire's weren't real (although that didn't stop me demanding a detour when, on a family holiday in South Wales, I misread a signpost). But despite the fact that I knew it was fiction, I had such a yearning to be part of the stable, unchanging world of lacrosse and midnight feasts and the upper fourth. It didn't matter that I couldn't tell a lacrosse stick from a liquorice stick. These girls were my friends. I loved that their characters didn't change, that there wasn't an emotional journey in sight.

I guess I'm saying that Enid Blyton's faults were the things that I loved - the unchanging, predictable world of a middle-class country I had never known.

It is telling, I think, that in the 9-12 section of my local Waterstones, Enid Blyton still takes up the most shelf space - yes, Michael Morpurgo has a fair spread and Jacqueline Wilson does even better. But Blyton is still Queen. Kids still need stories they can rely on.

Recently I read Ali Sparkes' Frozen in Time. It is a deliberate and well-observed homage to the Famous Five. I enjoyed reading it very much. I was so pleased to find that the shades of Blyton live on in contemporary children's literature because we can be too snobbish, I think. We want our books to be weighty and meaningful. We want them to explore the 'real' world - I do this myself, so I do know this is a pot-kettle situation. But, sometimes, when life gets tough, you don't want to read about woe. Sometimes, all you want is to whiz around country lanes with a knapsack full of ginger beer. Sometimes, you just need Enid.
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A child's Jane Eyre by Miriam Halahmy

 This year is the centenary of the publication of The Secret Garden which the British author and friend of Frances Hodgson Burnett (FBH) called, 'a sort of child's Jane Eyre.' There are lots of interesting parallels; Yorkshire, an isolated house, an absent owner and a girl who turns up, orphaned and alone.

I’ve just been on a wonderful study day on The Secret Garden, held by the Children’s Historical Book Society.  I received my copy of the book as a prize when I was nine and someone else on the study day had exactly the same version with her, for the same reason.

I fell in love with the book straight away. We often visited Yorkshire as we had family there and I loved tramping over the moors. We also visited Haworth and marvelled over the tiny handwriting of the Bronte sisters, viewed through a magnifying glass.

I found Mary and Colin so strange and compelling, Martha was like the big sister I never had and I was probably in love with Dickon. The book has remained a favourite ever since.

On arriving at the Study Day someone showed me a handwritten, undated letter which had fallen out of a second hand book she had recently acquired. Here is the transcript :

Maytham Hall

Rolvenden

Kent

Dear Mrs Parkes,

I should come with the greatest of pleasure now that I know that I shall not be a pariah and an outcast.

Yours sincerely,

Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Two of FBH’s biographers were next to me, Ann Thwaite ( who also wrote a biography of A.A. Milne) and Gretchen Gerzina, from New York. The letter caused quite a stir and according to the experts, probably referred to FBH’s  unhappy relationship with her second husband, Stephen Townsend and the problems these caused her socially.

The day was filled with talks by some of the world’s experts on FBH and her books and was full of the most marvellous insights. Ann Thwaite had met members of the family as well as former servants when researching for her book, including a man in his 80s, Harry Millam, who was a 12 year old stable boy at Maytham. I asked if he might have been the inspiration behind Dickon. Both biographers responded with, Oh, interesting, yes, well never thought about it before. Afterwards someone said, ‘Well done for asking the best question, you electrified them!’ It was like winning the school prize all over again.

Ann Thwaite’s husband, Anthony Thwaite, edited Larkin’s Letters to Monica and found a letter about The Secret Garden which Larkin read for the first time in 1953. He found the book ‘astonishingly good..calls on everyone to live life to the utmost....masterly ( about Yorkshire).’

Larkin observed how technically clever it was to depict two children, neither of whom had ever seen the spring. I hadn’t really thought about that before. Wonderful.

Snippets about FBH and The Secret Garden (TSG) you may or may not know ( taken from notes made on the day, so any errors are mine)

1.      FBH wrote 53 novels, mainly for adults, out of print now.

2.      There is a memorial to TSG in Central Park in New York.

3.      FBH wrote TSG in America where she lived for many years.

4.      FBH was considered one of the top five novelists in America and was ranked with Henry James.

5.      She crossed the Atlantic 33 times ( by sea) and was met by paparazzi every time, both sides.

6.      She was one of the highest paid authors, ever.

7.      The robin in TSG who showed the way came from Maytham, her home in Kent.

8.      Dickon was originally called Dick but FBH was told this was a silly name. She felt that Dickon was a good country name.

9.      TSG didn’t become famous until the 1930s after her death in 1924 aged 75 years.

10.   FBH would be most surprised at the celebrations all over the world this year for the centenary of The Secret Garden.

I could write more on Mrs Sowerby and the politics of The Secret Garden but I think that will be a whole new blog. I do hope you share my enthusiasm for the enduring fascination of this author and this book.

How Has Reading Changed? by Nicola Morgan

Everything we do changes our brains. So, if there's something we are doing differently now, compared with how we did it previously, our brains will be changing or have changed to reflect that. If readers' brains are changing and if reading behaviours are changing, surely this will matter for writers?

Reading behaviours have changed over the last twenty or thirty years, at least in parts of the world where the digital age has arrived. Almost all of us read a great deal on-screen, and we spend a certain amount of our day reading material on websites. New research at the University of California, San Diego suggests that the average person today consumes nearly three times as much info as in 1960. According to The New York Times recently, "the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times an hour."

We quickly become better at scanning headlines to decide what we want, and we skip and flit about, gathering snippets of info and processing it very quickly. Our brains change to reflect new skills. Gary Small's fascinating book, iBrain, is based partly on research on a group of people who had never used the internet before, alongside a control group. The study suggested - and this is backed up by other research into time taken to rewire neural connections - that after only five hours' practice, the brain of an internet beginner has changed, measurably, to reflect new skills and experience. And more practice or use produces more change, apparently.

(For more on the science of this, I recommend iBrain, and The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr.) But for now I want to talk anecdote, not science. I want to ask you if your experience matches mine.

Maybe five years ago, I was about to start writing The Highwayman's Footsteps. I wanted it  to be "rip-roaring adventure", thrilling historical drama, just like one of my favourite books as a teenager, The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas. I remembered that The Black Tulip had lots of gore and high tension and a very fast-paced story.

So, I took it from my shelf to re-read it, for the first time since I'd been a teenager. Well, I wasn't wrong about the gore. (Who says modern YA fiction is shocking? Blimey!) High tension? Well, maybe, but you had to read a LOT of words first and unpick reams of long paragraphs and complex sentences. It's turgid prose, with masses of subordinate clauses. The opening paragraph consists of a single sentence of 148 words.

Reader, I couldn't read it. Seriously.

So, what has happened in the intervening years? How did I turn from a teenager who could lap that up to an adult who couldn't keep her eyes on the page? But forget me - what about you? I'm guessing I'm not the only reader whose reading habits have changed. And it can't be to do with age, because surely a teenager would have if anything a greater need for pace than a middle-aged person? Are we just too busy nowadays to read slowly? Have we been subconsciously demanding faster books / simpler sentences over the last thirty years, so that now page-turnability is compulsory, whereas before (?) it wasn't? Has our definition of page-turnability changed?

If our reading habits, needs and tastes have changed, science tells us our brains have, too. There's nothing much we can do about this, although each of us in theory controls the mouse on our own computers. Besides, I'm not even saying that in terms of reading habits this is a bad change. (In terms of the arguments that people like Gary Small and many others are introducing regarding empathy and wisdom, that's a different matter.)

I'm just interested:

• Do you find it harder to concentrate on longer, denser texts than you used to?
• Have you had any Black Tulip examples, where you've tried reading something you once loved and then wondered what on earth has happened to your brain in the meantime?
• What might it mean for us as writers? Publishers say people want shorter, snappier reading material - are they right? 
• Do you think it matters?  Are you worried about any of this?

Answers in a comment. Oh, and keep it snappy - no one will read it otherwise.

Right, I'm off. Things to do, people to meet, tweets to tweet, info to process, websites to scan...

What Would Willy Wonka Do?

It was Roald Dahl day on Tuesday. Dahl would have been 95.

The day got some unwelcome publicity with the announcement by the Dahl Museum in Great Missenden that they were trying to raise £500,000 in order to move and restore the garden shed in which Dahl wrote many of his most famous works. Blogs and tweets ensued, many to the effect that a) that was a hell of a lot of money for a shed, and b) why couldn’t the well-heeled Dahl Estate pay for it?

I have sympathy with both points, but still, you’ve got to hand it to Dahl. There aren’t many writers who have museums devoted to them, and I can’t think of any, other than Burns, Shakespeare and Joyce, who have a “Day”. Even twenty-one years after his death, Dahl shoots effortlessly into the headlines, pushing aside Libya and the meltdown of the Eurozone, merely on the basis that his garden shed is a bit damp.

It’s harder for children’s writers to survive than writers for adults, simply because childhood doesn’t last as long, and their audience must be constantly renewed. Ideally they need to write for a long time, preferably for a generation. At that point, the people who enjoyed the early books are old enough to have children of their own, and may start buying all over again, starting a virtuous circle. Dahl has not only survived, he continues to be read in over fifty languages, and has sold some 100,000,000 books. In bookselling jargon, that’s known as shed-loads.

So here’s the odd thing. Dahl was, and is, incredibly popular. He still has the power to grab headlines. He’s widely loved, but he’s also controversial, having been accused of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and the glorification of violence amongst other things. He’s been the subject of two full-length biographies, and a third by Michael Rosen is reportedly in progress. Many of his books have been turned into successful commercial movies. There’s lots to be said about Dahl, whether you love or loathe him. So why is it that, apart from one short survey written a year or so after his death, there has never been an academic book about his work?

Let me put this in context. Children’s literature criticism is a thriving part of academia these days (I write it myself). There are, at a cursory count, no less than six full-length academic volumes on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000). On the Harry Potter books (1997-2007) there are at least fourteen. But on Dahl, whose books have been around so much longer and are so much more numerous, nothing.

I should add that this is about to change, as I’m currently co-editing a collection of academic essays on Dahl that will (we hope) appear next year, but it’s still rather mysterious. Why is it that Dahl – controversial, headline-grabbing, eagerly-consumed Dahl – is so widely ignored by the academics? I find it genuinely puzzling.

Could it be because his books are funny?

A Subject Close to my Heart - Lucy Coats

It's a new school year and all over the country teenagers are discovering the joys of moving up to 6th form studies--my own Lovely Daughter included.  The A-level choices have been made, and it's about now that the English Lit students discover what books they have been set.  In Lovely Daughter's case this means (so far) Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the poetry of Dannie Abse and Philip Larkin--and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

It has given me surprising delight that a child of mine has chosen to study a subject so very close to my heart.  Writers' children are obviously exposed to the idea of books from a very early age--but that doesn't necessarily mean that they want to study English Literature.  In the case of Lovely Son, who is an avid reader of all things Napoleonic, History was his choice.  So now what?  Do I let her get on with it?  Of course. Discovering for herself what she thinks about these books is the whole point. But she's done me the honour (and I definitely feel it is an honour) of asking me to re-read the stuff I already know, and to read the stuff I don't, so that we can discuss it (and, if I know Lovely Daughter, argue about it).  I haven't read Heart of Darkness since I studied it at school myself. Larkin I know and love, and Abse I am looking forward to discovering more of.  As for The Road, we'll both be opening that for the first time. 

To be asked to share anything with a teenager is a small, victorious vindication of parenthood--a sort of signal that normal conversation may not be the total impossibility it seemed 2 or 4 or 6 months ago.  For me, this potential daughter/mother communication about books makes me realise that the hours and hours of patient going over and over spellings (and the wiping away of endless tears over the trauma that is learning to read when you are dyslexic) has brought us both an incalculable reward.    Whether we disagree profoundly or agree amicably doesn't matter--the fact that we now share a love of books is prize enough for me.  I'm the second generation of book-loving writers in my family.  Will Lovely Daughter be the third?  Who can tell?--it's up to her anyway.  Meanwhile, I'm polishing the rust off my brain and preparing for the debate.  I can't wait.

How Bad Can You Get? by Emma Barnes

I love writing about naughty children. I loved reading about their exploits as a child – whether it was Anne of Green Gables walking the roof-pole, Daisy Bagthorpe setting fire to the dining-room, or Laura Ingalls giving her prissy sister a good slap. So naturally I wanted to create my own fictional little demon.

But writing about naughty children is harder than it looks. Too wild – and the adult world of parents and schools will be down upon you. Too tame – and your readers will lose interest. And unfortunately that balance is harder to find now than it has ever been.

How so, I hear you say. Isn’t children’s literature more embracing, and less preachy, than it has ever been?

Not really. Just look at this example:

A boy keeps kicking footballs over the garden fence. His crusty neighbour refuses to give them back. So that night he dons a mask, and breaks into her house. He finds the ball in her living-room, and when she comes into the room, he pretends to have a gun and threaten her, thus making his escape. She reports the incident to the police – exaggerating the circumstances – and he blackmails her into never keeping his ball again.

Which child is this? Horrid Henry or Dirty Bertie? No. This school boy rogue is Just William. First appearing in print in the 1930s, naughty William is able to do things that no contemporary child hero would be able to get away with. (Leading a gang, and regularly setting fire to things, being two others I can think of.) Naughty William may still be in print – but only because he is so wrapped around in the glow of nostalgia. Otherwise, just imagine the outcry!

For all the talk about liberal parenting, and “anything goes”, it just ain’t so. Most modern children do not go far afield compared to previous generations; they do very little without adult supervision. And horror of children running amok will be even greater after the recent riots. If you want to write about a contemporary child is a realistic setting you have to take this into account.

And yet every new generation needs new anti-heroes. They need to see child heroes push the boundaries – if only in fantasy-land. It’s an form of escape. And it’s good fun.

So, how to make it work? Here are some thoughts – using as examples some wonderful, classic anti-heroes.

1) Keep the protagonist young.
Younger children have the “Get Out of Jail Free” Card in that they can’t be blamed. Judy Blume’s Fudge falls into this category. When he eats his older brother’s pet turtle, it’s OK, because he really doesn’t know any better.

2) Keep it to home and school.
Current favourite Horrid Henry rarely goes beyond this world: his arch rival is his little brother, his bitterest enemies good old Mum and Dad. In the safe haven of the family, chaos can still reign!

3) Have a moral heart.
Perhaps my favourite naughty children are the Herdmanns, created by Barbara Robinson. They are seriously naughty – the first thing they do is to burn down a shed. They also bully, thieve, swear and smoke, and they never really pay for their bad actions either.

And yet nobody could object to the Herdmanns! For the stories have a moral centre to them that is irresistible, whatever your own particular set of spiritual beliefs, because it is ultimately compassionate and humane. Also, they are set in a small town world that seems inherently safe and secure in its values.
Which leads me on to –

4) Set your story in the past.
My Naughty Little Sister seems gloriously nostalgic now, but the stories were “old-fashioned” even when they were written, in that the writer was recalling her own childhood. A child’s exploits are a lot less threatening if they they are taking place in another era.

5) Make it fantastical.
Pippi Longstocking refuses to go to school, but she is a larger-than-life character in a larger than life world – so that’s OK. And finally:

6) Make it sufficiently inventive, clever and funny – and even the sternest teacher or parent will forgive you!

Have I made it work in my new book How (Not) To Make Bad Children Good?

Well, my heroine, Martha, is young, and her world is mainly that of home and school. There is a fantastical element too: the Guardian Agent Fred who is sent from an Agency in Outer Space that specialises in Making Bad Children Good. But the story is set now, because I wanted to write about the contemporary world we live in.

And is there a compassionate, moral heart? And is it inventive, clever and funny? Readers must judge for themselves.

So what are your thoughts on writing about naughty children? And who is your favourite little rascal?

How (Not) To Make Bad Children Good out now
Emma's web-site is www.emmbarnes.info

Like a Rolling Stone - Joan Lennon

I'd never read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It's one of those books where you think you know the plot and the characters and everything, but you've never actually sat down with any of them. I'm pretty sure I've never even watched a movie version, being of a delicate persuasion as far as horror goes. (The hard-core aficionados among you are now snorting scornfully. "Call THAT horror?!" you cry. Sorry.) BUT I needed a book to fill a particular length of time before going away - I needed something to read that wasn't any of the pristine, unstarted books I was leaving with but something I wouldn't have to leave behind still only partway through. And so I chose "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde".

And before I'd finished the first chapter I came across the following speech by Mr Richard Enfield, "the well-known man about town". (No, I hadn't heard of him either, but I move in fairly modest circles.) He is talking about asking questions. He doesn't hold with doing that. Too dangerous, he thinks ...

"You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name."

And as I read I thought, "That sounds so familiar. That sounds just like my job. That sounds just like writing stories." It really is like that, at least sometimes, isn't it? That sense of avalanching ideas, unexpected heroes, realities lurching into existence and then it being UNTHINKABLE that they should ever not have been. Gravity is as nothing to a story on a roll. You can no more argue with it than you can argue with, say, a sullen teenager.

It does make me a bit nervous about gardening, though.

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Just William, Just One more Time - Emma Barnes

Some books you don't get - however loved and praised they are by everyone else. I have never got along with Just William.

I love the idea of it: the trouble-prone child, the continual scrapes, the childhood anarchy, the poking fun at the grown-ups. It's all the kind of stuff I put into stories myself. And it's not that I have a problem with dated books about English school boys - give me a copy of Jennings and Darbishire by Anthony Buckeridge, and I will laugh so hard I'm falling off the sofa.

But every time I pick up a copy of one of William's adventures, I struggle. Just not for me, I thought. The language seemed convoluted, not witty. William's manner of speech annoyed me. Maybe I didn't read it at the right age. Maybe it's one of those books that adults love for nostalgia, but in actual fact is not that good. Maybe it works for others but it's not my cup of tea. (Not everyone likes the same thing, which is something I always stress talking to children in schools. A book may have prizes, or be your teacher's favourite - but that doesn't mean you have to like it. The important thing is don't give up on books - just go back to the shelf until you find a book you do like.)

It slightly annoyed me that Just William was constantly reissued and Jennings wasn't. It was on the radio too. And lots of children seemed to enjoy it. It was, a friend told me, her kids' favourite. What was wrong with everyone, I wondered?

Then something happened. I happened to watch an episode on the TV. (I didn't even know the BBC had adapted Just William. If I did I would have snorted "typical".) But I happened to watch it and it was ...good. Delightful. Clever. Witty. Best of all, it was extremely FUNNY.

So as soon as I have written this, I will be heading for the book shelf, digging out my neglected copy, ready to give William Brown one more try. Which makes me wonder - which books would you give another chance? Which books did you discover first thanks to TV?
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Children of the Revolution; Leslie Wilson

I adored historical fiction when I was a kid - a fact that's hardly surprising to anyone who knows my work! Only I found quite a lot of what was on offer a bit depressing. Stories about Kings and Queens, or about ordinary people who were devoted to Kings and Queens and recognised their inferiority.

I loved The Children of the New Forest for the way in which it portrayed the life of the children, suddenly having to learn to hunt and cook and keep house in the country. But there was an uneasiness, for me, about the story about the Restoration and the way in which the Puritan Intendant (forgive me if I've got this wrong, but I don't think so) turns out to have been scheming for the return of the monarch all the way along. Because my family were on the side of the Parliament - my Grandad, a Methodist lay preacher and staunch Liberal, once wrote an essay about his admiration for Oliver Cromwell, which my brother still possesses.



Then - aged about eleven, maybe? I read Trumpets in the West, by Geoffrey Trease. It's about the Glorious Revolution, when William of Orange superseded the last Catholic monarch of Britain. It made me happy that Trease didn't endorse the persecution of Catholics; the issue, as he (I think correctly) portrays it, wasn't about resistance to James Stuart's Catholicism, but about the ongoing conflict between King and Parliament. The regime-change that happened then was about Parliament's key role in a nascent democracy, about resisting the Stuarts who would have loved to introduce French-style absolute monarchy. Trease's hero and heroine are a young musician, Jack Norwood, who finds himself standing up for his principles, risking his career and his life in the process, and Jane, a girl who flouts her aristocratic background to become a real, professional singer. It's an issue-novel, but a gripping adventure and I was thrilled by it.

I kept reading Trease; The Crown of Violet, set in Athens, the first democracy; Follow My Black Plume about Garibaldi's nineteenth-century uprising in Italy; Thunder of Valmy, a novel that showed all the idealism and joy that fuelled the beginning of the French Revolution. And Comrades for the Charter, which portrays the Chartist movement, not in terms of 'what a pity they were undisciplined and turned to violence', but as a movement that turned to violence reluctantly, only because the authorities wouldn't grant to the visionary Chartists liberties that we now take for granted. Liberties that they shed their blood for.

Trease had great heroines, too, who took risks, had adventures along with the boys, who had aspirations, not just to be the cleaners-up and admirers of heroes, but to achieve something themselves. The 'feisty' heroine is right there in Trease's novels, up to date and capable. Girls who had better things in mind than being WAGS - or marrying a Prince and entering on a life of expensive and boring public duties.

And yes, I am writing this blog, on this subject, because of the expensive wedding that's happening tomorrow. Because, like Geoffrey Trease, I don't define patriotism as slavish admiration of a particular group of people, of a monarch who rules by the accident of birth, in a patriarchal system of succession that actually contravenes the law of the land - and whose family can engage in all kinds of skulduggery and get away with it because Parliament isn't, for some reason, allowed to criticise them.

But I can also see, as I write, how much Trease has set his mark on my own writing; like him, I like to portray the lives of 'ordinary' people who're caught up in history and have to act, even if, like Jack Norwood, they really only want to get on with their lives. So thank you, Geoffrey Trease, for those stories. And for the example!!

Three Great Books with Disabled Characters - Emma Barnes

I have been thinking recently about how disability is portrayed in children's books. This is partly because of a fascinating project I was involved in at the Foundling Museum, where I was invited to write from the perspective of a disabled child - read more here. I also went on a course about working with hearing or vision-impaired children which was truly "eye-opening" - never more so than when I was attempting various tasks with tunnel vision spectacles. All of which made me think about how disabled characters were portrayed in the books I read as a child. That involved a certain amount of head-scratching - after all as a reader you don't tend to categorise books as "including disability" (unless perhaps you are a drawing up one of those educational lists for schools). Instead you think of "books I loved" or "books that made me laugh"or "magical books" or "adventure stories". So it was intriguing to search around on my mental bookshelf from a new perspective.

Three of them jumped out at me. All books I read over and over again growing up, and all books from very different genres.

Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff

Set in the Bronze Age, this is the story of Drem, a boy whose right arm is useless, and who therefore faces the challenge of how he can become a full member of his tribe, whose manhood initiation requires the slaying of a wolf. It is an exciting, but also very literary, densely descriptive read. The theme of "belonging" goes beyond disability to the issues of tribal identity and birthright.

What I never realised as a child was that Rosemary Sutcliff was herself severely disabled by a form of juvenile arthritis. She knew at first hand some of the struggles involved in being perceived as "different" and inevitably dependent on other people, and she writes insightfully and amusingly about some of her experiences here. Her childhood illnesses may well have contributed to the development of her rich imagination - which resulted in so many classic novels, the most famous of which, Eagle of the Ninth, is now a film.

Jill's Gymkhana by Ruby Ferguson

This is the first of the "Jill" books - one of the best-loved series of girls' pony stories, narrated by the witty and independent-minded Jill Crewe. This is exactly the kind of "series fiction" that is usually looked down upon by critics, and always ignored when it comes to prizes. But the Jill books are truly wonderful, often subversive and non-stereotypical, and so it is no surprise that Jill's riding teacher should be a wheelchair user, Martin Lowell.

Jill can't afford riding lessons so it is her good luck that she bumps into Martin, formerly an expert rider who has been injured in a crash. At first she does not even notice he is in a wheelchair. Martin is chafing at the loss of his independence and career, and so delighted to take on a new project - teaching Jill to ride. And when Jill's mother expresses her discomfort at how much they "owe" him, he movingly explains that it is he who owes them - because he has met them since his accident they never hark back, but allow him to be himself.

It is this kind of supporting character that is perhaps most unusual, and most needed in children's fiction - not the central character struggling with their disability, and where the disability therefore feels like the whole story, but someone who happens to be part of the wider cast of characters, within the community.

What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge

A classic in the Little Women mould, it features one of those loveable, rebellious, trouble-prone heroines - Katy Carr. Rebellious that is, until she disobeys her aunt, falls from a swing, and injures her back so badly she may never walk again. Mentored by the saintly "Cousin Helen" - also bedridden - Katy learns to be sweetly gentle and beloved of the whole family, and is ultimately rewarded by learning to walk again.

I loved this as a child, although I think the escapades of the unreformed Katy were more fun to read than the story of her transformation in the "School of Pain". As an adult it makes me uneasy. Katy's physical problems are tied so closely to her moral state - really they are only an instrument for making her into a "better" person. I can't see why disability should lead one into being more or less angelic than anybody else. What Katy Did far predates the other two books, and the comparison makes me realise how much has changed in the way society views disability.

Nowadays there is a lot more sensitivity in the portrayal and treatment of disabled people - but there is a downside. Because authors are aware of the risk of being crass or stereotypical they can steer away from those issues and those characters altogether. It is this problem that the Foundling Project was trying to tackle.

Finally here is a link to a short film about the portrayal of disability in the visual arts - another stimulus when it came to writing this blog. Thanks to author Jane Stemp for the link.

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Diana Wynne Jones: Best Loved Books - Ellen Renner

This post is a tribute to Diana Wynne Jones, who died last month. I discovered her books nearly fifteen years ago, just at the moment when I had realised I wanted to write for children, and promptly fell in love. She is my favourite of favourites; one of only half a dozen writers whose books I can re-read and enjoy as much each time. She could do it all: elegant prose, big themes, clever plotting. But a clever plot is mere problem solving. Magic rests in characters. That is a gift of imagination and ear. To write characters who live off the page, a writer has to become her characters as she writes, and no amount of intellect will make up for a deficit of empathy. Diana Wynne Jones understood pain. All her main characters are flawed or damaged, and that's what makes them interesting.

I knew it would be no simple task to pick only three books by Wynne Jones to write about here, and so it proved.

I have to start with Charmed Life, the first book of hers I read and still, probably, the one I love most. Charmed Life illustrates a repeated theme in DWJ: a young person in search of their identity, coming to terms with their unique gifts. The young Cat Chant, orphaned, bewildered and stubbornly gullible, must come to terms with who and what he is. Why is Cat such an attractive character? Wynne Jones revisited him twice more: in the deliciously dark novella, Stealer of Souls, and the long awaited sequel to Charmed Life, The Pinhoe Egg. In neither of these does she quite pull off the magic Cat has over the reader in his first outing. And that, I think, is because in the later stories he knows what and who and what he is. Cat's magic in his first adventure is that he is running from himself as fast as he can, and we wait with bated breath for his destiny to catch him up.

My second choice has to be Howl's Moving Castle. Here it is another orphan, Sophie Hatter, who in classic fairy tale mode sets out to seek her fortune. Like Cat Chant, Sophie seems almost wilfully blind to her magic ability, her identity, until forced to accept her powers. And again, it is this avoidance of the obvious, this refusal of talent, which drives both plot and characterisation. But the real star of the book is the slippery, vain wizard Howl (that ultimate slitherer-outer) who is, like Sophie, hiding from himself. In the turn-upon-twist denouement, a real tour-de-force of plotting, both hero and heroine are forced to accept their gifts and use them honestly.

It was difficult to choose a third title. So many vie for next loved: Dogsbody, Fire and Hemlock, The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Homeward Bounders, Deep Secret (and its sort-of sequel, The Merlin Conspiracy), Hexwood, Black Maria, The Ogre Downstairs and A Tale of Time City. I especially enjoy the fact that, although Wynne Jones revisits certain character types and themes, each book is different.

But in the end, I chose The Magicians of Caprona, partly because of one, perfectly realised scene. An enchantress known as the White Devil turns the two children, Tonino and Angelica, into a living Punch and Judy and they are forced to re-enact the puppet show, with all its violence, before an audience of adults, some knowing and some innocent of the children's true identities. This is sheer horror, a darkness of concept handled with perfection, not candy-coated but made acceptable to young readers because of the accuracy of her characterisation of her young hero Tonino. Throughout the book, his observations, reactions, emotions ring absolutely true for a boy of eight to ten, including a lovely messy cake-eating-in-front-of-adults scene (which I frankly stole and recreated in Castle of Shadows), girls-as-other, unthinking rivalry between clans. The Magicians of Caprona is a tour de force in point of view and voice from beginning to end.

Those are my three favourite books by Diana Wynne Jones. What are yours?

ENCHANTMENT - Dianne Hofmeyr

Frank Cottrell Boyce came rushing up the steps to the altar of St James the Last church like a choir boy late for a service… his boyish charm and enthusiasm infectious. He reminded us at the CWIG Conference this past Saturday that the business we writers are in, is the business of enchantment. And that real creativity should feel like a game, not a career.

A huge relief… as prior to this it was ‘gloom and doom’ mood and the need for bells, drums and whistles on school visits. So not only was his ebullience reaffirming but it was also reassuring to be reminded that ‘story’ itself is sufficiently mysterious to make the simple act of reading to children enough to feed their imagination. ‘I’ve got a story to tell…’ is all that’s needed.

One of the debts Frank Cottrell Boyce owes his favourite children's authors is the way they alerted him – at an impressionable age – to various small pleasures. He’s still able to give himself a sense of freedom and carelessness by setting out on a walk with a couple of hard-boiled eggs in his pocket, thanks to reading Milly Molly Mandy as a child.

Tove Jansson writing about the mystery of others in her Moomin family helped him choose his wife. Little My, small and determined with her energy and fiercely independent nature was the person he saw when his future wife rushed into the Library. (where else does a writer find a potential partner?) He said that Jansson showed him, how in a family it’s the small pleasures and idiosyncrasies that keep us together when we start to grow apart, and we can express love merely by sharing a meal, even if everyone's eating something quite different, or making sure the roof isn't leaking.

He finds it uplifting that Jansson could describe so precisely and positively the relationship between a family and one of its members who chooses to live a different life – how this difference somehow enriches the others, how they yearn to go off but know they can't, how they long for her return but need her to keep adventuring.

He urged us not to share writing skills… ‘there are already enough writers’… but to share reading. That true creativity comes from listening and from winnowing. (lovely word) He feels the world is so driven by immediate response that we’re already scanning the sentences as someone speaks to put our own view in place. And that teachers are bound by objectives and outcome... ‘Look out for the Wow words class!’ type of agendas. But that you can’t teach children to love reading, you have to share reading.

What he found reaffirming about working with film-maker and producer Danny Boyle, was that he had ‘a reading corner’ whenever he worked on a film, and everyone busy on the project was encouraged to browse and to leave books.

Books don’t have to be mainstream. They can be voices from the edge. We live by stories and we need all the voices.

Frank Cottrell Boyce had me wondering about the books we as writers must remember vividly from our own childhood, as being the first books that sparked our imagination. Are there stories that are common to us?

For my own part I remember reading Pookie the Rabbit as a child. Coming from an environment of the sea, I was enchanted by the idea of the deep, dark forest where rabbits had wings. The Pookie stories literally took me into the woods of enchantment.

These words spoken by Badger’s in Barry Lopez’s children’s book Crow and Weasel, take on new meaning after listening to Frank Cottrell Boyce:

I would ask you to remember only this one thing. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves.

http://www.diannehofmeyr.com/

A Little Rant about Picture Books Meg Harper

I’m preparing for a library workshop on Friday – the theme is Cops and Robbers because my latest book, an early reader, is called ‘Stop, Thief!’ So we’re going to bring it to life with props and hopefully no actual theft and read other Cops and Robbers stories and make board games and the like. Hence, I have been re-reading wonderful old ‘Cops and Robbers’ and ‘Burglar Bill’ by Janet and Allan Ahlberg – and once again I am thinking, ‘What’s happened to picture books with subtle, delicate pictures and rich, satisfying texts of more than a few words?’ Ones that feature people rather than cutesie blob-like animals in garish colours? What’s happened to books like the ‘Church Mice’ series by Graham Oakley or classics like ‘Dogger’ by Shirley Hughes or wonderful, satisfying cartoon picture books like those of Philippe Dupasquier and Posie Simmonds? To the gentle pastel palettes of Helen Oxenbury or John Burningham? I support my wonderful local independent bookshop Warwick Books which though marvellous is tiny so maybe I should be visiting a bigger store – but the impression I get is that the vast majority of picture books now feature brash illustrations and minimal text. Some of that text is excellent, of course, and we’re seeing some wonderfully quirky exceptions such as the work Emily Gravett, but my over-riding impression is that the richness and diversity of picture books is diminishing. Picture books are a wonderful source of ideas for drama with young people but I’m struggling to find new ones these days. I leapt with glee on ‘Library Lion’ by Michelle Knudsen illustrated by Kevin Hawkes, the other day. Here we have delicate, evocative touching pictures and a ‘proper story’ which held me gripped and I know children will love – and it even has a wonderful, thought-provoking message embedded.
I don’t think I’m being an old fuddie duddie who can’t move with the times here. I know children are bombarded with technicolour TV and so perhaps publishers think that they need to compete with all that brightness and bittiness. I’m not suggesting we dump delightful Nick Sharratt or eschew Elmer. I’m just asking for more substantial stories in picture books and more variety in characters and styles. I’m quite happy with anthropomorphosis at its best – who can forget Jill Murphy’s hilarious Large family of elephants or Mick Inkpen’s Penguin Small who meets the Neverwasanocerous? But I’m fed up with endless blobby creatures with unmemorable characters and only a passing resemblance to the animals they’re supposed to be, especially when nothing much happens to them anyway!
Perhaps publishers could take a look at some of the work coming out of the Cambridge MA in illustration from which SAS member Sue Ferraby is just graduating. www.cambridgemashow.com
Those are her pictures, heading this blog. I’ve been a fan for years.
Do take a look at the web-site above. Haunting pictures and the hint of enthralling stories to go with them. I wish!

www.megharper.co.uk

Does it matter if the Emperor is really naked?

Over Christmas I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s ‘Royal Highness’ (first published 1909)– which is published in the UK by Vintage. It’s rather different from the rest of Mann’s work – though he actually wrote it about the role of the artist in society – an early-twentieth-century conception of the artist which saw him/her as a being essentially set apart from everyday life – it’s a Ruritanian romance – impoverished grand-ducal prince falls in love with American millionaire’s daughter and finally marries her. Though themes of madness, disease, a crazy dog, an insane countess, and a rose that smells of decay run through the novel, its subject-matter is an up-market treatment of one of the penny-novelette themes of the time.
Re-reading it for the first time since university – and for the first time since I became a published author – I found it hard work. Granted, I find ‘The Magic Mountain’ hard work, but that is for different reasons. There are many touches of humour and wonderful writing that show that the novel is really written by the Thomas Mann who wrote the wonderful ‘Buddenbrooks’ but my judgement, after reading it was that a novel of 381 pages (this comment, as Amazon likes to say about customer reviews, refers to the German version, the length of the English one may be different) has about as much proper, publishable material as a novella. It should have been cut, cut, cut.
Now Thomas Mann’s work is not where you would expect to find brief, punchy writing, but whereas his other works are meaty, and all those pages are stuffed full of intelligent and and thought-provoking subject-matter, I found this one sadly repetitious and full of empty narrative spaces. He spends far too much time describing domestic interiors, for example – I kept thinking I was reading World of Interiors magazine and wondering where the photographs would come. (They’d be taken by Fritz von der Schulenburg of course.)
Mann famously (well, famously in Germany) refused to cut ‘Buddenbrooks’, and I think there he was right. I wouldn’t miss a word of that wonderful novel. But he should have cut ‘Royal Highness’. Mind, the early twentieth-century critics had different reasons for greeting it with less than enthusiasm: the ‘Happy End’ and the operetta-atmosphere of the whole thing. ‘A descent into the flat land of optimism,’ one critic called it, while another remarked that ‘German novels should end tragically, in downfall, in the twilight of the Gods.’ (The history of the next thirty-six years provided plenty of material for such literature, but I won’t go there now.)
Of course novels were much longer in the past, and that it’s wrong to apply modern-day criteria to them – but I do honestly think that ‘Royal Highness’ has survived hostile crits, is in the canon, still published even – and translated into I dunnamany languages – just because it’s been buoyed up by the author’s other work. And of course because it provides material for students of German literature to chomp.
My question is: does it matter? Does it matter if some ordinary person picks up this slightly flabby novel and thinks this has to be good writing, because everyone respects it, because the rest of Mann’s work is brilliant? Clearly it doesn’t matter to the publishers. They can sell it. If they couldn’t, it’d be for the scrap-heap licketty-split. We all know THAT.
But that’s my question for the New Year: is a work of fiction good if the public has been persuaded it is, or is there such a thing as intrinsic literary merit?

Let’s hear it for My Naughty Little Sister! - by Emma Barnes

I’m always surprised when people compare my books to those by other authors. Not because I think I’m so dazzlingly original (in fact, when I go into schools, my answer to that question “But how do you get ideas?” is usually “I get ideas because over the years I’ve read a lot of books!”) but because the comparisons aren’t usually the authors or books I would have thought of. So when somebody mentioned to me that Wild Thing reminded them of Dorothy Hughes’s classic My Naughty Little Sister stories, first I was surprised, then I thought it was time to dig out a copy and see for myself. 

My Naughty Little Sister was first written for BBC Radio’s Children Hour. Perhaps this is why they are such wonderful read-alouds. I’ve heard some adults claim that the strong narrative voice is rather too cosy ("And what do you think My Naughty Little Sister did next...") and therefore annoying. Personally, I think this is what makes the stories so perfect for young children, guiding them through the stories (I’d recommend My Naughty Little Sister as a first read-aloud when moving onto chapter books). But then I do like a strong narrative voice (the Narnia books are another example where some find the narrator intrusive, but I find it confiding, and entertaining). 

There is a lovely nostalgia about My Naughty Little Sister, too. I think this is because not only do the stories now seem very quaint and long-ago, but even when Dorothy Edwards was writing them she was remembering a past time (her own childhood, and her own naughty little sister). So such details as washing day are lovingly portrayed, in a way they maybe wouldn’t be if they were contemporary to the reader, and therefore taken for granted. (In this way they remind me a little of Laura Ingall’s Wilder’s Little House books, in capturing the domestic details of a distant time.) 

I’m also envious, not only of the apparent safety of that long ago time, but also the freedom it gives a writer to give her child character adventures. My Naughty Little Sister is only four, but she can go on a train ride all by herself (with only the guard to keep an occasional eye on her). She can also travel from home under her own steam, and at one point is sent spontaneously to spend a day with her older sister at school. How much harder to construct real-life adventures now that young children always have to be supervised! 

Most all, though, the charm of the stories is in the character of My Naughty Little Sister herself. The stories may feel old fashioned, but they are never preachy or moralistic. My Naughty Little Sister thinks for herself. If the family has to look after a baby for the day, she really doesn’t see why she should pretend to like babies, just because it’s the done thing. And she makes friends with all kinds of unlikely people, grown up or child, because she responds to them honestly and directly. 

Her character, I think, is brilliantly portrayed in the illustrations by Shirley Hughes. 

So, even if I still don’t get the comparison with my own books, I certainly feel the compliment! And if you’re looking to escape into a young child’s world, in a gentler, cosier time, I’d recommend My Naughty Little Sister.
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Emma's new series for 8+ Wild Thing about the naughtiest little sister ever (and her bottom-biting ways) is out now from Scholastic. 
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman

 Wolfie is published by Strident.   Sometimes a Girl’s Best Friend is…a Wolf. 
"A real cracker of a book" Armadillo 
"Funny, clever and satisfying...thoroughly recommended" Books for Keeps


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