In this episode you’ll hear about:

• Different traditions of motherhood in children’s literature: from the saintly mother to the evil mother.
• The absent mother, or rather, the presence of the absence of the mother.
• Motherly sacrifices, literal and figurative.
• Dysfunctional, bipolar, depressed, teenage mothers… and how they still love their children in spite of all.

Comment on this post, send us an email at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com and share the podcast if you liked it. And if you have any suggestions for topics, or any questions, get in touch – we’re on Twitter too.

And yes, this is the 11th episode, coming after the 12th episode. This is because we’re highly postmodern (and a bit confused)
Here are some of the books we’re discussing in this episode – a full list can be found on our Books page.

Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror

As a self-confessed lover of many of the ‘pleb’ genres (hello Andrew Mitchell) I adore ghost stories. One of the most well-thumbed books on my shelf as a child was the Usborne Book of Ghost Stories, and since then I have sought out the humble ghost story wherever possible. It may also be worthwhile to point out that only short stories will do for me (apparently I have always liked my frights bite-sized). I’m talking MR James, WF Harvey and virtually every Victorian writer worth their salt. Even Roald Dahl has a couple of ghost stories in his canon! Supernatural tales that leave the reader haunted by the text for days afterwards. Particularly at night once you are in bed…

You might not think that children’s books contain many good quality, genuinely creepy tales – but like many other assumptions about children’s literature this one is wrong! Neil Gaiman’s Coraline would be an obvious example of a sinister book, but what about my favourite short story genre? What would I recommend as a great read for this Halloween?

If you want to be incredibly freaked out then I suggest you buy Chris Priestley’s Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror. Although ‘aimed at children’ and written by a modern author (pre-1940s ghost stories are generally so much better than more recent ones!) the stories are just as sinister as any aimed at an adult audience. They centre around Edgar, a boy listening to his uncle’s strange tales behind several artefacts in his rather peculiar house.

The stories Uncle Montague tells to the goody-goody Edgar range from the slightly hair-raising to the full on I’m-so-creeped-out-I’m-not-really-sure-if-I-want-to-turn-the-lights-out-yet variety. There are many scenes that I am sure that parents of the overprotective variety would disapprove of, from the reanimated mutilated corpse of a cliff fall victim to a sinister elm tree reminiscent of MR James’ ash tree.

But it is the macabre Offerings that haunts me late at night and makes my skin prickle. I won’t spoil the story for you here, as part of the fun is the skilful build up of suspense and the gaps left for the reader to fill. Oddly, this was not my favourite when I initially read the stories, but it is the one that stayed on my mind. Perhaps the scariest stories are the ones that let the reader’s imagination supply the terror?

These stories will scare you as much as any good adult ghost story and are thus perfect for Halloween. Maybe good fodder for Neil Gaiman’s All Hallow’s Read initiative?

Just don’t, whatever you do, read them on your own…

What do you like to read at Halloween? Have you got any more scary recommendations?

Lauren

Sita Brahmachari. Yes, the amazing children’s author of Artichoke Hearts and Jasmine Skies, that we keep telling you about. We met her. For real. And recorded an episode with her (and her puppy Ringo, if you’re wondering what that noise in the background is).

You can download the episode by clicking HERE (29 min), subscribe to us on iTunes, or play it in the sidebar.

And listen to Sita tell us more about what she thinks of the complex question of multiculturalism in children’s books. In particular:

• When dealing with mixed heritage and the encounters of different cultures, is it better to normalise or to problematise?
• Can you write about a culture you don’t know?
• How do young readers react to stories that stage the clashes and/or fusion of different cultural backgrounds?

Any comments, questions, requests? As always, post them here or email us at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com ! You can also follow us on twitter @kidyounotpod.

And here are the (brilliantly designed) covers of Sita’s books, which you should read if you haven’t already. We might be a little bit obsessed with them; just a little.

Enjoy!

Lauren & Clementine x

P.S. In case you’re wondering, Episode 11 is coming… next time. Yeah. Don’t ask.

In Episode 10 of Kid You Not, which is available to download

(29 minutes), or on iTunes, or in the sidebar of the website, we discuss the omnipresence of sex in teenage literature past and present, and its dark ideological undertones…

In this episode you’ll hear about

• the shift from didacticism to eroticism in the representation of sex
• chastity, virginity, NSBF, and other sexy instances of no-sex
• pregnancy, suicide, and other merry consequences of sex in (most) teenage literature
• why adult writers are so ambivalent about teenagers doing it, not doing it, losing it, keeping it and thinking about it.

And here are some of the books we’ll be discussing…

As always, email us if you have any questions at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com, and follow us on Twitter @kidyounotpod!

We hope you enjoy the episode. See you next time for a special interview!

Lauren & Clem x

You can download this episode by clicking HERE, or subscribe to us on iTunes to get all the episodes automatically downloaded to your mp3 player, or you can play the episode in the sidebar!

In this episode you’ll hear about…

• What ‘ideology’ means, and why you’re in it with the rest of us.
• The difference between passive and active ideology, and why the former isn’t at all the most benign.
• Princesses that don’t want to get married, and why the promotion of gay parenting in children’s books still needs nuclear monogamous family values.

Email us at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com if you have any comments or questions! In the meantime, here are some of the books we’ll be discussing…

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• Two non-fiction editors’ opinions about what it is and what it isn’t and why it’s great, thanks to Lauren’s interviews of Caroline Royd, of Walker Books, and Rachel Cook, of Franklin Watts.
• Clementine’s problems with the assumption that non-fiction teaches children about ‘facts’.
• Fluffy animals, egyptology, horrible histories and dinosaurs.
• How Michael Rosen would like to rename non-fiction, and why The Sad Book is, in fact, non-fiction.

Hope you enjoy the episode! and please forgive us for the slight technical problems with sound that we had on this one.

Email us at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com if you have any questions or suggestions!

And here are some of the books or authors we’ll be talking about:

In Episode 7 of Kid You Not, which you can download HERE (31 min) or play in the sidebar, or listen to on iTunes if you subscribe HERE, you’ll hear about:

• Full-frontal snogging, being wimpy, and why we like hearing about our flaws.
• Adults who think children don’t get jokes. We dun like them.
• Slapstick, parody, irony, puns, and all the nuances of what we call ‘humour’.
• Translating humour: is it even possible? And a debate on cultural imperialism, no less.
• People who despise funny books, and people who study Pippi Longstocking.

And here are some of the books we’ll be discussing..

.

Email us at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com !

And if you want the next and past episodes of Kid You Not on your mp3 player just like that, subscribe to us on iTunes!

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• Scandalous and sulphurous blasphemy (or not) in Meg Rosoff’s There Is No Dog
• Religion at the roots of children’s books, and its current unfashionability
• Why religious values still permeate non-religious children’s books
• The modern splitting of the religious life

and much more!

Please post all your comments here or email us at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com!

And here are some of the books we’ll be discussing…

er1-150×150.jpg” alt=”” width=”150″ height=”150″ />Paranormal or ‘dark’ romance is the literary phenomenon of the past few years in YA. But what is it that makes these books so compelling, particularly to teenagers? In this episode we discuss the main features of these books, and analyse what the fans say about them.

Download the episode by clicking

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• Lauren’s secret obsession with paranormal romance and Twilight in particular, and Clementine’s attempt at analysing it psychologically.
• Mary Sues and handsome dangerous supernatural creatures.
• Teenage fans who are much more critical and sophisticated than you may think.
• Why we tend to skip the end of Jane Eyre.
• The war between sexuality and chastity.

We hope you enjoy it! If you do, please spread the word…

As always, if you have any comments or questions, leave them on this post or email us at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com

And here are some of the books we’ll be discussing…

You can download the episode (30 mins) by clicking

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• The books that claim to ‘teach’ children about death
• The books that claim that death is somehow restorative… for the living!
• The books that are just completely obsessed with death and therefore meant for teenagers.
• The books that present death in such an emotional way that Lauren cries even though they’re bad.
• The books about suicide that Clementine doesn’t approve of.
• The funny books about death.
• The truth about life, death and the mysteries of the afterlife inside and outside children’s literature. Maybe.

Thank you so much for listening and let us know what you think, or any comments or suggestions, either here in the comments or at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com

To assist you in your long and strenuous journey in the land of the dead, here are the covers of some of the books discussed! You can always find all of them on the Page Of All Books.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Jacqueline Wilson as much as the next girl. I was at my most Wilson-obsessed at about my sister’s age (nine), reading The Suitcase Kid about five times in a row at one point. But I didn’t read Wilson exclusively. There was some Alice Through the Looking Glass, Goosebumps and Little Women to accompany The Suitcase Kid. Fourteen years later, neither threats nor bribery can convince my sister to read anything else. Not even the promise of crab fishing moved her.

So I am understandably concerned that my little sister is getting an incredibly limited literary diet. Some of Wilson’s books are brilliant, but as with any prolific author, some of the themes and characters tend to blur into one another somewhat. Unfortunately, Little Darlings falls into the latter category. A standard Wilson tale in which the children are more mature than the parents, and are either neglected or function as the parent themselves.

Destiny and Sunset are two girls from very different backgrounds. Whilst Destiny lives on a council estate with her single mother in the North of England, Sunset is the daughter of a rock star and a model whose days are filled with photo shoots for trashy magazines and playing with the nanny. They forge an unlikely friendship, and the book focuses on its development and their attempts to sort out their very different family problems. Destiny is worried as her mum is losing lots of weight and seems very weak all the time, whilst Sunset cannot get either of her parents to behave like adults – especially when her Dad leaves them all for another woman…

The book takes up the themes of most of Wilson’s work – children looking after parents, broken homes, poverty, feeling isolated etc – and adds an OK magazine lifestyle. Its messages are staid and predictable: Destiny’s family is poor but rich in happiness, Sunset’s family is rich and yet fractured. That both girls could have the same father is an interesting plot device, as it not only provides a tangible link between the two girls, but also makes difficult reading for an adult. Destiny’s mother is childlike, believing that Mickey (ostensibly Destiny’s father) will rescue them from the poverty they live in and be a parent to Destiny. At first Destiny buys into the fantasy too; it is heartbreaking to witness her gradual realisation that Mickey will never want anything to do with them, and comfort her mother. And it is this plot device that leads to the most shocking element of the novel.

SPOILER ALERT

It is impossible to discuss this novel without mentioning the ending. All through the novel Mickey wants nothing to do with Destiny or her mother. They are swept aside, and Sunset gets in trouble for even mentioning them.  But when Mickey’s agent accidentally learns of Destiny’s talent for singing, she is invited to take part in a reality television show where celebrity parents show off their talented offspring in order to help revive Mickey’s flagging career. The novel ends with Destiny, her mother and Sunset all happily preparing for the show, overjoyed that all their dreams have come true: Sunset has a true friend in Destiny, Destiny’s talent has been realised, and Destiny’s mother has the promise of no longer living in poverty. As an adult reader, however, I found it deeply disturbing. It is painfully obvious that Destiny is being exploited and that Mickey only wants to know her out of self-interest, and yet it is presented as a ‘happy ending’. It is either a rare cynical ending to a Wilson tale, or a startling departure from her usual morality. The child characters – and perhaps child reader – end the book thinking that it is great the family are finally united, which I find problematic considering the evident exploitation of the child. Perhaps I am underestimating the capacity of child readers to recognise this element that is never explicitly stated; I shall have to ask my sister when she finishes the book.

Overall, Little Darlings feels like a hotchpotch of other Wilson novels, with celebrity thrown in. But the ending reveals a rare darkness in Wilson’s work, setting it apart from the rest of the canon.

By Lauren

The pictures are as bright and funny as can be expected from the famous artist, and the matter-of-fact tone of the absurd sentences is guaranteed to make everyone laugh. It is also, importantly, a great read-aloud book, with clever variations in pace and tone which the adult co-reader will pick up on easily.

There is absolutely nothing wrong anyone can possibly say about Stuck; it is a good example of a completely successful picturebook, nothing less and nothing more.

But not only was Toby Alone translated (Walker Books), it was also extremely well translated, as Sarah Ardizzone won an award for it. I was delighted to hear it, and to see the book at Waterstones’, because Toby Alone is one of these few truly magical children’s novels which make you want to grab the nearest person by the collar and beg them to read it. A truly delightful, beautifully crafted, tender novel, Toby Alone is already, in France, a modern classic.

The premise is catchy: one-and-a-half-millimetre-tall Toby lives, like everyone else, on a great Tree-World outside of which, he is asked to believe, there is nothing. His father is an inventor, and has discovered the awesome properties of the tree sap. Properties which can be used for good… or bad (understand: for profit). And some people want to use it for profit. As a result, the tree is dying. Toby’s quest is, at the same time, to save the tree, to save himself, to save his parents, and to learn the truth about the World he lives in and the foreign people who sometimes invade, and who must come from somewhere…

Throw in a strong-headed young girl, a ruthlessly ambitious enemy, and some hilarious comic relief characters, and you get one of the most colourful and lively books for children in a very long time.

It is also an old-fashioned tale, with a nostalgic feel for a conservative order, a society of artisans, closet scientists and fragrant cooking. A world in which people’s lives follow the slow rhythm of the seasons. A world where everything is made of living matter to be feared and protected. The novel makes no mystery of its ecological dimension.

The main reason, I think, why it was translated into English (apart from the fact that it is a gorgeous book, but we have many other splendid French books that never get translated) is that the socio-cultural background is absolutely universal. Toby Alone will be readable tomorrow and in fifty years’ time, here and in Paris and in Tokyo. I am very glad Walker made this important and beautiful novel available to English children, and the second book in the duology, Toby and the Secrets of the Tree, is almost as good.

by Clémentine

As expected, the lecture was brilliant: funny, erudite and confident. Judging by the questions asked after the lecture, the most controversial aspect of Pullman’s talk was his take on the current ‘trend’ for narratives for children and teenagers in the present tense.

‘I see texts in the present tense everywhere,’ he declared, ‘whereas when I was young they didn’t exist. Recently, I visited a Creative Writing class at a university and almost all students were writing in the present tense. When I asked the teacher why that was the case, he admitted he hadn’t even noticed.’

While not directly attacking such narratives, he made no mystery of the fact that he was in favour of the ‘conventional’ past tense. The audience’s responses were interestingly mixed. Someone said – strangely – that she was currently writing in the present tense, despite the fact that she didn’t like reading in the present tense. Other people made bold assumptions that ‘young people’ now preferred the present tense because of the immediacy and the spectacular aspect of that tense. Translation: young people now live solely in the present and need constant stimulation to be able to read (if they manage it at all). Finally, someone laid the blame on a vicious circle at the level of the authors, who ‘feel obliged’ to write in the present tense. Pullman elegantly refrained from making any definite judgement on the matter.

I’m ambivalent. The present tense has never bothered me, either when I read, or as a ‘concept’. In French, my mother tongue, you can write a narrative in more tenses – two different forms of past, and the present (not mentioning the very experimental future tense). Writing in the ‘simple past’ (which is ironically absurdly complicated) makes for a ‘classical’, formal narrative. Writing in the ‘composed past’ is the most informal, relaxed form of narrative (Young Nicholas is an example). Writing in the present tense isn’t connotated either way – you can mould it to make it sound grand, philosophical and nouveau roman, or to make it sound fun, immediate and energetic. A neutral tense, in other words.

It’s a bit easy to assign a form of ideology or social commentary to the present tense. Yeah, it’s tempting to say that it will appeal to people who live in the here and now, refusing to look behind and to pay their respects to their elders. It’s tempting to blame reality TV and live events and the Internet (vade retro).

But we can also look at it another way. Suspension of disbelief in the present tense may actually be more difficult than in the past tense. It might require more imaginative skills than the past tense, and a better ability to navigate between different temporal levels. Especially as narratives in the present tense are often full of flashbacks and flash-forwards. What if narratives in the present tense were actually more complex and demanded more sophisticated reading skills?

Being multimodal young adults constantly plugged in to our iPods, constantly receptive to current affairs, constantly reactive, might very well enhance our ability to imagine ourselves everywhere and everywhen at the same time. Reading and writing in the present tense isn’t necessarily a blind declaration of carpe diem.

by Clementine

You see, all I seem to be able to read on it, is – for lack of a better word – trash (see episode two). If I purchase something on there I deem good, I immediately have to rush out and buy a paper copy. If it is something that I know will be good, or I will read more than once, then of course I want it in a form I can lend to people. In a form that feels much more substantial than a file on an e-reader, that I can read without having to charge a battery. One of my favourite things about my kindle is that it is an ideal receptacle for books that I want to/have to read, but would never deign to give shelf space to. They are all available and there for me to read, but hidden away. Being someone who ruthlessly judges others by what they read, e-readers also perform the function of hiding the fact that I am reading a children’s book/chick lit/Twilight. I can sit on the tube, happily caught up in Alex Rider’s latest adventures or Bella’s incessant whining and no one around me is any the wiser. I could be reading War and Peace for all they know. When I started to read books like that on my kindle, the frequently judgemental looks from other passengers stopped. Any lover of children’s books who uses public transport must be well used to these ‘looks’ by now. They are usually given by women in suits.

However, this has given rise to a new anxiety – one that I didn’t expect. I now spend entire journeys worrying that if I died, like, right now, and all that was left to know me by was my kindle, people would think I was an uncultured, unrefined pleb whose library solely consisted of paranormal romance, Jilly Cooper-esque romps and a couple of token free classics (that the examiner would assume were unread). My spirit would be there screaming ‘go to my house! There are adult books there! Proper ones! Middlemarch and everything!’ If I was reading a print copy of the paranormal romance they might (quite rightly) speculate that I had a broad taste in reading and this was only part of it. But the many many books on a kindle could be assumed to be representative of your general taste in books….

This is a literary version of the always-wear-clean-knickers-in-case-you-get-hit-by-a-bus anxiety, if you will. Clearly it is unlikely that if the tube crashed the kindle would survive. And it is also clear that this all arises from my own biblio-snobbery, and if I were a little less judgemental about others I would probably be less worried about being judged myself.

But as I am unlikely to succeed in dropping the snobbery any time soon I will continue to worry and have a spare copy of Jane Eyre in my bag. Just in case. And nice knickers on – of course.

By Lauren

Percy Jackson is the story of a twelve-year-old troublesome kid who turns out to be the son of sea god Poseidon. In a self-aware americanisation of Greek mythology, the book resolutely plays on the motif of hybridity – hybridity of the hero in a world that is in itself a multicultural hybrid, hybridity of genre, hybridity of time and space – to create an entertaining story that is not actually that simple, and which says a lot about how America perceives itself.

American culture is truly the focus of the book, and the displacement of Greek mythology in its heart allows for an interesting exploration of its current mixed feelings about itself.

It is a culture which, ideally, idolises the power of the individual, as illustrated so often in superhero comics. But it is also a culture which, in practice, fails to recognise ‘true’ power, clinically seeking to stifle it instead. In what is one of Riordan’s smartest inventions, Percy the demigod has been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, both of which betray his godly origins. This denunciation of the medicalisation of misfits is a nice symbol of a society which leaves its children’s abilities untapped.

Similarly, the book oscillates between a sometimes tiresome enumeration of bland American clichés (especially food, particularly processed and unhealthy), associated with the necessary road movie sequence, and a return to the wild furiousness of Ancient Greek mythology. This also gives rise, structurally, to a book modelled on the episodic form of the epic narrative, but in which most of the episodes are strangely reminiscent of a Goosebumps opus. The US in Percy Jackson is a sleeping society – one that has to look to the past for thrill.

In short, Percy Jackson is an amusingly ambiguous glorification of the US as the ‘heart of Western civilisation’. As the text patiently explains, Greek gods move Mount Olympus to wherever ‘Western civilisation’ seems to be at its peak; nowadays, obviously, it is the US. Riordan seems to clutch at this unquestioned ‘fact’ like a drowning man – and despite his faith in America the Beautiful, the whole book makes the US sound in fact like a civilisation in decline.

Medicated children, the flavourless reality of everyday life, a society which glorifies the famous individual but, left without true heroism, has to borrow it from ancient myths – this is Riordan’s America, and this is the enduring image of national identity that the reader is left with.

It is a lively, action-packed, fun book. The central trio is as attaching as it can be, and the joy of recognition of the many mythical creatures and characters makes for an entertaining read for the Greek mythology enthusiast. But it is, above all, a disturbing cry for help from an America faced with its own decadence.

by Clementine

Owing partly to the power of Twitter, we were incredibly lucky to get the opportunity to interview children’s author Jonathan Stroud, whose bestselling books include the Bartimaeus series, famous for the highly original character of the arrogant and vulnerable eponymous djinni, and Heroes of the Valley, an action-packed epic inspired from Icelandic sagas.

Click each cover to access the book’s own dedicated website…

…or click here to access Jonathan’s official website!

(I know, it’s like magic.)

In this exclusive interview of Jonathan Stroud, we’ve stuck to our Kid You Not focus: looking at children’s literature from the publishing side and from the academic side. Luckily, Jonathan knows a lot about both, since he has a degree in English literature and used to work as an editor at Walker Books.

In this special episode, you’ll hear Jonathan talk about:

• Why children’s literature is important!
• Children’s editors who are aspiring authors in hiding
• Why publishers are more likely to take on authors who are slightly schizophrenic
• The voice in his head which became Bartimaeus
• The truth behind stories, the reality behind fiction, and the adult liar
• Bartimaeus’s life beyond the books
• Masculine female characters
• Legends and myths in Heroes of the Valley
• Stephen Hawking summoning a demon

… and much more!

Listen to the episode and post all your comments and questions here. As usual, we’d love to hear from you and to follow you on Twitter if you follow us @kidyounotpod!

Thank you so much to Jonathan for giving up some of his Saturday morning for us, and special thanks to Georgia Lawe.

Clementine & Lauren

If you’re the ‘Oh please not another supernatural romance!’ type, just close this window and go tweet/ play Angry Birds/ do something with your life instead. I’m like that sometimes, too. I think everyone is pretty much fed up to the back molars with supernatural romance.

But now that I’m left with readers who have a slightly higher degree of tolerance for the accursed genre, let’s go on.

Angel is the story of a young girl who is a bit witchy and a bit rebellious, and who might possibly perhaps not be quite exactly human. And she’s in grave danger, because some people who are not human at all have noticed that there’s something strange about her. And the person they send to hunt her down unfortunately finds himself strangely drawn to the way she holds her hair and wears her tracksuit bottoms. A road trip and a final battle ensue, and between the two, a change of allegiances.

Sorry, this has been a bit of a dismissive and cynical review so far. The truth is, this book is so American, and so YA. By that I mean that it is full, firstly, of derelict cars and shabby motels, and secondly, of rebellious behaviour and sexual tension. Neither of which I have a lot of patience for, but you may do, and I’m just so totally cool with that.

However, this is not – no, really – to say that Angel is not worth reading. It is gripping, it is dramatic, it is enjoyable. But most of all, it has a very interesting and original feature – its depiction of ‘angel churches’ inspired from televangelical Christians in the US. This, I think, is truly where the interest of the book lies, and it is L.A. Weatherly’s best idea.

(The following paragraph gives away some information from the book, but nothing crucial past the first half.)

The ‘angels’ in the book are bad angels, but they are beautiful and hypnotic, and they feed on human souls. In order to sustain this diet, they entrance their ‘food’ into creating huge angel churches for the rest of the nation to adhere to and to be, in turn, fed on.

(End of spoilers)

The book truly succeeds at depicting a bureaucratic, impenetrable, mysterious, sectarian organisation which is almost a perfect mirror image of the American evangelical Christian churches with their factory-sized buildings and their governmental lobbies. A daring move, I think, on Weatherly’s part, whether or not she was fully aware of it, and one that, to my knowledge, no angry American evangelist has yet picked up on. Willa and Alex’s struggle against this battalion of beautiful, well-meaning monsters makes for a really quite neat condemnation of corporate and aggressively propagandist organised religion.

In other words, despite the deprecatory tone of the first part of this review, I did enjoy Angel and I would recommend it. There is a real social and political critique lurking in the margins of the clumsy romance, and I am looking forward to reading the next volumes to see whether it delivers.

by Clementine

Novels about eating disorders always disconcert me, as they are so hard to get right.  It is vital that the disease is portrayed sensitively, in order that the book offers the opportunity to understand what can seem an incomprehensible state of mind. Yet it is also important that the book does not act as a trigger to existing or potential sufferers, validating their behaviour or reopening old trap doors in the mind. This could mean that although the writing is responsible, it is not as ‘real’ or authentic as it could be. However, given that incidents of eating disorders are on the rise, both understanding and responsibility are vital when reading texts about eating disorders for young adults. Wintergirls (Scholastic) provides a vivid and sensitive portrayal of a recovering anorexic’s relapse and eventual ‘awakening’ into a healthy life, tracking the damage she causes to those around her on the way.

Lia is not always a likable character. A ‘typical’ selfish teenager anyway, the selfish nature of her affliction cannot be hidden, and it is grating to read of her treatment of her step-sister and parents. She shuts her mother out of her life, lies to her step-mother, and at one point succeeds in giving her little step-sister nightmares.  Through her the disease is not glamorised, she becomes a pathetic, pitiable creature the reader longs to slap. Or at least hurry up and realise what she is doing to both herself and her family. What I found the most convincing aspect of the novel was the depiction of depression. The metaphor Lia uses to describe anorexia sufferers poetically illustrates the disease: it locks the sufferers outside of society, into the cold. They become wintergirls: numb and trapped in a state of suspended animation as their bodies no longer grow and their future is postponed. What this metaphor suggests about mental health and depression is vivid and illustrative, striking a particular chord with me. The theme of isolation is repeated throughout the novel, as Lia describes herself as living on ‘the borderlands’, her memories are ‘ghosts’ and she is in ‘the dark’.

Difficult to read at times, and yet I was unable to stop, Wintergirls became compulsive and I read it in only one sitting. Part of me was annoyed that Lia was such an aggravating character, but this is clearly part of the depiction of the disease. As I reader I wanted to wholly sympathise with her, and yet this was tempered by my frustration with her attitude towards those around her. It is also fair to mention that there is a mystery involved to hold the reader’s attention – which it does – but anorexia dominates the book as it does the lives of sufferers and their families. There is compulsive calorie counting, suppressed urges and hallucinations. Beautifully and lyrically written, Halse Anderson takes the reader with her to ‘the borderlands’, as the poetic nature of the prose adds to this sense of isolation from reality and everyone else.

Engrossing and powerful, Wintergirls is definitely worth a read. Its depiction of the thought processes of an anorexic is extremely convincing, and helps illuminate the ‘logic’ behind a disease generally misunderstood. But it is a story about anorexia first, and a story second. The disease sets the pace, the tone, the mystery, the action. Everything about the book is surrendered to anorexia. Which, I suppose, is kind of the point.

By Lauren

Yes, I know, that was possibly the corniest sentence I’ve ever written. Still, that is exactly what Karin Littlewood’s delicate little picturebook Immi does to the reader.

Immi is a charmingly old-fashioned story about a young Eskimo girl whose white world is gradually lit up by tiny wooden objects she finds in the water that flows under the ice. But where do they come from? And how can Immi thank their unknown sender? The final twist is just as lovely, simple, and idealistically atemporal as the rest.

Littlewood’s subtle play on colours demonstrates the versatile character of watercolour, from frosty glazes of white and ice blue to the soft, sunny glow of the mysterious objects Immi receives. The traditional, clear line drawing style is perfectly adapted to this story which seems to reject, almost resolutely, the noise and speed of the modern world.

This is truly where the genius of Immi resides: in creating a world where everything is slow, quiet, subdued; where people are linked not artificially and ecstatically, and eager to reveal everything about themselves to each other, but where the mystery of human relationships is celebrated and the slowness, uncertainty of their development is what makes them so precious. The ‘gifts’ Immi exchanges with her friend on the other side of the world are patiently carved tributes to the value of their relationship.

This is also a book about nature, but not of the traditional kind. Nature is neither a caring nor a threatening force – it is there, it is changeable, and it constructs and constrains the human. Water in particular, in all its variety, rules the story. Water brings the gifts, water builds Immi’s frozen world, and water, of course, is the very matter of the illustrations – from its solid reds to its evasive, diluted whites.

Immi is a refreshingly quiet tale, almost Japanese in its contemplative and simple aesthetic. An ode to silence, patience and trust, it offers a welcome contrast to the flashy, energetic style of most modern picturebooks.

by Clementine

When we first heard about the terrible Oslo massacre of July 22nd, she sent me the following email:

it is watching things like this on the news that make me never want to think about how i ‘enjoyed’ the hunger games!

It is a controversial thing to say, but I was immediately struck by how true it sounded. I hadn’t even thought of making such an association, but now that she’d made it, I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Of course there is absolutely no direct link between the Hunger Games and the shooting perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik. But watching the news and listening to the horrifying testimonies of the teenagers and young adults present on Utoya island during the seemingly neverending shooting, I cannot help but think, just like my friend did – This is what a cold, organised, mass killing of a country’s young people really looks like, and really feels like.

This is the kind of circumstances when you realise that the enjoyment of fiction can powerfully anaesthetise us to the real equivalent of what it portrays. The Hunger Games plays on both modern and ancient fears to force us to watch a horrible, but oh-so-compulsively-watchable, theatre of child and adolescent sacrifice. It is an artificial construction, of course – no less than a chimera to be enjoyed and feared at the same time. The teenagers in the Hunger Games are unnaturally equipped to deal with thoughts of death. They face it, they give it, they fight against it. Our fear and delight in reading about their endeavour is safely enclosed within the dystopian universe of the books.

And as a friend pointed out recently during a conversation, the hype surrounding the upcoming Hunger Games film is giving rise to a strangely morbid display of young actors and actresses whose roles are just numbers, on the model of ‘Laura Smith, n.3 – runs into trouble at the Cornucopia’. Understand: this pouty Californian blonde dies within the first ten minutes of the movie. But look at her! It’s her first big Hollywood part! She doesn’t die, of course – only her character, so that’s ok.

And suddenly we are interrupted in our desensitised reading of adolescent death by the occurrence of the unimaginable: scores of real, tangible, material adolescent deaths. Deaths that will entirely rewrite the history of the country, that will forever prevent hundreds of friends and relatives from living a normal life.

Of course there is nothing wrong with reading the Hunger Games. Of course we need catharsis, and we need fiction to meddle with our vision of reality and deal with its excesses. And of course the Hunger Games does not defend murder – it denounces it.

But when faced with such a brutal reality check, I am uncomfortable and uncertain. I will draw no conclusions other than ‘This is what the mass killing of a country’s young people really looks like.’

by Clementine – first posted on the Cambridge Children’s Literature Students’ Blog

The blurb promised me a ‘stupidly funny escapade’ and in this it does not fail to deliver, as the humour is almost all derived from the protagonist’s stupidity. Although some jokes miss the mark – and Fintan’s clumsiness does become rather overstated by the seventeenth accident he causes – the book did elicit a few chuckles as I made my way through several boxes of Lemsip. Like Billionaire Boy (David Walliams), much of the plot and many of the jokes in Fintan Fedora the World’s Worst Explorer are very Dahl-esque, revelling in the grotesque and absurd. The obstacles generated by Fintan’s clumsiness provide many of the laughs, such as the image of furious piranha-nibbled Gonzalez with his false ginger beard.

Perfectly paced, the plot is tight and fast moving, never allowing the reader to be bored or a moment’s reflection. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read, particularly as there was a nice mix of the predictable and the unanticipated, in humour as well as elements of the plot. I did wish, however, that at least Gribley had noticed their pursuers earlier, as the belated arrival of the moment of discovery stretched the plausibility of the plot somewhat. I could believe that oblivious Fintan would overlook the unlikely yet repeated appearances of the same man with varying colours of false beards in the middle of Brazil, but not the intelligent Gribley who turns out to speak fluent Spanish and have incredible foresight.

For a children’s book lover this romp through the Brazilian jungle was exactly what was promised on the cover and the perfect distraction to summer flu – especially as it doesn’t quite turn out the way you’d expect…

By Lauren

Literary criticism has shown us in the past century that no text can ever be devoid of ideological content, that is to say of a system of values, beliefs, fears, worldviews, which are closely linked to certain conceptions of power and order. Ideology is embedded in language.

And children’s literature is no exception to the rule.

Children’s books are made of words, and they are created in specific historical, political, social and cultural contexts. When David McKee writes Tusk Tusk, a political fable on racial war, he is talking from the viewpoint of a second-half-of-the-twentieth-century-man with the heritage of post-war pacifism and awareness of racial conflicts. It would make no sense to Enid Blyton. It would make no sense to White American supremacists.

Actively ideological children’s literature

Tusk Tusk is actively ideological – that is to say, it is actively denouncing the issues of racism and violence. Other books that try to promote certain behaviours, values or beliefs are, for instance, Babette Cole’s picturebook Princess Smartypants – an anti-fairytale which attacks the ideal of marriage for girls – Anthony Browne’s Zoo – which begs the reader to consider the condition of animals imprisoned for our entertainment – or Armin Greder’s The Island – which denounces the situation of immigrants.

These children’s books, of a very high quality, exist partly for the purpose of instructing readers – not only children! – about the realities of our world, and, sometimes, about how to change them. They are political, because their very existence threatens the existing distribution of power by showing that it is flawed and unfair.

Passively ideological children’s literature

But don’t huff and puff if you’re against giving children ideological children’s literature. Because then you might as well take away all their books.

The most dangerous ideological content in children’s literature is the hidden one – the assumptions about the world that author, illustrator and/or publisher make when they release one book, and that the child reader is led to accept as fact.

Feminists have long denounced children’s books that represent doleful, obliging mothers, not because they are actively promoting male domination, but because they are normalising male domination. And that’s a much more insidious issue to get rid of. Because it’s inscribed, unquestioningly, everywhere the child looks to.

Passively ideological children’s literature represents 90% of all children’s literature (don’t quote me on this, it’s a rough estimate). And most often its ideology is conservative. Because conservative ideology, logically, tends to preserve itself. Passively ideological children’s books will normalise values and beliefs that have made their existence possible.

Next time you open a children’s book, ask yourself what worldviews, what conceptions of power, what ideals of education it conceals. It is not obvious – because the creators of the books themselves are unaware of it, and because it’s likely that they think more or less like you. But it is there. It cannot not be there.

And if you really can’t notice these assumptions, it means you’re so bathed in them that you take them for fact. It’s in your bones, in your brains, in your identity.

It’s ok, don’t freak out. We’re all like that.

by Clementine

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Thanks a lot for your patience,

Clem & Lauren

Click HERE to download the episode (28 minutes), or why not find us on iTunes and subscribe?

In this episode you will hear us discuss…

• The point of view of a teacher on how to deal with any children’s literature in a utilitarian way.
• The idea that ‘trashy’ and ‘quality’ children’s books actually support each other.
• The possibility for children to be ‘independent’ readers of fiction, and to form their own judgement about literature.
• The gender aspect of literary taste – what if the word ‘trash’ had been invented to label all things feminine?
• The formulaic and the unexpected in children’s literature.
• A dietetic approach to the consumption of literature. 

Lauren then treats us to a review of the beautiful middle grade novel Mimi, by John Newman.

Please leave us your comments, positive or negative constructive, and feel free to send us your questions – here, by email at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com, or on Twitter @kidyounotpod! What, you don’t like any of these options? How about adding us to your circles on Google+?

We hope you enjoy today’s episode. See you soon for a very special new one…

So, what I want to know is, why is it not ok for something to just be a good story? Even incredibly controversial books by authors like Melvin Burgess are almost overpoweringly didactic. No one finishes Junk and thinks ‘you know what, drugs might be ok’. This trend for ‘challenging but moral’ seems to be on the rise – a twenty-first century version of the repentant schoolgirls in the religious tracts that were the first examples of books for children. Maybe children’s literature never advanced from its beginnings as an educational tool in the first place – but then the anarchic books of the 1960s and 70s would contradict this. Texts such as the Beano and authors like Roald Dahl revelled in rebellion and the snubbing of authority, and can hardly be said to be useful for the moral education of a child – however brilliant they are.  Scholar Dennis Butts observed this trend, and put forward the theory that a sense of moral responsibility in children’s literature has followed a pendulum pattern, swinging from wildly didactic in the first place, mellowing to the authority despising texts of the mid-twentieth century, and now moving back into a more veiled didacticism.

Clearly, even in Roald Dahl’s texts the bad get their comeuppance and the good prosper – but authority can be defeated as George’s Marvellous Medicine shows. Compare this to current books as diverse as Horrid Henry and Doing It. Whilst both may revel in youthful mischief (of varying kinds), adult sensibilities permeate the entire experience and conquer the narrative. The fun is not allowed to overpower the moral prerogative.

It is clear that books help shape a child’s life – indeed Francis Spufford was built by his. But so do a lot of things: television, parents, friends … I am not suggesting that children’s literature should be bereft of moral substance or educational worth, that it has no role at all in educating its readers. Just questioning why every book has to be concerned with this responsibility – could its responsibility not be to merely entertain? Does a challenging book have to come complete with the safety net of a strict moral code?

For I believe that this attitude  forgets that, like adults, children read for different reasons. And sometimes they just want a good time.

By Lauren

A children’s book is an adult’s book

Adults write, select, publish, sell and buy children’s books. And they do so wanting them to benefit children – to entertain them, to teach them, to bring them up – to bring them up to become just like them, or perhaps a little different. In other words, children’s books are chock-full of adult desires and needs and fears – and by expressing them towards their children, they are expressing them towards themselves and their own society and culture. Studying children’s literature unpacks these desires and needs and fears.

Paraliterature: a parallel world we must explore

Children’s books belong to a non-canonical form of literature which literary snobs and the academic intelligentsia tend to neglect: paraliterature. Formed of an eclectic hodgepodge of genres and mediums – from detective stories to science fiction and comics – paraliterature is often thought to be formulaic, simple and commercial. But it is in the highly popular discourse of paraliterature that timely concerns about the world are crystallised and transformed to narrative. In its success we read the success of some ideas and the decline of others. Paraliterature is the barometre of human ideas in the world.

Children’s literature is actually good

Too many people don’t know that children’s books are good. They see the simplicity and the cuteness of a few remembered titles. Studying children’s literature helps raise the profile of children’s books – of the immensely diverse, extraordinarily complex world of children’s books. All of them. The challenging, the funny, the controversial, the edgy, the poetic, the outrageous, the revolutionary, the cosy, the erudite, the sad, the contemplative. Children’s literature critics explore and categorise this vibrant planet.

Children’s literature is an experimental platform

Many writers and illustrators, not least of which Philip Pullman, have established the need to write for children – the reason why they do so. And this reason has nothing to do with not being able to write for adults, or wanting an easy ride into publication. Children’s literature provides a platform for experimenting with form and content – for tackling themes from new and daring angles. The power of allegory, the infinite possibilities of text-and-image relationships, the ability to catch the imaginations of thousands of future citizens: here are the real reasons for the need to write for children.

Children’s literature fashions the future

Children’s literature, like all cultural productions for children, is a parallel educational universe in which we can see glimpses of the future. It constructs and impacts children’s developments, senses of identity, and visions of the world. It creates ambitions and aspirations, models taste and values. It is the only potentially world-changing form of literature. Studying children’s literature means studying both our heritage and our legacies.

by Clementine

Billionaire Boy tells the story of Joe Spud, 12-year-old son of a self-made-multibillionaire who would have wowed Lord Sugar with his clever invention of a half-moist, half-dry loo paper roll. Little Joe has everything he wants, except for one thing: a friend.

Walliams’s stroke of genius is to get rid of all sense of measure in the description of this nouveau riche family – the more outrageous, the better, and after just a few pages we find ourselves very willing to suspend disbelief when Joe is given a cheque for two million pounds for his birthday, or is seen driving a Formula One car especially designed to accomodate his overweight figure.

The storyline is an overly predictable fable which can be summed up in one yawn: money doesn’t make you happy and you shouldn’t buy your way into friendship. But it doesn’t matter too much that the whole plot is telegraphed from the first few pages. With Walliams, it’s form, not content, that’s appealing – and counterbalancing the shallowness of the ‘message’ is an often hilarious treatment of Joe’s misfortunes.

Billionaire Boy does have some extremely funny moments. I found myself failing (because I was laughing so much) to read out loud to my boyfriend the timetable of the posh private school that Joe attends – here’s a taster:

Tuesday

Ancient Greek; Croquet; Pheasant Shooting; Being beastly to servants class; Mandolin level 3; History of Tweed; Nose in the air hour; Learning to step over the homeless person as you leave the opera; Finding your way out of a Maze.

Sometimes, though, Walliams’s humour – perhaps because of his background as a comedian – is completely incomprehensible to children, playing on cultural or social references that young teens can’t know. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen too often and doesn’t hinder the reading, but I’m always wary of books that speak to the adult above the child’s head.

Tony Ross’s illustrations are of course excellent, and the Ross/Walliams duo immediately calls to mind Blake/Dahl books, as I mentioned earlier. But Billionaire Boy, whatever Julia Eccleshare might say on the back cover, is too well-behaved and lacks the linguistic playfulness to be truly described as being ‘in the best spirit of Dahl’. Not that it matters at all – I wouldn’t even mention it if it wasn’t written all over the book and inside it that it was the publisher’s intention to present Walliams as Dahl’s heir.

One fascinating thing about Billionaire Boy is the OCD emphasis on food, especially comfort food. Food rules Walliams’s world, arranging weddings, reconciling friends, and creating social bonds. The importance of food in children’s books has been explored thoroughly by children’s literature critics, and we find in Walliams’s novel a perfect example of a bulimic approach to chocolate and candy as the satisfaction of immediate, primitive desires in children – an easy and potent way to entrance the child reader by appealing to one of the most pressing cravings in a child’s life.

The outrageous display of money in the novel plays on the same instinctive craving in children. Children are the economically deprived class – however rich their parents are, they have no access to the bank accounts and have to rely on their parents for all spendings. Billionaire Boy effectively gets rid of this tough law of childhood to present a kid who can have as much money as he wants, to do whatever he wants with it. Once again, this is the ultimate dream for a child reader, and the attraction of the novel depends heavily on it.

The editorial work on the book is generally very good, with a nice play on fonts and layouts. However, the novel is stangely riddled with tiny editorial mistakes, especially regarding punctuation.

To sum up, this is a charmingly silly novel which will please young teenagers to no end, and will definitely make adults laugh. Like the chocolate bars that abound in the novel, it is a sweet, indulgent, predictable novel, which does exactly what it says on the cover.

Off to last Harry Potter premiere tomorrow with son Alfie, aren’t we lucky! Seems like only yesterday when I read first MS – life changing!

Barry Cunningham was an editor at Bloomsbury when Christopher Little, JK Rowling’s agent, sent him the first manuscript of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. According to the legend (and I have a second-hand account that it is true), Barry gave his daughter the manuscript and she loved it. The first Harry Potter book came out, so to speak, confidentially, until word of mouth made the series what they are now: the biggest international publishing phenomenon in human history.

Tonight the premiere of the seventh – sorry, the eighth – Harry Potter film will herald, according to some, the ‘end of Harry Potter‘. Tearful fans on the radio and on TV are bemoaning the ‘twilight of their childhood’. For those, like me, who quite literally grew up with Harry Potter from 1997 to 2007, this last film is the apocalypse. The last sigh of our adolescence! The dying words of a voice that brought us up! The epitaph of the first quarter of our lives!

Or not. The wonderful Harry Potter book series, as I see it, deserve to be critically set apart from their on-screen derivative.

Children’s literature critic Jack Zipes is a fierce detractor of the Harry Potter series, seeing them as supporting cultural homogeneisation and conservative values worldwide, and turning their readers into willing squaddies of the capitalist system. Where Zipes is wrong, according to me, is that he asserts that the Harry Potter books were marketed and designed to this specific end – real-life evidence contradicts him by showing that its success was, to start with, entirely reader-led and a big surprise to the publishing industry. But Zipes’s critique of the phenomenon, although it doesn’t apply to the books, works well to describe the Harry Potter film franchise.

Action-driven and Hollywoodised, the Harry Potter films and their countless derived products are a flashy, entertaining, unambiguous interpretation of the books. They flourished at a time when the power of the child and teenage customer was becoming, more than ever, a mouth-watering reality for advertising companies. Regardless of what one thinks of these films – I do think they are sometimes good, imaginative and funny – it is vital to consider them as an entirely separate phenomenon to the books: a product of the 2000’s, a displacement of the Harry Potter stories into the visual world of their time.

But they are in no way final.

In 2076 we will be flocking to cinemas (if they still exist) to watch the new filmic interpretation of the Harry Potter books. The director, productors and actors are yet to be born. They will not have grown up with the books. They will consider them as ‘classics’, not as a craze to be exploited before it expires. They will bring their fresh outlook to it. They will use new technologies to say new things.

In 3020, a new team will take over for a third version of Harry Potter.

And in 3100.

The books live on: there is one version and one only, it is JK Rowling’s; it is Barry Cunningham’s. The films are just one interpretation of these books. They are marked by their time, responding to the needs of their decade. The eighth installment of the Warner Brothers’s Harry Potter does not signal the end of anything else than itself.

If no one said that Orson Welles’s version of Jane Eyre was the end of Jane Eyre, then the Warner Bros’s version of Harry Potter is certainly not the end of Harry Potter.

by Clementine

Published in 2007 (presumably to cash in on the weepy trend sweeping the adult market in the form of Jodie Picoult novels) Before I Die tells the story of sixteen-year-old Tessa’s quest to complete her list of things to do before she dies of cancer. Yes, I became extremely emotional upon reading it. Yes, I cried so much in the last few chapters it was difficult to read the words. Yes, this was embarrassing because I was on a crowded bus. But did I care about the characters? No. Was it beautiful writing that had me in tears? No. In fact it was barely anything to do with Jenny Downham’s skill in crafting the novel at all. It was the use of a highly emotive subject – cancer in children – that allowed me to be easily manipulated by the content.

Tessa is not particularly likeable at the start; she is cruel to her family and the first item on her list is to lose her virginity – to anyone who will have her (a random boy in a club, as it turns out). This, to me, is a clumsy way of demonstrating the fact that she is angry with the situation, and is typical of the nature of the ‘developments’ that Tessa undergoes through the novel. The intent may have been to show what her illness drove her to, but the effect (on me, anyway) is that the reader is irritated with such an irresposible attitude towards her health – it is explicitly stated she is too ill/weak to go clubbing. Maybe this would have been better placed later on in the novel once the reader has got to know Tessa better, rather than as a ‘shocking opening’. Changes to her character seem clunky and forced, and as the majority of the plot developments revolve around the development of Tessa’s illness, the progression does not come across as natural. The writing itself did not particularly grab me, and given that the novel is focused around Tessa and that it is difficult to warm to her as a character, it is glaringly obvious that Downham uses the character’s illness as a crutch/shortcut to fleshing her out and making her real for the reader.

Many people have recommended this novel to me, but I am still confused as to what exactly they liked about the novel, aside from its ability to incite such strong emotions in the reader due to its subject. Novels like this strike me as manipulative and lazy, as they rely on the power of the tragedy involved, rather than the quality of writing or character development. They are designed primarily to provoke, and leave me as a reader extremely unsatisfied at the end. This is because I cannot reconcile the facts that I was underwhelmed by the novel and yet completely overwhelmed with emotion.

Clearly many readers do not agree with me – the reviews on Amazon are nearly hysterical in their admiration for this book.

‘I needed her to fulfil these desperate requests, because I lived the book like she was me or at least a best friend, which made it so painful to contemplate her death’

I can see why it has sold well, as misery lit has kept appetite for books like My Sister’s Keeper strong since the mid 2000s. Before I Die is no better or worse than any of Jody Picoult’s novels, and has the potential to be a crossover success given the subject matter, nature of the trend, and age of the protagonist. The publisher in me can see all this. But the children’s literature student in me is not convinced.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece …

What do Kid You Not listeners think of misery lit? Am I being unnecessarily harsh? Or is it too easy for writers to use tragic subjects as a substitute for poor writing?

By Lauren

It is a shame that Ness’ voice was diminished by Potter mania, as he used his acceptance speech to lambast the government for its library closures, highlighting the importance they had played in his upbringing and childhood reading. Describing himself as ‘a child that libraries built’, he singled out Education Minister Michael Gove for his failure to oppose the closure of libraries.

As the latest in a long line of prestigious authors to protest against the closure of so many libraries it will be interesting to see whether in fact the Government – or the media – take any notice of the campaigns to prevent the policy from happening.

By Lauren

It’s a book about colour-mixing, clashing patterns, dogs peeing on a tropical beach, painted coffins. It translates to the plot as the intermingling of terminal illness with teenage romance, constantly oscillating from energy to exhaustion and exhilaration to sadness. Told in the form of the not-quite-so-private diary of twelve-year-old Mira, the novel revolves around the gradual decline of her beloved grandmother Nana Josie, a revolutionary, imaginative, zany and slightly controlling hippie who could be the most attaching character in the novel if Mira wasn’t such an endearingly warm narrator. The story freely strays away from this original plotline, though, scattering secondary plots that sometimes lead somewhere and sometimes don’t, like the artichoke leaves of the title, but weave many more colourful characters into the tapestry. From Pat the posh, pedagogical writer and dog-walker to the beautiful and tragic young married couple waiting for death, the novel takes us through a gallery of portraits which could not be more remote from our everyday experiences while staying entirely credible.

Death is one of the most commonly tackled themes in children’s literature, and very often the portrayal of the death of a grandparent is a tear-jerking opportunity to teach the young reader about the harsh reality of our own transience. But Artichoke Hearts, although immensely sad, is not a tear-jerker; and although death is given more meaning and more stage presence in this novel than in most works of children’s literature that I’ve read, it is neither celebrated as a rite of passage or a process of maturation, nor lamented as a bitter truth of existence. In fact, far from allowing for generalisation, it is presented in all its singularity. Mira’s grandmother is like no other in the world. In her life, her death, her thoughts, her art, the artichoke charm she gives Mira, we read a unique and personal experience which does not call for universalisation.

Artichoke Hearts also presents a very tender, pitch-perfect portrayal of early teen romance. While Nana Josie is dying, Mira gets her first period, her first mobile phone and her first boyfriend. Far from both pheromone-packed hypersexualised YA and sickly-sweet love stories of pink girl-books, Mira and Jidé’s first steps into romance are gentle and loving, full of laughter and shyness and trial-and-error, firmly anchored in a world where the number of x‘s at the end of a text determines a teenager’s mood for the day, and where gossip is both longed for and feared.

Sita Brahmachari’s sensitivity in this first book is admirable. She deals with complex themes simply and gracefully, creating a resolutely modern coming-of-age story in a multifarious world. It’s a touching, fun, emotional, deep teenage novel which thoroughly deserves its award and will hopefully receive many more.

The editorial work on the book is enchanting, with a colourful cover and lovely detailed patterns introducing the chapters.

Reviewed by Clementine. Leave a comment

How will this interactive world unfold? We can be sure that the academic and publishing world will be watching extremely carefully. Too close to a video game, and it will betray the nature of literature, the dwindling of which everyone already deplores; too close to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story and we’ll feel like we’re back in the nineties. The designers will need to work their way cautiously between these two pitfalls.

Of course Pottermore will also be a platform for selling ebooks and, potentially, more derived Harry Potter products. Are we heading towards a new publishing trend where the gap between paper books and their e-twins will need to be bridged by imaginative marketing strategies, enlarging the reading experience to a tree of endless real and virtual ramifications? Straddling Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, the creative minds behind Pottermore are clearly tech-savvy and ready to embrace viral paths to success.

With Pottermore we can expect more definitional issues for academics. ‘Reading’, ‘literature’, ‘books’, ‘narrative’, ‘reader’ – what becomes of these signifiers when they come to encapsulate such a wide variety of signifieds? With one foot on pulped wood and the other one in the binary void, literature is still groping around for balance. In this precarious equilibrium, publishers, authors, agents, and academics find themselves in challenging times. Pottermore is more than Potter: it is a glimpse of the future.

by Clementine – also posted on http://cambridgechildrenslit.blogpost.com

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But please keep checking our blog for updates! and don’t forget to rate and comment on the podcast on iTunes.

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This week’s theme: In the first ever episode of Kid You Not Podcast, we discuss one of the many problems with adults – namely, their ambivalence towards children’s and teenage literature! Listen to the episode to learn more about crossover literature, publishing strategies behind adult covers for children’s books, and what it says about you if you don’t feel too comfortable reading children’s literature…

This week’s book review:

Numbers, by Rachel Ward (Chickenhouse)

Tell us what you think of Numbers in the comments!

The next book review will be Mimi, by John Newman.
Get hold of the book and let us now what you think before the next episode comes out!

Other books mentioned:

Junk,  by Melvin Burgess; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon; Pigeon English, by Stephen Kelman; The Giver, by Lois Lowry ; The Daydreamer, by Ian McEwan; the Twilight series, by Stephenie Meyer; the Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling; How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff; Holes, by Louis Sachar; The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. All books mentioned in the podcast or on the blog are listed here.

Thank you so much for downlaoding this episode! It’s our very first one ever and we hope you’ll enjoy it and forgive us for the glitches here and there. It’s all a learning curve!

Please share it with your friends and contribute to the blog and to the podcast by asking us questions and posting comments. You can also email us at kidyounotpodcast@gmail.com .

The next episode, on Quality and Trash, will be released on July 17th. Until then, subscribe to the blog for extra posts and book reviews!

Clem & Lauren

Given that neither of us had any previous experience with audio software or microphones it was an interesting Saturday in which we finally met to record the first episode. All the planning and research had been the easy part. Connecting the microphone to the computer was a little more challenging, as was working out how to reduce feedback on it and what all the buttons did…

After all this hard work we decided it was time for lunch in a local pub (before the harder work started). It seemed easier to tackle on a full stomach – anything is easier to handle after chips.

After playing around with the microphone and the audio software for long enough to work out how to make sure Clem’s voice was not ten times louder than mine, the recording finally began! We had a tentative start as we got used to the sound of our own voices and a couple of technical glitches. By the time we had finished both of us were convinced that we were going to need to start again – I could have sworn that we kept wandering off the point and that I didn’t phrase things at all as I meant them to. But when we listened to the material (to see which bits we needed to re-record) it wasn’t anywhere near what we had thought we had recorded! It was actually pretty close to what we had intended in the first place…

A lot of peppermint tea and audio aggravation later we had a roughly edited first episode. Just a little bit more polishing, and we have Kid You Not Episode One: Surely That’s Not a Children’s Book …

We learnt a lot making the first episode; hopefully future ones will not require quite as much confusion or peppermint tea.

By Lauren