CHILDREN'S BOOKS & WRITERS

C S Lewis: the famous Narnia books, the magic wardrobe and the White Witch, "always winter and never Christmas" and so on. I'm not a huge fan of these - the tacky Christian allegory really annoys me. The best books are the ones Aslan doesn't keep popping up in - A Horse and His Boy, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair. The final book, The Last Battle, is good too - very apocalyptic and rounds off the sequence beautifully. But I just ca'n't get over the whole "Aslan-rising-from-the-dead" thing, it really bugs me. I hate being force-fed things 8(

Diana Wynne Jones: aaaahh, wonderful Diana. Her children's books are so much fun (so is her only adult novel to date, A Sudden Wild Magic). Take a look at the Chrestomanci books, Charmed Life, Witch Week, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and The Magicians of Caprona, which are set in a universe filled with counterfactual worlds, divided into sets of nine. Everyone has a string of doubles, one in each world, save in exceptional circumstances where the nine lives are concentrated in one person, making them a very powerful enchanter. Chrestomanci is the title which goes with the civil service job of being in charge of the administration of magic. These books all deal with the events which befall one particular Chrestomanci, Christopher Chant, an elegant and vague enchanter and a wonderful character. If you read just one, make it - oh, just read them all, I ca'n't decide!

For slightly older readers Archer's Goon is a great book - good characters and a really interesting story, and best of all, Diana's wonderful writing. Then there's The Ogre Downstairs, A Tale of Time City...I really ca'n't describe how much fun it is to read her books - just grab one and dive in 8)

Ursula Le Guin: four very serious fantasy novels for older readers, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. These are *excellent*. They are set in the Archipelago, a group of islands (obviously), centred on Roke Island, which houses the School of Magic where young men go to learn wizardry. Ged (a.k.a. Sparrowhawk), our hero throughout these four novels, goes to the school, and, being an exceptional pupil, is soon bored with his studies and meddling with things he is not ready for. Trying to call a spirit, he allows an evil soul-eater through the divide between life and death, and must go on a quest to track the creature down and destroy it before it can destroy him. The other three books follow Ged's life on other quests and other journeys, with the final book being a very adult look at relationships, love, redemption, and how to pick up the pieces and start over when everything you rely on has fallen apart. Highly recommended.

Susan Cooper: another fantasy writer, author of The Dark is Rising sequence of six novels. These are good but not as adult as the Le Guin novels. Set in England and Wales, they deal with an ongoing battle between the Light and the Dark. There is a heavily Arthurian theme, particularly in the last two novels, which are the best of the sequence. Her writing is good and the stories are interesting, and the plot arc of the six novels keeps you reading, as each book advances the overall story significantly. Not as good as Le Guin, though, IMHO!

Robin McKinley: writes fun fantasy books. Her female heroines are strong, feisty, independent, and great role models for girls. The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown are set in the land of Damar, and centre on the traditional plot of fantasy novels, the struggle between good and evil. My favourite book of hers is Beauty, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. The characters are rounded and absorbing - you really care about what happens to them and whether things work out okay - whether they all live happily ever after. Reading this one is like cuddling up on the sofa with a box of choccies to watch a weepy movie - sheer self-indulgent pleasure 8)

Alan Garner: another fantasy writer (do I ever read anything else? 8)) A fantastic writer, imaginative and very unsettling. Some of his books for older teens, The Owl Service and Red Shift, are really scary and disturbing. Even The Weirdstone of Brisangamen and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, which are for slightly younger readers, can be frightening, with their intimations of evil secrets lurking in the most placid of landscapes - they freaked me out completely as a child. The Owl Service still spooks me 8) Nothing is overtly frightening - no tacky blood and gore - just very eerie. Top-quality writing and very well worth a look.

Philip Pullman: I understand he's a much acclaimed young-adult writer, but the only books I've read of his are the His Dark Materials sequence: a projected trilogy, of which he's written the first two books, Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife. These are amazing books, *so* well written and so imaginative. The story arc is too complicated to describe (and far too imaginative to sum up), but the focus is on the terrific character of Lyra, young, tough, and street-smart, who is trying to stop her uncle and his partner Mrs Coulter from destroying children and removing the mysterious Dust from their universe. The villains are truly scary, rather like in John Masefield's The Box of Delights - smooth and suave and plausible, and therefore it's all the more terrifying to discover the hatred and fanaticism under the polished veneer. Highly recommended, and not just for children. Come on Philip and finish book three!

Capt. W E Johns: Moving away from the realms of fantasy we enter the realms of good old-fashioned British stiff-upper-lippishness, derring-do, and general all-round decent chap-ness 8). Yes, it's Biggles. Okay, so along with all that Britishness there's the most appalling and cringe-inducing racism, but presumably most modern children can sneer at that in the best fashion. Actually, I ca'n't see most modern children wanting to read Biggles at all. But they're missing out 8). Under all the bizarre Britishness, the incredibly tacky race and class stereotypes, and the strange extension of the books to the post-WWII world where they seem hopelessly out of place, they're great! Firmly based in the belief that if you want things done, do them yourself, and that God doesn't help those who don't help themselves, they have a lot to say about using your brain, keeping cool in a crisis and never giving up on a situation no matter how black it may look. You can learn a lot of good life lessons from Biggles. Not to mention a lot about aviation, geography, history...you name it, it'll be in one of the books. Good stuff.

Noel Streatfield: a great, albeit old-fashioned, children's writer. Definitely one for little girls - well, traditional little girls, anyway. Her Ballet Shoes and White Boots are classic children's books, as are The Painted Garden and Ballet Shoes for Anna. A Vicarage Family is an autobiographical novel, beautifully and poignantly written, about growing up in a small country town before the First World War and the impact the war has on her and those around her.

Edith Nesbit: - The Railway Children, Five Children and It, The Treasure Seekers, The Enchanted Castle...all absolute classics. Very old-fashioned but still great fun - her children are so mischievous and always getting into such scrapes, no matter how well-intentioned...you always want things to work out for them. And of course, since this is nineteenth-century children's fiction, they always do 8).

Summer of my German Soldier by Bette Green. Great book about prejudice, fear, and the importance of ideas and education. Patty is a teenager growing up with an ignorant, psychologically and physically abusive father. German POWs are sent to the detention camp in her town and she strikes up a friendship with one, Frederick Anton Reiker, who confounds all her prejudices by being friendly, charming, educated, and humane. He escapes and she hides him in her garage; in return he introduces Patty to the world of ideas, finally teaching her the most important thing of all - self-esteem. Read the book to find out what happens to them. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats 8)

Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr. Marianne, on her tenth birthday, falls ill, and is confined to bed for weeks on end. She amuses herself by drawing with a pencil she finds in her mother's trinket-box. But what she draws with the pencil she sees at night in her dreams, and eventually her waking world becomes almost dream-like in comparison with the world she has drawn for herself, where she and Mark, the mysterious boy she has called into life, have to work together to overcome the Guardians watching menacingly over them. A fantastic idea, good writing and a strong ending. Made into a visually interesting film, Paperhouse (the acting leaves quite a lot to be desired but the visuals make it worth a look).

A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively. I like this one better than The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which is better known...I think it's more atmospheric and interesting. Maria is a strange, shy little girl, on holiday with her parents. She talks to objects, not people, and her conversations with clocks, a petrol pump, and the house cat are fun to read. As she begins to piece together more and more of the history of the house and its inhabitants the atmosphere becomes more and more brooding and threatening, as she waits for a repeat of the tragedy that happened so many years ago. The real strength of this book is the strange, remote atmosphere it creates and the tangible menace you can feel towards the end - you can smell disaster in the air. And the characters are well-written and believable. Recommended 8)

Also recommended is The Eagle of the Ninth, a historical story by Rosemary Sutcliffe (another good children's writer). Marcus is a young centurion sent to Britain to command a Roman outpost station. In an attack by the native British, he is wounded, and is invalided out of the army, the only life he has ever known. At a loose end, he teams up with a captured Briton, a slave, and together they make a difficult and dangerous journey into the heartland of the British tribes to rescue the captured Eagle of the Ninth Legion, which years before marched into the north and never came back. She gives a good idea of what Roman Britain must have been like, so it's an educational as well as exciting story.

HM Hoover's Orvis is a wonderful read - set in the future, Toby (Tabitha) and Thaddeus are pupils at a privileged boarding school on Earth. Toby's parents are off-world celebrities, movie stars, and they have dumped her at this school. She and Thaddeus, drawn together by loneliness, find a robot, which, deemed to be obsolete, has been ordered to junk itself in a dump near the school. The children manage to talk the spider-shaped robot, Orvis, into reactivating himself, and the story concerns the development of their prickly, difficult relationship. Orvis is vain - he hates to be "unkempt" and begs for lemon oil to clean himself with - and straight-talking. The two children are both charming characters, and their interactions with Orvis are funny as well as insightful. Orvis's detached, objective view of the human race is fascinating ("Humans smile to avert threat") and he has a lot to teach the children about relationships. A terrific book, and you'll remember Orvis long after you finish it.

A Solitary Blue by Cynthia Voight (one for older readers). Cynthia Voight has written a series of novels about a young girl, Dicey Tillerman, and her family. This book fits obliquely into that set, since the characters it focusses on meet the Tillermans towards the end of the book. Jeff, his hippie-dippy mother Melody and his father, an academic, live in Boston; Jeff attends an elite school which his father teaches at, but never feels he fits in. He adores his mother and is devastated to come home one day and find a note saying she has left them and gone home to her Southern family. Instead of showing his grief he buries his feelings under the responsibility of keeping the household ticking over, and ploughs on with things, living for the summers when he can go visit his mother - whom he soon discovers to be rather less than the saint he has always believed. The book tracks Jeff's slow-burning breakdown and his recovery. It's a good, moving story and a great study of loneliness and isolation.

Ordinary People by Judith Guest (older readers). A wonderful book, made into an excellent film with Mary Beth Hurt, Donald Sutherland, and Timothy Hutton (who won an Oscar for his performance as Conrad). The book starts shortly after 17-year-old Conrad Jarrett returns home from a mental institution where he was placed after trying to commit suicide. As the book goes on we learn that Conrad's brother, the golden boy of the family, was drowned the previous year in an accident which Conrad survived. The book examines Conrad's subsequent breakdown and his halting recovery, and the effects of these events on Conrad's parents. The writing is terrific, putting you in the shoes of both Conrad and his father, so you can understand the pressures on this family that have essentially caused it to implode. It's like Catcher in the Rye, but for high achievers rather than slackers, since before his breakdown Conrad was a straight-A student and star of the school swim team. I think this is its strong point. People today are under so much pressure to succeed, to perform well academically, to be fit and physically perfect, that it's easier to identify with a clever, outwardly successful character going off the rails than a Holden Caulfield. Whatever, this really is a wonderful, empathic, honest book. Highly recommended.

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