The stakes are high. Do not take the official death toll from the Great Fire of London seriously – as this letter to the Guardian points out, the lives of many poor Londoners were never recorded, let alone their deaths. We’re talking obliteration here. If that isn’t bad enough, her mother has been kidnapped. How will Hyacinth cope with such pressure?
Although this has a modern-day setting, it sounds Wonderlandish in terms of its characters. Tea parties with giant pigs, and the delightfully named ‘Toshers’. It sounds Frances Hardinge-esqe in terms of its population. I hope, as in Hardinge’s work, this world and its eclectic demographic will come with BACKSTORY.
I’m all about Middle Grade Adventure trilogies. Some of my favouite kid-lit of recent years falls under that heading: from Thirteen Treasures to The Dreamsnatcher, to The Last Wild and now The Huntress. I’m always open for another MG adventure trilogy, and look forward to reading.
Waiting on Wednesday is a meme hosted by Breaking the Spine. Thank you for hosting.
Ten Books I Absolutely Must Read From My Shelves Before I Buy a SINGLE Book.
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Every week, bloggers make a list on a related theme. I decided to take part for the first time this week, and found the theme was ‘most anticipated reads for the rest of 2017’. Sticking to it would have been like staring at a chocolate eclair while on a diet, because I’ve just announced a four week book-buying ban. Why? It’s basically a case of reader-I-did-it-again.
‘Shall I buy one book or nine?’ says I. Guess which answer won out. Much as I love books, the small pile of gold I keep guarded by dragon cannot take it.
This week, I have made a list of ten books on my shelves I ABSOLUTELY MUST read before I buy another book. Let’s see how far into June it lasts.
Have you ever imposed a book ban? Did you stick to it? (More to the point, how?) Let me know in the comments below.
Yep … I’m guilty of buying in bulk.
(Manny’s narration) I had never heard of pansies. Flowers do not grow where landmines are buried. I studied the picture on the packet and those flowers reminded me of the faces I saw in my dreams. They had big frightened eyes and no mouths. I dropped the paper on the seat and picked up my singlet. I needed to run again. That was the feeling I had inside me when I thought of the faces. But, before I ran, I saw that there was handwriting on the back of the packet. That is what stopped me from running.
Alice Nightingale is ‘forever 12’. She searches inside herself and out for the truth about what happened the night she went counted the stars at Oktober Bend. Words don’t come easily when she speaks, but when she writes they give flight to her thoughts. Thoughts about the mother who left, and the father who died, and the grandfather in prison.
Manny James has memories inside him he would rather forget. Memories of his little sister, and life in Sierra Leone. He finds a poem and connects it to the red-haired girl who stands under the stars and throws her poems to the world. Manny wants to learn more about Alice, but he must contend with the prejudices of people who think the Nightingales are nothing but trouble.
Together, they search for the truth about themselves beyond their circumstances.
Don’t be fooled by those short sentences – the use of language in The Stars at Oktober Bend is genius. Alice’s voice is superficially childish. She suffers from ‘theasurus syndrome’ – misuse of long words where a short one would do – and repeatedly uses words and phrases she has read in the family Bible. It soon becomes apparent that Alice has a gift for observation, and for crafting apposite metaphors. Alice also has a gift for poetry, and the book is worth reading for Alice’s poems alone. Read carefully – every poem contains a line or an image which tells you something you haven’t yet learnt in the text.
Alice is searching for the truth about what happened on a night when she was 12. The reader gathers clues with her – from her beautiful language, and from the revelations of other characters. This reminds me of stream of consciousness in Modernist literature, where thoughts occur as they would in real life. She questions whether she will, as the doctors say, be ‘forever twelve’. This is interesting in itself – Alice is caught on the cusp of adolescence, the cusp of abstract thought. When Alice meets Manny, she questions to what extent she will be able to enter a relationship.
While Alice searches for answers, the present day is not forgotten. There is Alice’s emerging relationship with Manny, the behaviour of a couple of local boys and their threats towards Alice’s brother Joey, and Manny himself. There is also the question of Gram’s bad lungs, and how much longer the Nightingales can hide away from the world.
Alice has acquired brain injury. I am sometimes wary of novels which deal with health conditions. There has been discussion about this within the YA Twitter community. There is nothing worse than a novel which invites people to sob over a person coming to terms with their health condition. This is not equal representation. The tone of The Stars at Oktober Bend is spot-on. Alice is a character, not an information leaflet. In terms of Alice’s brain injury and seizures, the reader is told only what the need to know for the plot. Alice’s development as a character is not about her health condition, but her relationship with herself and the world. This does not mean the brain injury plays no part. It means it is one aspect of Alice’s life. It does not define Alice.
Not only does Alice have difficulties with her health, she faces prejudice from the outside world. Millard portrayed this beautifully, from the man who tries to underpay her for her work to the ballet teacher who insists Alice’s seizures ‘disrupt’ the lessons.
I loved how Alice and Manny had similar development, despite having opposite problems. Alice wants to remember; Manny want to forget. Generally, the book looks at how the world responds to people who ‘with issues’ – be it poverty, bereavement, abuse or anything else you can dream of. The resounding message was we are people regardless of what has happened to us, and this, I think, makes the book both important and memorable.
Have you read a book in written in poetry or unconventional prose? Did it affect your reading of the story?
We were all quiet for a while.
Heo and Ismi scampered down the path, shouting that they were giant women made of moonlight. Jai looked at me with a grave expression.
The Red Abbey – an all-female community and haven for women from the oppression of patriarchal society. Maresi has lived at the island since her sister starved to death during the Hunger Winter. Most novices in the abbey’s community are apprenticed to one of the sisters before Maresi’s age. Maresi is left behind. She is drawn to the work of Sister O, and the treasure trove of knowledge held in the abbey scrolls.
Written as a testament, Maresi records the events of the previous year: Jai arrives on the island to escape her abusive and murderous father. Like the founding sisters Maresi reads about in the scrolls, the Abbey community is forced to protect itself. Will they be offered protection from the Abbey’s Goddess? Will the island come to their defence, as it did for the first Sisters centuries before?
Maresi is short, but it has such an impact you remember sometimes less really is more. The Abbey protects both the girls who live within its walls, and the scrolls which contain generations of knowledge. For me the suspense lay in this more than in Jai’s storyline. If something needs protection, it is necessarily under threat. The story reads as a record of one incident in the Abbey’s history. The threat to the Abbey from patriarchal society is a many-headed monster. Jai’s storyline concludes, but the values of the Abbey are still under threat.
The religion at the centre of Abbey life plays a huge role in Maresi’s development. The Sisters of the Abbey have roles which personify different aspects of the religion, and different buildings in the abbey are dedicated to these various roles. I love this. It makes the religion into something concrete, which makes it easier to visualise. It also plays a part in the feminist narrative. The Sisters’ roles represent different aspects of a woman’s personality. There are nurturing roles, industrious roles and there is the Rose, a priestess-like figure who represents seductivity. Then there is Sister O, who keeps the key to the library scrolls.
Initially, I thought these were stereotypes of the female personality, but this is where Maresi’s development became crucial to my reading of the narrative. Essentially, Maresi learns that affinity is not the be all and end all when making life choices.
A lot of what we learn about Maresi is in relation to different possible futures. Might she oversee the Novices, or become the Mother herself? Would she or her friend make a better Rose? Is it possible, when she hears the Crone’s voice, the Maresi might die before she finds her calling? The moments which are about life on the island and the socialisation between the novices allow the different aspects of Maresi’s character to be seen together. This is where we see her as a person more than as a Novice.
Maresi forms part of a trilogy, the second book of which I am eager to read ASAP. I am hungry for more than three books. The second book takes place centuries before Maresi. Using the idea of the abbey scrolls, I wonder if the series could go beyond three novels. However, where longer series can run out of steam, trilogies often keep their momentum. A memorable read.
Series crackdown begins this weekend. Hosted by The Bookmoo, it encourages readers to finish a those series on their selves which have been gathering dust. Stretching over ten day s, it seemed like a generous time span to make a push with a couple of series from my shelves.
My initial idea was to head into a six-book series which has been on my shelves for years. However, in my TBR for this month I chose to finish Abi Elphinstone’s trilogy, and continue Melinda Sailsbury’s trilogy with The Sleeping Prince and The Scarecrow Queen. These are not books I’ve had for YEARS, but books I expected to read in a day which have sat for a couple of months. Instead of pushing these books back further, when I want to read them so much, I am going to finish them for Series Crackdown.
As I want to finish the Carnegie list over the next couple of weeks, three books is enough to participate, without throwing my Carnegie read-through off-course.
Have you got a series languishing on your shelves? What are you reading for Series Crackdown?
Thanks to Sam for hosting this meme at Taking on a World of Words. This is the first time I have participated. The idea is to answer three questions – What am I currently reading, What did I reccently finish reading and What might I read next?
From Carnegie Website – Alice is fifteen, with hair as red as fire and skin as pale as bone, but something inside her is broken. She has a brain injury, the result of an assault. Manny was once a child soldier. He is sixteen and has lost all his family. When Manny first sees Alice, she is sitting on the rusty roof of her river house, looking like a carving on an old-fashioned ship, sailing through the stars. He has a poem in his pocket and he knows the words by heart. And he is sure that girl has written them. When Manny and Alice meet they find the beginnings of love and healing.
I have only read the first pages. The idea of Alice imitating Biblical poetry reminded me of David Almond’s Billy Dean, who learns language instinctively and is likened to Bede. Although the language in my current read has hooked me, my initial thought was how dark children’s literature can be. In eight or twelve pages, I encountered abuse, abandonment and murder. This was made more poignant by the narration – Alice understands what she is saying, but has difficulty putting her thoughts into words. Superficially, her language sounds naïve, but when you go back over the words and think about what she has said, it hits you full-force. I think the narratorial voices may be the strength of the novel, and am eager to read on.
There are so many books I might read next. I intend to read the Carnegie list before the winner is announced. The winner is announced mid-June, so with six books still to read, I am short on time. Both Salt to the Open Sea and The Bone Sparrow focus on the plight of refugees. The former is set in 1945, the latter in the modern day.
Series Crackdown kicks off this weekend – this is a ten day readathon hosted by The Bookmoo, which encourages people to read an unfinished series from their bookshelves. Having read Maresi over the weekend, I still have the last book in Abi Elphinstone’s trilogy. However, this will not take long to read, so hardly seems like taking part. If I am up for more of a challenge, I have John Maresden’s six book series. This starts with Tomorrow, when the War Began, which follows a group of teenagers who from a resistance group when the rest of their town is taken hostage at the start of a war. Their agricultural knowledge and familiarity with the land helps them survive and remain hidden.
The Red Abbey offers shelter to girls from patriarchal societies. Girls are educated, then chose whether to return – empowered- to their former homes, or remain as an apprentice to one of the Sisters. The novel is written as a first person account, as if the reader has found one of the abbey scrolls. Maresi records the events of the previous summer, which began when Jai arrived on the island, hoping to escape her abusive father. The story rolled along, and I loved how deeply Turtschaninoff had thought in forming the religion which is at the centre of abbey life. Check back for my review tomorrow.
Have you read any of these novels? What are you reading next? Please comment below – I look forward to seeing your thoughts.