A guest reviewer writes ...

I asked Armadillo reviewer and writer Bridget Carrington to review a book by Kathryn James so that we could mark a special event this month and link it to YA fiction.  The following is Bridget's contribution:

All over the UK June is Gypsy Roma TravellerHistory Month, and perfectly timed for this comes Kathryn James latest novel, Gypsy Girl (Walker Books). Kathryn writes from in-depth experience of this very special and widely misrepresented group, as she worked for years in a variety of jobs which supported the traveller community. 

In an interview she has written:

When I met up with the Gypsy girls we’d worked with in the past, they moaned that there’s never any books or stories about their lives. They and I both wanted a kick-ass Gypsy girl heroine. Sassy. Gypsy smart rather than School smart. And true to what the girls are really like.  

Sammy-Jo Smith is just that. She’s a prize-winning fighter, but can’t progress to the official adult fights because she’s too young. Her big sister wants a big wedding, so Sammy-Jo secretly earns money in illegal cage fights to pay for it, and remains unbeaten against all-comers. But this year when the Smith family pulls onto the field they’ve always stopped on they find they are no longer welcome, and Sammy-Jo discovers there’s far more to that than meets the eye too. And she’s fallen in love with a gorger, whose father owns the field, although she’s expected to marry a cousin, who seems to be mixed up in something illegal. Sammy-Jo is an unusual heroine, and her world will be unfamiliar to many readers, except via the discriminatory reports in certain areas of the media. Through her we learn much about the close family units, about the history of the people and their traditions, and how they’re both the same and different from us – the housed. All this comes through a fast-paced, exciting, and frequently funny, mystery-adventure-romance with an engaging heroine. 

There’s a hint that we might see more of her – I certainly hope so!

There’s an excellent Guardian picture article in which Kathryn James shows the sources for some of the ideas in Gypsy Girl, and a piece on the GRTHM site about a traveller who competed in the boxing in the 2012 Olympics.

The Quite Beautiful Ava Lavender

The wonderful Leslye Walton has generously written this short piece about her stunning novel, her YA debut, written when she was not busy teaching children how to read, write and be nice to each other.  Perhaps some of the inspiration from this evocative and moving story came from her teaching experiences, perhaps, as she says it cam from a song.  No matter where it came from here we have a beautiful novel about finding yourself, finding your own wings.  With its gorgeous prose, unpretentious storyline, characters that go straight to the heart there is so much to love about this book that its YA readers are quite certain to fall in love with it just as much as I did and hopefully they will spread the word far and wide too.  Now sit back, read the words of Lesley herself, read the book and then join me in waiting for her next offering ...

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender was originally inspired by the song “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You” by Colin Hay. While pondering the logic—or perhaps, the lack of logic—when it comes to love, I discovered Viviane Lavender, a girl who spent her entire life pining after a childhood sweetheart. I imagined the weight of this, the immense burden of loving someone who didn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, love you back. How you couldn’t help but allow that grief to shape the rest of your life.

At this point, I didn’t think I was writing a novel, but months went by, I kept returning to this story—one I had thought I was finished telling.  Soon, other characters began revealing their place in this now-evolving tale. Henry was based on an autistic boy I taught who had a remarkable aptitude for mapmaking. Trouver was a sweet tempered Great Pyrenees I walked to earn money while in grad school. But it was Ava who changed everything. I was looking at a picture of my younger sister, taken when she was perhaps eleven. She was all long limbs and big teeth, wearing an oversize white T-shirt, and running, her shirt billowing out behind her as if she had wings. And it was in that description that I came to a stop, my fingers poised over the keyboard, and I thought No. Not as if she had wings. She has wings. And in that, I also realized I had no idea what I was writing. This wasn’t historical fiction. It wasn’t fantasy. It was something else. I didn’t write again for weeks.

I spent the next few months devouring everything I could that touched on the topic of magical realism—Isabelle Allende’s House of The Spirits, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, Joanne Harris’ Chocolat. Reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s glorious One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time was like listening to someone speak a language I thought only I understood. And then I woke up one morning and found the Roux family waiting for me to tell their story, including Pierette, Emilienne’s sister who transformed herself into a canary after falling in love with a man who only had an eye for birds. Once I knew these peculiar characters, the story emerged quite easily from there.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is a story about love and loss and longing. I like to call it my love song to the strange. It’s for the lonely, the misunderstood, the unloved. Which is all of us, at some point, in some way or another. So, I guess this book is a love song to you, kind reader. May it serve as a reminder to fly with your own wings.