So now I bring you Bridget's latest thoughts on some of the latest goodies that have found their way to her ...
I’m writing this just before midday on April Fools’ Day, when anything
can happen! Something really good that has happened recently is the way in
which teachers try to engage children with reading, despite the shackles with
which state education tries to prevent us.
Although all are about castaways, Olivia Levez’s debut novel The Island, from Oneworld’s YA imprint Rock
the Boat, is about as unlike Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe or O’Dell’s Island of the
Blue Dolphins as you could imagine. Frances (Fran to her few friends, and
Frannie to her brother, who she calls Monkey) describes herself as ‘cold as
rock, hard as stone’, resulting from the traumatic family situation which has
resulted in her beloved little brother Johnny being taken into care. Her anger
at what she sees as a betrayal by a trusted teacher has resulted in her ending
up in court, but instead of a custodial sentence she becomes part of an experiment
to place young offenders in a situation where they will work co-operatively to
help communities in the developing world. The plane taking Fran and other
workers crashes, but she survives and reaches an uninhabited island, where she
has no option but to learn how to survive, and eventually discovers that there
are at least two other survivors. In the very short unnumbered passages which
comprise the novel Fran recounts in turn both her current situation and the events
which have brought her to it. While this takes time and patience for the reader
to navigate, we gradually see what the drivers were for her anti-social
behaviour, and to realise the close and enduring bond which exists between Fran
and Johnny, to whom she has been a surrogate mother. At the book’s end we see
Fran, a dog and a gravely sick survivor on a makeshift raft, attempting to find
civilization and medical help. There’s much to think about underlying the
immediate story, and we’re left not knowing how things end. Perhaps Levez will
write a sequel? She has practical tips for lone desert island dwellers
Monica Hesse’s The Girl in the
Blue Coat (Macmillan) is a move away from the author’s previous YA sci-fi
fiction. Instead her journalist self has painstakingly researched an aspect of
the Dutch Resistance movement and while the novel revolves around a Dutch
Jewish teenage girl, the result is an interesting alternative to Anne
Frank-related books. The Girl in the Blue Coat herself only appears towards the
end of the book, and the ‘heroine’ Hanneke is not Jewish, and indeed her Aryan
good looks allow her to undertake her Black Market activities under the noses
of the occupying German soldiers. When one of her regular Black Market
customers asks her to try to find Mirjam, a Jewish girl she was hiding, Hanneke
is reluctant. Still unable to come to terms with the death of her boyfriend
during the invasion of the Netherlands, and emotionally crippled by her guilt
at having encouraged him to join up, Hanneke seems a somewhat remote, aloof and
unfeeling character, but as she gradually understands what the student members
of the Resistance risk to move Jewish children to safety, and to record
everyday life under the Nazis she becomes increasingly, if still reluctantly,
determined to find and save Mirjam. There are several twists in the story, with
a major one right at the end of the book, but possibly the greatest interest
lies in Hesse’s carefully constructed account of life under the regime. While
with Anne Frank’s account we learn about life in hiding, through Hanneke’s
experience we appreciate the restrictions to ordinary everyday life – school,
work, romance, travel – that occupation imposed on those Dutch citizens who
were supposedly free to live their lives.
Somehow the Manson murders seem an odd topic for a YA novel, and Alison
Umminger’s My Favourite Manson Girl
(Atom Books) is an odd book. In this Bildungsroman, fifteen-year-old Anna tells
her own story and we learn that she has ‘borrowed’ her step-mother’s credit
card to enable her to run away to LA to join Delia, her older sister, a bit-part
actress in the movies. Her home life has been disrupted by her mother’s new
relationship with Lynette – now her step-mother – and the birth of their child,
Birch, and despite her deep love for the new sibling, she cannot cope with the
change of home and school. Needing to pay back what she ‘borrowed’ and at a
loose end while Delia is filming, Anna accepts a job researching the Manson
murders, for a film that Delia’s obsessive ex-boyfriend is planning. While we
learn a lot about Anna, about life on the edge of the starry world of movies,
and about relationships, both relating to family life and sexuality, we also
unpick the reasons behind what drove Charles Manson’s group of adoring girls to
commit murder for him. This may still intrigue US readers, but fifty years on
from those events it’s unlikely that this part of the story will resonate with
many UK YAs. Somehow I feel a potentially good novel about the complexities of
growing up has been side-tracked by the Manson element.
