Wonder, R. J. Palacio

I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.

Ten-year-old August Pullman is off to school for the first time, after being taught at home all his life. It would be a scary time for anyone, but Auggie draws attention. He has severe facial disfigurements that no one can help noticing. And for the first time, he will be constantly surrounded by people noticing, or trying very hard not to notice how he doesn't look like the other kids. Wonder is a simple, heartwarming story that follows Auggie and his friends and family through his first year at Beecher Prep School.

I defy anyone to read this book and not love Auggie. He is a bright spark, a good-natured and generally optimistic kid, although of course his situation gets him down at times. But with the support of a loving family, kind teacher and good friends, he gets through fifth grade and comes out the other side. Wonder is told from multiple viewpoints, a character-driven rather than action-filled novel that portrays the ups and downs of being ten - a ten-year-old with a particular and unusual set of difficulties, certainly, but one that can resonate with anyone who's been ten. I remember vividly the woes of still being a child when my classmates fancied themselves all-grown-up, just like Auggie and his friend Summer:

One of the things I'm not loving about this year is how a lot of the kids are acting like they're too grown-up to play things anymore. All they want to do is 'hang out' and 'talk' at recess.

After a lifetime of putting Auggie first, saying to herself, "hey, at least I don't have things as bad as him," his sister Via has her own worries. She, too is struggling with life at a new school, with friends who have drifted apart, a new boyfriend, and trying to find her own identity away from being "Auggie's sister."


Wonder is a superb book, and I would recommend it to anyone from about ten years old upwards. Although it shows that kids can be thoughtless, and adults can be ignorant - which is worse - it also reveals the best in human nature: kindness, family, friendship and loyalty. We can all learn a lot about acceptance and tolerance - not just from the characters around Auggie, but also in his attitudes to them. He is wise and forgiving, aware that people will double-take when they see him, no matter how kind they might be.

Like, it's okay, I know I'm weird looking, take a look, I don't bite. Hey, the truth is, if a Wookiee started going to school, I'd probably stare a bit! 

It was easy to love Auggie by reading about him on the page - but I was challenged to think about how I would treat him or think about him if I were to meet him in the street, or interact with him on a daily basis. Because, after all, Auggie is just a kid like anyone else. He may face challenges that others don't have to deal with, and that's not fair, but behind his face, he's just a ten-year-old boy with a Star Wars obsession.

To me, though, I'm just me. An ordinary kid.But hey, if they want to give me a medal for being me, that's okay. I'll take it. I didn't destroy a Death Star or anything like that, but I did just get through the fifth grade. And that's not easy, even if you're not me.

I was sent this book by Ellie from Musings of a Bookshop Girl. Thanks Ellie! :)

My Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece, Annabel Pitcher (audiobook)

Five years ago, Jamie’s sister Rose was killed in a terrorist attack in London. He doesn’t really remember Rose, because he was only five at the time, but his family has never recovered. His mum left just a few weeks ago after having an affair with Nigel from the support group. Jamie’s dad drinks all the time and hates all Muslims. Rose’s twin sister Jas – now fifteen – has dyed her hair pink and got her nose pierced, an act seen as a betrayal by their parents, because she doesn’t look like Rose any more. It’s like Jas and Jamie are less visible than the urn on the mantlepiece, less present than the hole where Rose ought to be, the gap around which their whole family revolves.

After Mum’s desertion, Dad, Jas and Jamie move to a small village in the Lake District to start a new life. At his new school, Jamie doesn’t fit in. His teacher always seems to ask the very questions he can’t answer, and is frustrated by his reticence and apparent stupidity. The other kids call him “freak,” with the exception of sparky, mischievous Sunya, who recognises in him a kindred spirit, a fellow super-hero. But Jamie dreads to think how his father would react to his friendship with a Muslim girl, when he blames all Muslims for Rose’s death.

Jamie is a bright, unusual child with a vivid imagination. His narration is full of bright similes and metaphors which fit perfectly:

“I was more nervous than the most nervous person I could think of, which right now is the lion from The Wizard of Oz. My tummy had something bigger and scarier than butterflies inside it. Maybe they were eagles or hawks or something. Or, come to think of it, they could have been those monkeys with wings that kidnap Dorothy and take her to the witch that's scared of water.”

Jamie doesn’t really remember his sister Rose. Every day he sees the effect of her death on his parents, but for him that’s normal. He doesn’t remember when life was any different. For the outside reader, it is clear that something is very, very wrong. I felt intense pity for Jamie’s parents – one could never get over the loss of a child – but they are unreasonable in the way they treat their surviving children, so wrapped up in their own pain that they resent Jas and Jamie for not being Rose, or for not letting their lives revolve around her absence. When Jamie had to write a school essay about a hero, and chose footballer Wayne Rooney, his mother made him rewrite it about Rose, dictating the memories he didn’t have. Then, at a birthday party, when Jamie asked for food, his dad filled a plate – to put on the mantlepiece beside Rose’s urn. Jamie is such an optimistic child, but his hope is painful to an older, wiser reader (or listener listener) because of the awareness of the crushing disappointment that is to come when his wishes don’t come true, or if they do, they aren’t what he had hoped. At times the story just seems to be disappointment after disappointment, and Jamie has to learn the difficult lesson that adults don’t always get it right, don’t have all the answers and do let you down. But they get there, slowly, until Jamie concludes:

If OFSTED inspected my family, then I know what grade we'd get: Satisfactory. OK, but not brilliant, but that's fine by me.

I downloaded the audio version of this book when I was struck by a bad migraine attack. I couldn’t sleep for the whole time but wasn’t up to reading, so I let David Tennant read this to me instead. Although he is a talented voice actor, seemingly able to imitate any accent he tries, in this case his reading is simple and understated, letting the story do the work, narrating with the right amount of innocent hope, eagerness and subdued sadness. I bought the audiobook from Audible.co.uk, but was quite disappointed that it came as one six-hour track, so I couldn’t burn it to CD to wake me up in the morning. In future I think I’ll stick to buying  audio books as CDs.

Anne of Windy Willows/Poplars, L. M. Montgomery

The fourth book in the Anne series is a bit of an oddity, sandwiched in between the Avonlea stories and the Blythe Family stories, covering the three years between Anne's graduation and her marriage to Gilbert Blythe. She takes a job as the principal of Sunnyside High School, but finds an obstacle in the form of the vast Pringle family and friends-and-relations. It seems that the clannish Pringles resent Anne for taking the position of principal, which the Pringles had expected to be offered to one of their own.

Like the "Patty's Place" scenes of Anne of the Island, a lot of the pleasure comes from the cosy domesticity of Anne's everyday life. In Sunnyside, she boards with two elderly widows, the austere "Aunt" Kate and timid, over-sensitive "Aunt" Chatty (Charlotte.) The workings of the household are seemingly dictated by housekeeper Rebecca Dew - a veritable Mary Quite Contrary, who is allowed to believe she is in charge by the widows, Anne and possibly even Dusty Miller, the cat, who manage Rebecca Dew by suggesting the opposite to their desired end result. Anne has an adorable little bedroom with a tower and a memorable blue cushion with an uncanny resemblance to a doughnut. Windy Willows (or Poplars, if you prefer) is as homey a house as you can hope to find.

In my opinion, Anne of Windy Willows is one of the weaker books in the series. It was written after some of the chronologically later books, and I think it shows that the author's enthusiasm was waning at the time. It suffers a little for being set in a place and with people we don't have much chance to get to know. Not too much can happen in Windy Willows because it might impact the plot of the later-set but earlier-written Anne's House of Dreams. As such, there is a lot of padding, a lot of "hello-goodbye" characters who have never been mentioned before their moment in the limelight, are never heard from again, and have little to no relevance to the main plot. I've said before that I love the Anne series for its episodic nature, but the hello-goodbye characters don't get enough development for me to care very much. Mainly they are either pessimistic, cantankerous old women who look for the worst possible outcome in every event, from weddings to weeding, or they have endless gossip of friends-and-relations we've never heard of, or they are half of a young couple waiting for Anne to help - sometimes with some hindrance along the way - to find their way to the altar. After a few such incidents, they all start to blur together.

But Anne is still the same imaginative, big-hearted girl, a little older, perhaps a little wiser. Her greatest strength is her empathy with lonely people. In Windy Willows, Anne reaches out to hostile, dowdy teacher Katherine Brooke, and to little Elizabeth Grayson, a small girl living next door to Windy Willows (or Poplars) who lives waiting for "Tomorrow" when her father will come back and take her to live with him. Anne knows what it is to be unwanted - until her adoption by Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert she lived a very unhappy existance, seen as a burden by those who viewed it as their duty to bring her up. Instead of letting herself be embittered by the hardships, Anne's imagination helped her to rise above them, even as a child, but as an adult, those early experiences lend her the kind of compassion that imagination alone can't supply.

Cookie, Jacqueline Wilson

After J.K. Rowling, Jacqueline Wilson must be the second most famous British writer of children's books. Formerly (if not still) the Children's Laureate, Wilson takes up plenty of shelf space in all UK bookshops, bringing out about two books per year. Most of her books are targetted at around 8-to 10-year-olds, although she has several for younger children and a few teenage books. Wilson often writes about difficult topics that nonetheless may be reality for her readership, such as broken families, mental illness and poverty.

I must have first read something by Jacqueline Wilson at the age of nine or so, Double Act (which depicts a set of inseparable twins growing into two individuals) or Tracy Beaker (Wilson's best-known character, a lively, untameable girl in foster care, waiting for the day her mother comes back for her.) Looking at her books as a whole, I find the "gritty realism" a little overpowering with its steady stream of abusive or neglectful parents, school bullies, lost tempers and loneliness, so that I wouldn't want to read her books one after another. But there is a simple sweetness in Wilson's storytelling, an empathy with her narrator - usually a preteen girl and often a social outcast. Wilson was clearly a student of the Enid Blyton school of world-building, with plenty of description, especially of clothes and food. I sometimes skim over these passages now, but it's the sort of thing that I couldn't get enough of when I was in her target readership.

Cookie is the story of the unfortunately-named Beauty Cookson, who is plain, dumpy and shy. A loner at school, and having to tread carefully at home, lest she provoke her dad's temper, Beauty finds refuge in her books, her drawing and with her pretend-friend Sam, in reality the presenter of a pre-school TV show, but with whom she imagines interaction and the sympathy she doesn't get from her father. Beauty's mum tries to shield her daughter from her husband's rages, but after Dad's moods ruin Beauty's birthday party, Mum decides enough is enough. She takes Beauty away to start a new life, though where, Mum does not know.

When we first met Beauty's Dad, I thought he could go one of two ways. He had the potential to develop into a 3-dimensional character, being a man who's made a small fortune, built a perfect world around himself and determined to keep it that way no matter the cost. Unfortunately, I ultimately found him too much of an exaggeration, with very flimsy excuses to fly into a temper, when it suited the plot if not a character. I couldn't believe in him as a person, because he was too much of a monster, defined only by his rages and cruel words. Mum, on the other hand, is very true to life, a rather young and timid wife and mother who married straight out of high school, and who has never had the chance to become her own person. She is torn between fear of her husband - who despite everything, she still loves - and the need to protect her daughter - and herself.

The school scenes took me right back to my primary school days, and in places it was painful to read about. Like Beauty, I was clever, but socially awkward, with a vivid imagination but far behind my classmates in terms of popular culture, TV and fashion. Shy Beauty could so easily have been me. If her descriptions of family life can be a little over-the-top at times, Wilson's recreation of the primary school playground politics took me about seventeen years into my own past.

Artichoke Hearts, Sita Brahmachari

Mira Levenson has just turned twelve and her world is becoming a strange and unrecogniseable place. Her Nana Josie, always so artistic, passionate and full of life, is dying; she can't stop thinking about Jidé Jackson, whose confident, joky manner hides a tragic history and a sensitive soul. Mira is changing. Sometimes she catches her mouth saying what she didn't intend to say, speaking out when she's always been so shy, or alternatively keeping secrets to herself. Nothing particularly drastic, she just doesn't feel like sharing everything with everybody.

There are a lot of books for teenagers that deal with the aftermath of the death of a loved one. Artichoke Hearts actually seemed to be targetted at the younger end of the Young Adult range (11+) but is unusual in exploring a terminal illness, and the feelings of helplessness of those who can only watch as a relative approaches death, and Brahmachari writes this with simplicity but a great deal of maturity. Nana Josie is early on established as a vivacious, artistic woman, a former hippy and passionate protester. Early on, there is a moment of dark, uncomfortable humour, as she embarks on her big artistic project: to paint her own coffin. It is heartbreaking to watch such a lively person fade.

The artichoke of the title refer to a charm given to Mira by Nana Josie, a symbol of the human heart, and how with age and experience, a heart which may seem to break grows tough layers to protect it, like the layers of an artichoke. The novel is a sweet, beautiful coming-of-age story, showing a child starting to learn who she is. Mira is a quiet girl, artistic and thoughtful, but through the sadness of seeing her grandmother die, the strangeness of early adolescence and the sweetness of a first romance, she grows in confidence and self-awareness. The characters are all very-well rounded individuals, and I think that Jidé Jackson is one of the loveliest boyfriends I've encountered in a kids' or teen book for a long time - and he's only twelve.

Read for the Support Your Local
Library Challenge 2011

One way that Mira grows in her understanding is in her extracurricular creative writing class, which is led by writer Miss Pat Print, and consists of herself, her best friend Millie, Jidé and his friend Ben Gbemi.  In the classes, Miss Print (an unfortunate name for a writer!) helps the children to understand themselves and their world through writing. The novel is written as being Mira's diary, in the present tense which itself is highlighted early on as helping reader and writer feel the immediacy of the narrative. On occasion, after a short writing exercise, the children start to feel empathy for others in a way that they hadn't before. I found these writing sessions fascinating, and they summed up what is, to me, why literature is so important: Fiction (or poetry, theatre, film, TV) helps to make sense of the world and cultivates understanding of other people.

Artichoke Hearts is a pensive, sometimes sad read, but ultimately it left me feeling uplifted, a celebration of life, youth, a loving family and good friends. I would recommend it for Judy Blume fans and older readers of Jacqueline Wilson, who are maybe looking for something a bit more grown-up. So far, Artichoke Hearts has quietly slipped onto the bookshop shelves with little fanfare, but it deserves to be widely read and talked about.

Play/Film: The History Boys

I first encountered Alan Bennett's The History Boys in its playscript format as one of my set texts at university. It was brand new at the time, being performed at the National Theatre, although I was never fortunate enough to see it. It was soon afterwards adapted into a film, starring the original cast. I found it interesting to compare the screen production with the version that played out in my head. Usually I am disappointed with how someone else visualises a story that I’ve imagined vividly for myself, however, The History Boys was a notable exception. An excellent cast, both of the schoolboys and staff, breathe life into the characters and make the story more complex than it was on paper. Of course, The History Boys, as I was always told when studying Shakespeare, was not written to be read and studied, but performed.

The play follows a group of grammar school students who, after receiving their A-Levels, return to school for a final term for extra lessons to prepare them for Oxbridge entrance exams. Their most influential staff are old-fashioned teacher Hector who values knowledge for the sake of knowledge, whose General Studies lessons are informative but often irrelevant (such as a wonderful scene, conducted entirely in French, when the boys enact a scene in a brothel, only to change rapidly when the headmaster walks in.) Also we are introduced to new teacher Irwin, whose job is to prepare them for the exams and show them how to turn out original, controversial, unexpected answers, a new interpretation on history.

The eight boys are each well-rounded characters, but the chief boys are sad-eyed Posner whose inner turmoil and crush on the cocky star of the class, Dakin. Though a more minor character, special mention has to go to Rudge, the (comparative) thicky of the class who is more interested in sport than academic achievement and who is only trying out for Oxbridge because it is expected of him. Rudge is played wonderfully by Russell Tovey, otherwise known as George the werewolf in Being Human, and who is currently, and deservedly, popping up on pretty much any TV show you care to mention.

The History Boys is a witty, fun play/film that nonetheless has a rather uncomfortable undercurrent, in particular in the feelings it evokes towards Hector. On the one hand, he is a teacher of the old school (if you’ll excuse the pun) with a passion for learning whose methods are being discounted in favour of league tables and impressing examiners with what they want to hear and never mind the truth. On the other hand, out of school, he crosses a definite line with his pupils in a way that makes it difficult to reconcile condemnation with sympathy, though the boys themselves treat it all as rather a joke. Despite the darker subplots, I found The History Boys to be, overall, a feel-good film about education, aspiration and growing up.

…Until right at the end, where the mood takes a jarring turn. Twice. In the stage play, there are “framing” scenes that seem out of place at the time, but set up the ending. The film does not have any of these scenes, which I was glad about because I didn’t feel when reading the play that they added anything. Yet their absence makes for a more shocking ending. Firstly, there is a shock twist to the story proper, and secondly, there is a sort of epilogue which is at the best bittersweet and at the worst depressing. I didn’t find this made the film any the worse, but if I had not read the play I would not have liked it. Certainly the makes you think and wonder why Bennett chose to end it this way. I haven’t yet come up with an answer to that question.

Just As Long as We're Together, Judy Blume

For my twelfth birthday present, my Nanna went into her local bookshop and asked the assistant what she would recommend for me, and was directed towards the Judy Blume section. ("They're all suitable, except one," she was told.) She picked out Just as Long as We're Together, and I was introduced to the world of teenage fiction. My mum read it first though, just in case. It was probably Nanna's suggestion - she didn't want me reading something my parents wouldn't approve of, but it passed the test. I asked her what she thought, to which I remember her saying, "It's very American." I wasn't quite sure what she meant by that, and I'm still not, other than the fact that it's the setting. I think it may have been that American children's books dealt with slightly more grown-up topics than the British books I was reading - but that was probably more to do with the era of writing than anything else, as at twelve I still read the Chalet School books - though I had outgrown Enid Blyton.

I loved Just as Long as We're Together. The characters, Stephanie, Rachel and Alison were a year older than I was. Their experiences of turning thirteen in suburban America, probably in the late '70s (I'm not certain as my book has lost its cover and copyright page) seemed like a completely different world from the one I inhabited at the time.

If you asked me what it was like to be a child growing up in the 1990s, I don't think I could tell you. I did not live in the world of the time, really, until about 1997 or 1998 - about the time when I read this book. I lived in the world of the books - the 1940s, with the Famous Five, the 1920s with Jo Bettany the second half of the 19th century with Laura Ingalls, Anne Shirley, Katy Carr... but the world of the day did not interest me at all. As previously stated, Judy Blume's books were still a bit dated even when I encountered them - but they were more modern than the world I knew. There was television, shopping malls, denim - and sex, divorce, and adolescence, things that were hitherto unmentioned in my reading. Chalet School old girls got married to their doctors, and some time later they started knitting bootees and vests and warning people they were going to be busy soon.

Stephanie's world became very vivid for me. For a while I was sure there was a prequel - that perhaps Here's to You, Rachel Robinson, which I had already read, came before, rather than after this book. There were enough descriptions about Stephanie and Rachel's lives before the book opens, and the characters seemed well-enough established that I found it hard to believe that this was the first time we had met them. However, when I read Here's to You, Rachel Robinson, I was very disappointed. I wanted to know what happened to Stephanie, whose point of view ...Together took, and didn't care so much for Rachel and her family. I liked them as secondary characters, but didn't get to know them as intimately as the Hirsch family, who barely appeared in the sequel. I had got to know Rachel as Stephanie's too-perfect best friend, and found her slightly annoying seen from Stephanie's point of view, and therefore found her difficult to care for as a protagonist. This probably says more about who I was at the times of reading the two books than being a comment on the writing, or even the characterisation. ...Together was my companion through the storms of adolescence. I met this book just before I started to experience things like boys, being able to go shopping on my own, arguing with my best friend for the first time, and generally being a bratty teenager. When my sister bought ...Rachel Robinson a few years later, I saw her as a bratty teenager, but I no longer was (at least, not quite so bratty!) so I could no longer really relate to her struggles.

By the way, my paperback copy of this book has lost its cover, a cover I was particularly fond of, and I can't find a picture of it anywhere online. It's a Macmillan paperback, illustrated by Richard Jones, a blue back cover, and on the front it has Stephanie in the foreground wearing dungarees, and Rachel and Alison in the background. I think Steph was standing in front of a house, but I couldn't swear to that. On the very slim chance that one of you readers have the same edition, would you be able to send me a picture, please?