15 Day Blogging Challenge: Day Five

Apologies for the delayed update. Unfortunately my laptop is being repaired at present, so I'm having to borrow the computers of friendsandrelations for valuable internetting. I miss my computer.

Day 5: Recommend a tear-jerker.

First of all I was going to go with The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, being the most recent book to require tissues, but that's perhaps too obvious, and no doubt you have all read it already. So instead I will go with the book that caused me to, literally, sit up all night reading through tears: Rilla of Ingleside by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

The final book in the Anne of Green Gables series is quite a departure from the rest of the books, and devastating for many reasons. By this time, Anne Shirley has been happily married to Gilbert Blythe for over twenty years, and has six grown-up or teenage children. But it is 1914, and the world is about to change forever with the outbreak of the First World War.

As you might guess from the title, Anne Shirley is not the focus of this novel. She is always there, but in the background, while the novel concentrates on her children, especially fifteen-year-old Rilla, and nineteen-year-old Walter.

Rilla is a very bittersweet read, especially if you think back to the beginning of Anne's tale as the ever-optimistic, imaginative redhead in a timeless village community. The war brings Anne and the Blythe family into the real world, and reality hits hard. How can Anne's story end with such heartbreak and devastation? But Rilla is an outstanding piece of writing, a contemporary study of World War 1 from the point of view of those left behind, the families who had to watch from afar, to carry on with life and hope that their loved ones would return. It also works as a stand-alone novel. It helps to have read the previous books in the series, but it is not essential.

Mini-review: The Fault In Our Stars, John Green

 Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never beenanything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten. (cover blurb) 

The Fault in Our Stars is one of those intensely human books that make you laugh even while your eyes are full of tears and you can't read any further. Hazel and Augustus are clever, witty teenagers, quirky thinkers that you can't help loving immediately. Their relationship is fun and natural, and made me really believe in love again. By 200 pages in, I just couldn''t imagine the world without them. But this book is about both life and death, with two teenage cancer sufferers falling in love even while facing their own mortality, and it's not fair.

How can any single book be so funny, so uplifting and so heartbreaking all at once? I guess that's what life is. With a few, well-chosen words in the right order, John Green makes poetry of simple prose and helps to bring understanding of the incomprehensible almost within reach. Green is without doubt one of the cleverest writers for teens out there. He knows.

Special kudos to Green for his correct identification, use and strategic abuse of the word "literally," and for his understanding of what star-crossed lovers really are.

Tv: Single Father

There are a lot of small-series BBC dramas that come and go with very little fanfare. Usually I think to myself, "Ooh, that sounds good," and forget all about it when it comes along. Single Father would no doubt be one of these, but is helped along by the casting of David Tennant as the titular dad. Dave Tiler finds himself solely responsible for four children when his wife* Rita (Laura Fraser) is killed suddenly in a bike accident. Struggling to cope with his own grief and that of his children, he finds support in Rita's best friend Sarah (Suranne Jones) which starts to turn to something more...

I was a bit tickled when I identified Rita, one of those actresses who once you've identified from two places, pops up everywhere. Laura Fraser was Door in Neverwhere, Kate in A Knight's Tale and Henriette in the BBC's Casanova. (So Casanova and Henriette were reunited at last. And... cruelly separated once more!)

I would probably not have watched this programme if I had realised that Sarah was already in a relationship - adultery stories usually ruin a book/film/tv show for me, and in this case I really didn't feel it was necessary. There were enough conflicts and complications to Dave and Sarah's relationship as it was - Dave had only just been widowed, it was too soon, there were the kids to think of and an ex-wife and another daughter hanging around. That being said, the story and characters draw you in and really make you care, events ripping up your insides until you think you can't bear to watch any more. The cast is superb, acting so well that you forget they are acting at all. Dave's breakdown at the end of the first episode is devastating and I forgot this was an actor, forgot this was the tenth Doctor Who and just broke my heart seeing a man so overwhelmed by his loss and fear for the future. In later episodes I found myself actually shouting at the screen when I foresaw disaster or realised something the characters overlooked.

The kids are excellent, from stroppy teenager Lucy to little cutie Evie, who I just wanted to adopt. They add some humorous relief to the drama, but also have some serious storylines of their own as they come to terms with the loss of their mother in different ways. Lucy is not Dave's biological daughter, and despite his best efforts, feels all alone in the world after her mother's  death. Watching the programme after reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, I realised that the girl playing Lucy is just how I imagined Katniss (but Scottish.)

Shown on Sunday nights, I watched the first episode before going to bed, but I think it is better to watch on bbc iplayer (or videoed) than live, as it is not light viewing. I found it quite stressful just to watch it as the story sucked me right in to empathise with Dave. Sleep does not come easily after this.




*It later emerges that Dave and Rita weren't actually legally married but we're led to believe they are until halfway through. I gather that he considered her his wife, but she was a free spirit type who didn't want to be tied down in that way. The writers seem to have changed their minds about this part-way through the story, as I'm pretty sure Rita is called Mrs Tiler at the beginning of episode one, and Miss Morris later on.

Boys Don't Cry, Malorie Blackman

It must be fourteen or fifteen years ago I first read a Malorie Blackman book. Operation Gadgetman was the first, and Hacker and Thief. One contained all sorts of computing references (almost certainly Hacker) and "modems," which I had no idea what they were. This was a few years before the Internet could be routinely found in homes; our computer was the old Atari with a dot-matrix printer. We didn't even have the Internet in school.

A few years later, when I had moved into the young adult age group, I discovered Noughts and Crosses, a dystopia which was heartbreaking and brilliant, probably the first book I read which ends in a particular way for a main character - to say more would be spoilers galore. Noughts and Crosses found its way onto the shortlist for my A-Level English coursework for comparison with Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I didn't think teen fiction, no matter how good it was, would be considered by teachers. (I now suspect I might have been wrong.)

After three sequels in the world of Noughts and Crosses, Blackman returns to the recogniseable world to tell a powerful story about teenage single parenthood, and is unique in taking the viewpoint of a seventeen-year-old father whose ex-girlfriend shows up with a baby, informs him he is the father, pops out to the shops - and runs. I've read quite a few books about teenage single mums: Mary Hooper's Megan books and Dyan Sheldon's And Baby Makes Two are the ones that stick in my mind from my teen years. Blackman wrote Boys Don't Cry realising that the issue has been covered entirely one-sidedly, and that teenage fathers are just expected to do a runner. Blackman shows another side to the story. When Dante gets up one morning, he's expecting his A-Level results and an acceptance into university. Instead he finds himself the father of little Emma, and in just a few moments he has to rethink his entire life plan.

Boys Don't Cry is also about what it means to be a man, and we see this through Dante, his younger brother Adam and his father. Dante's mother died several years before and the family don't like to talk about their feelings. Adam is openly gay, but that is Not Something They Talk About. Dante feels enormous frustration that no matter what he does, it never seems to be enough for his father to show pride or love. Something terrible has to happen before the three will open up to each other.

In previous works by Blackman, there are a mixture of male and female narrators, and it is interesting to see a female writing from an exclusively male perspective: mostly Dante but with some chapters from Adam's point of view. She captures the boys' voices well, and reading Dante's story I found myself transported back to high school - he could quite easily have been one of my classmates. Adam is a slightly arrogant, obnoxious yet likeable younger brother, and the dynamics between them were of an entirely believable sibling relationship. In the later scenes, when the family start talking to each other about what's on their hearts, I did find myself wondering whether this was really how a family of men would interact or if it was a female writer shaping the world to how she thinks it ought to be.

Boys Don't Cry did not take me very long to read, but I know it will take a long time to forget. There seems to be quite a high teenage pregnancy rate on the Isle of Wight, where I live, and Blackman challenged my thoughts and prejudices about teen parents, and evoked sympathy and compassion. Boys might not cry, but this girl certainly did.

Life on the Refrigerator Door, Alice Kuipers

As its title suggests, Life on the Refrigerator Door is a novel written entirely in post-it notes between a mother and her daughter. It begins very ordinarily, quick scribbled messages, beginning with a shopping list. Because most pages contain only a few lines, it is a book that is very quick to read, and indeed I had flicked through a good chunk of it it Borders three or four years ago. Knowing what was coming meant that the earliest, smallest little bickerings felt desperately sad, as both fifteen-year-old Claire and her mom feel the frustration of living in the same house and yet hardly seeing each other due to their different schedules. Claire comes across as a little bratty at first, and yet you can sympathise with both sides of the story: the single mother with a busy job as a doctor, and her daughter who feels a little neglected when Mom cancels their plans together.

When Mom leaves notes asking, casually but repeatedly, that they have a talk, you know something bad is coming, and eventually she writes down what she'd rather say in person:

"...I've got a doctor's appointment today. I've been trying to tell you. It's nothing to worry about, but I would feel strange if you didn't know. I found a lump in my right breast..."

Writing a novel entirely in fridge notes reads simply, but it must have been incredibly difficult to tell the whole story this way without it seeming contrived. There are a couple of places when I found myself thinking of Claire's response to her mom's message.

"I can't believe you'd leave me a note telling me something like this!"

Later on, though, any doubts about this choice of format are relieved when Claire admits that,

"It seems easier sometimes to ask you stuff on paper."

Besides, much of the tension in Life on the Refrigerator Door comes not from what is written down but what is not said: the irritable note followed by several pages of single line messages while in life away from the fridge Claire and her mom continue in uncomfortable silence, foreboding a disaster to start the messages up again.

Life on the Refrigerator Door is another quick read that nonetheless stays with the reader, using a minimum of words to tell a powerful message about the value of spending time with loved ones. Be warned: with all its cleverly crafted simplicity, it is a strong tearjerker.