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A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness

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Later this year a movie will be released of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls.

I’m keen to see the movie, but reluctant at the same time.

Anybody who loves a book will know the feeling; excitement at seeing a great story brought to life, but anxious at the thought it could be ruined.

The trailer looks hopeful.

The story centres on Conor, who lives with his mother who has cancer. Her illness has made Conor feel isolated and alone, and he has been plagued with a recurring nightmare of darkness and screaming.

One night after midnight a voice calls to him outside his window. It’s the huge willow tree from the graveyard of the church he can see from his room, terrifying and stern, who insists it will come back and tell him three stories, and then Conor must tell his story to the tree. The yew does as it promises, each time returning after midnight. 

The consequences of the yew’s visits to Conor
grow more and more severe.

Ultimately, it leads him to confront his deepest fears.

9781406311525A Monster Calls has a sad history. In an Author’s Note at the beginning of the book, Ness explains that the premise of the book was conceived by author Siobhan Dowd, along with the characters and the beginning. It would have been her fifth book. “What she didn’t have,” he says, “unfortunately, was time.” What he doesn’t mention in his note is that she had cancer.

However, he was asked to turn her beginning into a book. He felt like he’d “been handed a baton, like a particularly fine writer has handed me her story and said,

‘Go. Run with it. Make trouble.’

“So that’s what I tried to do.”

He had only a single guideline: “to write a book I think Siobhan would have liked. No other criteria could really matter.”

He certainly wrote a book a many people like. Ness and the illustrator Jim Kay won the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals for writing and illustration, as well the British Children’s Book of the Year and a swag of other awards. I’d include it on any list of the best books for pre-teens/teenagers, and would recommend it to most adults. It’s a deceptively simple story, with a huge depth of psychological and emotional sophistication.

Film is a very different media to print, but I hope the underlying complexity, the confusion, grief, fear, love and alienation that Conor deals with manages to be portrayed in the film.

The monster paused again.
You really aren’t afraid, are you?
“No,” Conor said. “Not of you, anyway.”
The monster narrowed its eyes.
You will be, it said. Before the end.

Details
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Candlewick Press/Walker Books
ISBN 1406311529
Pub: May 2011

Links
Patrick Ness’s website
Second trailer for the A Monster Calls movie

Two Wolves – which will you feed?

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Released as “On the Run” in the US

Ben Silver is home with his little sister one afternoon when the cops show up looking for his parents. After they leave, his mum and 19392551dad arrive and bundle them in the car, supposedly taking them on a spontaneous ‘holiday’.  Ben finds it hard to believe the two things aren’t linked.

So begins a tale of tension, suspicion and fear. Why did they leave so fast, without clothes or food? Why do his parents take Ben and his sister, Olive, to a filthy cabin in the middle of nowhere?

What’s in the bag his father
tries to hide?

Two Wolves is a novel at the lower end of the YA bracket that tackles some difficult questions. Parents are supposed to look after you, but what if other things are more important to them? What if they neglect you, or worse? What if they betray you? What if you come from a family who do things that are wrong? Does that mean you’ll be just like them?

Tristan Bancks handles these and other questions with skill. While his other books have lighter subjects and tones, Two Wolves captures the confusion, loneliness and longing of Ben as he tries to make sense of what’s happening to him and his family.

The title is taken from a story in the pages of Ben’s grandfather’s almost-empty journal, which is printed as a brief preface before the first chapter. In this version of the old story, a man tells his grandson that inside all of us a battle rages between two wolves.

“One wolf is bad – pride, envy, jealousy, greed, guilt, self-pity.
The other wolf is good – kindness, hope, love, service, truth, humility.”

23310747When the child asks who will win, the grandfather answers, “The one you feed”.

The conclusion to the novel isn’t a tidy, neat, Disney happily-ever-after, but it’s a satisfying resolution that stays true to the characters and story, while still allowing the reader to ask themselves, “What would I do?”

Highly recommended, for readers from late primary school up.

 

 

Details
Two Wolves by Tristan Bancks (On the Run in US)
Random House Australia
ISBN: 9780857982032
Published: March 2014

Links
Tristan Bancks website: http://www.tristanbancks.com

AUSSIE-AUTHOR-2016 Aussie Author Challenge 2016

Kitchen Encyclopedia: #Cherished

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Cookb2bI have many warm memories of my mum, but the most persistent ones from childhood revolve around the kitchen. We could always ‘have a go’ at baking a cake or making toffee, as long as we cleaned up our mess afterwards, though I can’t say I was always conscientious about the clean-up part. If we didn’t know how to make something, we were steered to the stained orange-red Kitchen Encyclopedia on the kitchen shelf.

Its origins are lost in family history. There’s a vague memory of my mother telling me a lady gave it to her when the family lived in Orange (rural NSW), before I was born, but that could be my own confabulation. There’s an inscription inside the cover to someone that might be a mis-spelling of my mother’s name, from someone I can’t read, but the year is clear; 1959. The book has no date of publication, though it’s published by a London publisher and printed in Czechoslovakia. Interesting, then, the spelling of Encyclopedia.

Cookbk4bBut why is it important to me? It means Home. It means Saturdays making cakes, checking anxiously to see if they were done, being careful not to burn myself as I took it from the oven. It means turning cakes out on the cooling rack, making cups of tea, and slicing up the cakes while they were still warm. It means sitting in the tiny dining room, looking out into the back yard and savouring warm cake, our dog begging for crumbs and Mum saying how good it was.

It also means constancy. The Kitchen Encyclopedia was a fixture in my house, surviving changes in furniture, wall colour, floor coverings, and china. Before Google, before personal computers (oh yes, I go that far back), it provided the answers to any questions I had in the kitchen. How do you make toffee? How many teaspoons to a tablespoon? How long does a lamb roast of a particular size take to cook? Cookbk7bWhen we won a seafood platter in a raffle, it even came through with how to cook a lobster thermidor.

And then there were the times I’d sit with it in my lap and browse. The first half is a dictionary of cooking terms and methods. I could learn what a woodcock was, or how one could ‘coddle’, or that if I was ever offered a ‘menus droits’ I would prefer to decline (pig’s ears cooked and served as an entrée). The second half consists ofCookbk9b recipes, but they’re packed in tightly, three or more to a page, with everything from boiled eggs to chocolate soufflé and jellied eels. When I was a young teenager many of the recipes were hilarious. Many more are now old-fashioned, even exotic.

What makes my copy special, though, are not the recipes but the tangible link with my mother, who we lost nine years ago. Early in my marriage we were visiting and somehow she ended up handing me the Kitchen Encyclopedia.

Cookbk8bjpgI don’t use it anymore,” she said. “You always liked it.”

It helped me through many tight spots. I rarely use it for recipes anymore, but it will always be cherished.

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Pieces of Sky, by Trinity Doyle

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What happens when your life revolves around water, then you can’t bear to get back in the pool?

23603939Lucy had life under control. A champion backstroke swimmer, she was always either training or at school. When her older brother, Cam, drowned while he was away with his mates, her world collapsed. Now her mum has zoned out, her dad ignores her, and her well-meaning aunt is running the family.

On the first day of Year 10 it’s also her first day back to swim training. But as she prepares to dive in, she’s gripped by panic. She can’t do it. The water killed Cam. It feels like it’s killing her.

Pieces of Sky is the story of Lucy trying to make life work again. More than that, it’s also about the people left behind when a young person dies suddenly; the family, the friends, and the community, in this case a coastal town.

Narrated by Lucy, the story begins eight weeks after Cam’s death, when the initial shock has worn off and those closest to him are trying to take up normal life again, when the real effects begin to reveal themselves. Feeling distant and ignored by her parents, her relationships with her friends take centre stage, including the new boy at school, Evan.

Doyle brings in the layers of Lucy’s relationships step by step, including Cam’s friends and former girlfriend, weaving them together in a web of social ties that feels organic. The relationship between Lucy and Cam is portrayed as somewhat hero-worship, making it even more difficult for her to adjust to his loss.

The ambivalence Lucy now feels towards water – and so perhaps to Cam and his senseless drowning – is difficult to miss. The opening paragraphs of the novel set the scene beautifully:

Mum painted my brother’s coffin.
It was beautiful, if such a thing can be – the waves of the ocean, gradients of green to blue mixed with the white of sea foam. Despite the grim irony that the ocean which smothered his lungs should cover him in death, it suited him.
Cam was made with more water than most.

Gradually Lucy discovers there was more to Cam than she knew, and maybe even more to what happened on the night he drowned than anybody was saying.

Pieces of Sky is not just about loss and grief, though. It’s about Lucy rediscovering life. Her time has been so regimented – train, study, train – that now she’s unable to go into the water, she has to learn how to live outside of a strict timetable. She’s let friendships and other interests slide. Without her brother, who introduced her to new things, and swimming, that let her go through her days without having to make decisions, she has to forge a new path on her own.

With a premise that sounds somber, Pieces of Sky has plenty of lighter of moments. It’s well written, and I wanted to hurry up and get back to it when I had to do something else. That’s always a marker of a great book.

Details
Pieces of Sky by Trinity Doyle
Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781760112486
Published:  June 2015

Links: Trinity Doyle’s webpage

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