WRECKED by Louisa Reid......reviewed by Adèle Geras

Two years ago, Louisa Reid wrote a terrific book called Gloves Off. This was published by Guppy Books. Guppy is the brainchild of Bella Pearson, who is one of the most intelligent and delightful of editors. Full disclosure:Bella used to work at David Fickling Books and was hugely helpful t0 me in the editing of my novel Dido. I also know Louisa Reid, who invited me to talk to her pupils when I first moved to Cambridge. As ever, you will have to believe me when I say that I have the luxury of never having to write a review of a book I don't love. Indeed, I give up books I'm not keen on very speedily indeed. 

I had no such problems with this book. It’s written in a form Reid first used in Gloves Off, a free- form poetry that works well to speed up action and uses rhyme, rhythm, and all the prosodic resources of more traditional verse to raise the emotional temperature and produce a narrative of great power and deep feeling.

Joe, who’s just done his A-Levels, has been involved in a car accident in which a woman in another car died. We see the trial unfold and the court room drama is interrupted by flashbacks to the relationship between Joe and Imogen, who first fell in love when they were fourteen years old.  Joe’s father is dying. Imogen’s family is wealthy. I’m giving away no spoilers but the really admirable thing about ‘Wrecked’ is the nuanced picture it paints of young love. It’s also good on families, school, and the justice system. If I were a teacher I’d give it to all reluctant readers who will rejoice at the sight of very few words on the page. It's also for anyone who loves a  good love story. Fans of courtroom drama will be enthralled. 

I usually quote a passage from a book I’m reviewing but I don't trust myself to reproduce the typography so here’s a photograph of one of the pages: 

It's shelved under YA I'm sure but I loved it and I have grandchildren of Joe and Imogen's age  And yes, I confess....there were tears along the way. 

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Mrs Noah's Garden by Jackie Morris illustrated by James Mayhew Reviewed by Adèle Geras

There has been much talk of gardens in the last couple of months. Lockdown has made everyone  aware of their importance. Those who are fortunate enough to have one thank their lucky stars and wonder how those with no garden are managing. To be without one seems a terrible deprivation. Delightfully,  just at the right time, this book appears and what it does is give everyone who reads it a small space where they get to enjoy the pleasures of growing things in a format that they can carry around in their hands and return to again and again. 

This book sees the return of the Morris/Mayhew team which brought us the wonderful Mrs Noah's Pockets.  The worry with sequels to beloved books is that they're not going to be as good as the first book. There are no such worries here, of course. Mrs  Noah's Garden is joyous and colourful and inspired  and we can enjoy the two books equally.

This story is an account  of how Noah and Mrs Noah and their children find an initially unpromising  spot to in which to settle. But undeterred, they clear the space, build and put together a dwelling place, and above all, plant a garden. Mrs Noah of course is the one who goes out at night when all are sleeping and plants it. And it grows and provides bounty and beauty and becomes a  perfectly glorious garden, 

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Nostalgia during the Pandemic......Adèle Geras

1. 
   

Everyone has been saying it in every single medium. In the newspapers, on television, on the radio (to which I listen all day long and always have) and on the social media. Above all on there....Twitter is awash with people saying it, and I've said it before myself. These are strange times. The Pandemic, Covid-19, Corona, whatever you're calling it, has changed life for every single one of us in extraordinary ways we had never imagined.  

One of the things that's changed is: for once, I haven't had any recent children's books to review. No one has sent me any. In normal times, I might have requested one from a friendly publisher but frankly, this time, I haven't got the mental space to take on new stuff. My head is full of a) the news b) thoughts about my family and friends c) thoughts about my next novel, which I hope to have done some fairly solid work on by the time I come out of self-isolation. 

But I wouldn't want to leave a blank space where a review should be, so I went to the little box where I keep the best and most beloved books that I used to read to my daughters. I chose three.

The first is called A Peaceable Kingdom and it's by Alice and Martin Provensen. It is long out of print and it's an Abecedarius which combines mythical and real animals. It's a Shaker alphabet, so the austerity and wonderfully understated colours of the Shaker aesthetic run through the book, which is completely enchanting. 

I've chosen the N page because it shows the lovely row of houses in the background and the birds combined with Cuttlefish and Spider make a really unusual combination. This yoking together  of the animals and birds and insects is striking. The A page reads: Alligator, Beetle, Porcupine, Whale..... don't ask why. Just because and because they make a wonderful spread.

Anyone with brilliant eyesight might be able to make out other strange combinations below. I apologise for the quality of all these photographs!

The date in the front of the book is 1974. My daughter Sophie was 3 at the time and it's a Christmas present for her. She loved it and I loved reading it to her.

The date in the front of this book is 1978. Jenny, to whom this book was given, was only one year old when we bought it, but the heroine is called Jenny, I had to have it. I guess it was a couple of years before we actually read it to her but Sophie liked it too...when Jenny was born, Sophie was very nearly 6, going on 45. Maurice Sendak is the towering genius of children's book illustration in my opinion and this very small format book has a dolls' house in it, where the inhabitants come to life and invite Jenny in...how could anyone resist?

Finally, there's the best book I know for teaching small children to read. Arnold Lobel's Mouse Tales. He is better known for the Frog and Toad series which  is still in print and still a great favourite. But to me, Mouse Tales is his masterpiece. I wish I had a fiver for every time I read this aloud. The story below tells of a mouse who goes to visit his granny. It's a very long way to her house and in the course of the journey, he changes his footwear several times. In the end, he comes across someone who's selling feet. He buys a new pair and when he gets to his granny's house, she admires his new feet. 

"What fine new feet you have!" she says and that always made us roar with laughter. 

Reading these books again, at a time when their first owners are having Skype suppers with me very often, and living with their children in close proximity, made me feel very nostalgic  for a time when these women were very young.  I'm looking forward to seeing them again in the flesh in due course.....meanwhile, these lovely books make me feel happy. I'm sure every family in the land has such treasures on their shelves, to be taken out at a time when everyone needs a bit of TLC. 

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THE TIME OF GREEN MAGIC by Hilary McKay. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

The arrival of a novel by Hilary McKay is always a real treat. This one was tempting from before I began. It has an attractive and slightly mysterious cover, sprinkled with the odd star and the font and layout are a joy. There's a lot of white space around the words and a beautiful drawing of ivy at the top of each chapter. This may seem trivial, but it's important for signalling the sort of book it is: accessible for quite young children, and the opposite of unapproachable, but still, quite grown up because not illustrated throughout.

 And the story is blissful. It paints the portrait of a family and Hilary is a Top Purveyor of Fabulous Families for readers too young for Anne Tyler.  This one is blended, too, which makes it  all the more interesting. Abi is the heroine. She acquires two step brothers, Max and Louis, when her dad, Theo,  (a nurse) marries Polly, the boys' mother. Abi's beloved Granny Grace goes back to her native  Jamaica and Abi misses her.

The family has to move. They fall in love with a strange place which has a lot of ivy clinging to its walls and somehow, they gather together enough money for the rent. There's a book room, full of many exciting books. They see a toad, whom they call Mrs Puddock and she becomes a kind of pet. A young Frenchwoman, Esmé, who's an art student, is employed to take care of the children between the end of school and Polly and Theo getting home. And the green magic begins to work on all of them.

Louis, who struggles a bit at school, falls under the spell of the books in a very particular way. Or is it the ivy which is the magical element? Or the specific kind of art Esmé creates?  I am not in the business of spoilers and what happens to the family while they're living in the ivy-clad house is something I'm not going to go into, but be assured, it's magic, as advertised in the title. The enchantment comes not only from the events of the book, (though they're exciting and intriguing enough) but from the language. McKay is one of those writers of whom I say every time  I read one of her books: I don't know how she does it.  She has the ability to conjure up places and people with the lightest of touches. She is the Queen of Subtlety. Here's Max, who has a massive  teenage crush on Esmé:

"Max was in his bedroom talking to his mirror. It was Monday and he had rushed home from school, showered, cleaned his teeth and dug out his best jeans and T- shirt, the Snoop Dog one that Danny's brother once remarked was cool. Now he was practising the words he needed for Esmé. He said to the mirror: 'I'm sorry I dropped the pasta on Friday. It was stupid.'

I rest my case.  The first sentence alone is a wonder. There's nothing strange or unusual or overwrought about it. It couldn't be simpler. Knowing how to convey so much in so little is what McKay excels at and she does it  all the way through the  story.  If you're a teacher, give your Year 6 class a treat and read it to them at the end of every day's lessons. Parents,  try and read it aloud to your children so that you don't miss out on the huge pleasures of this unusual novel. 

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Koshka's Tales, by James Mayhew. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

First things first. I do know James Mayhew but I only know him after getting in touch with him on Twitter because I was such a fan of his. It was one of his recent books, Mrs Noah's Pockets, written by Jackie Morris, which spurred me to write to him but I've always admired his work enormously. It's very varied, which I regard as a treat....every new book shows a different facet of his talent.   This particular volume, cleverly reissued by the wonderful Welsh publisher Graffeg Books to take advantage of his recent successes (Gaspard the Fox, etc) was first published in 1993 and it's fascinating to me to see all of the things I love already there, in the relatively distant past. 

These things can be boiled down to energy, colour and a taste for the theatrical. Those of you who know James as someone who bombs about the country and abroad painting while an orchestra plays....illustrating the dramas going on in a performance of music or opera...will see the energy of those performances (which I've never seen but which I read about all the time) right there on every page. It the energy that shines out in the boldness, the verve, the lack of reticence that says: Look at this beautiful thing! Look again!  It's the kind of work that welcomes readers (because in this book, James has written the words too!) as well as spectators. The combination is a real joy. 

I must apologise for the quality of the photographs, which I took myself. They do not do justice to the singing colours of this book and I do urge everyone to get to a bookshop at once and have a look at the real thing. It's a feast. I love the 'too much of a good thing can be wonderful' * attitude of every illustration.  The most fiery orange, the richest red, the whitest white (often tinged with blue) and greens like the lit-up hearts of forests.....they give a physical form to the stories which, being Russian, are full of wonders and over -the- top characters like Baba Yaga, with her chicken legs and appetite for human child flesh.  There are several full-page spreads as below, and the last photograph shows how the other pages are laid out, with beautifully designed borders. 

The stories are told by Koshka, a black female cat. This appealed to me because I once wrote two novels** for younger readers narrated by a cat called Ozymandias (Ozzy for short) who remains one of my favourite characters from  among my own books.

The illustration above comes from perhaps the most well-known of all Russian tales, Ivan, the Grey Wolf and The Firebird.  There's every sort of character in these pages: beautiful princesses, wicked rulers, talking animals, scary creatures and benevolent ones. There's passion, danger, violence and revenge. I picked out this very short  passage which gives a taste of what I mean. 

"Ivan saddled up his horse and set off. In time he reached a crossroads where a notice read: 'Go back and fail,  go forward and starve, go left and be eaten by wolves, go right and your horse will be eaten."

A delightful prospect, I'm sure you'll agree. Fortunately Ivan is helped by the magic of the Firebird's feather...

We have fables about the end of winter and the arrival of spring (very important in Northern lands) and about virtue triumphing as it must and pride being punished. We're on both  land and sea, and the stories reflect the Russian landscape and its enormous land mass.  The dark greens and shadows of Russia's forests are  everywhere. 

There's also a very useful explanatory note at the end of the book, where Mayhew explains that these tales are often retold and that they shape-shift with every new generation. Today's children are lucky to have this version of the stories. And James Mayhew is lucky to have Graffeg realising that we need them as much as we did in 1993. 

*Mae West said that.
** The Fabulous Fantora Files/ The Fabulous Fantora Photographs. 

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The Hare and the Moon, by Catherine Hyde . Reviewed by Adèle Geras

Because it's Bank Holiday and because I want to share it as widely as I possibly can, here is The Hare and the Moon,  a book I urge you to consider seriously as something to give this Christmas to anyone who loves both art and nature. For a wonder, Catherine is someone I do not know. I have never met her though we do follow one another on Twitter. Last year I bought several packs of her Christmas cards because I love her style. Please forgive the very inadequate photographs which do no justice to the real illustrations. It's published most elegantly by Zephyr, which is a branch of House of Zeus. You can't see it in this photo, but the leaves on the tree  are in fact gold and catch the light.

The book has a tree, a bird, and a flower for every month of the year. It also has a spread showing the journey taken by a hare through the landscape and the seasons. The words are as beautiful as the images. For this one below, for example,  the words read:

Sleepy in July, the hare wanders to where the air is salt-sharp in the dusk, the sky peopled with stars. And she sings: the Rose Moon, the Flower Moon,  the Thunder Moon, the Hay Moon, the Corn Moon, the Grain Moon.

Below is the robin, December's bird.

And this below is the January tree, a crab apple.

I've limited myself to four photos because the pleasure of the real book and all the other illustrations is something you should see for yourself. Go to your nearest bookshop and have a look at the whole thing....it's one of the most beautiful books I've seen in recent years, and one to treasure. If you're a teacher, your class needs this book.

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THE MAGIC HOUR by Ian Beck. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

A couple of years ago, I contributed a version of the Pied Piper story to the OUP series called Greatest Stories, part of their Tree Tops Reading Scheme. My editor, Maxine Howells, asked me by email who I would choose to illustrate it. I answered without hesitation: "Ian Beck, but he'll probably be far too busy. He's in demand."

Reader, he agreed. And I was thrilled to bits and my Pied Piper is gorgeous. Before that, Ian illustrated a version I wrote for David Fickling Books of The Six Swan Brothers.  So, as so often with my reviews, I know the person whose work I'm commending to you and admire him enormously. I am, however,  not in the least embarrassed  to be highlighting another book by him.  This one, whose cover is below, I was particularly interested in, because it's a sort of wonderful artistic footnote to one of my favourite paintings. Which also, I read, turns out to be a picture which obsessed the young Ian when he was, in his words, "a callow art student."

Below is  the picture Ian and I both love: it's by John Singer Sargent and it's called Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and it lives in Tate Britain. If you can get to see it, you should. You won't be disappointed. Ian tells us in his book that the Magic Hour of his title is  dusk, when the light is just right. 

The story is  a simple one of two sisters, Lily and Rose. Rose is younger and does everything slightly behind  her sister, following her everywhere. A sort of refrain is set up: First Lily, then Rose...

But it's the younger Rose who sees the light in the next door garden, at dusk.  She thinks that fairies might be in the garden. The girls go exploring and find their neighbours,  John Singer Sargent and his wife, though they're only referred to as The Man and the Woman.  And of course they don't find fairies but they do hear a nightingale singing and the lanterns that they mistook for fairy lights. 

The story is less important here than the glorious illustrations, spilling over double pages for the most part, as in the picture below, where Lily and Rose are depicted with long hair.  This is cut later on, but I am sure that the decision to show long hair in the first few spreads and on the cover is because Ian Beck wanted to paint the flowing tresses. He may correct me if I've got this wrong.

Every spread is suffused with colour and the blues and greens sing off the page. You could spend hours looking at the wild flowers, at the sky, at how the words are arranged on the page and trying to work out  how painting the dusk works. You do exactly this in front of Sargent's original painting. How did he make those lanterns glow like that? It's miraculous! The book has been very well produced by Tate Publishing, who know how to make books that come out under their name as perfect as possible. The typography, the quality of the paper, the colour reproduction: they're all beautiful. And I am always thrilled to bits when a book has endpapers. Here they are below and they're splendid. I'm glad the fashion for them has spread to much modern hard-backed fiction.  Do try and see this book in real life. It's wonderful in every way. And best of all, it will lead you to look again at the work of John Singer Sargent. 

PS. I checked with Ian before putting this up, and yes, he did have the long hair at first because he wanted to paint it.
PPS. The book was designed by Ian's son, Laurence Beck, who was too modest to have his name appear. Well, I reckon designers are the unsung heroes of the book world and I try to credit them wherever I can. Laurence Beck....huge applause to you! 

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The Swish of the Curtain

When I was a little girl, I was the kind of child who, when asked to sing a song by my relatives, would open my mouth and let rip, only stopping when the cake was being offered around. I have always loved performing. My teachers at school used to refer to it as 'showing off' and they weren't wrong. I've never been  nervous under the gaze of an audience, and  I think the sound of applause is the best sound in the world.  I went some way to fulfilling my ambition of a career on the stage, only setting this aside when I realised that there was no hope of any employment in the situation I found myself in in 1967 when I married.  I became a teacher of French instead but of course teaching is a performance art. You have to keep your pupils' attention on you at all times. You have  to engage them and get them on your side. It's a bit like being a stand-up comic. But it's very, very hard work and I was not a bit sorry to leave the profession and turn my hand to writing.


Three things had an enormous influence on my in my desire to be a star when I grew up. Th first of these was the movies. I went to the cinema about twice a week during my tv-less childhood and games with my friends involved pretending to "be" Jane Powell, or Anne Miller or Kathryn Grayson or any number of others. I saw Valerie Hobson (aka Mrs John Profumo) on the London stage in The King and I and that began a love affair with the theatre. In 1956, I saw Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady. I went to the London production of West Side Story in its first week. And so on...


All of this is to emphasise that I was the Ideal Reader for Pamela Brown's series of books about the denizens of the Blue Door Theatre. I first read The Swish of the Curtain in 1954 when I was 10, and Pamela Brown's books pleased me enormously. I'm very grateful to Pushkin Books, first of all for reissuin these novels, and secondly for sending them to me for review.


The first thing that strikes me, reading the first volume again (I haven't got to the second and third books yet but I will!) is the liberal scattering of adverbs in the text. The book was published first in 1941 and people spoke 'breathlessly' and capered 'wildly.' An editor today would probably strike out a lot of these adverbs and would definitely frown at 'capered'.


So young readers should be warned: this is an old-fashioned book. It's none the worse for that, in my opinion. Today's readers will be deeply envious of the freedom their long- ago counterparts enjoyed. When the Halfords (Nigel, Vicky and Percy known as Bulldog) move in next door to the Darwins (Jeremy, Sandra, Lynette and Madelaine) we have a perfect cast to take part in many adventures. The book begins with a performance and some of the names of the adults are designed specifically for comedy: Mrs Potter-Smith, Miss Thropple, Augustus Wheeley and so on.


The children come across a deserted old chapel in the town and thanks to the kindness of the Vicar and his delightful wife, they're allowed to clean it up and paint the doors and window frames and all by themselves set it up as the Blue Door Theatre. Just as adults loved the fantasy element of the bonkbusters so popular in the Eighties, stagestruck children of my generations couldn't imagine anything more delightful than being able to put on plays and performances in our very own theatre. The whole set up was my idea of utter bliss.
The best thing about The Swish of the Curtain is the detail we're allowed to  see about putting on a show. Everything: costumes, props, the scripts, rehearsals, publicity is discussed  by the children, who grow up through the books. A lot of the  dialogue is humorous. The children are individuals and we  sympathise with every one of them and cross our fingers that they'll succeed and fulfil their ambitions.  The nitty gritty of the theatre is spread out before us and reading this book is the next best thing to putting on a show oneself. I still love it and would recommend it to anyone who has a child who fancies themselves a star. 

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Noel Streatfeild's Christmas Stories. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

I've been reading Noel Streatfeild for nearly seventy years. If you ask any woman of my age which were the important books in her childhood, chances are that Ballet Shoes will be one of them. It ticked every single box for me. I longed for siblings, I longed for the limelight, I loved performing and the adventures of these sisters and the adults who surrounded them became a kind of ideal for me.

This little book, beautifully produced by Virago in time to take its place under many Christmas trees, is illustrated by Peter Bailey, with delightful decorations at the beginning of each story and black and white sketches throughout. 

It's a short book.  There are nine stories of just the right length to read in bed at night. Just the right length to be read aloud, too, and Streatfeild reads aloud very well. The tales have a Christmassy and theatrical feel to them. There are pantomimes, Christmas shows, performances of one kind or another that the young heroines are ambitious to appear in. In one story, a girl takes the place of her father who's been playing a goose in pantomime for years and years. He falls ill just before the first night and she steps nobly into the breach. There's a story where fictional characters from children's books come together to raise a sick child from her bed, in the nick of time. Incidentally, the list of books a child of about nine has read and calls upon to help him is most impressive. Old people are helped, parents are hard-working and not very rich, there's a wonderful trip to the country for two London-bound children and there's always a happy ending, which is always welcome, especially at Christmas.

And throughout, there's a strong sense of Streatfeild's own preoccupations: the theatre, the relationship between siblings, and parents and children, and in the background the strong atmosphere of London between 1949 and 1962. It's a very different world from the one we inhabit now, but still one that today's young readers will enjoy enormously.  The language is plain, but Streatfeild has the gift of evoking a place and characters in very few, well-chosen words. The stories can be enjoyed by children as young as eight or nine, and their parents and grandparents will enjoy reading them as well. 

Anyone who finds this under the tree will be delighted. 

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THE GREAT SEA DRAGON DiSCOVERY by Pippa Goodhart. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

Pippa Goodhart is one of the writers I call The Reliables. They're the ones whose name on the cover says: don't worry, you're safe with me. I know exactly what I'm doing. My usual disclaimer here: Pippa is a friend and I've known her for decades and you will have to trust my honesty when I say I would never recommend a book I didn't  enjoy. My life is too short to read books I don't like, let alone write about them.  But even though I've known her for a long time, and knew that she'd been no slouch where writing books for children was concerned, a short visit to her website was an eye- opener. She has been hugely productive and versatile and is the author of such real favourites as YOU CHOOSE and YOU CHOOSE IN SPACE and the Winnie the Witch books, as well as historical novels for somewhat older children. 

This book is one of those. It's the very model of what a historical novel  for children should be. There's a duty to tell a good story, first and foremost. As in every other novel, you need sympathetic characters,  a plot that bowls along at speed. All novels  benefit from knockout emotional punches along the way, together with a good few surprises.  This book has every one of these elements in abundance.

The other thing a historical novel needs is, of course, history. Novelists who write such books for children have a secondary intention: they have to provide some real facts, some true historical knowledge which will add to the store of information the child possesses.  Again, Goodhart is generous. We end the novel (and I have to confess that I am including myself in this. I'm very ignorant about these things) knowing an awful lot more than I did at the beginning. And since I live in Cambridge I am going to take myself off to the Sedgwick Museum very soon to see all the 'true things' for myself.

The historical layer of the novel concerns the discovery in Grantchester of remains of an ichthyosaur during the 19th century diggings for coprolites. These were ground up and used for fertiliser in the land around the village. A postscript helpfully provides everything you need to discover what and who are real people and who is a character from the writer's imagination. It's wonderful to have this postscript,  but while you're reading the book, distinguishing what's true and what isn't is the furthest thing from your mind.

You are caught up in the story from the very beginning when Bill Ellwood is in his classroom, watching a daisy turn blue from being stuck into an inkwell. He's our hero. I find it hard to outline a plot without giving away surprises the author didn't intend any reviewer to reveal, but during the course of this novel, Bill endures hardship, separation, violence, exhilaration, shocks and discoveries of every sort and by the end has undergone several kinds of transformation. His many relationships: to his parents, to his friends, especially Alf, to the other villagers, to the wonderful Mr. Seeley (who is a kind of real -life fairy godfather) are wonderfully delineated. Minor characters such  as Mrs Coddle (a midwife who makes you gasp and close your eyes in horror) and Mrs Buckle, the vicar's wife and Miss Snelling the teacher are described with great humour and affection. It's a crowded canvas, teeming with events and people and discoveries and does not gloss over the  dark side of life. We read of  pain, poverty, hardship and deprivation as well and Goodhart explains every situation clearly and sympathetically. But there is joy for Bill  in the story too, and enjoyment of small pleasures. This  novel encompasses all of those things. 

The new school term is just starting. I urge teachers to buy a copy of this for their school bookshelves. I hate categorising books by their suitability for this age of child or that. Anyone over about nine would love this story. Do buy it and read it. It would make a fantastic family book to read together....I loved it. 

Published by Catnip in paperback. £6.99
ISBN: 9781910611081

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Gaspard the Fox by Zeb Soanes and James Mayhew. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

I'd like to introduce to you Gaspard, the only fox, as far as I know, to have not only a Twitter account but more than 5,000 followers. Foxes have been important animals in folklore and art throughout our history and they wind their beautiful and sometimes devastating way through many landscapes. Recently, they've moved to town...well, why should they go scrabbling for chickens in uncertain circumstances when there are dropped burgers and tasty kebabs and nice suburban dustbins to investigate? They've had both a bad press and a good press, depending on the writer and the artist involved in the story but here, there's no denying Gaspard's charm and beauty.

Gaspard is one lucky fox. He arrives at a time when memoirs are popular. Anything that has the stamp of reality or authenticity is fashionable and Gaspard is a very real fox.  Not only has he got a Twitter account but he's chosen his narrator and artist supremely well. The person he visits on a daily basis (and I've seen the videos on Twitter and very delightful they are, too) is Zeb Soanes, who's media savvy and well-connected (he's a newsreader on BBC Radio 4) and seems a very kind chap to boot. He and Gaspard have a lovely friendship and to bring this friendship to light, Zeb has chosen a terrific artist who seemingly can turn his hand to anything.  I wrote on this blog about his beautiful collage illustrations for Jackie Morris's Mrs Noah's Pockets. This book is completely different.  I  see in each spread the influence of other artists in the best possible way: nods to excellent people like Ludwig Bemelmans (who gave us the lovely Madeline books) and in the last picture I have posted here, the great Edward Ardizzone. 

As we follow Gaspard's adventures, we're taken through a London which not all the touristy depictions of the city bring to the attention of visitors: the canals, the suburban houses, the towpath, the park benches. Gaspard has friends too. There's Zeb of course, but also Peter the cat, and Finty the dog, who are fully rounded characters in their own right. 

This, above, is the illustration that makes me think of Ardizzone. After his adventures, Gaspard goes back to Zeb's house....and I won't tell you how the book ends but it's all you would wish for. What does seem certain is that Gaspard is going from strength to strength and I'm quite sure there will be other books about him and his friends, both animal and human. 

Graffeg is a Welsh publisher which pays extra attention to the small details of the production of the book. Above you will see the Press Release. It's not every fox that gets such treatment. There are paw prints on the end papers. The font is beautiful. The whole thing is a total pleasure and the ideal gift, not only for fox fans. I can't wait to see what Gaspard is going to get up to next.  Meanwhile, do follow him (and Zeb and James too!) on Twitter! If you have a Festival near you this summer, there's a good chance they'll all be there. 

www.graffeg.com

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SPIRIT by Sally Christie Reviewed by Adèle Geras

Sally Christie is very good at opening paragraphs. 

"I saw a real live fairy," he said, "and I took it home in a bag."
Well, what would you think if someone said that? If it was someone you knew - a friend - you might say they were joking. But nobody knew Matt Barker. No one could guess why he'd said what he'd said. Was he attention seeking? Was he a show off? He didn't look the type.

This has it all:  a mystery, perhaps a way into a fantasy, and above all, the introduction of a character we're immediately anxious to know much more about. The scene takes place on a school bus on a school trip and it's part of a game called the Truth Game in which everyone has to tell the truth.

From that beginning, we're drawn into a wonderful mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary: school life and the life of nature  around us, young protagonists who are on the edge of adulthood and who need to negotiate the difficult terrain of friendship, and relationships with their contemporaries but who also are still children and open to possibilities in the natural (and supernatural) world that adults would scoff at.

Matt Barker has a friend called Jazzy who lives up to her name. She's very outgoing, unlike Matt, and  is even playing Ariel in the school production of The Tempest. She's the only person who believes Matt and it's she who accompanies him when he goes up to Burnham Wood, which is named deliberately, I'm quite sure, to have a Shakespearean resonance.

While the fairy element is focused on the wood, back  at school, Jazzy is having to negotiate her friendship with the cool girls and Matt has to  fit into school life, too. He loves football and the story of what happens to him on that front is another thread that's a pleasure to follow through the novel. Matt also has a dog called Dash, who is an important part of the action, and altogether delightful.

The school play figures large at the end, and Jazzy's performance opens Matt's eyes to more than another facet of his friend's character.  Any young person reading Spirit, quite apart from enjoying a very exciting and involving story, will learn a great deal about Shakespeare and be led, with luck, to wanting to know more.

Christie is a most wonderfully economical and resonant writer. She knows that simplicity is more telling than laying on the purple prose. She can summon up a scene with the lightest of touches and you are transported to a wood at night as deftly as you're introduced into a modern classroom.  She's also good at dialogue and the children who surround Matt and Jazzy all come to vivid life. Angela, Dip, Mickey and the others inhabit a real world which everyone will recognise.

As an afterword, Christie writes this: "This story isn't just about trees, but readers who like explanations for things may choose to interpret it partly as my farewell to the ash." People were worried about ash dieback disease, she says, and they still are. Christie is a passionate advocate for nature and her feelings for trees, plants and the landscape shine out of the book.


This novel seems just right for Years 7 and 8, but it works brilliantly for adults too. I loved it and can't wait for Christie's third novel.


Published by David Fickling Books in hardback. £10.99

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THE MANOR, HEMINGFORD GREY, by Adèle Geras

I hope readers of this blog will forgive me for the  kind of double whammy I'm presenting you with in this review.  My main aim  is to draw people's attention to this jewel of a house, and to a recent history of it, written partly by Mary Carter and partly by Diana Boston, who has been the guardian of the the place since the death of her mother-in-law, Lucy Boston in 1990.  Mary Carter's history was written in 1997, but is now published together with Diana's guide to the house, which makes the little pamphlet pictured above a must for anyone interested in this place. Copies are available for £5 from the shop at Hemingford Grey.

The Manor is one of the very oldest houses in the country and is mentioned in the Domesday Book. 900  years of human feelings and conversations: quarrels and kisses, tears and laughter,  have happened  here and must have imprinted themselves somehow on the fabric of the house. Many people have felt that it was haunted and even if traditional ghosts are not seen by everyone, the many young airmen who sat in the Music Room and listened to records on the gramophone, with its enormous trumpet, (and many of whom went on to die in defence of freedom in the Second World War) are still there in spirit in a way that's completely real. Here's a  photo from the booklet of the Music Room. 

The piece I've added below was written so many years ago that I feel I can bring it out again for a different audience. I hope many readers of this particular blog will know the Green Knowe Books but if they don't, then I can't recommend them highly enough and you can by those at the shop too. 

I have been back twice since I wrote this post. Once, on one of the coldest nights I can remember, we listened to ghost stories by M.R. James read to us by the light of candles by the wonderful actor,  Robert Lloyd Parry. The second time, Diana Boston herself (who tells us in the booklet that she's shown 80,000 people round the house) showed us (this was a second time for me) every one of Lucy Boston's beautiful, beautiful patchwork quilts. We put on white gloves to look at them and handle them and they are quite astonishingly lovely. 

Lucy Boston was very lucky in her daughter-in-law. Diana Boston is the perfect caretaker for this magical house and her booklet  is a model of clear exposition and succinct and modest description. She doesn't say how much she's done towards the maintenance of the Manor, but she's the spirit of the place now and what I'd like to say to anyone reading this is: get in touch by phone and arrange for your own viewing. You won't regret it. The website is www.greenknowe.co.uk Do go and visit it...

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And here is my piece from 2012.

If you park near St. James's Church in Hemingford Grey and walk along the towpath, you come across the Manor almost by accident. I was there on purpose. It's a place I've been longing to visit ever since I read my first Lucy Boston novel, decades ago. The Manor is Green Knowe, the house described so vividly in her children's books that I sort of felt I knew it already. On June 1st, on a mild and overcast day, my good friend Frances Wilson and I went to see the real thing.

We walked all round the garden first. The topiary, cut into very Jubilee-appropriate crowns, orbs etc was started in the year of the Coronation. Every bush had bunting around it, and we were greeted by two lovely dogs who bounded over the grass to welcome us.

If you wanted an example of a perfect English domestic garden, this is it. Planted with care and devotion, tended with enormous love for decades, first by Lucy Boston herself and now by her daughter-in-law Diana Boston and a couple of very good gardeners, it is full of everything beautiful you can think of: roses in abundance, shrubs and flowering plants of every kind and in particular on the day we went, banks and banks of the most splendid irises. These are purple and what you think of when you think of irises, but there were bronze ones and underwear pink ones as well as white and gold and mixtures of bronze and purple...the varieties were astonishing to me at any rate. And there were masses and masses of them. The whole display is spectacular. Visit quickly if you want to catch them at their best but after they're done there will be the roses, some of which were already flowering profusely.

Diana Boston met us at the door. She is the widow of Peter Boston, who provided the extraordinarily evocative illustrations for the Green Knowe books. She was showing us round the house and on the day we were there, Frances and I were the only visitors,so it felt exactly as though we were guests at the house of a friend. Diana knows all there is to know about the Manor and lives there now, and the feeling you get as you step into it is precisely that: you're entering someone's home. It's been around since 1130 A.D, this house, and is one of the earliest domestic dwellings in England. It has been the background to words, deeds, thoughts, emotions, celebrations, bereavements, births, and gossip for over 900 years. The walls in most of the house are very thick indeed and have absorbed so much that you feel the place is crowded with memories. The hall has in it coats, wellies, umbrellas, and the normal paraphernalia of everyday life. It's a dignified and beautiful and ancient house but in no way a grand one. You have to watch your step sometimes and the rooms lead off one another in unexpected ways, but wherever you go, you see wonderful pictures, pretty ornaments and evidence of Lucy Boston's presence as well as that of her friend, Elizabeth Vellacott, the artist. The link goes to the Daily Telegraph obituary of this interesting woman who died as recently as 2002.

One of the main reasons I've long wanted to visit the Manor was because I knew that Lucy Boston, as well as writing enchanting books, also created patchwork quilts. Quilts are something of an obsession of mine. Almost my first book was called Apricots at Midnight and in it, each story relates to a patch in a quilt the narrator has made. The patchwork curtains in the living room were lovingly mended by Lucy Boston, and this started her on the making of her own quilts. She spent each winter putting together the most extraordinarily lovely and carefully-designed and worked-out patchworks. The one illustrated here has a pattern of appliqued stars and the phases of the moon.

Patchwork is a metaphor for a great many things, as well as being, when well done, both beautiful and useful. It's like writing books for instance: you have to pick which words go well next to which others, how the paragraphs are going to line up, how the structure of everything will fit together at the end. I found it thrilling to imagine Lucy Boston, sewing away by hand (you cannot see any stitches at all on the quilts without bringing your eyes practically up against the fabric and even then it's hard!) through the cold winter nights. Diana assured us that the house is still very cold when the temperature drops but blessedly cool in hot spells. It's the thick walls... Frances and Diana put on white gloves to show off every single quilt. These are awesome in the true and not the modern slangy meaning of the word. For anyone who loves such things Boston's works of art are absolutely worth the trip all on their own.

During the Second World War, Lucy Boston played gramophone records to young airmen, many of them still in their teens, who were stationed nearby and who used to come in a special bus to hear the music. Still in the room in which this happened, and in the photograph, you can see the records, all in boxes and in their buff paper sleeves, and it's an enormous collection. The old gramophone shown in the picture still works and Diana played us a piece of music (she chooses different pieces to play for each visit) which you can hear by following this link. When the high-ceilinged, silent, ancient room filled with these notes, a real chill came over me and I found myself on the edge of tears and with gooseflesh all over my arms. And yes, it was partly the sound, the notes, the melody, but it was also the ghosts of those young men, hearing that song, facing death daily, suddenly present where we were. It's not a moment I'll forget in a hurry. I do urge anyone who can to follow the link to Gladys Ripley's rendition of O peaceful England! on the truly magical You Tube.

Readers of the Green Knowe novels will recognize the rocking horse and the picture of the toys in the trunk, brought to the house by children from other times and places. There's no room here to go into detail about them but they're the work of a truly remarkable woman and anyone who loves books with a proper sense of place, interesting characters and stories touched with the best kind of magic will love them. They are all on sale in the shop, of course, as are postcards of the garden and the patchworks and much more besides. Diana Boston explained to us why she hasn't gone the Disneyfied, theme-park route in the Manor. She has wanted to keep the place as it was, for all those who love the books: a home for real people who happen to share it with a multitude of benevolent ghosts. I'd like to thank Frances for driving me there and Diana for taking us round. She's the perfect guide and I can't think of a better place to visit if you're in the region. It's the very best kind of haunted house there is.

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