MIXED FEELINGS, edited by Miriam Hodgson. Reviewed by Ann Turnbull.

This collection of short stories about mothers and daughters was first published in 1992 and is still just as lively and relevant today, despite the absence of such things as mobile phones and selfies.

The themes are timeless. Ten favourite authors explore those early teenage years when girls grow up quickly, to the alarm of their mothers, and begin to form their own ideas and tug at the constraints of home.

In Anne Fine's opening story, the unnamed narrator begs her mother for a story she's heard many times before: how her mother came to be born. It's a brilliantly funny and involving story that tells much in a few pages, and it touches on the timeless themes that echo throughout the book: birth, first love, independence, finding out who you are and where you came from, and the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.

Here we have rebellious daughters (from the first nudges of independence shown by Berlie Doherty's Jenny to the desperate struggle of Jamila Gavin's Nasreen), unconventional and embarrassing mothers, schoolfriends, boyfriends, people in the workplace. Above all there is the tension between the powerful urge to fly the nest and the pull of home.

The authors are Anne Fine, Berlie Doherty, Vivien Alcock, Jamila Gavin, Marjorie Darke, Gwen Grant, Annie Dalton, Monica Hughes, Jean Ure and Jacqueline Wilson. All great storytellers - and the book is still in print!

Mammoth, 1997.


www.annturnbull.com



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BLUE MOON DAY by Anne Fine Reviewed by Adèle Geras

Yet again, I confess, I am reviewing a book by a friend of mine. This time I have a good excuse. It gives me a chance to highlight the many things about short stories which make them an excellent choice of reading matter for young people. For older people too,  if it comes to that, but by the time you've left school, you'll probably have decided whether it's a form you can cope with or not.

Many people are annoyed by short stories. They feel somehow let down by brevity. They think that there's no way that a short story can satisfy in the way a novel can. I think they're wrong, but then I've always loved short stories, both to read and to write.

The best examples are like small stones thrown into a pond. They strike the water and then the rings spread out and out. So you read something by Chekov, or Somerset Maugham, or Raymond Carver, or   MR James or a host of other writers and the echoes and possibilities and resonances fill your head and go on  reverberating in your mind for a long time after you've finished reading.

Fine has chosen a framing device for her stories, which are all about children in institutions:  various sorts of boarding school, a school for the blind and visually impaired, and even an educational unit for young offenders. It starts with a girl who really, really does not want to go to her own day school that morning having what she calls a Blue Moon Day (because it happens so rarely) and bunking off. However a condition of not going is that she has to go about in the car while her mother, a caregiver, goes from house to house seeing many different kinds of people. To pass the time while she's waiting, she reads the stories in a book called Away from Home, and we read the tales with her, one after another.

I speak as someone who was very happy indeed at my boarding school,  (Roedean School in Brighton) for eight years. And though I wouldn't dream of sending any child of mine to one, I can see several advantages. The most important of these, for me at any rate, was the extraordinarily high standard of the actual education. I am still enormously grateful to my teachers. I also made friends there, and  I'm still in touch with some of them. I don't recollect any serious bullying. Maybe I went round with my eyes shut but I don't think so. Girls could be spiteful. I was made miserable by several people on several occasions but nothing too traumatic.  Fine, too, in  depicting such places as they really are NOW does not resort to any of the old boys'  school  clichés of people having their heads stuck down a lavatory, and other such horrors. Her stories are much more modern than that, and even children who go to day school will recognise that they have a great deal in common with Fine's protagonists.

But this framing story does have its bleak moments, not only when we learn about the people being cared for, but also in our heroine's recounting of her family circumstances. The ending is hopeful, however, and along the way the  young reader will have been introduced to institutions and teachers that might very well make him or her look at their own school with fresh eyes.

The eccentricity of teachers is on display throughout and makes for a good deal of comedy along the way. The writing is elegant and crisp throughout. Heartstrings are pulled with no trace of sentimentality. I think readers of this book, whether they go to boarding school or not, will love it for the light it sheds on an experience which can be painful for many children.  If you're a teacher,  buy a copy for your class library and if you have a school -age child, it's required reading which you as an adult will also enjoy.

A final sad note:  the book is dedicated to Frances, whom I also knew and who used to teach at Roedean, long after I left it. She  died recently and this book would have made her very proud and happy.

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BLOOD FAMILY by Anne Fine Reviewed by Adèle Geras

WRITTEN ON AUGUST 28th.

I realize, reading through the review below that I might be taken to be saying: stay away from this book because it's too much in all kinds of ways. It wasn't my intention to say any such thing and indeed it ought to be required reading for anyone who has dealings with adoption services or who wants to understand the difficulties faced by many children. The picture of adoption that comes out of the book is a wonderful one, I think and very sensitively done. What I meant by 'hard to take' is that the book is written so well and at such a finely tuned emotional pitch that it will leave you thinking about it for a long time afterwards and you are not likely to forget it as you are many more trivial works where bloodletting and all kinds of horror are rife. Children who read it will see they are not alone and don't have to be...there are ways of surviving and being helped. Adults who read it will learn much that could prove most useful in their dealings with difficult adolescents....In short, a smashing book and one you should seek out!

Anne Fine has been writing books for children of all ages and for adults for a good many years and her work for readers of every age is marked by its elegance, its humour and its honesty. She also does a good line in spooky, as witness her book of last year, to which this novel is a companion piece, THE DEVIL WALKS. She is also, I have to confess, an old and good friend of mine. Quite a number of my best friends are writers and I'm afraid I can't help it if they're the kind of writer whose books I want to shout about. Am I biased? Well, maybe, but I have no qualms at all in promoting novels I think are good and which many people will enjoy.

"Enjoy" is not perhaps the word to use in the case of this book. It's very hard-hitting and readers of a delicate and easily-upset disposition would be well advised to steer clear of it. Parts of it are difficult to read. Parts of it are so eye-wateringly appalling that I can well imagine the odd person putting the book aside thinking: this is too much for me.

Eddie, four years old, lives with his mother and an abusive man and it's only thanks to the intervention of a nosy and kind neighbour that he is rescued and eventually both fostered and adopted. His foster and adoptive parents are lovely, but by then much damage has been done to Eddie and his mother has been so badly beaten that she can barely talk, much less relate to her son. Eddie, however, as he grows up, has problems of his own. He comes to think that maybe the abusive man who brutalised his mother is his own father and that maybe, as they say, blood is thicker than water and he is in danger of turning into the Beast he so fears and loathes. What he does is take to drink and Fine provides a clear and depressing picture of exactly what this can lead to.

The novel is told in the voices of its protagonists and everyone has a part in the narrative patchwork. This allows Fine to vary the tone and the inflection, and makes the book easier to read as well as moving it along at a cracking pace. You won't be able to put it down, once you begin it. The only person who is never heard is Eddie's mother and that's because she's been beaten to such degree that she can no longer speak or think in any coherent way. Her silence is the saddest thing in the whole novel.

Many people help Eddie along the way and Fine is very good at finding silver linings in the most impenetrable of clouds. There is a happy ending, but prepare to be soundly harrowed on the way there. Teenagers should read this book and so should their parents and carers. When real-life children like Eddie are not as fortunate as he is, our newspapers fill up with tragic stories like that of Daniel Pelka.

Perhaps not a book to recommend as an easy beach read, but one which will stay with you for a long time after you've closed it.

Published by: Doubleday Books in hardback Price: £12.99 ISBN: 9870857532404

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THE DEVIL WALKS by Anne Fine

You might think you know all about Anne Fine and her books. She's the wicked dissector of social mores. She's the hilarious creator of books like Bill's New Frock and Diary of a Killer Cat. She's the person who knows everything there is to know about families of every kind. She was an excellent Children's Laureate. She's a tireless promoter of good books for everyone. She's sharp and clever and witty and also, along with the precision of her analysis of relationships, tender-hearted and anxious for every unhappy child in the world.

But it doesn't do to take her for granted or think you've got her classified. She's diversified again. The proof that she can turn her hand to anything and make it her own is to be seen in her latest book, Thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhe Devil Walks.

If you go to Anne's website (apologies...I haven't been able to put in a link so I'm afraid you'll have to Google her!) and follow the links there to some interviews, she talks about the genesis of this novel, which is a Gothic tale of a young boy who is, as Anne puts it "horribly orphaned" and then undergoes more torments than a young lad should ever have to deal with when he's sent away from his kind adoptive family and has to live with the wicked uncle of all wicked uncles.

There are all the elements here of a great scary read. A big house. An old dolls' house, hints of voodoo and worse, possible evil residing in all kinds of unexpected places, a garden with a maze in it, hidden things, things that aren't what they seem at first: Fine deals herself a full hand of the Gothic imagery and trappings but if the book were no more than a collection of special effects, it wouldn't be the wonderful book it is.

What makes it really good is the emotional heart of the story, which deals with the way we find love in a hostile world. It tells us, among the frights we have to endure, about the persistence of goodness in opposition to evil, and of kindness and benevolence sharing the world with the dark things that abound in it. It's written in the first person in the most convincing Victorian style which nevertheless is miles away from fusty and difficult. Any child picking up this book will understand every word. The language is simple and it's precisely this simplicity which makes the the horrors appear even more frightening. A really terrific read for anyone of any age who loves a creepy tale which is more than just smoke and mirrors.

Doubleday hbk £10.99 ISBN:9780857530646

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