The Wind Singer by William Nicholson - reviewed by Cecilia Busby

"I hate school! I hate ratings! I won't strive harder! I won't reach higher! I won't make tomorrow better than today!"

So shouts Kestrel Hath, bellowing her rage and frustration from the very top of the highest tower in the exam-obsessed city of Aramanth, near the beginning of William Nicholson's classic fantasy, The Wind Singer. In Aramanth, your family status is judged by the grades each member gets in annual exams, from the age of two upwards - and a strict hierarchy results, with demarcations maintained in the type of housing, clothing and employment granted them by the city administration. Kestrel has finally had enough - of the endless tests, of the fear they produce, of the unfairness of it all. But her defiance will seal the family's fate - they will be sent down to the lowest tier of all, Grey District, and the only way she can hope to change anything is if she sets out with her twin brother Bowman into the wilderness to find the 'voice' of the mysterious Wind Singer, the contraption left in Aramanth by the legendary Singer people, long ago.

This book was a favourite of my eldest daughter, now off at university, and I revisited it recently because my youngest (12) seemed about the right age for it. We listened to the audiobook on a long journey from Devon to East Sussex, and I was struck by the sad fact that the book is even more relevant to children today than it was in 2000, when it was published.

Near the beginning, Kestrel's brother Bowman hugs his other, baby, sister, Pinpin, with a sadness that comes from knowing today is the day of her first test. "She was only two years old, too little to mind how well or badly she did, but from now till the day she died she would have a rating." We are told that in Aramanth "life was measured out in tests. Each test brought with it the possibility of failure, and every test successfully passed led to the next, with its renewed possibility of failure. There was no escape from it, no end." Every day at school, the pupils are ranked in order of their points, and exhorted to "strive harder, and reach higher, to make tomorrow better than today".

Of course, this is a fantasy. Aramanth isn't real. But it's heart-breakingly close to the mark for so many children today, who are (according to OFSTED guidelines) expected to know their national curriculum levels for each subject, whether they are achieving above, below or on 'target' and exactly what must be done to achieve the great leap to the next minor sub-division. Even the motto they chant reminds me of the constant exhortation to strive and do better every day that we see in our current education system - my son's school's (newly coined) motto is "Dream, Believe, Achieve".

Nicholson does a great job of showing us the folly, cruelty and unfairness of such an exam and achievement-based system and the ways it sees only a certain sort of value. Later in the book, Kestrel's father subverts residential retraining classes for those adults who regularly perform badly in the exams by persuading them to write about not what they are asked but about what they know - and they all know some fascinating and valuable things that the rigid exam structure doesn't allow for.

My daughter certainly enjoyed the parallels, and appreciated the efforts of Kestrel, Bowman and their family to revolt against the Examiners, who ruled the city. But the book is about more than just that ratings system. It's about love, loyalty, the power of the imagination, empathy and keeping true to a moral centre. Kestrel and Bowman are helped in their epic journey to find the wind singer's voice by the dunce of their class, Mumpo, a lumpy, inarticulate, dribbling failure, who falls in love with Kestrel because she once sat next to him in class as part of an act of defiance. Kestrel isn't too pleased by his adoration to start with, and Nicholson doesn't spare his readers from just how annoyingly whiny, smelly and greedy the boy can be, but there are hidden depths to Mumpo, and over the course of the book the siblings learn to appreciate and love the apparently unloveable.

My daughter loved it, and I was really taken with it over again. Above all, the book is a great, imaginative and warm-hearted adventure story, which asks you to really think about what is or isn't valuable in life. As such it will live on in the minds of its readers for a long time.







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The Blade Itself, reviewed by C.J. Busby

The Blade Itself is written for adults, but it's a book that might also be enjoyed by older teenage readers, especially any who are fans of G.R.R. Martin. I picked it up almost by accident from my sister's shelf while visiting this summer. She is an extremely discerning reader of fantasy and sicfi and I always trust her judgement, so I knew it would be good. But I wasn't prepared for just how good.

The Blade Itself is the first book of a trilogy set in an alternative world but one that is reminiscent of medieval Europe, albeit with a very different history. There are no maps, so my sense that I almost recognised the topography and names (Angland? Midderland? The southern, oriental-type empire called Ghurkul?) added a certain resonance, but also left it all nicely vague. The world is one that has a recognisable kinship with G.R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire - swords, men at arms, politicking, and scepticism about the apparent reappearance of old magic. But it's not derivative - for all the inevitable resonances any epic fantasy has to other epic fantasies all the way back to The Lord of the Rings, Abercrombie's world is original enough to really engage the reader, and what's more important, his writing is cracking.

The story is told from the viewpoint of a number of different characters, and I loved all of them - whether it was bitter, twisted torturer Sand dan Glokta, vain, lazy, aristocratic Lieutenant Jezal dan Luthar, the tough northern barbarian fighter Logan Nine-fingers (also known as the Bloody Nine), the seasoned northern scout, Dogman, or the long-suffering army stalwart, Major West. Each has a distinct voice, and although the threads intertwine, each also has a distinctly interesting journey and their own sub-plots to follow, so I greeted each change of chapter/voice with the sense of excitement of catching up with a really interesting old friend.

But it's not just the characters - Abercrombie's writing is sharp, clever and above all funny. I like my fantasy laced with a decent amount of self-deprecation and deadpan humour, so for me this was the best aspect of the book. Despite some very dark moments, gritty realism and a lot of blood, it also had me laughing out loud in parts. Sand dan Glokta has a nice line in bitter sarcastic humour, while Luthar is unwittingly funny just because he's totally lacking in self-insight. Nine-fingers, as well as having the ability to eviscerate an opponent on autopilot, is master of the one-line put down. There are also some nice moments where Abercrombie subverts the usual fantasy fare - the powerful wizard who's drawn Logan down south turns out not to be the white-beaded old sage standing by the front door, but the person Logan barely glanced at - the stocky butcher with blood half-way up his arms, dissecting an animal in the yard below.

The plot follows a lot of disparate strands, all, like the characters, with their own fascination, and there's an underlying sense that all of them are going to turn out to be interrelated. There is an empire on the move in an unholy alliance with dark magical forces, a conspiracy needing investigation at the heart of the corrupt, class-ridden central Union, a wizard who apparently still lives hundreds of years after he first made an appearance in the Union's mythology, and some violent orc-like creatures overrunning the Union's northern borders. It's a full-scale adventure, and one that's very hard to put down. I had to stop after book two of the trilogy because I had my own pressing writing deadline to make, but as soon as I'm done I'll be diving into the last book.

The Blade Itself is gritty, bloody, and there's a lot of politics to keep up with, so I wouldn't recommend it to those under 16, but there's nothing that would worry the older teenager. There is a lot of swearing. But you probably hear worse on an average secondary school bus...

So, in return for all the great reads we adults have had from YA fiction, here's one that crosses over in the other direction: older teenagers (and adults), I give you Joe Abercrombie. Enjoy!



C. J. Busby writes fantasy for 7-12. Her latest book, Dragon Amber, is out with Templar: the first in the series, Deep Amber, was published in March and has been shortlisted for the Stockton Book Award..

"A rift hopping romp with great charm wit and pace" Frances Hardinge on Deep Amber

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

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CUCKOO SONG by Frances Hardinge, reviewed by Cecilia Busby

Her head hurt. There was a sound grating against her mind, a music-less rasp like the rustling of paper. Somebody had taken a laugh, crumpled it into a great, crackly ball, and stuffed her skull with it. Seven days, it laughed. Seven days.

When I opened Frances Hardinge's new book, Cuckoo Song and read those words, I knew I was going to enjoy it. After a few more pages, I found myself closing the book, and hugging it close to my chest. I wanted to hold on to that moment - the fizz and delight of knowing this story was going to  get under my skin and make me live it, and for as long as I stopped, and refused to read any more, it would all still be there, waiting for me, stretching out ahead. It's the best feeling - and Cuckoo Song didn't disappoint. It's a glorious, imaginative, delicately spooky book, with characters that stay with you afterwards, and some fine twists and turns of plot.

One of the plot twists is quite a big one, and it's hard to review the book without giving it away, but I'll do my best. In fact, anyone even vaguely familiar with fairy tales will probably guess it quite early on (I did) but it doesn't spoil the story. There's still plenty of tension in working out exactly how this twist will play out and what will happen when it's discovered. And tension is one of the things that Hardinge does incredibly well in this book - from the first page, and that ominous 'seven days', the reader knows this is a story that has a ticking clock in the background. 

The book opens with the main protagonist, Triss, waking in bed and learning that she has been rescued from nearly drowning. Her memories of the event are elusive - and in fact, there's something very odd about all her memories. She's not sure who she is, or how she got there, and even when details of her life come back, they still feel odd, not quite real. It's as if she's acting the part of being herself. Something happened to Triss in the Grimmer - the lake where she nearly drowned - and she needs to find out what it is. She is ravenously hungry; leaves and bits of earth appear in her bedroom without any explanation; every night she has strange dreams, and each night the countdown is one less: six days left... five days...

Triss also has to contend with a fiercely antagonistic younger sister, Pen, jealous of the special attention the invalid Triss gets from their parents, and also apparently terrified of her older sister. But it's Pen who holds the key to what has happened, and it's only when the two sisters join forces that they begin to have a glimmer of a chance against the mysterious Architect who's behind it all. The bond between the two sisters is at the heart of the story, and Hardinge skilfully shows the mix of jealousy, rivalry, loyalty, love and exasperation that animates their relationship.

The book is set in the 1920s, in an imaginary industrial town in, at a guess, the midlands, and the fairy-tale elements gain some of their power from the contrast with this very down-to-earth setting of trams, telephones and motorcars. It's the beginning of the modern era, but lurking in the shadows of the remaining gas-lamps, and in the cracks and wastelands of industrial development, are the Besiders, Hardinge's version of the fairies. The Architect is the most powerful but there are others, too - the Shrike, with his strange bird-like face, and others, whose shadows flit across the corner of your vision - and they want something from the humans, something they are prepared to kill for.

But it's not just the story that makes this book so brilliant - although that's superbly realised - it's also the language. Hardinge's images and descriptions are pure delight, and on almost any page you can find a sentence that will make you want to copy it out and put it on the wall to remind you of what amazing writing looks like. Here she is on jazz:

All the instruments plunged in at once, as if they'd been holding a party and somebody had opened a door on them. Where was the tune? It was in there somewhere, but the instruments fought over it, tossed it between them, dropped it and trod on it, did something else, then picked it up again and flung it in the air just when you were least expecting it.

Later, Triss watches a party of young men and women dancing to some of this untamed music in an old warehouse down near the river. The windows, looking out over the water, make her feel as if she's on a boat.

Nobody was steering the boat, everybody was dancing, and nobody danced more wildly than Violet. There was something desperate about it, as if dancing would stop the boat sinking. There was something fierce about it, as if she wanted to drive her foot through the hull and sink the boat faster.

Violet, the ex-fiancee of Triss and Pen's dead brother Sebastian, is a motorbike-riding, cigarette-smoking, thoroughly fast young woman. In her acknowledgements, Hardinge suggests that the inspiration for Violet was her own grandmother, who 'threw her home village into confusion when she returned from London on a motorbike'. Wherever she came from, she's another treat in a book full of them.

In a recent blog post on ABBA, I tried to come up with a set of criteria that got at the heart of what a really good children's book should be. Cuckoo Song, for me, fulfils all those criteria with gusto, humour, wit and pure panache. 

C.J. Busby writes funny fantasy adventures for  age 7-11. Her latest book, DEEP AMBER,  was published in March 2014 by Templar and has been shortlisted for the Stockton Book Award.

@ceciliabusby

www.cjbusby.co.uk

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The Echorium Sequence., by Katherine Roberts, reviewed by Cecilia Busby

Katherine Roberts' Song Quest, originally published in 2000, was reissued by Catnip in 2012. Recently Roberts has added the two sequels, Crystal Mask and Dark Quetzal, to the growing numbers of her back catalogue which have been reissued as e-books. I became a fan of Roberts' writing after coming across an early, book, Spellfall, in my local library. My daughter and I both loved it, and kept an eye out for her other books, subsequently devouring the whole Echorium Sequence, as well as the later Seven Ancient Wonders series (also now reissued as e-books and highly recommended!) I thought it might be time for a review of the Echorium books which are particular favourites of mine.

Song Quest opens on the Isle of Echoes, where apprentice Singers are trained in the songs of power. These are songs that can be used to bring healing, songs for laughter, sadness, death, fear - in essence this is the form magic takes in this world. Not all apprentices go on to become fully-fledged Singers - some lose their voice at adolescence and have to take menial jobs as orderlies - but the main protagonist of the story, Rialle, is a particularly gifted apprentice, and one who, unusually, finds she can communicate with the Merlee, the fish-people. All is not right in the world the Singers inhabit. Merlee are being killed and their eggs stolen - and it is Rialle, together with her best friend Frenn, one of those apprentices who have been demoted, who ultimately have to find out what is wrong and try to remedy it. At the same time, Rialle's great rival, Kherron, finds himself on the other side, working for the Karcholders who appear to be responsible for the Merlee killings. The story is told alternatively from Rialle's and Kherron's point of view, and while Rialle is an easy heroine to like and sympathise with, Kherron is an altogether more divided and difficult character. Is he on Rialle's side or not? Will he help or hinder Rialle and Renn in their quest to help the Merlee and stop the Karholders?

Song Quest reminded me of Ursula le Guin's Earthsea books, and I loved the originality of the idea that magic here was done through song. Rialle, Renn and Kherron are strong protagonists, and the Khiz priest, Frazhin, who is ultimately responsible for all the evil going on, is suitably creepy. Its a great read, deservedly winning the Branford Boas Award the year it came out - and it's a world you really want to return to at the end. Which brings me on to...

... The Crystal Mask, the second Echorium book. This is set twenty years after Song Quest, and features Renn, Rialle's son, as well as a half-wild girl called Shaiala, who arrives on the Isle of Echoes with half memories of centaurs, and of a sinister crystal mask. The mask is made of the khiz crystal used by Frazhin in the previous book to manipulate people's thoughts, and the suspicion begins to rise that the evil Frazhin might not, after all, be dead.

In the final book of the sequence, we get to hear more about the mysterious bird-people, the Quetzal, and we see Frazhin once more trying to use khiz to destroy the Echorium. Dark Quetzal is set eleven years after The Crystal Mask, and features a grown-up Renn, older Rialle, and promising novice Kyarra, the daughter of Frazhin, brought up from a baby on the Isle of Echoes. The story is as complex and spell-binding as the previous two, and we grow to love the new characters while also enjoying meeting old friends again - especially Shaiala. All the books have a fabulous assortment of half-creatures - the Merlee, the Quetzal, the centaurs - and Roberts does a great job of making them both familiar and alien, fully imagined and intriguing non-human characters. And Frazhin, the twisted and bitter source of all the nastiness in the sequence, is a great invention, who sends shivers up your spine.

All in all, it's a great trilogy, and I thoroughly recommend it to any fantasy fans out there who haven't yet read it!



Cecilia Busby writes as C.J. Busby. Her new book, DEEP AMBER, is a multiple worlds adventure aimed at age 8-10, which was published by Templar in March

Website: www.cjbusby.co.uk
Twitter: @ceciliabusby

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CRACKS by Caroline Green, reviewed by Cecilia Busby

I thoroughly enjoyed Cracks, although it's not the best of titles for a sentence like that - actually, it's hard to think of a sentence with the title in that wouldn't draw a snigger from several of the teenage protagonists of this book. That aside, it's a rip-roaring adventure that will appeal to many of the readers who devoured The Hunger Games, and reminded me of some of the futuristic thrillers I read as a child by Peter Dickinson, John Christopher, or Robert Westall. Essentially, it's the revolutionary underground against the evil system, but there is scope in that general area for all sorts of interesting things to happen, and Green adds her own inventive take, with some memorable characters and a good deal of exactly the right kind of nail-biting tension and multiplication of layers of plot which need to be uncovered.

In the first part of the book, we meet Cal, who appears to be an average teenage boy, stuck with a rather nasty stepfather and older stepbrother and a mother who's turning a blind eye to the bullying going on in the family. But from the first sentence we are aware that all is not as it seems: Cal sees a crack running across the ceiling of the school toilet which, when he runs and calls for help, has disappeared. More cracks appear and disappear, he hears strange voices, saying things like, "He's waking up. We need to increased the dose", and sudden stoppages or slippages in time. Despite these clues, it's actually quite a shock when Cal "wakes up" and we discover where he really is.

I don't want to give too much away, because one of the joys of this book is that, along with Cal himself, you have to piece together what's going on from little bits of information or disinformation, and often Cal is forced to reassess things he'd previously thought he had nailed. But essentially, from the point he wakes up, Cal is fighting to find and regain his lost identity, as well as to avoid the establishment scientists who took it away in the first place. Along the way he makes contact with some other lost souls, and meets a girl, Kyla.

The future as painted by Green is recognisably extrapolated from our present - more terrorism, more control, more marginalisation of the poor or non-white. It therefore asks teenage readers to think quite hard about the possible end results of the casual racism, anti-immigration and fears of terrorism we are constantly showered with by the current government and press. White teenager Cal, by way of contrast, associates his warmest memories with an Asian family who ran the local shop in his home-town, and the girl he falls for, Kyla, is black - his growing feelings for her are tenderly drawn, as is his friendship with her best mate, also black, Jax.

I read the book in a little under a day, and it was perfect for that fast-paced, can't put it down, plot-driven story that is sometimes just exactly what you want. Green has recently published a sequel to Cracks, which continues the story, but focuses on Kyla, called  Fragments - I will definitely be looking out for that one, too!


Cecilia Busby writes as C.J. Busby, and writes funny, adventure-filled fantasy for readers 7+

Website: www.cjbusby.co.uk
Twitter: @ceciliabusby



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Deep Amber by C.J. Busby

Reviewed by Julia Jones

Deep Amber has pace, humour and inventiveness. It's the first volume of a trilogy aimed at 8 – 11 year olds and is also a thoroughly relaxing and pleasurable read for an adult. Things begin to go wrong in Roland Castle when first a pair of swimming goggles, then a camera and finally a scarlet DS arrive unexpectedly. The knights and ladies, servants, squires and student witches are baffled by these unfamiliar objects. Only the Druid in the cellar recognises that they are arrivals from another world and knows that urgent action must be taken. Apprentice witch Dora and kitchen-boy Jem are despatched into the Great Forest to seek advice from the sinister Lord Ravenglass. Meanwhile Simon and Cat living in their great-aunt Irene's house in a gently 21^st century world (with plumbing) begin to notice that things are going missing.

What I love about this book is that it never takes itself too seriously. Yes, there are quests to be undertaken and evil to be defeated but there is nothing portentous or sub-Pullman about the rifts between the worlds. The first Forest Agent that we meet is not a giant spider or a High Elf but a bright blue flying caterpillar called Caractacus.  This is an adventure, the writer seems to say: here are runes and swords and incredibly stupid knights in armour – enjoy! When the bold Sir Bedwyr arrives in Sunset Court Home for the Elderly the first resident he meets is already under the impression that she's Queen Elizabeth I. The rest of the octogenarians take the view that it's "a lot more exciting to prepare for battle than for hot milk and biscuits before bed". They cut the phone wires and lock up the management team with enthusiasm. 

Deep Amber is not all farce: Lord Ravenglass is ambitious and unscrupulous and his agents, Mr Smith and Mr Jones, are dangerously creepy. The child characters are attractive (especially the dopey but talented Dora Puddlefoot) and the adults are variously eccentric, benevolent, protective and fallible. There's a crackle of magic in the atmosphere and a rapidly thickening plot which promises well for the subsequent volumes. I look forward to them.

Deep Amber is published by Templar Publishing at £6.99, currently in paperback only

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A KISS LIKE THIS by Mary Murphy, published by Walker Books, 2012: reviewed by C.J. Busby

It's Valentine's Day, so I thought I would review something that fitted the theme. A Kiss Like This is not something I'd normally pick up - it's a picture book, and my children are all past that stage - but I really loved it.

The premise is one of those beautifully simple ones that make such great picture books: what are the kisses of other animals like? 'A giraffe kiss', the first page informs us, 'is gentle and tall' - and then, you lift a flap and the giraffe adult is kissing the giraffe baby - 'like this!' Parents will immediately spot the only way to read this book: with an inventive and giggly different kiss for every page.

A bee kiss, for example, is 'fuzzy and buzzy':

I can just feel how much fun it would be to give someone a fuzzy, buzzy bee kiss. The illustrations, as you can see, are lovely - simple and colourful, just as they need to be. The story takes us through the kisses of a number of different animals, until on the last page, the reader gets 'your kiss - like this!'

My youngest daughter's first word was 'kiss'. She'd have loved this book. I don't think there's any toddler who wouldn't.


C.J. Busby writes funny magical adventures for 7-11.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

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The Bone Dragon by Alexia Casale, reviewed by C.J. Busby


The Bone Dragon is an extraordinary book - strong, delicate, magical and matter of fact all at once. It's beautifully written, and will, I'm sure, be deservedly feted by prize committees. It's also gripping, and funny, and very original.

The main protagonist, Evie, is a young teenager who is adopted, and gradually recovering from childhood abuse. At the start of the book she has had a number of shattered ribs removed, and the remnants of one of them is carved into a dragon, to keep by her bedside. The piece of broken rib, symbol of her helplessness against the violence she's suffered, is transformed into a symbol of strength and endurance. But it is soon clear that it is more than just a symbol -  the bone dragon comes to life, becomes a kind of protector spirit and guide. In a number of strange, magical interludes, the dragon takes Evie on a slow journey of healing, their night-time adventures exploring the moonlit fens around her house gradually helping to dissolve some of the anger and the strong defenses that have partially shut Evie off from her new friends and adopted family. Casales makes it clear that the dragon does not exist just in Evie's imagination - there is real mud on her clothes in the morning, and real consequences of some of the dragon's acts: this is magic. But it's a strange, wayward magic that is woven into an otherwise very straightforward narrative of Evie's life and recovery. We learn about her ups and downs with her new family, the process by which they themselves are gradually coming to terms with the death of their son and their brother's wife in a car accident, Evie's troubles at school, her relationship with a teacher who also becomes her counsellor, and the physical complications of her rib operation. Magic and matter-of-fact events mingle, as night follows day, each equally gripping.

It's the counterpoint of these two elements that makes the book so unusual, especially in children's literature, where books are generally either fantasy or 'real-life'. Casales is even more unusual in weaving this thread of magic into a book that deals with the very contemporary and troubling issues of domestic violence and abuse, and particularly in producing a book that deals with those issues obliquely, delicately, without the least bit of sensationalism or easy emotional tugs on the reader. What Evie suffered at the hands of her birth family is never specified, although it can be inferred - she herself, as the narrator, avoids giving it words, cleverly deflecting the probes of her teacher/counsellor, and indeed avoids even thinking about it except in sideways, partial glimpses. We feel the weight of its horror at moments, but always counterbalanced by the warmth, love and understanding Evie is surrounded with from her adopted family. Similarly, the bullying she suffers at school is painful, but always balanced by the support she gets from her two best friends. And ultimately, the anger and fear she still feels about her birth family is balanced by the steadfast, if elliptical, promise of the dragon.

The bone dragon acts as a kind of counterpart to the trauma Evie has suffered - as if the outrageous wrongness of what happened to her has called forth an equally outrageous and irrational magic in response, to rebalance the world. And there is indeed a kind of rebalancing in what the bone dragon achieves - a measure of peace for Evie and a measure of justice in the world. Along the way Casales offers us some wonderful characters and some extremely moving, funny, true-to-life interactions between them - I particularly love Evie's adopted Uncle Ben (everyone should have an Uncle Ben - where can I get one?). I've read reviews that carp slightly about how lovely Evie's adopted family are, as if Casales makes it all too easy. I don't think she does - I think what she shows is just how scarring this kind of experience is for any child, even when they get the best possible second chance, but also, just how much difference such a second chance can make. Personally, I mistrust books that pile on the misery, and one of the things I loved most about this book is precisely that Evie gets the love and security she deserves, and the help she needs, whether from her new family or from the magical bone dragon.

At the end of the book, Casales informs us that she herself, like Evie, has a piece of rib in a pot, and notes that potential critics should beware: it is just waiting to become a dragon. This, I assume, explains the incredibly assured and vivid descriptions she gives of the pain and feeling of shattered ribs. But since this is a nice review, she (hopefully) won't be needing that dragon to protect her!


C.J. Busby is the author of a knockabout magical fantasy series for children aged 7-9, Frogspell and sequels (see www.frogpell.co.uk)
Twitter: @ceciliabusby

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READING AND DYSLEXIA - A review of the use of e-readers by Cecilia Busby

A month ago, an eleven-year-old boy from our local secondary school won the CILIP Carnegie Shadowing Haiku competition ( http://www.alcs.co.uk/ALCS-News/June-2013/ALCS-News-Bulletin-June-2013/Carnegie-Winner-piece). This was his haiku:

In my possession
I have a word soup, jumbled
Into little grains

The poem is about the experience of dyslexia - apt, in a year in which the Carnegie was won by Sally Gardner, herself dyslexic, and her book, Maggot Moon, which features a main character unable to read or write. My review today relates to the same subject - its not about any one book, but about access to reading for those with dyslexia.

Sally Gardner deliberately wrote Maggot Moon with short chapters, because she could remember how frustrating it was as a child to be asked, "What chapter have you got to now?" and having to admit that she was still on the same one. It's a problem my daughter would identify with. At ten, she has not yet been diagnosed, but it's looking very much as if her reading problems are related to some form of dyslexia. When she saw James Cutler's haiku, above, she said: "That's exactly what it's like! Exactly what it feels like, looking at a page of words..." Izzy is ten, and while she loves books, her slow reading speed has made it very hard for her to access the kinds of books she would ideally like to read - the ones that engage her intellectually and emotionally. They take too long to read, the print is too small, the lines too close together. On the other hand, the books she could manage strike her generally as too simplistic, too dull, or too silly. So she tends to struggle through the longer books, but it's a painful process, and it's all too easy to give up.

Recently, however, we've discovered a device that has made a phenomenal difference to Izzy's ability to access the books she wants to read, and to successfully negotiate that 'word soup'. The device she uses is a Kindle Fire, but in fact most e-readers can perform the same functions - the key is the ability to increase font size, and the use of a text-to-voice application.  When we first got her a kindle, for its ability to increase font size, it did help her read books she otherwise found difficult - it cut down the number of times she mixed words up or skipped lines. But the biggest revelation - and one she discovered herself - was the 'voice' function. With headphones in, the rather robotic voice that 'reads' the displayed text confirmed for her what each word was as she read it. As she put it to me: "It's like using stabilisers on a bicycle." The voice supports her when she hits a word that would otherwise make her stumble, it keeps her going at a steady speed, and it allows her to 'read' at a pace that keeps the story flowing and exciting. At the moment, she's reading Gillian Cross's dystopian novel, After Tomorrow - and has amazed us and herself by how far she's got through it already.

At first, I was a little sceptical about her using the voice function - how could this monotonous voice enhance the imaginative side of reading? Was it even reading, really? But talking to her, and seeing the pleasure she's getting from the experience, has converted me. In many ways the monotone seems to act a little like the plain black-and-white words on the-page to a fast/automatic reader - just as such a reader turns that sterile code not into individual 'words' in their head but into a whole colourful scene of characters and events, so a dyslexic reader can take the monotone voice, alongside the words, and convert it into 'seen' action. In this sense it is very different to audio books (which my daughter also enjoys), and much more like the experience of 'normal' reading - with work and input required from your own individual imagination.

There are a number of text-to-voice applications for e-readers (a list is available here:
http://atcoalition.org/article/accessibility-and-e-readers) but they are mostly aimed at people with visual impairments. I've not seen them recommended for dyslexics before. I hope this review might encourage a few people to try the technology for their children - for Izzy, it's opened up a whole world of more technically difficult reads, and a hugely affirming level of personal control over her reading.



Cecilia Busby writes as C.J. Busby
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A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge, reviewed by Cecilia Busby

The heroine of Frances Hardinge's new book, A Face Like Glass, actually has quite a normal face - it's everyone else who is odd. Discovered in his cheese tunnels by the cantankerous old cheese master, Grandible, the child Neverfell has something no one else in the underground city-world of Caverna has: a face that displays its emotions quite naturally. When Grandible first finds her, half drowned after falling into his vat of Neverfell curds, he expects a Face - a 'learned expression' - to be pasted onto her otherwise immobile features, just at it would be with any other denizen of Caverna. "I wonder which Face it will be?" he thinks. "No. 29 - Uncomprehending Fawn before Hound? No. 64 - Violet Trembling in Sudden Shower?" But the truth is that Neverfell is an outsider - she had fallen down somehow into the underground world from 'up above', where the legend has it that the relentless sun shrivels you up and peels off your skin. And her face displays a bewildering array of emotions that you can see right through to her thoughts and feelings - hence a face like glass.

Hardinge's worlds are always wildly inventive and fantastically described, and her heroines have a wonderfully feisty ability to turn them upside down and inside out. Mosca Mye, in Hardinge's debut, Fly By Night, reminded me strongly of Dido Twite, and Hardinge's writing in general is reminiscent of Joan Aiken's - the same kind of adventurous romp, the great cast of secondary characters, the sense that you're never quite sure what disaster is going to happen next, but you know somehow the heroine will survive it in grand style. This one though, has to do a lot of work to carry the central conceit about Faces, and I found myself wondering what this idea had enabled Hardinge to do, and where it had hindered her.

In the acknowledgements for A Face Like Glass, Hardinge thanks her editors for letting her write a book "that sounds crazy even to me". It sounded crazy to me, too, and I have to admit, the premise very slightly put me off reading this one, even though I'd really enjoyed Hardinge's previous books. When I did read it, I found myself utterly gripped by the story, the writing, and the characters, and yet not totally convinced by the logic of the world she'd developed.

The inhabitants of Caverna display no emotions on their faces, yet they crave the ability to display them, and pay large sums to learn new expressions from Facesmiths, who teach them the appropriate facial positions for, say 'Contemplation of Verdigris' or 'An apprehension of Apple Boughs', as well as more complex emotions such as 'World Weary with a Hint of Sadness and a Core of Basic Integrity'.  They can choose appropriate Faces to let others know what they are feeling, or to influence them - what they cannot do is ever be sure the Face another person is displaying has anything to do with their true emotions.

This set-up works in numerous ways to enhance the book. It really allows Hardinge to have fun with the social structure of Caverna: the richer you are, the more Faces you can afford, while the drudges - the poor, the servants - have only one Face, of respectfully waiting for orders, or at the most, can add an extra eager-to-please smile. It doesn't matter how angry, upset, resentful, hungry or sad they feel, they can only ever offer their masters a Face of respect and readiness for work. Meanwhile, the rich at court play endless games of power - using their Faces to display their wealth and power, to influence others or to indicate particularly chosen emotions in the same way that an expert card player uses his aces and trumps to dominate the game.

Neverfell has the useful role of the innocent, who naively trusts everyone - who takes them completely at face value, and cannot see the hidden calculations going on behind the Faces. Much as a young child gradually learns to discern false emotions from true ones, Neverfell gradually learns to see the signs that all is not as it seems - people's deeds, in the end, don't match their Faces. But in turn, her innocent, puppyish friendliness and trust disturbs the careful balance of suspicion and mistrust that fuels these political games - and one of my favourite characters is actually the very political young aristocrat, Zouelle Childersin, who is most affected by Neverfell's blundering appearance in the middle of her plots.

Despite the ways the Faces conceit fuels the plot and the wonderful strangeness of this world, I still felt slightly unconvinced by the central idea. Wouldn't the inhabitants of Caverna have learnt to judge people by voice and body language, rather than these paid-for Faces? In which case, the faces would have become redundant - mere toys, soon discarded. Wouldn't the drudges have expressed their emotions by voice and word, or by gesture, rather than taking their fellow drudge's Face of acquiescence as some kind of real expression of their acceptance, which Hardinge suggests has prevented the spread of resistance or revolution? Why did the inhabitants even value or attempt to learn Faces linked to emotions, when there was effectively no one who displayed real emotions via their face in that world? The outsiders, who did so, were traded with but generally kept at very long arm's length. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't really see this particular aspect of the world Hardinge has created as anything but implausible, and yet without it, much of the driving force of the book is lost.

However, in the end, I was prepared to put aside my doubts about the Faces, and just enjoy the exuberant invention that makes the book such a delight - who could resist the 500-year-old ruler of Caverna, who only lets half of his mind sleep at a time, and rules non-stop as either Left -Eye (non-verbal, intuitive, slightly random) or Right-Eye (verbal, logical, scrupulously organised). Or the idea of a cheese that, if not turned and fed in exactly the right way, will explode with the force of dynamite. Or the Cartographers, the map-makers of Caverna, to whom you can only speak for a limit of five minutes before they twist your mind into the same warped madness as their own.

Read it - see what you think for yourselves. It's a romp.



Cecilia Busby is the author (as C.J. Busby) of Frogspell, Cauldron Spells, Icespell and Sword Spell (Templar).

www.frogspell.co.uk



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Christopher Uptake by Susan Price

Reviewed by Cecilia Busby

Available on Kindle

"Christopher Uptake" is a curious book. I have an original copy of it, illustrated with a picture of a rather serious young Elizabethan man, bending over some writing in a dark room, illuminated only by a candle. The newly issued Kindle cover has an immediately recognisable portrait of an altogether more confident character, gazing at the viewer with a hint of challenge in his eyes.

The motto on the original portrait (below) is "Quod me nutrit me destruit" - that which nourishes me also destroys me. In Elizabethan times the motto was associated with a torch or candle held upside down - the falling wax causing the candle to burn more brilliantly but also eventually extinguishing the flame. The image reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night; But ah my friends and oh my foes - it gives a lovely light!" The lovely light, was, of course, the short but brilliant career of Christopher Marlowe, poet, dramatist, atheist and spy, whose wild living and controversial opinions may have led to his murder at the age of 29.

Christopher Uptake is clearly based on Marlowe - yet strangely that link is not made in the blurb for either the original or the re-issued book, despite the portrait on the front. Nor do any of the Amazon reviews mention it. It seems odd. Uptake, like Marlowe, is the son of a tradesman, a grammar-school boy who wins a scholarship to Cambridge, an atheist who takes to writing plays, and who gets mixed up in the Elizabethan secret service, spying on the equivalent of Second World War fifth columnists: the English Catholics. Yet Uptake is not Marlowe; his trajectory is, finally, very different. Rather than taking to the business of spying with gusto, Uptake is riven with doubts. He suffers from stabs of conscience and from guilt at the thought of what his spying may lead to for the Catholics taken and tortured by the Elizabethan secret police. Uptake is a reluctant spy, caught in a net where his cooperation is ensured by threats to himself and his family. He is represented as a miserable collaborator with a harshly repressive state regime.

It's a long way from the swashbuckling image of Marlowe the dramatist, with the "high astounding terms" of his bravura verse, his reputed love of "tobacco and boys", and the boast that "he had as good a right to coin as the Queen of England and ... meant through help of a cunning stamp-maker to coin French crowns, pistolets and English shillings". I have to confess to having fallen half in love with this version of Marlowe when I was sixteen and first discovered Tamberlaine the Great. In the preface to my secondhand copy of his Collected Works was a reproduction of the infamous Baines Note, detailing Marlowe's supposed blasphemies. That, for example, "all Protestants are hypocritical asses", and "if he were put to write a new religion he would undertake both a more excellent and admirable method" as "all the New Testament if filthily written". Like the later Marx, he argued that "the beginnings of religion was only to keep men in awe", and that "Moses was a juggler". Doubts have been cast on how much of this was really Marlowe's opinions and how much was malicious slander - but I was hooked: by the poetry, the drama, and the blasphemies.

Reading "Christopher Uptake", I wondered whether Susan Price had set out to write about Marlowe and then found that she couldn't make it work. Simply couldn't find a way "in" to a character who was so obviously intelligent and free-thinking and yet came to work as a spy for the government, betrayed those he had feigned friendship with, professed a Catholic faith only to entrap and incriminate others. Perhaps she just couldn't prevent the guilt and the doubt overwhelming her Christopher, unlike the historical one, to the point where he had to become Uptake rather than Marlowe.  It seems curious, otherwise, to stick so closely to the original and yet give her character's story such a different resolution. Certainly the book made me think much more deeply than I have before about what it would have been like to live in the time of Elizabeth I, what it really meant to be surrounded by such a strong network of spies and agents provocateurs, to live in the middle of rumour, plots, counterplots, agents and double-agents. It would have been, I think, a little like living in Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Uptake is a young man who wants to be left alone, doesn't want to do anyone any harm; yet in such times it's hard to stay neutral, and Christopher struggles in the sticky webs laid by the Queen's spymasters.

I was really gripped by Christopher's predicament, by his moral dilemmas and justifications, as well as his attempts to limit the damage he has done. Price does an excellent job of making his world believable, making us care about Christopher, making us desperate for him to escape the clutches of the sinister spy, Bagthorpe. It's a book that lives on in the imagination after it's read, and it certainly made me think again about the real Christopher Marlowe and what he may or may not have done in the service of the unscrupulous Sir Francis Walsingham (pictured).

I think there are ways to understand Marlowe's role as a spy, particularly when you remember that England at the time was a small and insecure island, surrounded by great Catholic powers simply waiting for a chance to invade. It was a crueller time, life was more fragile and more contingent. But Susan Price's Christopher is a fine creation that certainly serves as a challenge to anyone who admires the playwright: what made Marlowe choose differently from Uptake?


Cecilia Busby writes as C.J. Busby
She is the author of Frogspell, Cauldron Spells, Ice Spell and Swordspell
www.frogspell.co.uk

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The Storm Bottle by Nick Green

THE STORM BOTTLE by Nick Green, reviewed by Cecilia Busby

I thoroughly enjoyed The Storm Bottle - in fact, I read it under the covers in bed, just as if I were ten, not wanting to go to sleep till I knew what was going to happen next. It's a perfect adventure story - with the twist that two of the main protagonists are part-human, part-dolphin, and mirror images of each other - one, a dolphin trapped in a human body, the other, that same human trapped in the dolphin's body. Their link is Bibi, the girl who is our narrator, and who witnessed the moment of the transfer when her step-brother almost drowned, trying to swim with dolphins, and was brought back to consciousness strangely unable to speak or do the simplest thing for himself. The book really takes off from this point, where we switch back and forth between the attempts of the misplaced dolphin, Rodrigo, to learn to be human, along with Bibi's gradual understanding of what's happened, and the separate adventures of the boy Michael, learning to swim, fish and fight with Rodrigo's ex-pals. I loved the dolphin bits - the idea of the dolphins as a little like swashbuckling pirates with Spanish accents - and although dolphin society was portrayed as exceptionally sexist (maybe it is, who knows?), the female dolphin character who befriends Michael is a very strong presence. In the background are a number of family tensions: Bibi and her step-brother loathe each other, their parents having only recently married, and the raw emotions let loose by Michael's apparent 'brain damage' after his accident look set to destroy that marriage just as Bibi starts to have some empathy for Michael. The driving force of the book, however, and the element that kept me reading till it was way past my bedtime, is the question of whether Michael and Rodrigo will manage to find a way to return to their original lives, to switch back: the odds don't look good, but if anyone can make it happen, it will be Bibi. She is the heart of the book, and a great character: she is feisty, independent and determined but also hides a knot of grief and hurt deep down. The way that Rodrigo, the dolphin-turned-boy, sees this, and gets her finally talking about it, is really moving. I won't give away the end - but it's a gripping read, which is as much fun for adults as children, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Cecilia Busby is the author, as C.J. Busby, of the Spell series, published by Templar

www.frogspell.co.uk

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