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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Hilary McKay's FAIRY TALES reviewed by Adèle Geras

Please notice the title of this book. It's not  "Fairy Tales by Hilary McKay" but rather "Hilary McKay's Fairy Tales." And that is precisely what these are: tales that Hilary McKay has taken from the general stock of such stories and made entirely her own. She is well-served by the beautiful illustrations of Sarah Gibb, who has decorated this volume with a series of pictures, using paper cut-outs, which perfectly capture the flavour of each story.

For a wonder, Hilary McKay is someone I've never properly met, though we are buddies on Twitter and by post. But as ever, I have to assure my readers that I am in the enviable position of ONLY reviewing books I really want to review and this is one of them. I have form with fairytales. I've retold them several times. I have written a modern YA trilogy based on them (Happy Ever After: the Egerton Hall trilogy). I love them. I want children to know them and I don't object to Disney's contributions in this field. I grew up with the original, OLD  versions of Snow White and Cinderella and they still colour my image of these stories. I am promised the new, non-animated Beauty and the Beast next weekend, when I'm babysitting my grandchildren and I can't wait. 

It's difficult to convey exactly what Hilary McKay has done, but it's a combination of retelling of the original stories in their conventional form, together with added twists, updates, references and jokes, too, which lift them straight into modernity, without losing any of their old-fashioned magic and power. And the pictures, such as that for Snow White above (the hunter taking Snow White into the forest to kill her, on the orders of her stepmother) are old-fashioned and resolutely decorative.  They add enormously to the pleasures of reading this book.

McKay has chosen 10 stories out of many. She asks questions about the tales to which she provides modern answers. In her introduction she writes: 
"It was exhausting and wonderful to write this book. I walked miles through forests. I watched swans and skies.  I read and read. I studied silks  and brocades. I visited salt marshes and windmills. .....If ever I wrote a book with love, it is this one."

The love is apparent on every page. Those readers who know Hilary McKay's other work will know what an assured and stylish writer she is. Basically, she doesn't put a foot wrong. There are no false notes anywhere in her prose. Her timing is brilliant. Look at those short sentences and see what poetry she can conjure up just by the placement of several full stops...she's a marvel.

And, of course, we know the stories are great. Most of us have read them before.  Therefore we can enjoy such twists as appear. For example, the 'Princess' in Princess and the Pea is not entirely who she seems to be and  (this is spookily prescient! Meg can, of course be a diminutive of Meghan!)  Also, the jokes are fun. There's a fabulous school in the Hansel and Gretel story, where the teacher, one Angelika Maria (I wonder who McKay could possibly be thinking of?) takes a delightful register, containing such pupils as  'Punzel. R' and asks why she's absent. Gretel tells her: "She's been locked up in a tower for ages." And Hansel and Gretel's tale is presented as a 'What I did in my holidays' composition.

The other stories are no less clever and no less poetic. McKay also provides wonderful references for older readers. For instance, the heroine of the Red Riding Hood story is called Polly, which of course will remind many people of "Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf" by Catherine Storr: another real classic. This book too is  destined to become part of the fairytale canon. Any child who gets it for Christmas will be set up for a lifetime of taking pleasure in these old, old stories. 

Published by Pan Macmillan in hardback £12.99

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