Diversity and perversity

The winner of the first Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Award is Christy Burne with Takeshita Demons. Her novel, about a Japanese schoolgirl, will be published by Frances Lincoln and she wins £1,500.
Geraldine Brennan wrote a thoughtful piece about the award and the need for more diversity in children's books in the Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/schoolgate
and opened the floodgates to a horrifying reaction in the comments. The very least was along the lines of "they should publish their own books."

And these are responses to a broadsheet article, albeit online. I've found the same with the Guardian website. It's so bad that I've almost decided never to read online comments on anything, since they always seem to bring out a hang 'em and flog 'em, send 'em all back where they come from squad of commenters, who, I hope, represent a tiny minority of the population.

More news from Frances Lincoln is that Janetta Otter-Barry, former Children's Editorial Director, is to have her own list. Janetta will publish about twenty books a year in a very hands-on way as commissioner and editor. For the main FL children's list, Maurice Lyon will be Editorial Director. And both lists will continue to have a strong multi-cultural flavour.

This is in accord with the beliefs and principles of their founder, Frances Lincoln, who died unexpectedly, aged 55, in 2001. Since then the company has been run by her widower, John Nicoll, who has continued to publish children's books that accord with Frances's philosophy.

How pleased she would be with the new developments.

May books

May 7th and thereabouts has become a very popular date for publishers to bring out new titles for juniors and teens. Here is a selective list:
N.M. Browne Warriors of Ethandun
Fiona Dunbar Tiger-Lily Gold
Adèle Geras Dido
Liz Kessler Philippa Fisher and the Dream-maker's Daughter
Katherine Langrish Dark Angels
Tabitha Suzuma Without Looking Back
Leslie Wilson Saving Rafael

Now, I have not managed to read all of these yet but I can tell you that two of them at least are corkers. I read Saving Rafael some time ago in proof and thought it very strong. It's basically a love story of a German teenage girl in Berlin before and during WW2 and her Jewish friend Rafael. Some of it makes for very bleak reading but it's not a run-of-the-mill tale of star-crossed lovers and Leslie Wilson keeps you guessing till the last minute about whether they will escape and survive. An earlier novel of hers, Last Train to Kummersdorf, was very well received.

Completely different but very accomplished is Katherine Langrish's Dark Angels. This writer arrived on the scene with her three books about trolls ( a trollogy?): Troll Fell, Troll Mill and Troll Blood. Dark Angels is different again, a story set in the 12th century, about a boy called Wolf who escapes from a punitive monastery and finds a wild elf-child, who has been abandoned by her people.

Both of them are captured by Sir Hugh, a crusader and troubadour, and taken back to his home, where his daughter Agnes is intrigued by both of them. Sir Hugh is maddened by grief for his dead wife and believes that the elves could restore her to him. So it falls to Wolf to try and teach the child to speak.

But a plot summary doesn't really do this book justice. I loved the way the final part spiralled into some very weird places but never out of control.

Coraline the movie

I saw this last night, in glorious 3D, with special specs, such as I haven't used since I was a child. Not the cardboard framed, one red, one green lens effort of back then but something more like regular shades. We must have been quite a cool-looking audience; in fact the photographer from Laika took a picture of us all specced up.

It was a visually stunning realisation of a book that just begged to be made into a film.

At first it was a bit of a shock to hear Dakota Fanning voicing Coraline but of course it made good economic sense for her to be American and it's an American film company. The second shock was the arrival of a character who doesn't appear in the book - Wyborne (Wybie) Lovat - whose grandmother owns the house.
He serves two functions: a sounding board for Coraline, who would otherwise have had to spend a lot of time talking to herself and someone for the boy viewers to identify with.

Once past these changes, I was struck by the film's fidelity to the book. They both have the very strong USP of the little girl who goes through a door in the wall of her parents' new apartment and finds an alternative mother and father in the one next door.

At first they seems a refreshing change, since they actually have time for Coraline, as well as cooking her favourite food and creating a wonderful garden for her to play in. This is in direct contrast with her real parents, who spend all their time at their computers, expecting Coraline to amuse herself.

But at least her real parents have real eyes! Other-mother and Other-father have buttons sewn in where they should have theirs. And Other-mother, who is rapidly revealed as the mastermind behind Coraline's Other-home, says she can perform the same little adjustment for Coraline as a condition of her staying in the preferable flat for ever.

That's when Coraline decides she would rather have her original life. "The needle's so sharp, it won't hurt" is Other-father's idea of reassurance.

The set-pieces are quite spectacular: a hundred blossoms really do bloom in Other-garden - and multiply exponentially; the mouse circus sequence is a tour-de-force of Busby Berkeley-ish exuberance and the scenes towards the end when the Evil Mother's powers are challenged and her elaborate traps demolished are visually stunning.

The grotesques that are Coraline's neighbours in both worlds - Miss Spink and Mis Forcible (voiced by French and Saunders) and Mr Bobinsky (Ian McShane) - are really OTT grotesque. And there are two things that work better "visually" in the book. One is the scene, in the cellar in the original, where Coraline finds that the concept of Other Father has been unravelled by the Beldam. He tries to warn the girl but is unable to stop himself from attempting to hurt her. In the movie, he charges towards her on his mechanical preying mantis in the garden and collapses through a bridge. It's spectacular but doesn't compare with the creeping sinister, clutching, open- mouthed, eyeless figure in the cellar.

The other is that the Beldam's hand, which gets in through the door in the wall, is in the film a kind of spindly metal scurrying thing. But you don't really need to make Neil Gaiman more scary; that severed hand with the red-painted fingernails is quite horrific enough.

I'm also sorry that it's Wybie who crushes the hand at the end. Bring in a boy if you must but don't let him take anything away from Coraline's heroism and resourcefulness; in Gaiman's orginal she lures the hand to its destruction by a trick that requires a cool brain more than a hot head.

But these are quibbles. It's a spectacular film and a triumph for the animators at Laika who spent four years lovingly creating every detail. It will linger in the mind a long time, so be careful what child you take to see it. Not for those under ten and/or of a nervous disposition.

The long, the short and the confusing

Here they are: Henrietta Branford in colour and Wendy Boase in Black and white. Their names are commemorated in the Branford Boase Award whose shortlist has just been published. It is a prize for a first book for children or teenagers and not only the author but the editor of it.

Before we get on to the shortlisted authors and editors, a word or two more about the women in whose memory they are being honoured. Henrietta was a writer, who produced two dozen book, from picturebooks to novels in the round about thirteen years she had from her "late start" at the age of forty till she was lost to breast cancer.

Wendy Boase was a charismatic editor at Walker Books, one of the founder members with Sebastian Walker and Art Editor Amelia Edwards, who had edited Henrietta Branford's work. They died within weeks of each other in 1999, Boase also a cancer victim, and the award was set up in their joint names. This is the tenth year.

The first winner was Katherine Roberts, who later wrote the magnificent I am the Great Horse, and others over the years have been Marcus Sedwick, Meg Rosoff and Frances Hardinge.

This year's shortlist is a bit confusing. Here it is:

The Traitor Game by B.R.Collins edited by Emma Matthewson, Bloomsbury
The Toymaker by Jeremy de Quidt, edited by Bella Pearson, David Fickling Books
Flood Child by Emily Diamand (formerly Reavers' Ransom) edited by Imogen Cooper of Chicken House
Between Two Seas by Marie-Louise Jensen, edited by Liz Cross of OUP
Bloodline by Katy Moran, edited by Denise Johnstone-Burt of Walker Books
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, edited by Denise Johnstone-Burt of Walker Books
Ways to Live Forever by Sally Nicholls, edited by Marion Lloyd of Marion Lloyd Books

Last year's winning writer was Jenny Downham, whose Before I Die was reviewed in many places alongside Sally Nicholls' book because they were both about main characters with fatal illnesses. Sally's book won the Waterstone's award.

But Before I Die was shortlisted for the Guardian Award, which Patrick Ness won with The Knife of Never Letting Go. Marie-Louise Jensen's Between Two Seas was on the shortlist for the Waterstone's award that Sally Nicholls' book won but Marie-Louise's second book, The Lady in the Tower, has also already been also on the shortlist for this year's Waterstone's prize.

Which is all another way of saying that all children's book prizes have different eligibility dates. It would be wonderful if they all, regardless of when the prizes were decioded and presented, covered the same time period!

Anyway, this is a list full of stonking good books, well worthy of the women whose work it commemorates and I don't envy the judges their task.

New Kid on the Block

Well, actually, David Teale is quite an "old kid" if he won't mind my saying so! He started the Red House Book Club thirty years ago and ran it for nearly twenty and now he's at it again. I met David in Bologna in March and he was telling me about his new website which has just gone live.

My School Book Club (www.myschoolbookclub.com) is dead easy to use. If you're a school, once you've registered, you'll have your own personalised website, e.g. www.bashstreetschoolbookclub.com and order books direct. If you're a parent, grandparent, you join and have the books sent straight to you. Either way the school benefits and gets 20% worth of orders extra in free books.

"The aim is to make reading pleasurable and help mental and personal development of children by guiding their reading," said David, who has four grown-up daughter and six grandchildren, stressing that this is all about pleasure and nothing to do with testing.

In time there will be all sorts of extra goodies like video clips and author interviews, games and so on. 15,000 schools have received a mailing about the new club, endorsed by former children's laureate, Michael Morpurgo, among others.

And the criteria for the books featured? "Nothing boring," says David Teale.

Old favourites

All the coverage I've seen and heard about the Children's laureates' favourite books has mentioned the absence of Harry Potter. This is just lazy journalism. Why would four writers and one author-illustrator who are "not in the first bloom of youth" as Anne Fine described them on Radio 4 this morning, pick such a Johnny-come-lately as HP?

What the headlines should have been were: "No Alice, no Pooh, no Peter Pan, no Wind in the Willows, no Tolkien or C S Lewis." For that is the case. You can read the full list of 35 books at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/5230697/Childrens-Laureates-pick-favourite-books---the-list-in-full.html

It is a funny list, as all such lists must be, with some of the usual suspects, like Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, John Masefield's Box of Delights and so on. Some are not children's books at all, like Oliver Twist, or only arguably so, like Treasure Island. It takes more than a child protagonist to make a children's book. I hated the Diary of Anne Frank (one of Mike Rosen's choices) when I was a child and felt moved by it only as an adult.

So here's my list of seven:

J R R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
OK, three books and not according to its author children's ones at that.

I read this as it came out, removing the volumes one by one from my older sister's hands as she finished them. And then I read them every year until I was 18 and doubts began to set in. I read them all to my three daughters in family reading and they loved them and we all, plus my sisiter, adored the Peter Jackson films.

But I can no longer read them as an adult with unalloyed pleasure. The storytelling, names and invented languages and cultures are superb but the language isn't good enough and the attitiudes to women and to "evil characters" totaly inadequate.

James Thurber's Thirteen Clocks
Many of the phrases from this are part of family vocabulary: "a blob of glup," "I'll slit you from your guggle to your zatch," plus the Gollux with his "perfectly indescribable hat" are just part of my mental furniture. The Wonderful O and The Great Quillow are equally good.

E. Nesbit's Five Children and It (one of Quentin Blake's choices)
One of the great classics. I loved the way the sand fairy was so grumpy. But I found I had to expurgate the appalling class attitudes towards the cook etc, when reading Nesbit aloud to my own children.

Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories (One of Michael Morpurgo's)
I adored these and so did the girls. My favourite is The Beginning of the Armadilloes

Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden
An almost perfect children's book. Other recent ones with this claim are Louis Sachar's Holes and Frank Cottrell Boyce's Cosmic.

Lewis Carrol's Alice Through the Looking-Glass
I had Adventures in Wonderland as a child but prefer this one, discovered in adulthood. I especially love the White Knight.

Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle
You need to be a 13-year-old girl for this, which I was when I read it first. And I thought the film, with Romola Garai and Bill Nighy, wasn't half bad either.

My omissions? Well I have never liked Peter Pan or Wind in the Willows. I read every word of Enid Blyton but can remember not one so haven't included anything of hers.(her husband did take my appendix out, though).

And CS Lewis is a mystery to me. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a wonderful title and Narnia a magical invention but I find the books such a sloppy unsatisfactory mishmash that they could never be a favourite.

We want him to be handsome

I heard Professor Stanley Wells discussing the Cobbe portrait with Sir Roy "codswallop" Strong on the radio this morning. Wells is convinced that the portrait is not only Shakespeare but painted from life; not sure who Strong thinks it is but another Shakespeare critic, Katherine Duncan-Jones, thinks it is Sir Thomas Overy.

Now Katie Duncan-Jones taught me a bit at Cambridge when she was a research student and I was an undergraduate. I daresay we have both come on a lot since then.

But what interests me is why so many people, including me, want this to be what the great writer looks like, rather than the Martin Droeshout engraving in the Folio. I'm reading Peter Ackroyd's biography of Shakespeare at present and he says he reckons the bust in Stratford church, which has been described as "looking like a pork butcher" is probably closer than even the Chandos portrait (the swarthy one with the gold earring). He says "why shouldn't a great writer look like a pork butcher?" which is a fair question. (Mind you, if you look at PA's author photo, you might consider it special pleading)

The thing is, we DO want people to look like their books. I'm sure Shakespeare's intelligence, subtlety and wit would have illuminated even the stodgiest of countenances but, since we'll never know, we hope he might have been objectively as attractive as his writing.

Why else are author photos on jacket flaps or back covers usually at least ten years old and taken from the writer's best side?

Happy birthday, Will. Handsome is as handsome does, which makes you a stunner in my book.