AS IN THE LONG AGO

 So, here we are in the 1990s and we're starting to see more and more books about 'Issues'. In 1991 Berlie Doherty tackled teenage parenthood, and you might say that in 1992 Anne Fine was in the same territory, although while  Flour Babies  touches on some of the same issues as  Dear Nobody  it's also funny and poetic and beautifully constructed. It absolutely avoids any kind of preaching and I love the way the words and tune of an old song are woven into the final third of the book and contribute to its transformative climax. This book has a tremendous final paragraph and I do love a good ending. It's a shame I can't quote it but that really would be a spoiler. Then in 1993 as a complete contrast there was  Stone Cold  by Robert Swindells, a bleak book with a central character who is all victim and has no agency whatsoever, and apparently no hope. It's a book, almost a documentary, about teenage homelessness, dressed up as a thriller about a serial killer p

  Dear Nobody  is one of those Carnegie winners that has managed to remain in print since its original publication and which has had a life of its own. It has been extensively translated and much used in schools to prompt discussion about teenage pregnancy. Berlie Doherty says on her website: 'I knew that in  Dear Nobody  I was handling a difficult situation. It is about two young people who love each other, but it's also about the ways in which love can go wrong, and how sometimes it can make us do things that aren't sensible or that hurt people. In a broad sense, it's about family love and family relationships, how sometimes love turns to hate and drives people and families apart.' Well, yes, it is all that. But what struck me most about  Dear Nobody  was that it was about choices and how we make them. When I wrote on this blog about Berlie Doherty's first Carnegie winner,  Granny Was a Buffer Girl  I said that any of the stories in it could have been expanded

 1990 seems like yesterday to me. I mean, it sounds quite recent until I remember that it was the year my son was born and  so, obviously, it was 33 years ago.  I just watched an excellent documentary about Judy Blume -  Judy Blume Forever  - (it's on Amazon Prime) and I could hardly believe that  Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret  was published in 1970, a full 20 years before this month's 1990 Carnegie winner,  Wolf , by Gillian Cross. And in 1990 it was books by Judy Blume that my 12 year old daughter was reading, and they were more frank, especially about sex, than any books published in this country for teenagers at that time. The young assistants in Waterstones, where I just bought a copy, were very excited about the upcoming film of the book, and they weren't even born when it was first published. It's interesting to compare  Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret  with  Wolf . The aspects of  Margaret  that attracted most attention were the frank depicti

 Lately, I've been making shirts. It turns out that I make all the same mistakes when I'm sewing as I do when I'm writing a book. Luckily, when a shirt goes wrong you've only wasted a day or two of your life, rather than a year or two - or ten! This free, customisable shirt pattern can  be downloaded from the V&A website.  Actually, when a shirt goes wrong it's usually possible to fix the problem by undoing what you've done and re-doing it properly, so the shirt isn't really wasted - it's just provided you with a painful learning experience. It would be nice if a troublesome book could be fixed as easily.  At least with a shirt you do have a pattern to follow, and a set of instructions, although the pattern usually has to be altered to fit and the instructions seem to quite often miss out crucial bits of information. Or, just as likely, I haven't read those instructions properly.  It turns out that my way of making shirts is very similar to my wa

 Once again I've made the mistake of reading a Carnegie winner long before I come to write about it. I read  A Pack of Lies  by Geraldine McCaughrean a few months back but when I took it off the shelf again I couldn't remember a single thing about it! Of course, when I started reading it (again) it all came flooding back, but it's set me wondering about a few things, chiefly whether some books are more easy to forget than others. Or perhaps I should say, easier for  me  to forget. I do know that it has nothing to do with how enjoyable a book is. I enjoyed  A Pack of Lies  very much, both times! And I often pick up books by my favourite crime writers in charity shops and read a few pages, then buy the book, convinced that I haven't read it before, only to find, once I'm 50 pages in, that I actually do know what's going to happen. Looking back over the list of Carnegie winners I realised that the act of writing about them seems to have cemented them into my brain

 It's almost 20 years since my wife, Ellie, died of breast cancer, but before she died she contributed to a book edited by Tania Yelland called  All Woman: A Life after Breast Cancer.  Tania Yelland* also died several years ago, so there's a kind of grim irony about the book's title, but it's not in any way a grim book. Rather, it's a collection of pieces of writing by thirty quite different women about how they coped with their illness and its aftermath. One of the things the contributors were asked to do, in addition to having their photo taken by Arthur Edwards who at that time specialised in taking photos of royalty for The Sun newspaper, was to choose a helpful quote for the start of the piece. Ellie almost chose this, which we'd seen at the start of Kevin Crossley-Holland's  The Norse Myths. 'Fearlessness is better than faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors.'  (Anonymous lines from  For Scirnis ) Readers of Susan Price's 19

Not many teen romances had won the Carnegie Medal before 1986, but that was the year Berlie Doherty won, somewhat to her surprise, with  Granny was a Buffer Girl. She  gave the world four love stories for the price of one, with added extras. This Mammoth edition is  not the greatest. The book had its origins in a series of short stories that Doherty was asked to write for BBC Radio Sheffield and it was inspired by William Rothenstein's painting  Buffer Girls  in Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield. These stories were then later reworked into a novel. It's a short novel which begins as Jess, the central character and sometimes the narrator, is about to leave home for a year in France as part of her university course. Her family have gathered to celebrate the life of her brother, Danny. Danny has died some years earlier, at more or less the same age Jess is at the start of the book, though at first we're told very little about him. It's only later that we learn of his life co

This Carnegie Medal reading project is starting to make me feel old. In 1982 Margaret Mahy won with  The Haunting . I'd been thinking that now we were in the 1980s I'd be starting to read more books by authors who are still very familiar to readers today, and then I realised that this book was published 40 years ago.  When I was a primary school teacher back in the 1980s Margaret Mahy's picture books, like  The Lion in the Meadow  and  The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate  were much-read fixtures in our classrooms, but I never read her books for older children and young adults at the time. I probably  would  have read them, but for my aversion to ghost stories, and that's a shame because Mahy writes about the supernatural like nobody else I know. Actually, Mahy  writes  like nobody else I know. I am an inveterate skipper and skimmer of text but I promise you I read every single word of this book because every single word is so brilliant. Look at how she describes what'

The Scarecrows  by Robert Westall is a novel about sex, violence and masculinity. It won the Carnegie Medal in 1981 and it is very different from Westall's first winner,  The Machine Gunners . It has taken me some time, and two readings, to figure out what is going on in the book: I started by feeling revolted by much of it, but while it's never going to be an easy read I have gradually realized that this complex story ventures into areas not often explored by fiction, whether intended for adults or children, and that the things that I disliked so much are there for a reason. Do I like the book now? No. Is there a lot to think about? Yes.  The book left a nasty taste in my mouth and despite many passages of very powerful writing, I don't think it achieves what it seems to be trying to achieve. It paints a vivid picture of a boy with a lot of problems who is in a difficult situation, but I can't see how it would help a child in the same kind of trouble. And, perhaps more