AS IN THE LONG AGO

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 o...

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. Lo...

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...

It was on the 6th March 2020 that I started posting about my plan to read my way through the Carnegie Medal-winning books, starting at the beginning. It's strange to think that it was two and a half years ago, and before the first lock-down. It's starting to feel like a long time, but at last I've reached the half-way point—42 down and 42 to go. So I think it's a good time to take stock and see what, if anything, I've learned from the experience. The 42nd winner of the Carnegie was Peter Dickinson's retelling of Old Testament stories in  City of Gold . Dickinson was remarkably down to earth in his assessments of his work. Of  City of Gold  he said: 'I was happy with the result, but at the same time flabbergasted when the book won the Carnegie Medal. When I'm asked what sort of books I write I say the sort that adults think children ought to read. That isn't my purpose. I intend them to be enjoyed, but I admit that a lot of my reviews contain the drea...

I was in a second-hand bookshop in Lavenham in Suffolk in 1989 when I picked up a copy of  Scott's Last Expedition,  abridged for children. I was on a cycling tour of East Anglia with my wife and daughter and the book made for perfect evening reading. And it was a gateway book for me into the vast and freezing realms of polar literature. I collected many books by members of Scott's expeditions, and soon moved on to Shackleton. I'll mention a few of my favourites, but before I do it occurred to me earlier that I couldn't think of any children's fiction concerning polar exploration. Then I thought, well, it would be a bit hard to convincingly get children to the Poles without adult supervision. And then  I realised that I'd just finished a book that did so, in its way. That book is Arthur Ransome's  Winter Holiday,  and though the North Pole that is the object of the adventure is not the real Pole, the adventure on the frozen lake is almost as tense and fright...

Several times now I've read that the real central character in the 1978 Carnegie winner,  The Exeter Blitz  by David Rees, is the city of Exeter. The novel describes the experiences of the fictional Lockwood family on the night of the 3rd-4th of May 1942 when a massive German bombing raid destroyed much of the city. This bombing raid was part of a German retaliation for the Allied fire-bombing of Lubeck earlier that year. The Baedeker Raids, as they were called, targeted English cities of particular cultural importance and took place  mainly in April and May 1942.  David Rees's book reminded me of a TV drama-documentary where, to give a bit more focus to the recycled archive footage and add human interest some invented scenes are recreated by actors in the studio. The book also slightly alters history. David Rees says in his introduction: 'The story is not intended to be an exact reconstruction of the events in Exeter of the night of May 3rd-4th . . . The magnitude o...

  The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler  by Gene Kemp is this month's Carnegie Medal winner and it is the first winner to be written in the first person. It's not the first children's book to be written that way, but I don't think that before 1977 there had been all that many. I'd be interested to see what readers can come up with, but I immediately thought of Oswald Bastable, narrator of E. Nesbit's books about  The Treasure Seekers .  Here is Oswald at the start of  The Wouldbegoods : 'My father said, "Perhaps they had better go to boarding school." And that was awful because we know Father disapproves of boarding-schools. And he looked at us and said, "I am ashamed of them, sir!" Your lot is indeed a dark and terrible one when your father is ashamed of you. And we all knew this, so that we felt in our chests just as if we had swallowed a hard-boiled egg whole. At least, this is what Oswald felt . . . so, of course, the others felt the same....

Here on this blog you can find posts about Carnegie Medal winning books, starting in 1936 with Arthur Ransome's Pigeon Post. Older posts deal with education and all sorts of other things. You can also find pages about the children's books I've written, and a little bit about me. All the illustrations on the Books pages are by Emily May. I have another blog about my bike trip around the North Sea in 2015. There's a link in the sidebar. Enjoy your visit!