AS IN THE LONG AGO

  A dozen Carnegie winners. Look Both Ways  by Jason Reynolds won in 2021 On his website Jason Reynolds has a film,  Dear Dreamer , (there's a link lower down) which was produced 'in collaboration with the hardworking students, educators and dreamers of Atlanta.' In the film he says 'I think I just want to create work which makes young people feel cared for.' This reminded me of Elizabeth Acevedo's statement that 'I hold young people more tenderly,' (than adult readers). She was suggesting, I think, that in her adult work she is more honest—things are less likely to turn out well there. She allows more hope to younger readers.  Jason Reynolds means something different, or maybe something extra, because he does show great tenderness towards his characters. Bad things happen but people make it through by caring for each other. The extra thing he's saying is that by writing about the lives of people just like his readers he is caring for them. 'I wa

  Elizabeth Acevedo has a story she tells about rats. And a poem. The story concerns a creative writing professor (and poet) who tells her that rats are not noble enough creatures to be the subject of an ode, and she needs to get more experience. You can watch Acevedo tell the story and deliver the poem on YouTube, but here's a few lines from   Rat Ode. Because you may be inelegant, simple, a mammal bottom-feeder, always fricking famished, little ugly thing that feasts on what crumbs fall from the corner of our mouths, but you live uncuddled, uncoddled, can’t be bought at Petco and fed to fat snakes because you’re not the maze-rat of labs: pale, pretty-eyed, trained. Elizabeth Acevedo is not going to be told what it is OK to write about. Her novel,  The Poet X,  which won the Carnegie medal in 2019 is the story, told in a series of poems, of 15 year old Xiomara, a Dominican American growing up in New York City. Xiomara has a troubled relationship with her very religious mother and

In an interview  that you can watch on her website  Geraldine McCaughrean described the origin of her book  Where the World Ends  which won the Carnegie Medal in 2018. Her daughter had visited St Kilda and returned with a head full of anecdotes about the island archipelago, the most remote in the British Isles. One of those anecdotes concerned something that happened in 1727. A small party of boys and men had crossed from the main island, Hirta, to a sea stack called Stac an Armin which is also known as the Warrior Stac, to catch wild fowl. They were ferried across on the island's only boat and expected to be picked up again after three weeks or so. But no one came, and they were marooned there for nine months with no idea why the boat had not returned to take them home. In fact, as Geraldine McCaughrean says in the interview, this anecdote consisted of only two sentences. No one knows what actually happened on that entirely barren spike of rock during those nine months, other than

I read a lot of fiction. SF, thrillers, detective fiction, literary fiction, all kinds of stuff. In none of it do I find rape, murder, genocide and war occurring so regularly as in the Carnegie Medal winners I've been reading in the last few months. This month I've read  Buffalo Soldier  by Tanya Landman, 2015 winner (rape, lynching, murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, American Civil War, Indian Wars) and  Salt to the Sea  by Ruta Sepetys, 2017 winner (rape, murder, ethnic cleansing, maritime disaster with thousands of deaths, WW2). Did I enjoy them? Not really. Is enjoyment even an appropriate response to these novels? Well, probably not. Are they children's books? No. So why, then, are they not adult books? (Not that that is even a category). The subject matter is at least as extreme as most adult fiction that I read. I'm beginning to suspect that an important distinguishing feature of YA fiction is that it lacks  complexity.  I know that's a ridiculous over-simpl

Yes, I am getting close to the end. This month I read   Maggot Moon   by Sally Gardner, the 2013 Carnegie Winner, and   The Bunker Diary   by Kevin Brooks from 2014. Neither book did much to cheer me up, even though both are about the human spirit in the face of adversity. Both books (spoiler alert) end in death, and in the case of   The Bunker Diary   (even more spoiler alert)   everyone   dies. I found things to admire in both books. In  Maggot Moon  Standish Treadwell is a wonderful creation and his relationship with his friend Hector is touching and beautifully drawn. But the future dystopian world where Standish lives—or is it a 1950s world where the Nazis won the war?—that world seems to me very like the unconvincing stage-set the authorities of Motherland have built to fake a moon landing. There's not much to it—a street, a school, a housing estate and a weird building. It's like a TV series that's been shot on a very tight budget. What's  very  real is the extre

I've always been happy to abandon a book after 50 pages (or less) if I'm not enjoying it.  Occasionally the first page is enough. Then, in March 2020, just before the first lockdown, I decided to read all the Carnegie winners in order, and write about the experience here. I don't think I realised how long it was going to take (maths was never my strongest subject) and here I am, starting on my fifth year of reading.  There have been 84 winners of the Carnegie Medal so far and it was too much to hope that I would like all of them. When I haven't enjoyed a book I've found myself quite reluctant to write about it, but I'm interested in describing the  experience  of reading all these books as well as in saying a bit about the books themselves, and that means that occasionally I need to find ways of saying what I didn't like, or felt didn't work. And that, of course, is as much about me as about the book.   Patrick Ness won the Carnegie twice in 2011 and 201

  Death has always been a presence in Carnegie Medal winning books. The third winner, Noel Streatfeild's  The Circus is Coming  begins like this: "Peter and Sarah were orphans. When they were babies their father and mother were killed in a railway accident, so they came to live with their aunt." This is an extreme example of how children's authors get rid of the parents to allow the children some agency. Roald Dahl did a very similar thing in  James and the Giant Peach  although he waited until the second paragraph to dispatch James's parents by means of an angry rhinoceros. Both Streatfeild and Dahl are just clearing the ground before they start their stories, cutting the protagonists free from those pesky parents. Books like  The Lantern Bearers  and  Tulku  do the same thing in a more organic way, but although people die in both these books, death is not central to the stories. There are other winners with high body-counts, like Ronald Welch's  Knight Crusa