Short Reviews of Some Children’s Books

Next year, I’ll be going back to university to do a P.G.C.E. (a British teacher training qualification), so I’ve been reading lots of books aimed at children and teenagers recently. Here are a few brief notes on some of them.

Chinese Cinderella (1999, Adeline Yen Mah) 

This book is an abridgement for young readers of the author’s memoir Falling Leaves, published in 1997. It describes her family life during the time of the Japanese occupation of China and the armed struggles that followed liberation, which led to the establishment of the Communist state in 1949. Yen Mah came from a privileged background (one female relative was a very successful banker), but she grew up in a household starved of love. Her mother dies giving birth to her, and she is called a bad luck child as a result. After her father’s marriage to a beautiful but cruel young woman, the children of his first marriage are treated harshly while all parental affection is bestowed on the author’s half-siblings. Little solidarity develops between the aggrieved elder children, with older sister and brothers seldom relenting in their meanness and mistreatment, which is often quite shocking. Only her grandparents and aunt show any kindness, but she is generally abused, neglected and underestimated. Although the story was written by an adult looking back at the past, the narration largely adopts a child’s perspective and avoids the use of hindsight and mature reflection (an exception is made when the historical background is discussed). Yen Mah seems to want to place herself back into her childhood self, to relive events as she experienced them many years before, to limit her understanding of them to the understanding she had as a girl, but the vocabulary is slightly higher than a child of that age would be expected to use (and, of course, is rendered in English); the result is an elegant, somewhat distanced tone that vividly relates the author’s sufferings without wallowing in them. This is not a misery memoir, but something altogether finer. Memorable passages include a relationship with a pet duckling that comes to predictably sticky end, and an eerie period spent as the only remaining pupil in Catholic boarding school as Communist troops advance. Some readers may be put off by the slow, episodic narrative, but I found it an engrossing and evocative book.

The Garbage King (2003, Elizabeth Laird)

The Garbage King is about two Ethiopian boys from very different backgrounds: Mamo, who has grown up in poverty, is tricked into slavery after his mother dies, and Dani, who struggles at school and lives in fear of his stern, powerful father. For several chapters, the narrative alternates between the two boys until their storylines come together on the streets of Addis Ababa, where they join a gang of child beggars. Laird subtly softens some aspects of her story, but this is nonetheless an admirably tough-minded book that largely avoids milking the pathos out of its grim situations (the appearance of a cute puppy is rather unnecessary, but fortunately it doesn’t have much to do). It takes some skill to write about prostitution, slavery, attempted suicide, AIDS and the death of children for a young readership in a way that is neither timid nor sensationalistic. The author’s chief virtue is the strength of her characterization, which doesn’t idealize its heroes, and lends shading to even the least sympathetic characters. The prose is straightforward, perhaps a little too reliant in places on very short sentences (e.g. ‘He’d been wrong to be suspicious. This man was family. A relative. Someone he could trust.’), but Laird does offer a few simple but effective flights of descriptive writing (e.g. ‘A fan shaped cloud was blowing up across the vast expanse of the blue sky, and a sudden sharp breeze was stirring the red hibiscus flowers in the hedges by the entrance to the pool.’). Her figurative language often makes verbs do the work, so that questions boil up, dreams flower, depression settles, sweat sprouts. Interest flags whenever the narrative switches to Mamo’s elder sister because the sub-plot involving her is sketchy and underpowered. I would also quibble with the role Dani’s talent for writing stories plays in latter chapters; it leads to a plot development that strikes me as quite fanciful. This is a fine book, nonetheless, which has the good sense not to spoil the ending either with forced positivity or with despair. The frequency with which it appears on school reading lists in the U.K. is well deserved.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006, John Boyne)

Bruno, a young German boy, moves with his family from their comfortable Berlin home to a disagreeable place called ‘Out-With’, where his father, determined to impress a man known as ‘The Fury’, is to assume an important position. Disturbed by the strange, thin people he sees in a fenced-off area next to his house, Bruno nonetheless strikes up a friendship with one of them: a boy of his own age named Shmuel, who, like almost everyone else on the other side of the fence, always wears striped pyjamas. No prizes, after reading this summary, for guessing that the setting is Auschwitz during World War II, but author John Boyne is quite adept at withholding information in order to disguise the obvious for as long as possible. On a technical level, it is a mostly skilful performance, but to what end? If Boyne ever had a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve with this book―which is open to question―I doubt it was worth achieving, and certainly the result does not deserve the accolades it has received.

The central problem is one of narration. The book has a third-person omniscient narrator, and yet adopts the naïve tone of its protagonist (e.g. Out-With, Fury), who is unable to grasp the terrible reality of the situation. In this queasy mixture of knowingness and innocence, the innocence is deliberately exaggerated in order to stand for the inability or refusal of the German people to face up to the mass murder of Jews and others that was happening under their noses. The use of a nine-year-old boy to bear this allegorical weight strikes me as wholly inappropriate, for it cannot help but simplify and distort the multiplicity of attitudes held during this period by ordinary Germans, who could not claim youth to reduce their responsibility. It is true that Boyne makes the members of Bruno’s family representative of some of these attitudes: the boy’s father is a dedicated careerist Nazi; his mother has deep reservations, which she tries to suppress; his sister becomes fanatically pro-Reich but has only a superficial understanding of the politics; his grandfather is complacently ‘apolitical’; his grandmother bitterly mocks her son and the Nazis, but not in public. Yet it is Bruno’s innocence that drives Boyne’s narrative scheme, Bruno’s innocence that assumes such great thematic importance; this equation of childhood to innocence, and of childhood innocence to something larger, strikes me as a profoundly wrong-headed simplification. Fables inevitably involve simplification, Boyne might reply, but the implications cannot be dodged so easily. Bruno is a nice boy and a thoroughly sympathetic character in spite of his flaws; we root for him, and want him to discover the truth, to mount some sort of opposition, and yet be shielded from the consequences. In making this child such a representative figure, and placing him at the centre of his tragedy, Boyne is directing our sympathy and pity away from the victims of the Holocaust, so that the book wrings suspense and pathos above all else from the fate of a Nazi’s child, and the Holocaust becomes a tragedy about the acquiescent Germans―an obscene manoeuvre that makes of all those millions who died in the camps and in the ghettos little more than instruments for moral education. This is clearly demonstrated in the figure of Shmuel, who doesn’t feature in the book as much as you might think, and who isn’t invested with a personality of his own. Boyne would probably counter that all the characterization is deliberately flat because, hey, this is a fable, but although Bruno and his family are portrayed without psychological depth, they are at least provided with strong outlines. Shmuel, in contrast, is hardly there at all; indeed, the one thing that does stand out about him is that he is a little wiser than Bruno, because, of course, experience has made him so―but this only underscores the limitations of his function as Bruno’s educator (much of his dialogue consists of remarks that slightly raise Bruno’s awareness). Ah, but you’re being too harsh, Boyne might say, because the thing about my fable is that it’s not restricted to its setting, but can apply to all situations in which hatred and oppression are allowed to prevail due to ignorance and complacency.* Using history as material for fables can be a fraught business; the more generalized the fable and the further it is abstracted from the particulars of historical truth, the greater the risk of falsifying and dishonouring that truth. The use of children in such fables exacerbates this risk, because of the ease with which the enterprise can become contaminated with exploitative, tear-jerking mawkishness―for evidence, let The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas serve as Exhibit A.

The problems with the narration do not end there, for if, as I have written, it mixes knowingness with innocence, the former is as dubious in its effects as the latter. Boyne employs a persistent irony not only when he writes of Bruno’s understanding of the death camp on his doorstep, but also of his father’s position, his sister’s relations with a guard, his concept of time and distance, and more. What are we to make of all this irony? The repeated use of ‘Fury’ and ‘Out-With’ is particularly problematic in this regard, not just because because the puns only work in English, but also because it raises the question of who is narrating all this, for although the narration adopts a child-like tone, it is not written from the perspective of a child, and alludes to things beyond Bruno’s experience and knowledge. The narrator knows what Fury and Out-With refer to, and the clued-in reader knows; the terms are limited to those a preternaturally naïve child might understand, but they are delivered in a kind of code that at the same time communicates other things to the big kids and grown-ups. It seems, then, as if the narrator is patronizing Bruno, even mocking him, which I cannot imagine was Boyne’s intention. Readers who are slightly older than Bruno (say around 12 or 13) may not immediately warm to the idea of a book with a naïve 9-year-old protagonist, but provided they have knowledge of the history, the narration flatters them into a sense of superiority, for they understand what Bruno does not, and can chuckle or tut at his cluelessness; does this not risk nudging them into an awful smugness and condescension? And what of younger readers, or those without the historical knowledge or reading skills to apprehend the situation and appreciate the irony? Might they not come to feel as if they are being made the butt of a joke, as if their failure to realize what is going on mirrors Bruno’s failure? Is it not deeply horrible to use a child as a device for wringing sentiment out of mass murder while simultaneously writing about him in such a snarky manner, unintentional though it may be? I think Boyne has seriously miscalculated here; he is not in control of his novel, and has allowed it to produce a nasty taste.

*A clunker of a last line (‘Not in this day and age’) gestures in this direction.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2007, J.K. Rowling)

I have thus far been resistant to the allure of Rowling’s door-stopper Potters, satiating the little curiosity I had by flicking through a few pages in bookshops; as with Dan Brown’s bestsellers, even the briefest of samples is enough to convey the turgidity of the prose. You would have to pay me a lot of money to read one cover to cover. The films are more tolerable, but I don’t think I’ve even watched one of them all the way through. Nonetheless, given Rowling’s popularity among young readers, I thought I had better try a bit harder to understand her appeal, calculating that the ordeal would be lessened by selecting one of her shorter works. Having now read The Tales of Beedle the Bard, I find that its author’s success is as mysterious to me as ever. This is very much a book for dedicated Potter fans, to the extent that I can’t see what anyone who isn’t a dedicated Potter fan could possibly find to enjoy in it―but, of course, Rowling can toss out even something as dire and worthless as this safe in the knowledge that a vast readership is ready and waiting to snatch up all things Potter. I believe Rowling has described this as a jeu d’esprit, and I can see what she means, so long as it is understood that this particular jeu is about as light and fun as a game of pétanque played with cannonballs, and that the only esprit involved is l’esprit de l’argent. It begins with a mock-scholarly introduction in which Rowling attempts some metafictional intrigues, as if she were a writing a kind of Nabokov for kids. These stories, we are told, are by a 15^th century bard; they have been translated from the original runes by Hermione Granger and are published with commentaries (complete with footnotes) by the late Albus Dumbledore. This is all presented as if the whole Potter saga had actually taken place, and that she, Rowling, is not the author, but is merely making a pre-existing text available to the public. Such a conceit suggests a surprising confidence on Rowling’s part in her own talent, but, alas, as far as writing is concerned, she has no more talent than Lord Voldemort has a nose. The required wit, ingenuity and lightness of touch are entirely absent from Dumbledore’s extensive notes, which make him sound like the wizarding world’s biggest bore. A parody of Beatrix Potter falls flat, first because it is so tiresomely obvious, and second because Rowling is often scarcely less twee than the target of her satire. The first story begins: ‘There once was a kindly old wizard…’, so we know right away that we’re in for a large dose of ye olde fairy tale style, which continues with such archaic anastrophisms as ‘What care I…?’ and ‘Lost she is…’, and extends to the inclusion of words like ‘chattels’, ‘dittany’ and ‘benison’. It is possible to be charming while writing in this mode, but it requires an ease and familiarity with the language, an avoidance of excessive self-consciousness, and a degree of sincerity (even if there’s room for humour) that are quite beyond Rowling’s meagre capabilities. In any case, there is a conceptual confusion here: if these tales are supposed to be 15^th-century in origin, why have they been translated in a style reminiscent of Victorian or Edwardian fairy tales? If the supposed translator, Hermione, is writing for a modern audience for whom Beedle’s text is too difficult, then why not use modern English? This is a mess of a book. As for the tales themselves, they are so tedious that it’s not worth the bother of describing them.

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (2009, Helen Grant)

This intelligent and ambitious crime thriller, which was marketed to both adults and teenagers, may appeal to confident young readers who are able to handle a fairly advanced vocabulary, which includes such words as ‘lugubriously’, ‘barrette’ and ‘eldritch’. It is set in Germany, and the extensive use of German words and phrases may also present a challenge, although there is a glossary at the end. The narrator is Pia, a girl of about 17 (or almost an adult, as she says), resident in England, who recounts a traumatic series of events that occurred several years before, when she lived in the small German town of Bad Münstereifel with her German father and English mother. Grant manages a considerable stylistic feat here: the book reads very much as if it had been written by someone proficient in the English language, but not quite at home in it, for the prose has the slight stiffness and formality of a very gifted and well-read learner, which tones down the potentially lurid aspects of the story. A note of gruesome comedy is struck from the beginning, with the bizarre explosive death of the girl’s grandmother in an accident involving the overuse of hairspray. All sorts of rumours surrounding this death spread around the town, leading to Pia becoming so ostracized by her classmates that an unpopular boy nicknamed Stink Stefan becomes her only friend. The repressively gossipy and conformist nature of the community is a running theme in the book, and also informs the tension in the marriage of Pia’s parents, with her mother fixating on the negative side of the town while her father values its spirit of co-operation and selflessness. When the young girl of the title disappears without trace, the apparent safety and tranquillity of Bad Münstereifel are shaken, and both the best and worst elements are exhibited when other girls disappear. Pia and Stefan have vivid juvenile imaginations, and when they begin to investigate the disappearances, it is under the influence of kindly old Herr Schiller’s macabre folk-tales―real-world horrors becoming mixed up with uncanny, imaginary ones. The pacing may be slow for much of the book, but the gradual build-up of tension works to its advantage, as the attention Grant devotes to portraying Pia’s family life and the communal life of the town only heighten the sense of surrounding menace. Indeed, when Grant does speed up the narrative towards the end, the perils perhaps come on a little too thick and fast. I was disappointed by the solution to the mystery, which is both predictable and implausible, while the discussion of the killer’s motivations is rather too pat, as if younger readers are being shielded from the more inexplicable evils of which humans are capable. Still, this is a gripping and well-written book. Figurative language is generally simple and restrained, with straightforward similes like ‘my mother charged into the room like a rhinoceros defending its young’, but Grant occasionally permits a few of greater elaboration. I particularly liked an extravagant example from Herr Schiller, describing in one of his tales a building besieged by evil spirits: ‘It was as though the very timbers of the mill had soaked up the unearthly forces that seethed and thronged in the valley, like the wood of a wine barrel takes up the stain and scent of the wine’.

Billionaire Boy (2010, David Walliams)

David Walliams first became well-known as the comedy partner of Matt Lucas in the popular sketch show Little Britain, the broad, mean-spirited ‘humour’ of which I found unendurable.* One very minor interest it held was the notable gap in talent between the duo: Lucas was undeniably an accomplished comic performer, whereas Walliams was strained and amateurish in all he attempted. For the past decade, Walliams has enjoyed remarkable success as a children’s author, releasing novels at the rate of one a year, in addition to picture books and story collections. I can’t say that I was enthused by the prospect of reading one, but while I didn’t exactly enjoy Billionaire Boy, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. The story is a basic morality tale in which Joe Spudd, aged 12, learns the valuable and unexpected lesson that money can’t buy you happiness, not even if it’s a fantastic fortune your dad has made by inventing a special kind of toilet roll. Walliams varies the visual format with lots of lists, tables and stylized fonts (plus illustrations by Tony Ross), so that a short book with short paragraphs is made even easier to read by fragmentation; this makes it particularly suitable for readers who struggle with big blocks of text. There are words here and there that might draw forth the odd puzzled frown (for example, ‘connoisseur’, ‘incredulity’, ‘inexorably’), but nothing that a competent teacher would find difficult to explain.  To my mind, Walliams doesn’t fully exploit the comic potential of his material, but though Billionaire Boy falls well short of being hilarious, it does contain a few good jokes (e.g. Mr. Spudd’s angry command to his son: ‘Go to your rooms!’). Some of the humour, alas, is in the vein of Little Britain, much of it at the expense of fat people and a girl who looks like a boy (ho ho!).** Female characters are almost all portrayed negatively, including two who initially appear to be sympathetic. On the whole, it’s bearable, I suppose; Walliams is probably capable of better.

*It began as a radio series that aired between 2000 and 2002, before making the transition to TV in 2003. The last series was broadcast in 2007, though Walliams has subsequently reprised some of his characters for occasional sketches. Lucas, wisely, has had no involvement since 2009.

**And this from an author whose first book featured a cross-dressing hero. Apparently it’s important to promote the message that it’s OK for boys to wear dresses, but if a girl happens to seem a bit masculine, then she’s ripe for ridicule.

My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece (2011, Annabel Pitcher)

Annabel Pitcher’s narrator is a 10-year-old boy named Jamie, who lost his elder sister, whom he barely remembers, in a terrorist attack a few years ago. Following the departure of Jamie’s mother, his embittered father takes him and his other sister Jas to live in the countryside, where he wallows in alcoholic grief and self-pity, his life revolving around the memory of his dead daughter (whose ashes are kept in an urn on the mantelpiece), at the expense of his surviving children. Jamie is bullied at school, but strikes up a friendship with a Muslim girl named Sunya―a friendship he has to conceal from his father, due to the latter’s obsessive hatred of Muslims. Meanwhile, Jas isn’t eating properly and carries on a relationship with a boy in the face of her father’s disapproval. A lot, then, is going on in this book, and at times the sheer volume of stuff threatens to get out of control (a plot-line concerning a T.V. talent show does not work at all). Some of the supporting characters are hastily sketched in, particularly the mother, whom the book harshly condemns for abandoning her family, without considering the emotional strain of her remaining with a quick-tempered, bigoted drunk. The book is quite funny, and Pitcher has a nice line in black humour, but the overall impression is of a promising first work that should have been redrafted a couple of times before being published. One issue is that Jamie, while psychologically well-conceived in some respects, doesn’t sound much like a 10-year-old, for his narration is altogether too mature, reflective and ordered. When Pitcher does strive for a more child-like effect, the results are liable to over-shoot the mark (e.g. ‘the number one best plan in the entire world and probably the universe, which Mrs Farmer says goes on and on forever without stopping’), while the dialogue between Sunya and Jamie often has an ironic tone that makes them seem as if they’re 12 or 13. I wonder whether this is intentional, part of the author’s design to appeal to her readers, most of whom are likely to be 11 or older―but then, why not make Jamie 12 instead of 10? I was also troubled by the book’s endorsement of revenge and violence as responses to bullying; wishful thinking about how bullies can always be defeated by standing up to them is something I suspect not a few of Pitcher’s readers will see through.

Wonder (2012, R.J. Palacio)

This is one of those nice stories with an unobjectionable message that might as well come with a label: Wholesome Inspiring Positive Literature for Kids. Auggie, the main character, is a boy with severe facial disfigurement who is bullied by other students and struggles to make friends when, after years of home education, he starts school for the first time. Palacio soft-pedals the bullying, which takes the form of casual cruelty rather than sustained torment―obviously upsetting, but not too upsetting for readers*. The school is a genteel institution, with sympathetic teachers, while Auggie comes from a loving, financially stable family. Swearing is carefully avoided, so we find ‘pee’ and not ‘piss’, ‘what the heck?’ and not ‘what the fuck?’ or even ‘what the hell?’. This is a book that knows how to stay safe within a parent-approved comfort zone, offering only the mildest of disturbances. When potentially troubling elements are introduced around the edges of the story, it is briefly, as if dropped into the mix as superficial classroom talking points: one child has a dead military dad, another comes from a less wealthy background, another character has facial tics and neglectful parents. Palacio mentions these things without exploring them, so that the primary purpose they seem to serve is to provide Auggie with a range of allies who are, like him, outsiders in some way, which gives us extra reasons to sympathize with characters who are already sympathetic.** The book tries to do something formally interesting by making use of multiple narrators, but this does not come off particularly well since the attempts to differentiate the narrators stylistically are insufficient; Palacio can’t quite shake off the pervading bland, voiceover-like tone no matter which character is narrating. That voiceover-like tone is the key to what is unsatisfying about the book: the sense that it exists as an expertly manufactured product, ready to be adapted with the minimum of effort into a Hollywood movie.*** The abundant dialogue seems derived from screenplays; the scant description employs only the simplest language, occasionally stretching to an elementary simile or two; the interior worlds of the narrators are only lightly sketched. There are two big corny emotional climaxes: one character receives a standing ovation after being forced at the last minute to act the part she was supposed to understudy, while at the end there is medal ceremony that irresistibly calls to mind the tediously drawn-out finale of The Return of the Jedi (which may not be unintentional, as Auggie is a Star Wars fan). I find it impossible to actively dislike a book such as this―who, after all, would be so heartless as to condemn a book that so good-naturedly promotes acceptance, kindness and friendship?―but it is not one that I would recommend either to teachers or to young readers. I certainly hope that I am never asked to teach it.

*It is revealing that the most serious threat comes from bullies from another school, not the ones Auggie sees every week.

**Pointedly, Auggie’s chief antagonist is just a two-dimensional rich brat, although Palacio has subsequently written a spin-off story from this boy’s perspective.

***Of course, a film was indeed made. I have not seen it, and am in no rush to see any film starring Owen Wilson.