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Values and themes in the CILIP Carnegie Medal shor tlist 2015


Nicholas Tucker appraises the shortlist for the prestigious award.


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he 2015 Carnegie Medal shortlist of eight novels provides an interesting snap-shot of current literary taste in the children’s and young adult books world. Those chosen are not necessarily


representative of all the books published in that year, but their particular selection does give a glimpse of how the experienced adult readers who selected them are thinking about contemporary children’s literature. So let’s look for some common themes in this selection, wondering as we go how much may have changed and also how much may have stayed constant since the first Carnegie Medal judges assembled in 1936.


What stands out in all of them


is the continuing faith their authors have in the essential resilience of their young heroes and heroines





First, the books themselves. Sarah Crossan’s Apple and Rain (Bloomsbury) is a contemporary story involving a daughter’s dysfunctional relationship with a delinquent mother. Brian Conaghan’s When Mr Dog Bites (Bloomsbury) features a sixteen-year-old boy with Tourette’s Syndrome wrongly convinced that he is about to die. Sally Gardner’s Tinder (Orion), luminously illustrated by David Roberts, is a re-imagining of the traditional fairy tale The Tinderbox. Frances Hardinge’s Cuckoo Song (Macmillan) describes a girl whose body has become temporarily occupied by someone else. Tanya Landman’s Buffalo Soldiers (Walker) is about the life of a freed young woman slave who, dressed as a man, joins up with the American army to finally put down the remaining tribes of indigenous Indians. Elizabeth Laird’s The Fastest Boy in the World (Macmillan) features an eleven-year-old contemporary Ethiopian boy on a first troubled visit to Addis Ababa with his grandfather. Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Middle of Nowhere (Usborne) is set in 19th century Australia, with a young girl in the outback trying to keep things going after her mother dies and her father goes into deep depression. And finally Patrick Ness’s More Than This (Walker) involves an adolescent boy transported to a dystopian future after apparently drowning.


What stands out in all of them is the continuing faith their authors have in the essential resilience of their young heroes and heroines, up to and including acts of enormous physical and/or psychological courage. Parents may let them down, teachers may not always understand them, other children may gang up against


12 Books for Keeps No.212 May 2015


them, but these main characters are still telling their readers that obstacles, however threatening, can be overcome. There is also the message that even in the bleakest times it is worth hanging in there for that special friendship – not necessarily a love interest – that can finally make all the difference. Life may be grim, and indeed in all these novels it mostly is. But there is always hope.


This may seem an obvious point to make, but last year’s winner, Kevin Brooks’s disturbing The Bunker Diary, is a novel devoid of any hope or good feeling at all. So while previous Carnegie Medal author winners of not so long ago may have blinked at some of the swearing and frank sexual content on show this year, particularly evident in Brian Conaghan’s novel, they would still surely recognise and respect the positive image of childhood evident in each young hero and heroine here if not always in the other young people in their lives at home or school.


This brings me to a second common theme this year: a hatred of violence. For while the world of computer games continues to shower young people with violent images, children’s authors see things very differently. There is no room in any of these novels for the idea that receiving or inflicting pain and suffering is good for the soul, let alone in any way also exciting or praiseworthy. Nor is there any confident feeling that violence in itself is ever going to make things better. Sally Gardner adds sad and telling detail to the quick deaths familiar in fairy tales in order to show what life as an 18th century mercenary in lawless times could really be like. Tanya Landman describes the deadening effect on the personality once killing becomes a way of life. Given the current disillusion with Britain’s military involvement first with Iraq and then Afghanistan, this anti-war writing seems closer to current thinking than do the casual mega-deaths found in screen games. Children’s authors could once get away with a far more gung-ho attitude to violence in their novels. But not any more, at least on the evidence of these eight stories.





there is a feeling for all young people, of whatever background, who do not fit in


Selected time spans meanwhile remain various, with only Sarah Crossan and Brian Conaghan placing their stories in contemporary times. Young readers therefore searching for an accurate reflection of what they are seeing around them will have to look elsewhere. Writing a would-be state of the nation novel for young readers is becoming increasingly hard, given that developments in technology are so rapid that the latest thing for a writer could quickly seem yesterday’s news even before publication. Composing a novel reflecting young people’s evolving interactions in the social media is also a considerable challenge, given that each





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