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BfK is the danger than Tracy’s people’s ice


10 – 14 Middle/Secondary continued former


boyfriend Sean Godfrey may re-enter their lives. The second is the need to identify the boy on the beach who steals


creams. What


effect may this ice cream thief have on the lives of the Beakers? The boy on the beach, it transpires,


is a fugitive foster-child. This provides an opportunity for Wilson to explore in the most effective way the issues of fostering. Although fostering issues often arise on the periphery of stories for young readers. Including the earlier history of Tracy herself, it is rare for fostering issues to appear (as they do here) at the centre of such narratives. Readers who have followed Tracy’s career since her debut in 1991 will have become familiar with her attitude towards teacher and figures of authority


in general – a mix of detestation and fear. They may be relieved to learn that Tracy has now moderated her destructive urges. She now has a grudging respect for those who are trying to help her daughter develop. Admirers of Dame Jacqueline will be pleased to learn that the full array of memorable characters who have appeared in earlier Beaker books do reappear in this latest offering. RB


The Boy Giant HHH


Michael Morpurgo, illus Michael Foreman, HarperCollins, 288pp, 978-0008347918, £12.99 hbk.


Omar is a twelve year old Afghan refugee. He and his mother want to get to England but his mother says he is to go ahead alone. She will join him


later. Omar begins his journey in an overloaded yellow dinghy, a journey which nearly costs him his life. When he comes ashore not in England but in Lilliput, his arrival feels like Gulliver’s. The reader does not know for certain whether Omar’s perception of himself as huge is real or imagined. Omar spends the next four years


with the Lilliputians and without his mother. He believes that she has reached England before him. Omar is befriended by two Lilliputians, Zaya and Natoban. They teach him English and escort him round the island, becoming his best friends while he is in Lilliput. The novel now poses the question whether Omar and his two best friends will ever reach England. Will Omar be reunited with his mother? Opening a Morpurgo


book, one


expects to find oneself in a strong relationship with the narrative and the characters. That is the reputation the author has built. With this book,


14+ Secondary/Adult Pumpkin Heads HHHH


Rainbow Rowell, illus. Faith Erin Hicks, Macmillan, 228pp, 978 1529008630, £9.99, pbk


In this perfectly realised graphic


novel, Josiah and Deja are spending their last night as student workers at a Halloween Pumpkin Patch in the Midwest of the USA. For those readers who are as unfamiliar with a Halloween Pumpkin Patch as I am, it seems to be a seasonal family event which takes place on a (pumpkin) farm and features lots of Halloween- type snacks and other attractions like a petting zoo and a Halloween ghost train, and is staffed predominantly by high school


students. Josiah


and Deja have been teamed up for the last three years, usually at the Succotash Hut, where they stir and sell – well- succotash. But next year they will be at college and this night is an opportunity for them to savour Halloween joys for the last time and to take care of some unfinished business. With illustrator Faith Erin Hicks and author Rainbow Rowell, we follow the two friends as dynamic and sociable Deja attempts to shake diffident Josiah out of his cautious and


self-conscious ways and to


actually talk to the girl on the fudge counter that he has admired from afar.


It’s a well-observed humorous


conversation piece in which we get to know them both much better and to realise how their friendship is based on mutual respect and a shared sense of humour. The obvious question that arises, of course, is what kind of relationship this really is. Could it be that, by the end of an evening of unruly child customers, an escaped goat, half-finished snacks and their incompetent replacements who set the succotash on fire, they will find that they are more than


just friends? It’s gently and wittily done with sympathy for


its two


central characters and their different approaches to life and much affection for this once a year innocent country jamboree. CB


The M Word HHHH


Brian Conaghan, Bloomsbury, 354pp, 9781408871560, £12.99, hbk


Conaghan takes us to dark places in seventeen year-old Maggie’s life. It starts with a bit of teaser in the first page or so, when we are invited to wonder what an unknown man is jabbing into Maggie that is not producing the expected ecstasy and which she would rather he gets over with quickly. Actually it’s a tattoo drill but you could be excused for thinking that it is something else that girls are not expected to enjoy on the first time. And this kind of knowing black humour from narrator Maggie turns out to be necessary in a story that gets to grips both with suicide and self-harm.


It’s Maggie that’s


cutting herself and there are some scenes that, while they may make you squirm, will certainly cause you to grieve at the mutilation, even as you understand the temporary relief that it gives her. Maggie herself is grieving for the suicide of her best friend and failing to cope with her mum’s spiralling depression. She is also facing up to a new turn in her life as she starts Art School and has to find her place there, as well as struggling with the usual relationship and sexual anxieties. Conaghan convincingly sets the self-harming in the context of this perfect


stress storm and


introduces us to a young woman who is certainly a victim but with whose vulnerability, guilt and anger we can empathise. She is


who, in her wit, self-awareness and 32 Books for Keeps No.239 November 2019 also someone


creativity, has the growing strength to make her way steadily out of the dark. I was not equally convinced by the turn in the plot that sees Maggie and her boyfriend setting her mum up for a date and it all working out swimmingly. Yet this is a quibble to set against the novel’s achievement of dealing so approachably with such a difficult subject. CB


Scars Like Wings HHHHH


Erin Stewart, Simon and Schuster, 384pp, 978-1471187018, £12.99 hbk


Ava Lee is aged sixteen, American. She is a junior at Crossroads High School. A year before the story begins her family house was burned down. Both her parents and her cousin Sara died in the fire. Ava suffered sixty percent burns and permanent disfigurement. After the fire Ava goes to live with the parents of her late cousin, Aunt Cora and Uncle Glenn. Stewart sets out to tell the story of


Ava’s recovery and self-acceptance, fraught though that story may prove to be. There is a narrative running parallel to that of Ava. Her friend Piper also bears the marks of fire, as a result of a car crash. Piper is now a wheelchair user with spinal injury and quadriplegia. This book is an unusual example of its genre. Most


books which


tackle the difficult subject of life- changing impairments fail to allow the characters to witness the full gamut of feelings experienced by those who in real life face such situations. Such books often avoid mentioning the darkest moments that such a destiny involves, or if they mention them they do so fleetingly. Such books also often gloss over the endless and debilitating medical treatments that come in the wake of serious injuries.


Stewart’s


book neglects neither of these themes. The author explores both in


this reviewer did not feel the expected relationship. Morpurgo has attempted to combine two very different genres, the realistic narrative of refugees in flight from danger or poverty and the more imaginative intertext with and retelling of Swift’s famous fantasy. If any author could combine these very disparate elements, it would seem that Morpurgo could do so. But in fact the strain of combination seems to be too severe even for him. Once the reader has become reconciled to the dissonance of the two themes, the read is enjoyable. But the dissonance remains. Two themes dominate the text, namely the need to be kind and welcoming to strangers and the need to eliminate war. But both themes seem to be hammered home in an uncharacteristically blunt and unsubtle


manner. The author’s


many admirers will feel that on this occasion he has not lived up to his past standard. RB


detail and she describes how people confronted with such experiences may swing from an optimistic few days to the depths of despair and the darkest of thoughts. Occasionally even Stewart fails to meet a realistic standard. At one point Piper, despite her spinal injuries and quadriplegia, manages to move herself unaided on to Ava’s bed. Nevertheless


this


outstanding book, the informed


Full Disclosure HHHH


Camryn Garrett, Penguin Random House, 290pp, 978 0 241 36706 3, £7.99 pbk


Camryn Garrett was only 13 when she was invited to work as a reporter for TIME for Kids (a supplement to TIME Magazine); she has also written for MTV and The Huffington Post. To


is an most account of its subject


since the publication of Lois Keith’s A Different Life in 1997. RB


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