wonder created by her expert re-imagining of what once might have really happened. Her descriptions of the British Middle Ages in A Little Lower than the Angels, her first novel, are as convincingly realistic as it is possible to be.
Other favourites come to mind. The twelve stories for the price of one in A Pack of Lies, the Carnegie Medal winning novel that proved that there is quite literally no end to the powers of Geraldine’s imagination. Not the End of the World offers a brilliantly dark re-examination of the story of Noah’s Flood, with God finally shown as having a lot to answer for. Every adult reader I have recommended this book to, and there have been several, have all returned demanding other titles. The White Darkness, partially set in Antarctica, manages to be wickedly funny as well as diabolically clever, featuring one of the most plausibly awful villains in all children’s literature. More recently Where the World Ends, set on a remote island off the West coast of Scotland, painted yet another unforgettable picture of humans up against nature, human and physical, in the attempt to say alive against all the odds. This also won the Carnegie Medal, and well before that there have been numbers of other prizes too.
Geraldine was once advised by her mother to ‘Never boil your cabbage twice,’ advice she has certainly taken to heart as a writer. Has there ever been a novelist, children’s or otherwise, who has chosen such a diverse range of setting and characters? Series are not for her, and this restlessness of her imagination may be one reason she has never had a massive readership with young readers seeking another dose of the same. But another likely explanation for her lack of a mass readership may lie with the novels themselves. For they can be demanding. Any suggestion of a pat, predictable narrative always disappears after the first chapter or so. If there are larger questions arising from the text, they will be discussed, not avoided.
Children’s literature has always operated as a broad church, and there should, indeed must, always be room made for top of the range novels along with everything else. But it is a shame that so many good books from the recent past, including many by Geraldine, have now slipped away from library shelves and otherwise can only be found as second-hand copies. We should be more carefully conserving of our greatest writers. And this is what she most certainly is. Not to have read her is to miss out on an experience like no other I can currently think of in all children’s literature and even beyond.
The Supreme Lie, Usborne, 978-1474970686, £8.99 pbk The Middle of Nowhere, Usborne, 978-1409570516, £6.99 pbk The Kite Runner, OUP, 978-0192769596, £6.99 pbk Stop the Train, OUP, 978-0192718815, £6.99 pbk A Little Lower than the Angels, OUP, 978-0192752901, £6.99 pbk A Pack of Lies, OUP, 978-0192752031, £6.99 pbk Not the End of the World, OUP, 978-0192754325, £6.99 pbk The White Darkness, OUP, 978-0192726186, £7.99 pbk Where the World Ends, Usborne, 978-1474943437, £6.99 pbk Plundering Paradise, OUP, 978-0192719942, O/P
Nicholas Tucker is honorary senior lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at Sussex University.
Books for Keeps No.248 May 2021 17
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