New Zealand setting and New Zealand author, this was first published in 1957 and reissued as a Penguin Classics in the early 2000s. It has been deservedly held in high regard, though on occasion set as a school text for teenagers and therefore hated by some of them. It is certainly a novel for older…
A familiar kind of story – 12-year-old Kasienka thrown into an unfamiliar world, Coventry from Gdansk, because her mother is determined to find her fled father. There’s friendship and false friends, first boyfriend, found father, but it’s complicated. And there’s swimming; Kasienka is friends with water, knows it and understands it. But there’s an unfamiliar…
Will is shifting out of childhood. The world reveals itself differently to him. Archetypal energies move back and forth between myth and modern times; the Rider, the Walker appear as the troubling friend of his father, the tramp mobbed by crows. The power of the light emerges out of the neighbouring farmer or the lady…
Oscar is ten, in hospital and the last operation hasn’t worked. He needs a friend and Granny Rose, the visitor who says she is a retired wrestler (and she has thrilling accounts of past triumphs to demonstrate her veracity) suggests God. Oscar is dubious, but decides to write a letter to God each day, in…
Naomi is having a bad time. Her Mom and Dad are splitting up, her beloved dog Diesel has died, and she’s probably dead as well. But it’s hard to be sure. Maybe she’s not, maybe she has a second chance. Diesel thinks so, because here he is alive again and talking to her in her…
We meet Kit, brought up by a well-meaning but uncomprehending cousin and a professor father, largely absent in all but body, as she discovers ‘if you can’t lead your own life, you’re not you at all.’ She comes to realise that she is a song bird and gradually she finds the courage to follow her…
Jimmy and his little brother are evacuated to Wales along with some of his school. It’s the phoney war, so he doesn’t see the point and is hurting because of what’s happened at home. To make it worse his brother takes to it all like a duck to water and his best mate betrays him….
‘Just on the other side of the wall’. Ah, how often did the young Frances Hodgson Burnett wonder what lay there, when by the sudden death of her father she was plunged from middle-class comfort into years of precariousness like her heroine Sara, the princess of this story (and surely so like the young and indeed…
I came across this book when I was about 10. I remember finding it on the classroom library shelf (I think second shelf down and about a third in from the left – the memory is that vivid!) and feeling that it was in some way important. It was the first story I read which…
Published in 1963, when it won first prize in Scandinavia for fiction for older readers, the telling of the tale has not outdated it, for it is a kind of timeless pilgrim’s progress, as well as an odyssey across Europe. David knows his name and, he sometimes feels, little else. A journey, then, of self-discovery….
Sam is 11 and he’s dying of leukaemia. He reckons he’ll be dead by the time you finish the book. This is his journal. We meet his cynical, adventurous best mate Felix from the hospital, his Mum, doing her best to hold it all together, his Dad, trying to pretend it’s not happening, his little…
Arthur Ransome breaks so many rules – and brilliantly. If you are not a sailor you find the book littered with terms you don’t know, many unexplained, detailed descriptions of estuaries and compass bearings, children who much of the time seem to have little inner life, a title that reveals the whole plot; and yet,…
