Why did I not review How the Light Gets In by M J Hyland when it was reincarnated last summer as a young adult novel for Walker Canongate? Maybe I just allowed my prejudice against authorial initials (yes, yes we all loved Catcher in the Rye but, you know, get over it) to overcome  my critical neutrality, or maybe it arrived too late for my deadline? But better late than never to hail a teen classic.

  Lou, an Australian exchange student living with an American Dream family is in equal parts fascinating and repellent. The reader sits uneasily in her head observing the front she presents to the world. Highly intelligent and clearly damaged, she is the product of an impoverished background, both materially and culturally. So she aspires to clean sheets and unconditional love and her desire to sleep in other people’s beds (preferably without the owners) is both touching and creepy as is her sensory sensitivity. On the plane coming over the old woman next to her smells of “stale vase water” while her host mother smells like “milky picnic tea poured from a flask” and the school room of “suffocated paint”. The nearest she gets to intimacy is to ask people if they know what “desquamation” is – though  of course she already knows the answer.

  Hyland’s descriptions are exquisitely wrought. The cartilages at the back of her host-sister’s knees “splay like miniature cathedral buttresses.” And a teacher has “a jagged black hairline near the front of his skull that makes him look like a shiny egg cracked open by a small and furious hatchling”. The sense of dread that dogs the reader – you know it’s not going to end well –  is counter-balanced by the sheer pleasure of reading such beautifully crafted work. I hate to say it, but I think M J Hyland has earned the right to those initials.

So, according to Claire Tomalin, today’s children don’t have the attention span for Dickens? The television’s on in the corner so we can’t really concentrate on the argument other than to say that Dickens himself, who objected to both memorialisation and cruelty to children, would not have condoned force feeding his dense prose to young readers. The truth is that some children will take to Dickens, and others won’t; it was probably exactly the same when Tomalin was at school. In the meantime, here’s our selection of titles to help them on their way.

Oliver Twisted by J D Sharpe (Electric Monkey) - the boy who asked for gore, set amidst zombies, vampires and ghouls. 

Liesl and Po by Lauren Oliver (Hodder & Stoughton )- tragic orphan, wicked stepmother, metaphysics - this lovely story for younger children has it all.

Six Days by Philip Webb (Chickenhouse) - a dystopian novel set in a richly evoked post-apocalyptic London

The Eddie Dickens Trilogy by Philip Ardagh (Faber) - ah, Mad Uncle Jack and Even-Madder Aunt Maud, Malcolm the stuffed stoat; Mrs Cruel Streak and St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans. This was the book that launched a thousand imitators and it’s still the best.

The Black Book of Secrets by F E Higgins (Macmillan). Ludlow Fitch, Jeremiah Ratchett and Joe Zabbidou - Higgins out-Dickens Dickens when it comes to names in this stylish Gothic fairy tale about a pawnbroker who buys guilty secrets.

Customer: “I’d like to return this copy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

Shop: “Oh, was there something wrong with it?”

Customer: “There aren’t any Christmas carols in it.”

Unfortunately this isn’t a sketch from The Two Ronnies, or a bad cracker joke. It actually happened. Happy Christmas!

I have been forced to have a radical rethink on the seminal influence of Ladybird books. A friend has just been round and dived with glee in to the box of covers - ‘Oh The Nurse! that was my favourite.’ All her nostalgic joy was directed at the educational ones - and as she is an Oxford educated Renaissance Woman who can unblock an S bend with one hand, while writing books about the Perfect English Cottage with the other, I have to consider whether my enthusiasm for stories about greedy, vain and discontented farmyard creatures set me on the right path in life. Maybe the Ladybird books we favoured in early life had a direct impact on our futures. Someone should write a thesis on it…. 

Shameless bout of nostalgia brought on by the box set of Ladybird cover postcards that arrived in the post the other day. Ohhhhh! Beaky the Greedy Duck! That was MINE - in a family of five children, books were read by us all but we had a strong proprietorial sense of which ones belonged to us. One Christmas my brother and I received each other’s books - he had Puppies and Kittens and I got Tootles the Taxi. By the time my mother realised the mistake it was too late - they had been unwrapped and possessed. But the anxiety over this piece of literary gender bending was palpable - I was watched carefully for signs of growing up in to Andrea Dworkin. Anyway, whoever chose the Ladybird selection clearly had a different childhood experience - it is heavily slanted towards the “educational” ones. Where’s Tiptoes the Mischievous Kitten? The Discontented Pony? The Conceited Lamb? (they were mine too). And Cocky the Noisy Rooster (my brother’s - clearly to make up for the girly kittens)? Pity the poor child who found ‘The Public Services - Gas’ or ‘The Postman and the Postal Service’ in their Christmas stocking… But the box of one hundred cards would make a great present for anyone who grew up in the Fifties and Sixties or who is interested in design. They are fabulously retro.

The opposite of Guilty Pleasure must be Worthy Read. And I must confess that when faced with a cover featuring an AK47 and those orange-y colours that usually denote war-torn African country, my instinct is to reach for the glitzy book next to it. The Frances Lincoln list is heavy on Guilt Trip Lit - and we love them for it. Because, generally, it means their books are well written and resonant. Far from Home by Na’Ima B Robert is both of these (bar a tendency to have a few too many smiles playing on lips). A dual narrative novel, it starts in Rhodesia with the story of Tariro who together with her village, is violently banished from her ancestral land by white settlers. Fast forward forty years to Katie, living a charmed life in Zimbabwe, until the Land Regeneration Programme delivers poetic justice. Although the connection between the two girls is awkwardly contrived, and towards the end Robert lapses clumsily in to history telling mode, the evocation of landscape and the emotion it engenders is powerfully done. Tariro’s story leaves you with tears down your cheeks and a residue of guilt that is harder to wipe away.

Maybe it was the fact that the Pop Up Book of Poo (Walker) arrived with Harvey, the Boy Who Couldn’t Fart that caused the sense of humour short circuit. I’m sorry to be so po-faced - oh, let’s get in to the spirit of things and add an extra o to that - but ever since The Story of the Little Mole who Knew it was None of his Business (a mole goes round with a lump of faeces on his head demanding to know who did it) there has been a …. shit load of books on the subject, Andy Stanton’s Here Comes the Poo Bus being the worst; honestly, it’s crap. The Pop Up (they missed a trick there - plop down?) Book of Poo may disappoint children whose expectations will be raised by the lift-up lavatory seat on the cover, as it’s really quite educational. Yes, mice have “teeny-tiny poo. Elephants have simply ENORMOUS poo.” Who knew? Actually, it does get more interesting - blue whales have pink poo and geese go every twelve minutes…. And at least they don’t call it poop. In America you canbuy a book called It Hurts when I Poop!: A Story for Children Who are Scared to Use the Potty. 

Last Thursday LBB had the pleasure of attending an event with not just one, but two of our favourite illustrators/authors: Chris Riddell and Tony DiTerlizzi.

The event focused very much around their childhood. Tony grew up in Florida (the Mickey Mouse badge he was sporting on his blazer surely an ironic nod to his roots?). Spiderwick Chronicles started as a field guide that he made when he was 12. His formative and early adult years were shaped by an obsession with Dungeon and Dragons - something that comes across strongly in his latest book, The Search for Wondla.

Riddell’s childhood was spent drawing pictures of decapitated knights during his father’s church sermons. He was promoting Muddle Earth Too, which he described as a chance for him and Paul Stewart to let their hair down: “well I say let our hair down, mine’s thinning and Paul’s bald.” He joked that Muddle Earth was less of a collaborative effort, more him “imprisoning” Paul Stewart and making him write stuff he wanted to draw. 

We were also treated to live drawing demonstrations - we could only gawp at Riddell’s ability to conjure up book worthy illustrations in a matter of minutes. On the other side of the room, DiTerlizzi’s depiction of himself as a young boy replete with a Luke Skywalker barnet bore an uncanny resemblance to Elton John.  

Perhaps the highlight of the event was that we managed to get our trembling mitts on not just one but three of Chris Riddell’s sketchbooks. Ooh we bet you’re jealous now… 

Admittedly she has only published one children’s book which shouldn’t really qualify her for an infatuation. But what a book! If you haven’t already read the 10 O’clock Question (Templar), rush out and buy it immediately. It was the best young adult novel published last year.

But having met Kate the other day (tea at Fortnums – it’s been a fattening week) it’s clear why she is such a brilliant  writer. She lives and breathes children’s books. The last time she came to England from her native New Zealand she made a pilgrimage to all of her favourite authors, including Jan Mark, Diana Wynne Jones and – the usual awkward pause here -William Mayne. Though she talked briefly about the genesis of Frankie, the brilliant hero of her book with his “rodent voice” of worry, mostly she just wanted to talk about other writers. So we all sat around sighing like adolescents over their favourite bands, as we threw names in to the pot.  Jerry Spinelli, Louis Sachar, Geraldine McCaughrean,  David Almond, E L Konigsburg, Francisco X. Stork…. A roll call of honour on which she most definitely belongs. 

One of the best things about literary dinners (and last night’s at Quo Vadis – we suffer for our art - definitely was literary because it was in honour of Roddy Doyle) is not necessarily meeting  the author – though in this case he was as lovely as his book A Greyhound of a Girl. No, it’s the chance to have no-holds barred conversations about books with other critics and booksellers and to discover that  what you thought were your own uneducated prejudices are shared by others. We were talking about defections by authors who have been nurtured by their publishers through the lean years and are then poached – not cool. Shall we mention names? Oh, why not?  David Almond – from Hodder to Puffin. Kevin Brooks from Chickenhouse to Puffin. Ok, yes they’ve as much right as any footballer to follow the money and maybe it’s not just about megabucks, maybe it’s in pursuit of artistic freedom or a particular editor but, I don’t know , we just expect more from them. We are – to use that terrifying parental expression – disappointed. You can’t fault Almond’s latest, Billy Dean, but could it have happened without the brave and beautiful publication of My Name is Mina? And as for Brooks, let’s just hope that Naked is a temporary slip from form. Maybe his first few books, written under the wing of Chicken House, just set the bar too high.

(I’m sorry I’m not techno-savvy enough to work out how to put a response section on this blog but I am happy to publish  a post from any publishers or authors who want to put forward an opposing view. )