Cover: George Ermos
Serendipity
I don’t have a particular policy to review American children’s books. In fact I don’t have a policy at all, other than to write about books I have really enjoyed and can enthusiastically recommend to children, parents and teachers. I do sometimes try to avoid the trending titles that many others are blogging about, unless they are so good I can’t resist. However, it just happens that a string of US authored titles have been amongst my recent favourite reads. And perhaps it isn’t a bad thing for me to try to draw attention to them. Although we undoubtedly have some children’s writers of the very highest calibre in the UK, it would be a serious mistake for young readers here to neglect US authors. Amongst many admittedly mediocre offerings from over the Atlantic (as there are here too, of course) are to be found some of the world’s greatest contemporary children’s books and writers.
And a shining example is Lauren Wolk.
Masterpiece
Cover: Gelrev Ongbico
‘If my life was to be just a single note in an endless symphony, how could I not sound it out for as long and as loudly as I could?’ (p 228)
Only a relatively few novelists produce a masterpiece with their first book. Richard Adams’ Watership Down and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now come to mind as examples, and, of course, To Kill a Mockingbird. Lauren Wolk did it too with her debut young readers’ book, Wolf Hollow in 2016 *. Ever since its publication she has been awarded accolades and lauded as ‘a worthy successor to Harper Lee’. Although I have a general skepticism towards inflated book jacket claims, I can fully see the justification for this particular comparison.
Lauren Wolk seems to specialise in books about small, remote communities and relatively recent history. Wolf Hollow sets this precedent, recounting a short period in the life of a young girl in a rural American township, towards the end of World War II. Through the exquisitely caught voice of its narrator, Annabelle, it vividly evokes the narrow, isolated life of a small township that has changed relatively little in its ways to meet the twentieth century, and even less so in its mores and attitudes. A story of school bullying, and the unreasonable violent antagonism that feeds it, evolves in a context of fear of the USSR and threats of imminent nuclear attack, perhaps exaggerated into paranoia by the politics of the times. This expands into a book about prejudice and intolerance more personally focused and directed against a strange, lone man who is actually suffering the traumatic after-effects of fighting in the First World War.
Annabelle’s deeply compassionate, but ultimately inadequate, attempts to put this world to rights are at the heart of this profoundly human story. It is occasionally funny, but more often harrowing and deeply disturbing, made more so by the author’s skilful ability to have us live through every minute alongside her young protagonists.
Lauren Wolk often uses a clever technique of hinting at things to come, often at the close of a chapter, without in any way explaining them. This adds an intriguing compulsiveness to read on; psychological cliff-hangers. As with other great novelists, she shows us our world in microcosm, and what we see is not always pretty. But seeing may ultimately help us to change things.It is a truly fine book, even as it is a difficult one to read.
Is it a children’s book? It is certainly about a child, although one in the process of growing up, on many levels. Perhaps it is readers on the cusp of childhood/adulthood, whenever that many come, who will identify most readily. But it is a book for those children who are ready for it, and for all the rest of us who may not be, but should be.
Sparkling sea
Cover: Tang Yau Hong
Some of the authors who produce an early masterpiece, never seem to achieve quite the same level of inspiration again. Not so Lauren Wolk. This follow-up book is also very special indeed. It is simultaneously like and unlike her previous title. This time the small (even smaller) community is an island one, and her story set slightly earlier in history, although still not in the distant past. It is 1925 and, ever since she washed ashore in a small boat as an abandoned baby, a girl who has come to be known as Crow has been brought up by, ‘Osh’, a recluse living on a tiny island in the Elizabeths, off the coast of Massachusetts,. In this surrogate parenting he is significantly aided by Miss Maggie, a spinster from another island just across a tidal reach.
At one level, it is another story about prejudice. Crow is aware that she is different, having a skin colour not shared by the other islanders. Further, suspecting that she originated from a nearby leper colony, all but Osh and Miss Maggie shun her physically. However Beyond the Bright Sea is a far more lyrical book than Wolf Hollow. It is a hymn to simple, remote island life, the sea and shore and wind, as well as a condemnation of intolerance and small-mindednes . Its developing storyline does involve a pirate treasure and a malevolent villain who will will stop at nothing to get his hands on it. This gives the tale more of a feeling of a children’s adventure than her last. Yet this is not the heart of the story. The essence of the tale lies in Crow’s search to discover not only who she is, but who she wants to be. But what could, in other hands, be a cliched theme, here glows with the truth of simple humanity, expressed through the most potent writing.
Whilst Lauren Wolk does not go in for unrealistic ‘happily ever afters’, this is a more positive book than her first, heartwarming rather than harrowing, but a no less a fine a piece of writing for that.
Echo-girl
US edition
‘I was an echo-girl. When I clubbed a fish to death, my own head ached and shuddered. When I snared a rabbit, I knew what it meant to be trapped. And when I pulled a carrot from the sheath of its earth, I, too, missed the darkness.’ (p 16)
However superb her first two books, neither of them rival the sheer lyrical potency and beauty of language that is Echo Mountain. Ever skilful, Lauren Wolk, seems to continue to grow in skill as a writer. If Wolf Hollow is one of the most powerful books I know for young readers (and it is), then Echo Mountain is one of the most exquisitely written. Here still are the gripping narrative cliff-hangers and the devastating heart-pulls, but they are wrapped in a peon to nature; to the wild, simple, rustic life; to the place that is Echo Mountain, and all it represents; to much that is lost, and even more that could be. The intense, raw nature of the mountain and the emotional sensitivities of protagonist, Ellie, echo each other.
‘Her kind of courage (my mother’s) had very little wild in it. Very little of the mountain. Which was all I had - wildness- though plenty of it. And of several sorts: not one vast thing, but as varied as trees. As flowers.’ (p 101)
It is 1934 and, as a consequence of the Great Depression, Ellie’s family have been forced to move from city life into a remote part of New England and there begin to follow a much poorer, but also a much simpler life, including the building of their own cabin. For most of them it is a difficult and demanding wrench, but Ellie is immediately at home there, and in many ways becomes the strength of the family, the potential for life and growth amidst the ruins of what has been,
‘When I climbed down to sit in the bowl of that ruined house, cupped in that granite hand, sheltered by the trees growing up in it, I felt strong and able, too. A mountain girl. Smart. Quick. On my way to wise.’ (p 38)
Healing the heart
The book is essentially about healing, and Ellie is the healer, or at least the agent of healing. And hers is the healing of nature, of the mountain.
Not long after the move, Ellie’s father is badly injured whilst felling a tree, and ends up in a deep and enduring coma. Nor is he the only one sick. Her mother seems hardened not only by the loss of her former life, but now prevented from grieving her beloved husband only by the slenderest and most tormenting of hopes. Ellie’s older sister does not adapt much better, and the grim coping strategies of both mother and daughter barely hide much inner pain. Only Ellie’s younger brother retains the wayward vigour of his years, although he too misses his father badly.
When Ellie discovers an old ‘hag’ living higher in the mountain, a woman who is decidedly not a witch many think her but a nature healer herself, she too turns out to be seriously hurt. And even the young boy from the ‘other side of the mountain’, himself an important and rich character in the evolving story, suffers a bad eye injury that needs Ellie’s ministrations.
The narrative develops slowly, full of fascinating, vivid detail of Ellie’s life and her gradual understanding of who she is and what she can achieve. This gifts the reader time and space to get to know her and those who make up the tiny community in which she spends her days. But it is the mountain itself that becomes a dominant element in her story. The book’s healing, Ellie’s healing, is the healing of nature. Although, in the end, conventional medicine is not denigrated, it is her ability to echo the wild, to see everything as connected, as part of the same whole, that makes her, and her apparently simple story, so powerful, so universally truthful and so relevant to us all.
Time and again Lauren Wolf’s writing takes the breath away, with its mastery of language, its ability to catch thoughts perfectly, to express the seemingly inexpressible, to capture a moment, a feeling or an experience with a few simple but skilfully manipulated words.
‘The morning began as any morning might - a matter of yawns, squinting at the weather, wobbling on the tightrope between yesterday and tomorrow.’ (p 71)
And perhaps, in this third book, Lauren Wolk, has found a healing for her own authorial spirit too, for here, for the first time, is a truly happy ending. It is not trite or sentimental, her characters are too rich and complex for that, her language too vital, her humanity too real. But it is warm, and comforting and as wild and sweet and natural as her mountain.; an echo of love that bounces back from its crags, its forested slopes.
A present of the past
Lauren Wolk unfolds Ellie’s narrative in the past tense and, like the very best of writers, knows how to bring a recount to life through vivid evocation, leaving space for readers to draw it into their own present through the immediacy of their envisioning.
I know of only a few current writers for young readers who can match her. Her understanding, Her affirmation of life.
She can, of course, say it much better than I.
‘The closer we got to the cabin, the more I was able to see what the bear saw in the eye of the purple aster, what the crow saw from her topmost nest, what any untamed creature knew from the moment it first opened its eyes: that life is a matter of moments, strung together like rain. To try to touch just one drop at a time, to try to count them or order them or reckon their worth - each by each - was impossible.
To stand in the rain was the thing. To be in it.
Which I would do.’ (p 297)
Echo Mountain is recently out in a very handsome hardback, with a paperback presumably to follow fairly soon. All Lauren Wolk’s books are available in UK editions, so there should be no problem finding them - preferably from an independent bookseller, if you wish to buy them.
Note:
*She had written a novel for adults quite a few years earlier.