Cover illustration: Isabel Roxas
Too gold to miss
In 2018, Hello, Universe won the Newbury Medal in the USA, the close equivalent of our Carnegie Medal. Happily, it has recently been published here in the UK by Piccadilly Press.
It is yet another example of the stunningly high quality of the best of contemporary American children’s literature, and might well be a good place to start for any young readers (or their teachers) who have not yet ventured so far afield. It is a reading journey that will enrich experience enormously and reap manifold rewards. But whether or not you have already made such an overall discovery, this is a treasure of a book and not to be missed. It has an outward simplicity and easy, entertaining charm, yet communicates with considerable depth, both intellectually and emotionally. Although it wears its authorial skill lightly, and is ideally pitched for its young readership, it is a masterclass in skilfully sophisticated storytelling. It opens some of the glorious potential of quality fiction, at the same time as entertaining hugely. Moreover, it carries many messages about human worth and potential that are vital to the world in which its readers are growing. It is a book that may just help them, and the world itself, to be better.
Wonderfully diverse
One of many things that this author does supremely well is to represent diversity through the young characters of her book. The story is told through the voices of four children, each very different in background, but all living in close proximity within the multicultural society of the USA.
Virgil is of Filipino heritage and his story is replete with the folklore of those islands, mostly passed on to him by his beloved Grandmother, his Lola. Further, he suffers from being a quiet, shy, introverted boy in a loud, brash, extrovert family. He is often called Turtle by his mother, as a joking reference to his need to ‘come out of his shell’. It is not a implication he particularly likes, and in his heart of hearts he is tempted to think that, as with an actual turtle, his shell is perhaps an integral part of who he is.
Kaori is Japanese in ancestry although second generation American in reality. She likes to think of herself as having inheritated the mysticism of the orient and to be something of a psychic. However Erin Entrada Kelly’s implicit messages of understanding and inclusion are not so much about awareness of particular backgrounds or cultures, but about the understanding that every heritage has richness and value to offer as a piece in wonderful jigsaw that is humanity.
Chet is a bully from a family that appears to embody something of the extreme right wing conservatism.
Perhaps most pertinent of all, though, the other principal character, Valencia, is deaf. I know of relatively few children’s books that so sensitively convey some of the pertinent issues that affect children with hearing loss I am sure readers who are also deaf will delight in finding themselves prominently portrayed, as so rarely happens, in a mainstream book. Hearing children too, though, will learn a very great deal about how they need to behave to best help those who can’t hear. Even more importantly, Valencia is a strong, clever, highly articulate character. Her positive image is an salutary lesson to any inclined to see deafness as a disability rather than as a fully surmountable disadvantage.
A quartet of voices
Yet this book is not some sort of polemic on intolerance. Its many positive and important messages are fully embedded within a totally engaging story. And it is a story quite wonderfully told. Its themes and its style complement each other perfectly and are equally integral to its endearing (and I suspect enduring) appeal.
Each of the voices is beautifully evoked and takes us right inside the thoughts and feelings of the very particular child to whom it belongs, evoking very effecting empathy. These four narrative accounts weave and interplay through the book like the instruments of a string quartet. Although the characters are sometimes eccentric and zany, and often amusing too, they are very much grounded in childhood truth. We are even led to a degree of understanding for bully Chet’s behaviour, even whilst not approving it. The story is very much about the way the lives and actions of these four different children move ever closer together over a few hours of their lives, and that is just what happens in the telling of that story too. Whether it is fate or coincidence that brings them together is one of the fascination questions posed by this fascinating book. Either way though, that conjunction results in hugely important growth for both the characters themselves and for the reader.
When the present is timely
Narration in the first person present tense can be very effective in the hands of a skilful writer. However, I have to admit to finding it rather tiresome that it has become so ubiquitous in current children’s fiction. Especially so, where it appears to have no real literary justification but to be emplotpyed solely in the cause of trendiness. However these reservations decidedly do not apply to this author. She uses the present tense for only one of her four narrative voices, thus creating distinction and variety whilst avoiding monotony or restriction of viewpoint. Further, the voice she chooses for the present is that of deaf Valencia, where it not only emphasises her very particular perception of the world, but also gives her feisty attitude a powerful immediacy. It is most cleverly done.
An interesting comparison
Surprisingly, there were several times whilst reading this book when I was put in mind of this year’s UK CLIP Carnegie medal winning novel, Anthony McGowan’s stunning Lark. I say surprisingly because the two books are in many respects completely different. Hello, Universe is very much a children’s (MG) novel, with the sort of cutely smart kids that always seem to me distinctly American. Don’t get me wrong, Erin Kerry’s are vivid, convincing protagonists, but they are nevertheless distant cousins of Charles M Schultz’s Peanuts characters, somehow capturing something of the essence of American (and maybe universal) childhood. They dress a good deal of human truth in light, bright clothing. Lark, by contrast, is a book for slightly older readers, set in the gritty realism of the British north country, offering a short tale that is is harshly demanding emotionally, even if not without its own beauty.
Yet the two books each tell superficially simple stories developed around a central incident where the principal protagonist in in fear of his life and in desperate need of rescue Nicky in Lark falls down a rocky ravine; Virgil in Hello, Universe finds himself trapped at the bottom of a disused well. Even more though than this narrative parallel, I think, it is the fact that both books are fundamentally about character and relationships, and draw their potency from the way that, through the unfolding of a few hours of story, the reader learns more about the protagonists at the same time as those protagonist learn more about themselves. Notwithstanding the warm charm of one and the raw emotion of the other, these are each in their own way books that show young readers the power of literature to grow understanding of others - and of themselves.
And now . . .
Another of this authors most popular titles, Lalani of the Distant Sea, has also been published in the UK in a fairly recent Piccadilly Press paperback. I now anticipate reading it with excitement.
