The Asparagus Bunch by Jessica Scott-Whyte

Cover: Russell Cobb

‘Oh my God, Noel, you’re magic! . . . that’s why I hang out with you : you’re different. You’re a complete misfit and you don’t give a toss. I love that. Even more than Jazzies.’ (p 186-7)

For any one with (sadly) limited confectionery experience, these are Jazzies.

Curiouser and curiouser and curiouser

It is now almost twenty years since Mark Haddon produced the ground-breaking The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. His book was remarkable in featuring very positively as its main character a boy with what appeared to be Asperger’s Syndrome. It was it even more remarkable in its phenomenal and continuing international success. (Although it is a brilliant book, so perhaps not all that surprising.)

In the years since, there have been quite a number of children’s and teen novels featuring characters on the Autistic Spectrum, many of then outstanding books. This may well be because of their authors’ strong commitment to the importance of this subject, but clearly many of them are excellent writers too. This has, of course, been a wonderful and important thing. However, it does beg the question of whether we needed yet another novel for young readers about a kid with ASD.

The answer is a resounding YES when it is as entertaining, truthful and moving as TheAsparagusBunch from Jessica Scott-Whyte. It is a simply joyous read.

The story centres on three young people, brought together by the fact that they each display a different form of neurodivergence. Its narrator (or supposed author) Leon, lives with his single-parent mother, who works on Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The most prominent aspect of his Asperger’s (ASD, or whatever you like to call it) is a huge obsession with sweets; that is international confectionary in every conceivable aspect, its comparative quality,  its history, science, social importance, you name it. It is hard to imagine that he is not a (if not the) world expert. Tanya, his eventual big ‘mate’, wants to be a writer, despite her dyslexia, whilst Lawrence (aka Beeboy) has ASD with somewhat different characteristics (as is often the case). In this book you get three joyously neurodivergent characters for the price of one.

Novels about neurodivergent kids usually have lists 

Here are some of the reasons I am so excited about The Asparagus Bunch:

1. I love Blackpool; I was born and brought up not too far away and my grandmother lived there. 
2. Leon, the main kid, calls lunch dinner and dinner tea, just like I do (what with me having been born and brought up not too far from Blackpool).
3. Leon just says straight out the sort of things about other people that we (I suppose I mean I ) wish we could say.
4. Leon is great. I would love to hang out with him.
5. It is a very sweet book (sorry). Leon loves some of the confectionery items I did as a kid (especially Christmas selection boxes).
6. It is written in the past tense (Yea!).
7. It is hilariously funny (main reason).

You think that there’s  nothing funny about ASD?

Well, I’m sorry. but Jessica Scott-Whyte just proved you dead wrong. The Asparagus Bunch is one of the most delightful, entertaining, sometimes side-splitting books I have read in a long time. But it is also one of the most sensitive, caring, and positive in sharing understanding about neurodivergence and promoting the importance of valuing ways of thinking and experiencing that are different but not inferior. It strongly encourages those with neurodivergent outlooks to be strong and proud in their difference. It also promps the rest of us to recognise their potential and their integrity as well being sensitive and supportive to their needs. 

Jessica Scott-Whyte’s genius is to get us to identify wholeheartedly with Leon from the very start. This means we are always totally on his side, understand completely where he is coming from and indeed accept his different thinking and behaviour as our new normal. So often this author brings out the humour in Leon’s neurodivergent behaviour, but she is categorically not poking fun, rather just seeing the funny side, as it were, from inside.

More than this, Leon is frequently witty, clever and downright hilarious in his comments on life and other people. He shows remarkable insight, pertinent, needle-sharp observation and honesty (crowned by the glory of saying exactly what he thinks without inhibition). At other times he displays a charming naivety, that is more to do with his age and life experience (or lack of it) that with any neurodiversity.

One of this author’s great talent is in making valid points at the same time as being funny. As in her chapter title, ‘Dyslexics are Teople Poo’. She make us smile, and gets her point across without any heavy lecturing. It is just brilliant.  

Conversation at school (from page 78):

Tanya: Gotta swing by the loo.

Leon: As if this place wasn’t shambollic enough. Why would they go and install a swing beside the toilets?

Tanya (rolling her eyes): I have to go to the loo. Is that better?

Leon: Well, it’s certainly more reassuring.

Typically, it’s not Leon’s inability to relate to idiom that is so funny, as much as his final dry reposte.

Although, to be fair, Tanya herself does a pretty good line in repartee.

‘You’d better shut that smart-arse mouth of yours, mate, before I rip off your goolies, roll ‘em in icing sugar and eat them as bonbons.’ (p 106)

(Remember. Leon has an obsession with confectionery.)

(If you don’t find at least one of these very funny then this book is probably not for you. But are you for real?)

There is also much entertaining banter between the three ‘mates’ and though it often includes mocking of each other’s ‘afflictions’, it is always good-humoured, underpinned with understanding and respect. This is effectively contrasted with the taunts of the bully, Glen, which make very clear the difference between friendly joshing and cruel mockery.

Another of Jessica Scott-Whyte’s master strokes is to make Leaon’s principal problem in the narrative one that pertains to many children and is not exclusive to ASD, his mother’s taking up with a ‘new fella’. Leon’s extreme reaction, as usual very freely and bluntly expressed, probably opens up feeling shared by many, as well as promoting understanding by others. 

What another list?

Some more reasons I am so excited about The Asparagus Bunch:

1. Like much good comedy, there is touching pathos not far below the surface.
2. Noel is possibly the only person I have ever met (real or fictional) who can turn an appallingly bad attitude into an endearing (even an admirable) quality. He thinks he is normal and the rest of us think differently. He could well be right.
3. Like Noel, I am delighted that God made me an atheist.
4. Amidst the humour, the author communicates effectively the severe stress that can be experienced by ASD and other neurodivergent children.
5. Jessica Scott-Whyte uses laughter to show us vividly and truthfully how someone who thinks differently thinks. That is so much more accessible (and effective) than lecturing (main reason).
6. The sweet ending might verge on the sentimental but it still sent me rushing off to seek out again Track 7 from Carole King’s Tapestry LP*
7.  . . . and a Toblerone.

Got it covered, mate

This wonderful book revels joyously in promoting and celebrating the importance of difference in our society, both for those who are neurodivergent and those who aren’t.  It deepens the humanity in us all. It lightens the load for those facing difficult times in life and is simply one of the finest books of recent years.**

After all, sometimes, for all of us, ‘Life is like a Marshmallow. Easy to chew but hard to swallow.’ (p 156)

Russel Cobb’s cover illustration not only catches the essence of the book, but is startlingly arresting, which is just brilliant for a book completely deserving to be (correction) destined to be one of the biggest hits of 2022.

* ‘You’ve got a friend’

** Oh, and did I say, it’s very funny. 

Broken Ground by Lu Hersey

Cover: Rhi Winter

‘The mound was built and the great stones erected as signposts in the landscape, so people would never forget that this is sacred land.’  (p 253)

Old ground 

The great Alan Garner, Susan Cooper and others established a wonderful tradition of children’s literature that taps richly into the magical landscape of our British Isles. That is to say, not only the power of the landscape itself, but also the myths and legends of its ancient roots. Even without a belief in magic as such, there is a potency still in stone circles, ancient barrows and the like, because these things seem to represent an awareness of the earth, the sky and the seasons that still has much to say to us today, or perhaps ought to have. Whether consciously or subliminally, these things give a novel a deep resonance with our very identity, our origins and our essence as human beings. They can also provide powerful metaphors for events and issues in our modern world.

This tradition has, thankfully, been continued by many other fine authors since, although it has faded in and out of prominence at different times. A few years back Bone Jack by Sara Crowe dipped very impressively into this area and, more recently, two outstanding fantasy sequences, Celine Kiernan’s Wild Magic trilogy and Catherine Doyle’s Storm Keeper trilogy, have drawn effectively, if rather more fancifully, on Irish lands and legend. However, it is a while now since I discovered  a book that has so successfully blended a relevant, contemporary story with the post-Garner tradition as does Lu Hersey’s new Broken Ground.

Rich ground

Of its precedents, what this new book puts me most in mind of is Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. Though no less thoughtful, Lu Hersey’s style is far more explicit, more accessible than Alan Garner’s very densely packed, concentrated writing, and her setting and themes are quite distinct. However, the parallels lie in the exploration of intense relationships between a trio of teenage protagonists and their families, worked out against, and through, a background of particular landscape and its ancient myths. In this case, her setting is an only thinly veiled version of the area around Silbury Hill in Wiltshire.

Lu Hersey’s trio of troubled youngsters centre on  the novels’s narrator, Arlo, whose family have lost their long-standing ownership of the local farm and its land, following the suicide of his father. Warm-hearted and sensible Jaz, the friend Arlo is very attracted to, is a girl of African heritage, only recently returned to this area of England. The third of the triangle is Hayden, son of the violent and abusive Phelps, the new owner of the land. Although his involvement in events is more peripheral, the author cleverly also includes a fourth young character, Clay, whose pragmatism and good-humoured bluntness are often brought in as a foil, thankfully defusing some of the intensity of interaction between the others. 

A thoroughly contemporary concern provides the catalyst of the action here, in that Phelps is illegally using the ancient land of his farm as a base for test drilling the potential extraction of shale gas. And whilst, in our own world, fracking may have been largely discredited as a potential energy source in the not too recent past, it has now begun to be reconsidered as a possible solution to the short-term energy crisis. Few environmental issues could be of more immediate relevance.

Using the ‘magical’ creation of intricate Celtic-patterned crop circles as the way in, events and character interactions are catalysed by the intervention of the highly disturbing Andraste, an archetypal earth figure conjured into reappearance from beneath The Hill by the attack on ‘her’ domaine and demanding a high price as recompense.

Deep ground

Broken Ground may be a more accessible, more contemporary novel than, say, Red Shift or The Owl Service, but easier to read and understand does not mean that it is easier to take emotionally.. In fact this is ultimately a very dark and disturbing teen read. As indicated by the title, it is a story about ground that is broken, violated; the ground of human relationships as well as the soil of the earth. And it is a reminder that deep folklore, ancient beliefs with their sacred sites and nature deities, are not always benign and certainly not comfortable. They give, but they also demand. Here, reparation for the desecration of the earth, for the disturbance of its personified guardian,  demands sacrifice, requires blood, and the price paid by its young inhabitants is terrible on a personal as well as an emotional level. 

This is a story that will disquiet as much as it comforts and, though its young protagonists learn much about themselves, their families and their world, it is at cost. They grow into love and reconciliation but only having lost and suffered much to achieve it. In this sense, Broken Ground is a very grown up book, or at least a growing up book. It is a book for the time of Lughnasa, and the dark secret Harvest Home, even whilst it holds the perpetual promise of Imbolc, the coming of Spring.

Of its type, it is a remarkable book, and its type is very remarkable indeed.

Rhi Winter is to be warmly congratulated for a cover that catches the essence of the story brilliantly, without giving too much away. It is is also one of the most tastefully compelling to be seen on a young readers’ title for quite some time.

Wilder than Midnight by Cerrie Burnell

Cover: Flavia Sorrentino

‘A snow-white lie. Scarlet-cloaked, with sharp teeth and yellow eyes.’ (p 75)

Wilder than Fairy Tale

Cerrie Burnell is a talented writer across a range of genres and for different ages. Her last MG novel, The Ice Bear Miracle, was a very fine book, but her latest, Wilder than Midnight, is something else. It is a little masterpiece; a joyous, lyrical romp into and beyond Fairy Tales, lifting tradition gloriously, magically into our own time - and back into timelessness. 

For a start (although it is no small thing) Cerrie Burnell finds a rich, immersive language which totally conjures the magic of a fairy-tale world , without ever falling into the ‘Victorian’ heaviness of many traditional versions. Page after page is pure joy to read, replete with almost poetic construction and cadence, lush with the evocation of nature, and the magical mystery of storytelling.

‘. . . her wolves were singing. She joined their moonlit call, her voice raw with the melody of the forest - the burn of the wind and lilt of the river and the deathly nights of winter.’ (p 145)

Magic beyond spells 

Although Cerrie Burrell’s book does not contain magic in the Harry Potter sense, it is thoroughly magical. Its magic is the magic of story, of Fairy Tale. But she does not simply retell or even rework traditional tales. Rather she takes elements of these well known stories - sometimes clear references, sometimes wickedly playful borrowings, sometimes little more than oblique hints - and reimagines them into a complex multi-layered narrative that simply fizzes  with life and excitement.  Often, she does not so much draw from traditional tales as constructs a narrative from which traditional tales could derive. It is all very clever - and totally captivating.

Her tapestry of fantasy is woven from the narrative strands of three girls, each having at least a degree of origin in different tales, but crisscrossing in quite wonderful ways that enliven, illuminate and often undermine our expectations. As a consequence the story is in no way predictable, beyond even its being unpredictable.

‘Aurelia tipped into that new reality: a different understanding of the world. All at once, her thoughts rushed together, then drew apart in a different order,’ (p 205)

As with the character, so the whole narrative. It is brilliantly clever.

Look again, think again

And within this are explored characters and themes that are one hundred per cent contemporary and relevant; Wild Rose, raised by wolves, is at one with the forest; Aurelia is determined to escape the constraints in which she has been imprisoned; Saffy is conquering her own timidity to discover what her world has truly to offer. Here is girl power par excellence. Here is wildness and freedom, oneness with nature to almost rival Katya Belsen’s October. Here is determination not to be limited by oppressive convention. But, more than anything, here is celebration of the lack of limitation of so-called disability. The potential to defy expectations and make your own destiny.

Because of her one short, handless arm, Wild Rose is rejected by her own parents and by the village at large, branded with the ‘Mark of the Witch’. But, through this fictional embodiment, she conveys the passionate message ‘I am not a Label’ just as compellingly and just as as convincingly as the real-life examples in this author’s wonderful non-fiction book of that title.

Here Cerrie Burnell again proves herself to be a powerful advocate for the ‘disabled’, all those who should not feel limited by labels given to them by others. She is, simultaneously, the most gifted of writers and it is a combination truly to be treasured. Clearly this is a story that means a great deal to her. It is her story. But, thanks to her fearlessness in sharing it, it becomes our story too. Through it, many will learn to fear difference less and to love wildness more.

‘Living was more than just running and breathing,’ she writes. ‘To really live, you had to find bliss in the unrestful dark,’ (p 79)

May we all learn to find bliss in the unrestful dark, in all the beautiful midnight wildness in our world - through life and hope, through nature and through appreciation of the unlimited ability of the ‘disabled’. 

The Storyteller’s Handbook created by Elise Hurst

An important precedent

Way back in the 1980s, when I was still teaching and later working to support other teachers, we were blessed with a quite brilliant resource book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdock by American author/illustrator Chris Van Allsburg (perhaps best known for The Polar Express). 

It was a picture book of sorts, but not a story as such. Rather it held within each page a myriad potential stories.  It was a series of full page illustrations, hauntingly strange and often rather surreal in quality, each with just an enigmatic title and a single sentence of text. What it provided was the most amazingly potent stimulus for talk, for storytelling, for talk for writing, and for imaginative story writing itself. I cannot count the number of times I used it to great effect with school classes, on CPD courses and recommended it to colleagues. (Incidentally, it was re-issued here in the UK in 2011 by Andersen Press and seems to be still available in this edition.) 

A new doorway into the imagination

Now we have a wonderful new addition to this area of resource, the rather more explicitly titled The Storyteller’s Handbook. It has been created by talented Australian artist/illustrator Elise Hurst who some in this country may best know for her illustrated edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. In fact, this new book has a remarkably insightful, and indeed moving, foreword by Neil Gaiman himself. It is currently published by a US company called Compendium, but is easy enough to source on the internet*.

The Storyteller’s Handbook has a small number of pages with inspirational quotes:

‘Our imaginations are not limited by what is, they can soar into what if.’

‘Stories are doorways. . . All doors are open to us, especially when we make them ourselves.’

‘Every new beginning, every new path begins with a single mind daring to believe that things could be different.’

However, most of the book is crammed with the most incredible double-page drawings, which open these very doors and indeed set imaginations soaring. A few are comparatively simple and amusing  (like the penguin aiming to fly with a colourful kite strapped to its back) but most are detailed, complex, and multi-layered, stunningly beautiful in their own right but also shockingly surreal.They jerk us out of our conventional vision of the world and open up a myriad potential ways of seeing and thinking afresh. Many combine both human figures and animals, but in amazingly different proportion and relationship; they are are pictures which need to be seen to be believed (or not believed).

The Storyteller’s Handbook is another truly wondrous thing.

My golden trio

Were I still teaching Key Stage 2, I would categorically want these two books (together with Aaron Becker’s Journey trilogy) in my classroom and I cannot recommend them strongly enough. They would also, I’m sure, be enormously valuable to those children who love to write their own stories at home.

In my mind, they now form a golden triangle for inspiring imaginative talk and writing (without constraining it), portals into other worlds - and perhaps new versions of our own. 

    

Note:

*I strongly advocate buying books from independent bookshops whenever possible, or high street chain bookshops as second best. However, I have to admit that buying on the internet does allow easy (and usually fairly quick) access to books published in the USA. 

The Midnighters by Hana Tooke

Illustrations: Ayesha L. Rubino

Euro  pean

There is a delightfully eccentric, somewhat quirky quality about some of the best children’s fiction from mainland Europe (as in the wonderful works of Cornelia Funke, Jakob Wegelius and Tonke Dragt, for example) so it is quite enchanting that Dutch-born but Bath-resident author, Hana Tooke, brings more that a little of this continental quality to her UK published novels. 

Her first book, The Unadoptables, was a true delight, bringing to a ‘classic’ story of abandoned orphans the author’s captivating richness of characters, an inimitable flair for imaginative invention, and all in the Amsterdam of the 1880s. It is delightfully unfamiliar, sometimes odd, always engaging, and warmly comforting. It has much to say too about individual worth. Perhaps one day she will write her own remarkable story, but for the present, like the fine writer she is, she lets much of it percolate into her books.

Midnight chimes

If I had to find one word to sum up The Midnighters it would be delicious. It would be Black Forest Gateaux (if only the Black Forest were in Bohemia): double-layer chocolate, cream, kirch-soaked cherries, the lot - and with a crumbled Flake on top. (Well, isn’t Bohemian cake a bit like that anyway?) Regardless, it’s just scrummy. 

A decidedly different protagonist 

The novel’s protagonist, Ema, has a good many insecurities. She feels inferior to all her (many) scientifically gifted siblings, and thinks that those strange talents, or peculiarities, that she does seem to have, are of little worth. 

I am an enigma. Not a good, interesting kind of enigma - like the birth of the universe. But the bad, frustrating kind of enigma - like how one sock always vanishes in the laundry.’ (p 31)

Hana Took has a great talent for inventing details that reveal character in a way that is simultaneously amusing and poignant, as when Ema, so fed up of people not noticing her arrival, wears a bell collar in the hope of alleviating her self-perceived invisibility. 

In some lovely scenes in the midnight city, following a strange meeting with the mysterious Silvie, she begins to discover more confidence, become more herself. Tentatively fear begins to be ousted by daring, even while new friendship is mixed with intriguing secrets and science starts to mingle with what could even be magic. 

Gone girl

However, when Silvie suddenly disappears the narrative deepens, becoming dark enough to thrill young readers, but not so sinister as to disturb them seriously. The whole scene is suffused with tombs, masked, hooded figures and deep, fearful shadows. It tingles with delicious fear, intriguing mystery and makes compelling reading,  Nineteenth Century Prague is a wonderful setting for such dark doing, with its long history of science and invention, but also alchemy and magic. This book would be an ideal read for anyone who has visited this wonderful city, but such travelling is not necessary as Hana Tooke paints such a vivid picture of the place; its famous landmarks, including the Charles Bridge and the Astronomical Clock, play their evocative role as background scenery to the mystery.

Gilded murder

Soon, Ema discovers a link between the missing Silvie and a strange ‘Midnight Guild’, and, despite continuing to involve some search for her friend, the narrative shoots off in a rather different direction. It is in many ways what you might call a story of two halves. The covert world into which Ema now intrudes feels initially almost like a children’s version of Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, except that its various ‘entertainments’ are not so much magic as artifice, contrived spectacles. This exotic location becomes the setting for what is essentially a complex murder mystery, with Ema its bewildered but determined detective. With its large cast of colourful potential suspects, tangled motivations, twists, turns and shocks in the way events play out and a long final scene where Ema gathers all the suspects for questioning and an eventual revelatory explanation, the the thing is very cleverly done and, indeed, worthy of Agatha Christie herself

What pulls the whole story together though is that it is Ema’s new found confidence in her own idiosyncratic abilities which allows her to win the day and reunite her family and friends.

The past is tense

Throughout, Hana Tooke crafts her prose with skill and sensitivity. It is a refreshing pleasure to find another example of past tense narration that demonstrates so clearly that it is not essential to resort to the limiting first person present tense to create a reading experience that is immediate and involving. Here the objective narration adds a great deal to the atmospheric picture painting and the author has a particularly delightful way of conjuring verbal  images that are original and surprising as well as vividly evocative.

Drawing us in

Illustrator Ayesa L. Rubio contributes strongly to the atmosphere of the book with her chapter head vignettes and her strikingly lovely cover art is a big part of what makes this initial hardback edition a particularly handsome volume. It is good that she is given reasonably prominent acknowledgment on the back flap.

Proudly peculiar 

Overall, what is so special about this book is that it is not really about adventure, fantastic spectacle or even murder and detection. It is about being individual, about being ‘odd’ (in a good way). The wonderful message that permeates The Midnighters  is one that needs to be taken to heart by all those who physically, mentally or emotionally do not conform to our society’s concept of ‘normal’, and perhaps just as much by those who think they do:

‘Normal is the biggest illusion of all . . . ,’ says Sophie. ‘I don’t need to be psychic to know that you are splendiferously peculiar . . . We will banish the idea that normal,is something worth striving for. I will make you proudly peculiar.’  (p 87) 

This is far more than just another gothic mystery, albeit a very entertaining one. The whole adds up to a multi-layered book with plenty to think about and a strong messages. A further delicate layer is added to the cake by its closing passage, a whimsical epilogue that is yet another of the book’s many delights. The author’s humanity shines out from under this tale’s dark hoods and behind its black masks.

‘Adventures are best served with a drizzle of moonlight,’ says Silvie. (p 54) Or, we might add, with a dribble of midnight. But they are particularly well dished up with a large dollop of Hana Tooke.

Let us all strive to be ‘proudly peculiar’.