Covers: Kay Wilson
Alike and different
It is brilliant that more neurodiversity is now being represented in children’s fiction, and in some very fine books too. The real potential of children who think differently is at last being promoted. Undoubtedly one of the trailblazer in this field has been Elle McNicoll. We must celebrate her as a writer just as she so effectively celebrates neurodiversity and inclusion in her books.
I hugely admired her first titles which fully deserved their many awards. But, for some bizarre reason I hadn’t caught up with Like a Charm until I picked up its newly published sequel, Like a Curse, the other day. So I tried to make amends and read them both together. (Well one after the other, to be strictly accurate!) And what a joy they were.
In this new duology Elle McNicoll has pulled off a very clever coup. She has combined her trademark promotion of neurodiversity with the sort of light fantasy that is so popular with many MG readers. She has added magical creatures to her evocative setting of contemporary Scotland, whilst ensuring that the quest of her highly entertaining novels is still for a kinder, more inclusive society.
LIKE A CHARM
In her dyspraxic protagonist, Ramya Knox, Elle McNicoll has created is a kind of badass, female, beret-wearing Harry McPotter - with a heck of a lot of attitude.. But then Ramya has reason. As someone diagnosed with Dyspraxia she has had a lifetime of put-downs.
‘There’s a price to being unlike other people. People can sense it. I grew up with faces frowning down at me in confusion and frustration. I became a measuring stick for people’s characters. For their patience, their compassion, their empathy.’ (p 91)
It seems most people around her didn’t measure up and her attitude is in direct response.
‘A flower grows thorns once it’s been snapped out of the ground too many times.’ (p 91).
Elle McNicoll’s great talent is in capturing the thoughts and feelings of her neurodivergent character, her resentment, her isolation. And she communicates this in language and images that are at once straightforward, yet so telling:
‘They are a village. All linked together, overlapping and reaching across minor walls. . . I’m an island. Across the water. Watching the tide.’ (p 93)
Other characters too, are beautifully drawn to foil Ramya. Relationships are often sensitively and meaningfully developed, especially that with her grandfather, before and after his death, and with her cousin, Marley. The rest of her family and, indeed, many of the fantasy characters, the fae, vampires, sprites, trolls and the like, also spring vividly to life from the page.
Like magic
Elle McNicoll also cleverly uses those fantasy characters to further her vital inclusion messages. Many of the ‘Hidden People’ are themselves shunned, feared, marginalised and outright dismissed by human society. The quest that Ramya inherits from her grandfather is to promote understanding and acceptance of their ‘difference’. Nor does Elle McNicoll ignore other issues of the real world. Her themes extend to both family tensions and wider political ones, some of which chime very potently with our current society. Her sensitive handling of the experience of loss and bereavement is balanced by hints of the the support and consolation to be found in friendly community.
The tale’s setting of Edinburgh, vividly and atmospherically evoked, is wonderfully apt as the context of her story; history, tradition, and ancient magic seem to seep from its very stones. And, even with so many crucial messages embedded within it, Like a Charm is a stonking good story, keenly exciting, with several surprising twists. With the help of the magnificent Kelpies, and Ranya’s own very special abilities, its climax is truly exhilarating, whilst humorous comeuppance and future promise round everything off very pleasingly indeed.
As a former school adviser, I even tried to forgive Elle McNicoll her obvious antipathy for the species, hoping all the while that I was never as lacking in empathy and understanding as the one she so entertaininglylampoons.
LIKE A CURSE
‘I’m different. I should be allowed to celebrate and bask in that glow, but the whole family wants me to be quiet and cautious. And hidden. Just like other magical creatures. I don’t want to be hidden.’ (p 22)
Perhaps even more that the first book, this second majors on story, and what a story it is. It is of the most original and creative children’s fantasies I have come across for a good while.
Here the narrative, switching between Edinburgh and the misty shore of a wintry Loch Lomond, pulses with myth, folklore and tradition, but transfigured through wonderful imagination. Here are Selkies and Dryads, Witches and Sirens, in fact a whole host of magical creatures, but not as you have probably quite thought of them before. Even the much-hyped Loch Ness Monster turns out to be real (in a way) but is actually . . . Well I won’t say what it actually is, as that would be a terrible spoiler, but believe me it is both completely unexpected and utterly wondrous. There is mystery aplenty, and enigma too, not least in such wonderful conjurings as the shape-shifting ‘Ripple’ and the never named, elusive ‘Stranger’. This writing is so clever - and spiked with sharp, self-aware humour too
’Marley . . . worries over everything in life. Not just where the commas go.’ (p 32)
Yet this same Marley gently teaches us how to relate to neurodivergence.
‘Marley and I view the world through entirely different lenses. It frustrates and isolates both of us, sometimes. Yet Marley always tries to understand what I’m seeing, and never tells me I’m insane.’ (p 40)
Indeed this whole book is suffused with the perspective of the neurodivergent in a way that almost subliminally seeds understanding in the mind of the reader. And defiant, sassy Ramya is undoubtedly its hero, in her everyday life as on a fantasy level..
‘I’m neurodivergent. No moulding, no occupational therapy, no tough love or extra help or special education is going to change that. I’m never going to be a neurotypical child.’ (p 115)
Both Ramya and her creator have a wonderful ability to tell it straight. And to put us straight.
Like character like author
Like a Curse is a deliciously engrossing story, a story of twists and turns, of discoveries and betrayals, of tender relationships and of thrilling confrontations. As it moved on I felt more and more pleased that I had read these two books together. Rather than a novel and sequel they began to feel like two parts of the same story. But in the end, I felt that it was not the exciting denouement of narrative strands, introduced in Book 1, that made this second book so important. It was the development of Ramya’s character. What she learns, what she grows into, is a kind of resolution for those individuals who’s thinking is different from the ‘norm’, but also for all who are struggling to grow into themselves.
‘I have finally understood the need to control myself, to preserve my peace instead of rising to other people,’ (p 230) says Ramya towards the end of the narrative. But it is not simply about anger and control. Ramya discovers that she has remarkable, magical potential (and may well one day develop and use it) but she does not need it to be special. All that she needs for that is to be who she is. That is specialness itself.
What Ramya has, and has in spades, is not is not angry resentment. It is not even magic as such, it is resilience.
I go back to the first of the two books for a quote that is, in context, about Ramya, but that I believe applies equally to Elle McNicoll herself:
‘If I have to fail one hundred times inside a world that was never designed for me, then so be it. It will make winning all the more glorious.
Magic is easy to me. Magic is just the art of letting all that resilience sing.’ (p 304)
Elle McNicoll is a glorious, magical winner. She is a hugely successful neurodivergent writer, who communicates tellingly what it means to be neurodivergent. That makes her very special. But she is also a very fine writer, period.
This duology is a triumph on so many levels. . . . and it sings.