Never and Forever: Wizards of Once Book 4 by Cressida Cowell

‘The crucible of the story changes those who listen to it, those who are within it, and the person who is telling it, all at the same time.’ (p 380)

(No) more to be said?

I have written enthusiastically about the Wizards of Once series so many times now, (well, once, twice, three times actually, most recently in May 2019 - see previous posts) that I have little left to say. Except that this concluding book of the quartet fizzes and crackles with all the thrillingly entertaining magic of the previous three, and a good deal more too. Cressida Cowell certainly proves to have a great deal of value still to say.

As one, so the other

As ever, her own exuberant illustrations are strewn across the pages. Her anarchic line and sprawled captions pull in her excited readers, their imagination freed by the freedom of the images. Like the pictures in the best graphic novels (although most certainly not confined in rectilinear frames) they are not perceived as static but create momentum, propelling both the characters they represent and the reader through the story with breathtaking drive. Whether conjuring the swooping of a flying door, materialising a rider clinging on for dear life to the fur of a jet-propelled bear, or simply capturing the downward drift of a gifted feather, these pictures both move and move. They are funny, terrifying , thrilling, touching, bewildering and bewitching. They can be incredibly sensitive too, and that is a big part of Cressida Cowell’s genius; she creates hilarious scrawls of fantastic creations that are often deeply compassionate and somehow profoundly human. Us as not us. (Or is that vice versa?)

And as the artist so the writer. Cressida Cowell’s story is all these same things too, and more besides. This book, these books, are the apotheosis of young children’s fantasy. They are pure reading joy. They have just about every kid-pleasing element and have it in spades (and enchanted spoonfuls). But they have more besides (did I say that already?). Her story changes and changes us. 

Meta matter

Ultimately this is metafiction for young readers. And that is a hard thing to pull off. But Cressida Cowell can do it. This is a story wrapped in story. It is old story wrapped in new story. Rich legend wrapped in wild invention. It is story of story yet to unfold, told through stories told before. It is steeped in lore as much, as the tales of, say, Alan Garner or Susan Cooper. It just wears its erudition more lightly. It is sometimes ‘magical and invisible in the quiet still darkness of the sheltering trees.’ (p 380) At other times, it lurks in gleeful laughter But though its echoes often chortle, they resonate no less for all that. 

Through four wonderful books Cressida Cowell has developed the intriguing mystery of which character in her story is the secret  narrator. In this volume, all is finally revealed. I am most certainly not going to tell you who it is.  But that which was lost is found, and that which was found is lost. Study the faces, and you may just spot the face. And if young readers are puzzled by the esoteric esthetic of the denouement, then many will think too, and is that not the purpose of a puzzle? Of a story? Of a fantasy? We are story. We are fantasy. (Or is that verse vica?)

Four-ever?

This title , like the series, is a triumphant tour de force from one of our very finest children’s book creators. But is this really the end of the story of Wish and Xar? The author is at pains to point out that a story never truly ends. Will there be more? Hopefully, never say

NEVER AND FOREVER. 

I did find a bit more to say, after all. 

Little in response to much.

Major Award Winner: October,October by Katya Balen

‘Let neither friend nor foe this secret know.

In the wild world flies Stig 2450’  (p 267)

For the present

Here on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds, not many miles from the Humber, October has felt like the month of the wild geese. Thousands have arrived to roost on the islands of the estuary and now head inland daily to feed on the stubble fields left behind by the recent grain harvest. My regular walk has been enlivened by the spectacle of wave after wave of pink-footed geese flying overhead in huge, ragged V formations, their incessant honking unmissable.

Reading Katya Balen’s book has seemed particularly apt at this time, not simply because of her protagonist’s name, but because I have felt a close kinship with eleven year-old October’s love of autumnal nature.

I am actually no great fan of fictional narrative written in the present tense, especially now that it has become so ubiquitous. There are notable exceptions, though. It seems to me this viewpoint is most truly effective when an author has a very particular narrative reason for the wanting the reader to share a protagonist’s intense, moment-to-moment experience. A few years back YA novelist Sally Green was shockingly arresting when she used such a present tense narration to capture the stream of consciousness of Half Bad ‘witch’, Nathan Byrn. The effect was disturbed, disturbing and quite devastating. More recently Christopher Edge  has used first person, present tense narration to great effect in books like The Longest Night of Charlie Noon, where time and the perception of time play a pivotal part. And now here is another remarkable exception. Katya Balen’s chosen style captures brilliantly a sensual receptiveness in her young protagonist, October,  that amounts almost  to a perpetual state of mindfulness. She is intensely aware of every moment she lives, responding to the natural world around her with committed passion. October’s voice is utterly captivating and her story would not be the one it is were it written in any other way. Which is exactly how a fine novel should feel.

Wild woods and terrifying town

However, this intensity is conjured not solely by the narrative perspective but also by the author’s stunningly beautiful use of language. Her construction of prose is often breathtaking in its mastery, as is her occasional use of arresting typography. Whilst never obtrusively ‘arty’, her writing has an intrinsic lyricism that enchants the reading ear, thrills the senses, and stimulates the mind with its vivid conjuring of experience. Nor is it only October’s adoration of her life living wild in the woods with her father that is caught with persuasive truthfulness. This is contrasted quite wonderfully with her horrified reaction to everything around her when, after a serious incident, she is forced to live instead with her estranged mother in London. Her appalled terror at  the unfamiliar oppression of the sights, sounds and smells of the city is also conveyed with devastating potency.

Inside and out

There is also much of huge implicit importance in Katya Balen’s book,  caught as effectively through her clever writing as it is through her storytelling. In first establishing October in the context of the wild, wood-living life that she experiences as so idyllic, our empathy for her is deeply established. This means that when, in the city, she exhibits behaviours that could well be experienced as strange or ‘difficult’, we already see and understand things completely from her perspective. We fully appreciate her ‘normal’, even when it may be very different from that of others. It is therefore a book that engenders understanding in a truly vital and compelling way. More than this, without any feeling of  didacticism, it also shows how beneficial to children experiencing dislocation and loss can be the patience, acceptances and appropriate love of others, whether they be a parent, friend or teacher.

Naturally the best

As happens, I am also a huge fan of Angela Harding’s art work. For several years now her Advent calendars have taken our family’s countdown to Christmas to a whole new level of loveliness, and many special celebrations have been marked by the sending of one of her magical greetings cards. She captures a vibrant and deeply effecting essence of the natural world quite breathtakingly, and her jacket for October, October is a perfect example of this. It is almost impossible to think of there being a more fitting cover for any book. Equally apt and moving are her vignettes of  Stig, the owl that October rescues. Interspersed  through the text, they echo Katy’s Balen’s story in leading the reader towards the final heart-lifting image of freedom and flight.

Wild anywhere 

This book captures so vividly and powerfully the potency of the wild, with its healing and invigorating potential, that even young readers who have no direct experience of wildness will be able to find it vicariously through October. In her they can discover the value of wildness in their own lives and world, whatever the context of their current living. There is a somewhat different, if related, theme in the book too, that also has much to offer young readers. This is the idea encapsulated in the activity of  Thames Mudlarking, rediscovering lost treasures from the past, and not only rediscovering them but ‘hearing’ and telling their stories. All this, of course, is in addition to the most valuable insight into the lives and minds of others who may appear to think differently from us but have so much to offer in and through that difference. And, above everything, October, October is a thoroughly enchanting and engaging read that ravishes with its writing. There is so much treasure for young readers (or indeed older ones too) to discover in this wonderful book.

‘All the world is wild and waiting for me.’  says October. (p 287). It is waiting now for us all. In the present. Which is exactly where it should be. Where it is. 

In my last post I flagged Finbar Hawkins’ Witch as my YA book of the year so far. Now October, October leaps into my other top spot, as front runner for children’s novel of the year. In fact, it is way ahead of the field. 

The same but different 

Back when I was a teacher I loved to explore comparisons and contrasts with my class. If I were reading October, October with them (which I certainly would have been, were it around then) I would compare it with American author Lauren Wolk’s equally superb Echo Mountain, which also explores wildness, of both nature and character, but within the context of a very different landscape  and culture. I would also contrast Katya Balen’s story with one of the several excellent children’s novels about evacuees in World War II, where the experience of children was so often exactly the opposite of October’s, being uprooted  from urban life and moved into the alien countryside. 

Major awards

October, October has now won the 2022 Yoto Carnegie Medal and the 2022 UKLA Book Award in the 7-10+ category. Congratulations to a wonderful writer. 

Witch by Finbar Hawkins

Jacket: Edward Bettison 

Internal illustration: by the author

‘I had found my witching way. And it felt so good. Now I must finish my spell.’ (p 269)

Witch seeker

As a boy in East Lancashire, I was more or less brought up with stories of The Pendle Witches. Later, when our own children were young, we lived for quite a few years in the shadow of Pendle Hill itself. Robert Neil’s book Mist Over Pendle was one of the first ‘grown up’ books I ever read. It was amongst the few novels my father owned and the same volume, very tatty now, still stands on my own, much fuller shelves. That particular book about the Lancashire Witches is not exactly a literary masterpiece, but, even so, it made a big impression, and I have had a particular interest in seeking out historical fiction about seventeenth century ‘witches’ ever since.

There have been quite a few in the intervening years, both adult and YA, some truly  excellent, others rather less so. But Finbar Hawkins’ new contribution is one of the very best. In fact this astonishing debut goes straight onto my list of books of the year and, ironically, makes the list shorter by being there. How so? Well,  because it has raised the bar for me considerably. I have read only a few other novels this year that can stand comparison with the breathtaking quality of this one.

Now and then

Witch does not, in fact, so much tell a historical story of ‘witches’, but rather uses the seventeenth century context as background for what is essentially an exploration of character. And a very powerful study it is too. Superficially, teenaged Evey seeks to revenge the brutal murder of her mother, a country woman of benign ‘witching ways’, devoted to births and healing. Her targets are the perpetrators, a gleefully vicious gang of witch-hunting men. However Evey’s less conscious quest is to discover her own identity, particularly in relation to the dead mother and living sister she resents because of her own perceived lack of their power. It is just as much a story of our time as it is of its setting, for it is the very fact that men would deny Evey her own integrity, indeed her own life, that gives her the incentive to find it. She needs the shared strength of sisters too, though - and that too resonates. Finbar Hawkins borrows from the historical period  men’s  appalling degradation of women; men whose fear of women’s true power threatens their own tenuous dominance and superiority. His ‘tall  man’ based very loosely on the historical ‘Witchfinder General’, Matthew Hopkins provides his archetype and Evey’s nemesis. But it all speaks to us still. 

Make no mistake, this is no book for young children, It is a violent, sometimes horrific story, just as the emotions Evey has to work through are violent and destructive. But it is at heart a story about the power and potency of sisterhood, both within and beyond the family, the collective strength that can resist, move beyond, the oppression of a male-orientated world. It is also untimately about the triumph of goodness over evil, of the benign use of the ‘witching way’ over its destructive potential. But the triumph is ultimate. Very ultimate.Thank goodness the tale includes one ‘good man’ within its world  of obnoxiously gross, but not exaggerated, misogyny. There is one corrupt and malign female too, to restore a little balance. Yet, even though this overwhelmingly a story of sistershood, it does not mean it is only for ‘sisters’, but I will come to that.

Bewitching writing

There is something even more to say first, for special as all of this is, the narrative itself is, for me, not the crowning glory of  this novel . Witch is not simply its story, powerful though it is, in more ways than one. It is not simply its story, but the way it is told that makes it very special indeed.

The brusque, single word Witch, feels like a very fitting title for this work. It reflects its style well, for the components  of Finbar Hawkins’ prose, its sentences, are themselves, generally terse. They are short and powerful, crafted, honed. In the voice of Evey, and in the conjuring of the settings, he achieves something very difficult. He gives a real feeling of period, pressingly real without ever seeming artificially archaic. Yet he creates a voice that speaks directly to us and to our world too. By distancing things from us, he brings everything nearer. He shows us the past as a mirror, not as an oil painting. 

Often the narrative fractures. Particularly at moments of high drama and explosive emotion, which often in Witch  amount to the same thing, the storytelling fragments into a kaleidoscope of language, images, events and impressions. It floats across the page like blown seed-down, it scatters like dead leaves, then it swoops like a murderous flock of crows. 

Many fine authors enrich their language with powerful images, and Finbar Hawkins does so excitingly, but, like a great film maker, he also builds his narrative through visual images, conjured in the mind’s eye of the reader. And sometimes it is the events described in the narrative, or the objects that are its catalyst, that are themselves the images. It is all most marvellously done. It is not only the pivotal images, like  the birds and  the scrying stone, that burn into the memory long after this story is done, but the kicked gallows bench, the wood ash on the face and the ash wood on the hill. The magnificently crafted chapter, I think it was number twenty two, where agonising news is learned during the spilling of a bowl of apples, bites deep and will live long. So too does the one about Evey’s stealing through a dark market. And these quieter scenes only serve to throw into high relief the trauma of chaos in the hanging square and the subsequent storm-fed battles on the hill. 

Images of images

Finbar Hawkins’ own skilful drawings front each chapter and add wonderfully to the atmosphere, as well as foreshadowing themes, becoming partners with the words in creating  rich imagery. One of his particular touches of  design genius is the way small silhouettes creep across the text pages, around chapter heads and into blank spaces in the text block; leaves, feathers, creatures, dandelion seeds. They draw the eye and the mind of the reader through the story and deeper into its meaning. And, oh, the blood magic! Oh, those crows!

I have seen this book classified as ‘Women’s and Girls’ YA’. However, it would be a crying shame if its audience were limited, even to such an important one. Men and boys need to read it too.Even those who themselves stand with the ‘good man’, and I hope there are many, will rightly cringe at the despicable acts their sex commit. All the more reason they need to read it. More important though, no avid reader who is old enough should miss this wonderful writing from a debut writer.

When the power of language and the power of story meld so thrillingly together, they make something very special, and important - witching magic. They leave us

‘Dancers all of the day’ 

The Book of Hopes Edited by Katherine Rundell

Cover: Axel Scheiffler 

Hopes come . .

Ever since it arrived in this morning’s post, from the wonderful Sam Read Bookshop in Grasmere, I have spend today’s down-time browsing this delightful anthology. It is a true treasure chest, and, quite the opposite of Pandora’s box. Open it and out fly clouds of glowing enchantment: poems, illustrations and short prose passages from many of our very finest children’s writers and book artists. Each, in their own way, brings a warm message  of hope, optimism and encouragement. Their multitude of bright colours truly glow in a world that might at present feel particularly dull and bleak.

. . . not single spies . . .

These are little gems for our times, but far more too. The need for hope, comfort and inspiration extends far beyond our current pandemic and I am sure this book will have much to offer to many children (and perhaps others too) in many places, and under many circumstances, for many years to come. 

As well as for children themselves, this book is a real gift for parents, carers, grandparents and teachers.The numerous lovely little snippets make it ideal for just picking up, dipping into and sharing at odd moments of time, odd moments of need. And it has more to offer too than just its comfort and encouragement. It will also act as an introduction for children and their adults to many quite wonderful writers and illustrators that they may not yet know, but will surely, after this, want to explore further. Were I still teaching, this book would be always to hand on  my desk, ready to pick up and share whenever those few spare minutes arise, precious little oases before the next thing in class life needs to happen.

. . . but in battalions 

The lists of ‘Further Reading’ that Katherine Randell has added to the end of the book, are themselves a wonderful source of inspiration. Herself one of our finest contemporary writers for young people, she clearly has extensive awareness of some of the very special books currently around for each age group. Perhaps because it is her own main audience, her suggestions for ‘Older Readers’ (MG) are particularly rich and extensive. I would be surprised if even avid readers don’t find some titles here that they do not yet know and are encouraged to seek out. 

It is yet another bonus that proceeds from the sale of this book are supporting ‘NHS Charities Together’. Buy it. Treasure it. Share it. And like the figure on Lauren Child’s brilliantly simple but evocative endpaper, look out to see bright birds of hope. 

Lauren Child

The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris

‘Let the wild world’s whispers call you in.’

Lost and found 

I generally do not like to follow the crowd and simply post on here yet another rave review for a book that is already lauded widely all over the internet. However, when two of our most treasured advocates for the natural world produce yet another stunning volume what can I do but add my voice to the thousands already praising their incantations of ‘lost’ wonder?

Following the breathtaking impact of The Lost Words, this wordsmith-astist duo have now produced more of the same in The Lost Spells. And whilst ‘more of the same’ can sometimes be a rather derogatory description, it is categorically not so in this case When the original is unspeakably wonderful, and the follow-up every bit as special, how can ‘more of the same’ be anything but gloriously welcome. 

Spellbinding words

Here again are Robert Macfarlane’s skilfully crafted orchestrations of words, sounds, rhymes and rhythms that delight eye , ear, and mind. At the same time they take us right into the spirit, into the soul of the very creatures and plants that are his subjects - and often into our own souls too, showing just how connected we really are. He truly helps us to see; see things that have always been there, but that we never knew, had forgotten, or never really appreciated; indeed, things we had lost. In bringing alive particular wonders of the British countryside, he brings the whole alive, and makes us alive to it, alive to life itself. His spells conjure little things, little things that are big things, simple things that are the very depth of everything.

Spellbinding images

When illustrations are successful, we often speaks of them as enhancing the text. Here it is almost the reverse, as Robert Macfarlane’s words complement page after of Jackie Morris’s breathtakingly beautiful art. Her images of animals and plants manage somehow to be free and flowing yet still to give the impression of sharp detail. Her colours are vivid, yet simultaneously subtle. What she sets before us are, very obviously, painted images, artifice, yet they are more ‘real’ than photographs, capturing not only the look but the spirit of a thing. Fixed as they are they so often create the most magical feeling of movement, the swirl, the prowl, the sweep of things; the float of a feather through air, the slap of a grey seal’s tail against water, the silent beating of a pale moth’s wings. I want to say the height of perfection in her art is to be seen in the simple shape of a white egret against a vast double page of sky. That is, until I come across the downward swoop of an owl, the drama of starlings against a red brick wall, or find myself stopped in mid breath by the mesmerising eyes of a fox. 

The more you look, the more you read, the more images and words dance together, echo each other, say the same things, tell the same truths, and help us rediscover the lost.

Then larger, now smaller . . .

Yet, there is one way in which the new books could not be more different from its predecessor, in its format. The Lost Words is a huge and opulent volume. It drips gold, as a background to many of the images, and strews it across the lettered pages. It is huge and radiant in its impact as well as its size. It is stunning, almost iridescent.

The Lost Spells is, by contrast, a much smaller book, thicker but less ostentation than its older sibling. But, in its way, it is equally captivating. Rather than make you want to stand back, this book invites you in. Its greater number of pages allows for fuller exploration of each subject. If the earlier book is a portable gallery, this follow-up has more of the feel of a pocket field guide, although I would no more cram such a beautiful object into a pocket that I would take it into a muddy field. But its message, its songs, its spells will for ever go with me, out into field or woods, when I walk, when I conjure up awareness.

The Lost Words and The Lost Spells are much the same, but very different. Very special in their sameness, and very special in their difference.

One minor drawback of the new smaller, thicker volume, is that some of Jackie Morris’s double spread images get slightly distorted by the depth of the fold. The curved bill of the curlew is a particular casualty. But this is nowhere near enough to detract from another triumph: another not-to-be-missed, gem of a book. We should be enormously grateful to its creators for what they have once again given to our children, and to all of us; for what they have done for us as human beings, and for what they are doing for our lives - and for our world. 

Let their whispers call you in.

Let the seal and the moth call you in. Let the oak and the daisy call you in. Let the owl and the fox call you in.