The Places You Will Go

About a Boy

Review by DAPHNE LEE

SLAM
By Nick Hornby
Publisher: Penguin, 342 pages
(ISBN: 978-0141324494)

I THOUGHT Slam was going to be about skateboarding. I was wrong and glad I was wrong. I used to skateboard when a teen - to impress a huge crush I had, who roller skated, but I didn't do any impressive stunts and I didn't think I'd be interested in reading about a guy doing them. However, as I said, Slam is not about skateboarding. It's just about Sam who skates and who worships the air skating champion Tony Hawks flips through.

He's so into Tony Hawk (or TH as he calls him) that he talks to a poster of the skater (skateboarding and skateboarder, Sam says, would be terms used only by losers) and, as he's read Hawk's authobiography contless times, finds it really easy to imagine his hero talking back, giving him advice, offering opinions, telling him where he's gone wrong and what he's done that's worthy of praise.

Anyway, Sam is a 15-year-old lad who lives with his single mum. Near the start of the book, Sam morosely reflects that his family isn't the sort that goes from strength to strength, each generation doing a little better than the one before. Instead, everyone just takes turns to make stupid mistakes that put paid to any hopes of success: "In our family," Sam says, "people always slip up on the first step. In fact, most of the time they don't even find the stairs."

Saying Goodbye

"Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes," said Benjamin Franklin.

Death is not a common topic in children's literature, but it is something that kids have to deal with and books help to explore the topic, which most adults find hard to discuss with one another let alone little ones. 

Ways to Live Forever is the story of a dying boy from his own point of view. Other YA books that deal with death and dying include winner of the Costa Children's Award, The Bower Bird by Ann Kelley, and Garbrielle Zevin's Elsewhere.

Michael Rosen's The Sad Book (a picture book, illustrated by Quentin Blake) was written in response to the death of his son Eddie.

And Badger's Parting Gifts by Susan Varley (illustrated by Maurice Sendak) tells the tale of Old Badger who senses that he will soon be leaving his friends and gathers them so he can say a fond farewell.

For the Love of Blue Shoes

Like me, Priya Kulasagaran, isn't used to reading Malay stories and, also like me, she was pleasantly surprised by how much she liked and "got" Kasut Biru Rubina by Sufian Abas.

I don't know about Priya, but I felt quite chuffed that I could read and understand, and appreciate, something not in English. What can I say ... Kasut Biru Rubina mademe feel quite accomplished!

Read Any Good Books Lately?

Find an opening

By DAPHNE LEE

WHEN I mentioned to a friend that I was writing an article about literary fiction, he asked, “Actually, what is literary fiction?” I immediately referred him to David Lubra’s Guide to Literary Fiction.

True Story

I think Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian would make a great Christmas present. The bloke I've asked to review the book isn't as impressed as this old woman though. Look out for his review, due out in StarTwo in the next few weeks.

Just Read It

The Star never reviewed any of the books in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy so it decided to correct this oversight by running a review of Northern Lights to coincide with the 6th December release of the  New Line Cinema film based on the book (renamed in the States as The Golden Compass to avoid confusing it with Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light, this is also the name of the movie).

The reviewer, who loves the books, was not impressed with the film, saying, amongst other things, "they turned it into a cliched good-vs-evil thing, which is NOT what the story is about, and eliminated Pullman's technique of slowly giving out answers - instead they spent pretty much every moment explaining things!!! [It was] so dull and the dialogue was so cliched and completely missed out the variety of voices Pullman has."

I have yet to watch The Golden Compass and I think that even if I decide to, I can wait til it's released on DVD.

Philip Pullman told Roger Sutton, in a Horn Book podcast that, "To be truly happy with [a film adaption of a book] you have to be the director as well as the scriptwriter and the star and the composer and the producer and everything else because the whole nature of the film obviously is collaborative. It’s the work of many, many people and the writer, even of the script, is not at the centre of it. The director is at the centre of it, and the writer of the original book on which the film is based is a long way away from the centre of the action. So inevitably there are things that, as writers, we always think we’d have done that  differently, or “I wouldn’t have put the camera here, I’d have put it there."

You can read the entire transcript of the interview here and listen to it here.

An Affair to Remember

You’d think a novel about a dying woman would be depressing, wouldn’t you? Yet this one isn’t, for it brings to vivid, delirious life a love affair whose consequences reverberated for 40 years.

Young Man Saves the World ... Again

I don't normally post other people's reviews, but I'll make the exception as it's The Dark is Rising by SUSAN COOPER. Also, links to the Star's website go unclickable after a bit and I'm too stupid to fix that ....

P.S The Dark is Rising Sequence is now available in a number of new editions, including a hardback omnibus with a rather nice navy blue cover and silver lettering, but rather tatty paper. I plan to get the box-set (as my softback Puffin omnibus is coming apart at the seams), which features not-too-tacky illustrations. Sorry, but the look of a book is quite important to me as an ugly cover might prove too distracting and distressing. When there's no hope for it, brown paper, or a page out of a magazine, does the trick.

Doll Parts

So what's your stand on boys-and-dolls (and i don't mean the kinky, blow-up variety)? I'm fine if they do play with them and fine if they don't.

My daughter, until recently, disliked dolls (she would throw them across the room), while my sons have always taken great delight in dressing and undressing my posse of My Scene and Bratz dolls (constantly making me wonder if they're colour-blind or simply "innovative" in their pairing of colours).

I have male friends who collect figurines, who get mad when I call their toys dolls: "They're action figures, dammit!"

I like dinosaurs, trains, books, water guns and dolls (my favourites are my Babooshka and my Jesus doll).

Sink Your Teeth In

A human girl and a luscious male vampire decide to go steady. A werewolf offers the girl an alternative (hot-blooded) romance. Obviously, some females attract all the right monsters.

Fan art of Bella and Edward, the human-vampire lovers in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series.