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.

Life's a Bitch

The YA Book Club at Borders will be held for the first time on Friday, March 14 at 7-10pm,  at Starbucks, Borders, The Curve, Mutiara Damansara, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The session is open to 14-21-year-olds. All registered participants will receive free complimentary tall coffee of the day and a Borders Gift Certificate.

For enquiries call 03 7725 9303 or email curve@bordersstores.com.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is the featured book.

Force of Habit

I love reading about nuns and convents - it must be something to do with the fact that I'm Catholic (lapsed) and attended a mission school from the age of six to 17.

Here is a list of books set in convents (schools as well as nunneries) that I've read and enjoyed:

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy by Rumer Godden

Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien

Frost in May by Antonia Frost

Quiet as a Nun (Jemima Shore Mysteries) by Antonia Fraser

New Habits by Isabel Losada (Non-fiction)

There's Something About a Convent Girl by Jackie Bennett And Rosemary Forgan (Non-fiction) 

The Mysteries of Fate

Tots to Teens
By DAPHNE LEE

MOST of the time, coincidences are simply an accidental concurrence of events linked in one way or another. 

But what of coincidences that bring people together? In E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, George Emerson says that it’s fate that causes people to be “flung together” and “drawn apart”.

And the award goes to ...

I wonder if Malaysia will ever have its own awards for children's literature. Will the standards of writing and the number of children's books published ever call for the sort of recognition given by prizes like the Newberry and Caldecott, and the Carnegie and Greenaway, or should the awards come first, acting as encouragement to writers and illustrators of children's books?

In Singapore the National Book Council held a picture book writing/illustrating contest a couple of years ago. If I remember correctly, out of the submissions, six picture books were published. I didn't consider them particularly interesting or inspiring, well-written or -drawn. And, speaking to several writers and artists who had submitted work, I think the NBC still has very old-fashioned ideas of what makes a good children's book.

A friend and I are toying with the idea of applying for a grant with which to start a similar contest. Stay tuned to see if anything comes of it. As I keep saying, so much to do, so little time ... 

Celebration of Life

The winner of the Costa children's book award is Ann Kelley for The Bower Bird.

The book is about love, life and death seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl with congenital disease. It's the sequel to Kelley's The Burying Beetle.

The winners in the other categories are:

First novel
Catherine Flynn for What Was Lost.

Novel
AL Kennedy for Day.

Biography
Simon Sebag Montefiore for Young Stalin

Poetry
Jean Sprackland for Tilt

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.

That Time of the Year, Again

It's 43 days to Christmas. Made your lists yet? Trying to figure out who's naughty and who's nice?

Should a good girl be rewarded with the latest Gossip Girls book or served with a stack of Austens? How about a subscription to Vogue? And what would Roger Sutton (left), editor-in-chief of The Horn Book magazine, say if you asked him?

By the way, I wouldn't say no to a subscription to The Horn Book Guide (I've already treated myself to the magazine).