Indigo's Star

McKay, Hilary. Indigo's Star. London, Hodder Children's Books, 2003.

McKay, Hilary. Permanent Rose. London, Hodder Children's Books, 2005.

An absent father, school bullying, shoplifting, physical disabilities, a mother who keeps keeps forgetting to shop for food and often sleeps in the garden shed, shocking news about an unknown father, a hospitalized younger sister - the makings of a serious, moving, gritty novel for children? Not at all. In this series about the inimitable Casson family, humour is the name of the game. The writing is clever, fun, and endlessly entertaining, but the topics are not always lightweight. This series of books has a particularily British sensibility, where nothing is sacred when it comes to material for humour. Even though these aren't overly controversial books, this sense of irreverence is part of the appeal.

The Casson family is quirky. The children are all named after paint colours - Permanent Rose, Indigo, Caddy (Cadmium Yellow), and Saffron. Bill Casson, their artist father, has left to live in a quiet and immaculate flat in London. Their mother, Eve Casson, isn't very domestically-inclined and spends most of her time in the garden shed painting commisioned pictures of dead pets. Saffron suntans naked behind a wall of hamsters in the back yard and beats up bullies for her younger brother Indigo. Eight year old Rose draws giant pictures on the kitchen wall and sends desperate letters to her father hoping for a crisis big enough to bring him home. Caddy has moved out but brings home a string of hopeless temporary boyfriends in an effort to decide if her real love Michael really is as perfect as everyone thinks.

The Casson family is eccentric, but not hard to identify with. Each book focuses on the story of one central character, but the ongoing storylines of the other siblings continue in the background providing continuity between the books and appeal for a wide range of ages. In Indigo's Star, for instance, twelve year-old Indigo's daily terror at the hands of school bullies is about to change forever when Tom arrives from America with his red bouncing ball and utter disregard for authority. But this central storyline is woven in, at a hectic pace, with the continuing dramas of all other members of the eccentric family.

I am not generally a fan of humorous novels (for children or adults) as I often find them a little too light-weight for my taste, but there was something about the tone of this book that I found very appealing. I enjoyed that nothing seemed out of the reaches of humour, but that real content was not sacrificed for the sake of a quick laugh. I can't help wondering whether a book like this would have come out of North America.

The Invisible Child

Paterson, Katherine. "In Search of Wonder." In The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children. New York: Dutton Children's Books, 2001.

"I fed upon wonder as a child, and when I'm deprived of it, my inner life feels as sterile as a barren landscape and my outer life feels as bombarded with junk as a suburban mall."

Katherine Paterson's opening chapter is taken from a lecture on wonder that reads like a sermon without duty to any particular religion; it is a taxonomy of the different flavours of wonder - curiosity, wonder at the extraordinary, wonder at the ordinary - and an exploration of the role wonder plays in our lives, with a gentle nod towards the mystery at the core of wonder. And the bent of this talk it that children's literature, the stuff that really shines, is rich with it. Is, in fact, defined by it.

I appreciated the differentiation between the wonder at the extraordinary - the new invention, the unbelievable message in Charlotte's Web, the thrill of faster, louder, more exciting - which pales with familiarity, and the wonder at the ordinary which continues to expand and unfold with careful attention paid to even the most familiar object. Look no further than Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden for that heightened sense of magic and wonder in what is so easily ignored.

Paterson uses the image of the spider web to talk about wonder, and visits it from different angles - from Charlotte's Web to the poetry of A.R. Ammon. I love the idea of the web as precisely patterned in the centre to reflect the species of the maker-spider, and moving out in increasing chaos towards a complete freedom to hang itself from whatever is available. Is that what children's literature aims to do? Hang itself, so improbably at times, from whatever is available while starting from a tightly woven core of wonder as individual as the maker.

This is a beautiful talk about a topic essential to any consideration of children's literature. If you haven't already - read it.

Paterson, Katherine. "Newberry Medal Acceptance Speech (1978) for Bridge to Terabithia. " In The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children. New York: Dutton Children's Books, 2001.

I didn't mean to start reading this speech, but suddenly I found I'd accidentally finished it and was surprised at how moved I was by the story of what this book was born out of and how it came into the world. I'm still shocked to hear that some critics find it devoid of hope simply because it deals with the unthinkable death of a child. But just as courage isn't the absence of fear but the willingness to face it, isn't hope something more than the absence of difficulty? Isn't it, in fact, something that depends of the presence of difficult circumstances for its very existence?

I was also fascinated to hear about the very substantial process of editing, to re-discover how involved a good editor can be in the act of creation. But I think what moved me the most was to hear how real the story was for the writer, and how difficult it was for her to write the difficult parts - to me this seems like the antipathy of condescension, the ultimate show of respect for the child reader.