Tag: Children’s Books

Posted in Sunday Spotlight

Sunday Spotlight On The Moomins

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I was born in Scunthorpe in the the 1970s and our family had a fairly set weekend tradition. On Saturdays mum and dad would take us into town on Saturday mornings where we would visit the market and mum would take us to Scunthorpe Library. This was a huge brick building in a square full of pigeons and had a entrance that was a glass pyramid giving it a strange futuristic look. I was left in the children’s library to make my choices. I was always a voracious reader and started reading more grown-up novels when I was ten, my first being Jane Eyre. I loved it when all my classmates were reading the scheme in class and I was allowed to sit in the library alone and read by choice. I can still smell that library when I think about it. But it was in the Scunthorpe library that I first met the Moomins and I’ve been hooked ever since. These plump white hippo- like creatures were so cute and I loved the range of characters Tove Jansson had created. From the tiny light-up hattifatteners that brushed against your legs and felt like nettle stings to the determined and bitey Little My, I’d never read anything like it and I’m sure part of me thought there might be an unknown corner of Finland where they actually lived. Moomin House was a blue tower by a lake surrounded by snow and ice. I’ve recently found out that Finland doesn’t just have the Moominland theme park, there is a genuine Moomin House where you can spend your holiday. It’s the perfect combination for me and my other half, I can immerse myself in reading and he can fish the lake.

Despite having an actual theme park, the Moomin’s world created by Tove Jansson is not a sanitised pink Disney experience where everything is beautiful and everyone is safe. Yes, there are floating clouds you can ride, fantastical creatures full of character and the safe space of Moomin House, always welcoming and happy to see you. Yet, the family have ups and downs from comets, floods and an evil hobgoblin. In Comet in Moominland Moomintroll and his friend Snufkin set off on a quest to find out about a comet hurtling towards earth. In Moomin Summer Madness the Moomin are flooded out of their home and have to go on a trek to find another. In the final book Moominvalley in November, the other characters are waiting for the Moomins to arrive, but there’s no sign of them. As we wait with the others there is a palpable sense of absence and potentially loss. Our beloved friends are often in peril, suffering anxiety or are openly depressed and despairing of life. I realised when I was older just how carefully the books address worries that children and adults both have. Sometimes, it’s a worry or issue that is affecting the real world at the time Tove Jansson was writing. It’s easy to see the comet in the first book as an allegory of real world concerns about nuclear warfare. When read now we can see issues about climate change and the experience of being a refugee in Moominsummer Madness. The Snork Maiden is in love with Moomintroll and worries about her appearance, particularly her plumpness. Snufkin comes and goes from Moomin House, sometimes needing a quest with his friend and sometimes he needs quiet, only his fishing rod and flute for company. This could be read as the response to sensory overload experienced by introverts and people on the autistic spectrum. There’s the rather melancholy Hemulen, he’s a botanist who likes to wear dresses. Mymble is a single mother to Little My who’s a force to be reckoned with. All of these creatures seem to find solace and community spending time with the Moomins.

I always felt that the Moomin house was like my own. The welcoming, non-judgemental and loving Moomin Mamma and Papa are so like my mum and dad. My brother and I did have a penchant for waifs and strays, sometimes people and sometimes animals. We’d bring them home and look after them for a while. I had a friend who would ring my mum and ask if they could come for tea, then he’d wait for me outside school and go home with me on the bus. To be honest he did worry my dad a bit with his huge flared jeans and red Mohican. I was probably a square teenager, I didn’t really rebel and we were brought up in church. I did wonder sometimes what our friends got out of being with us, but at fifty years old I can see that some of our friends were drawn to the comfort and stability of my family. My mum was always home, was a great cook and accepted everyone. My dad was a bit more concerned, especially about boys, but he was a youth worker and used to relating with teenagers. My brother is Snufkin through and through, preferring solitude to being with people and enjoying nothing more than fishing with his dog. He walks off into nature for a weekend with his tent and a fishing rod on his back. My late husband was rather like the Hemulen, not that he wore dresses, but he had that professorial air and focus. I’m an absolute Snork Maiden, impossibly romantic and a little too plump.

I think Tove Jansson created beautiful, endearing characters that would appeal to children, but she doesn’t hold back when it comes to plot. That’s the enduring appeal of these books and the merchandising that has exploded over the years. If friends or family go to Covent Garden they always bring me something from The Moomin Store. I have jewellery, note books, Christmas baubles (including a Moomin House), posters, mugs and glasses. I have a beautiful shadow box and various travel mugs and water bottles. So I couldn’t resist this beautiful Folio Society anniversary edition of Finn Family Moomintroll. As you can see it has beautiful illustrations and I absolutely treasure it. This year is the 80th Anniversary of the book so I’m looking forward to a year of the comfort and nostalgia I still get from these beautiful books.

Meet the Author

In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, one of the most famous cartoonists in the world was a lesbian artist who lived on a remote island off the coast of Finland. Tove Jansson had the status of a beloved cultural icon—adored by children, celebrated by adults. Before her death, in 2001, at the age of eighty-six, Jansson produced paintings, novels, children’s books, magazine covers, political cartoons, greeting cards, librettos, and much more. But most of Jansson’s fans arrived by way of the Moomins, a friendly species of her invention—rotund white creatures that look a little like upright hippos, and were the subject of nine best-selling books and a daily comic strip that ran for twenty years.

From the New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/inside-tove-janssons-private-universe

Posted in Random Things Tours

Bedtime Story by Chloe Hooper

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Whenever I’ve been faced with difficulties in life, my instinct is to reach for a book that helps. It might be a self-help or nonfiction manual, it might be a novel that closely echoes my own experience, or it could be a memoir that tells a similar story from a totally different perspective. I’ve been helped by so many books over the years: Havi Carel’s Illness helped me cope with my invisible disability, several books about coercive control and psychological abuse helped me through a terrible break-up and books like Small Dogs Can Save Your Life and The Year of Magical Thinking helped me negotiate my first year of being a widow. Books have helped me understand the world in so many different ways, so I was fascinated with the concept of Chloe Hooper’s beautiful book Bedtime Story. In the same way I’d always reached for literature, Chloe Hooper had turned to children’s stories to hopefully find a way through a terrible situation.

Let me tell you a story…

When Chloe Hooper’s partner was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she had to find a way to tell their two young sons. By instinct, she turned to their bookshelves. Could the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss? Hooper embarks on a quest to find what practical lessons children’s literature—with its innocent orphans and evil adults, magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals—can teach about grief and resilience in real life.

From the Brothers Grimm to Frances Hodgson Burnett and Tolkien and Dahl—all of whom suffered childhood bereavements—she follows the breadcrumbs of the world’s favourite authors, searching for the deep wisdom in their books and lives. Both memoir and manual, Bedtime Story is stunningly illustrated by the New York Times award-winning Anna Walker. In an age of worldwide uncertainty, here is a profound and moving exploration of the dark and light of storytelling.

I was first drawn by the look of this book and felt really lucky to receive such a beautiful proof copy. However, it wasn’t long before it was the beauty of the words that seduced me. Hooper manages to convey so much in her choice of words. She talks about childhood bedtimes and how ‘you lie in the fresh anarchy of the dark’ once reading is over and it’s time for the lights to go out. I loved the use of the word ‘anarchy’ because that’s exactly how it feels when the light goes off and the ordinary shapes of furniture and well worn toys become something completely different. The darkness allows them to metamorphose into whatever horror they like. It reminded me of childhood trips to the toilet in the middle of the night, when flushing the toilet and turning off the bathroom light would leave me momentarily without sight or hearing. I would run down the hallway on my tiptoes and leap from the threshold of my bedroom onto the bed, just in case whatever lurked under there grabbed hold of my ankle.

I completely understood the author’s need to move into researching children’s stories at a time of such great loss. When I lost my husband I was writing about my experience, but found myself veering off towards the Victorian form of mourning with all it’s rules and regulations. Reading about Queen Victoria’s loss of Prince Albert in a non-fiction format felt safer than reading a novel. It was all facts and couldn’t suddenly ambush me with emotion. The author was obviously looking for answers, but I wondered if she too was looking for reassurance in the dark. Trying to find a correct or right way to do something that is unimaginable. There is something strangely comforting about reading that someone else has faced this. In fact if you think about it this wre ads a mot ptyuuere are a lot of orphans and lost children in literature. Anne of Green Gables, Pip in Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights – it was a more common experience to loo your parents in the 19th Century. In fact many of the authors themselves suffered childhood bereavements so perhaps their storytelling was a way of writing out that experience from the safety of adulthood, trying out what might have happened to them in that situation, or perhaps exploring their greatest fears at the time. So maybe from these stories there are clues to the better ways of helping a child through the experience, a way in which ‘the right words are an incantation, a spell of hope for the future’.

When working as a writing therapist with people who’ve had life-changing diagnoses, one of the first exercises I do with people is to imagine their illness is a monster. They must of course think about how it looks, but also how it smells and the texture of it’s skin or fur. How does it move across the room and if it came in now what would it do? Would it sit, talk to the group or slink off to a corner and stay aloof or separate? How does it behave with them? What is it’s personality and it’s drive? This is a fascinating exercise and brings so many different responses to the surface to talk about within the group. Of course this is only how we perceive it to be. Our illness and our symptoms, don’t care about us. We are irrelevant to them. It’s what their presence does to us that’s important, how we respond to it – anxiety, fear, dread, anger. Hooper writes about monsters within narratives in interesting ways. On one hand they are amoral, unstoppable and all powerful. As Hooper writes, her husband’s cancer cells are completely indifferent to him and what kind of person he is. Similarly, the Basilisk doesn’t care that it’s Harry Potter he’s trying to eat, because in the monster’s world Harry isn’t the poor, orphaned, centre of the universe, he’s just a meal. On the other hand, the monster can be fashioned from what lurks within ourselves such as the tree monster in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. This monster is seemingly fashioned from Conor’s mother’s illness, but actually he isn’t there for her. He’s there for Conor. While adults feed him platitudes and half-truths, the monster is straight with him and confronts him with a terrible truth, so awful that Conor can’t bear to face it. He’s finally able to tell the monster of his terrible feelings, that he’s so tired of his mother’s illness that he wants her ordeal to end. He is ashamed of feeling this, but in saying it he becomes free. It shows the desperate need for an outlet, away from the parents, where the child can express everything they feel, even the negative and shameful narratives they tell themselves.

If all this sounds powerful, thit is. What I love about this book and the reason I want to use it with clients, is that it doesn’t sugar coat anything. It’s not syrupy sweet, but tells iiīiiooooôoothe truth about trying to live while potentially dying. Anticipating the death of someone you love is like a slow torture and Hooper doesn’t compromise. This is about that daily struggle to be a family and continue to make sense of a world that has suddenly become scary, hostile and uncertain. The love she has for her children won’t let her lie to them, but somehow they find solace in the stories and imaginary worlds she studies. There’s a way in which it teaches them how to accept that our time here and our time together is finite. Or, to quote from The Fault in our Stars, some infinities are bigger then others. I found Hooper’s narrative utterly unique and incredibly beautiful, full of strength, a resilience within the grief. She tells us that as soon as we describe something that’s happened to us in words, we’ve placed it a step or two further away, in order to examine it and understand it better. That’s what’s happening throughout the book and we go along that personal journey with her and her family. It’s such a privilege. However, it’s also a book that treasures literature and shows us how important stories are to our culture. When we bring our children up with stories, we’re sharing something imaginative and magical but we’re also equipping them for everything life can throw at them, because without stories we have no way to make meaning of our existence and experiences.

Out now from Scribner.

Meet the Author.

Chloe Hooper’s most recent book is the bestselling The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire. The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island won the Victorian, New South Wales, West Australian and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards, as well as the John Button Prize for Political Writing, and a Ned Kelly Award for crime writing. She is also the author of two acclaimed novels, A Child’s Book of True Crime and The Engagement. She lives in Melbourne with her partner and her two sons.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/13/bedtime-story-by-chloe-hooper-review-an-extraordinary-treasure-of-hope-and-grief

Posted in Publisher Proof

Are Mummies Scared of Monsters? By Fransie Frandsen.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Children’s books aren’t my usual fare, but I decided to make an exception for this book based around childhood fears just in time for Mother’s Day. This is the third book in Fransie Frandsen’s Alexander’s Questions series, written with the purpose of helping parents and children explore emotions. Frandsen’s work as an art psychotherapist has given her so much insight into the need for tools like this for opening up communication. From my experience as a counsellor for adults, I know that it isn’t always an event that affects a child into their adult years, but being unable to talk about it. Frandsen knew that to foster healthy bonding or attachment good communication is vital so made these books in the form of questions and answers the cornerstone of her book series.

There are many reasons why healthy communication isn’t established. It could be through lack of opportunity to talk or a parent who doesn’t know how to initiate that conversation. Children may also lack the emotional language to express how they’re feeling. This is where a picture book like this is an incredible tool for establishing healthy communication between parent and child. It allows parent and child to look at the book and make meaning out of the pictures alongside the words together. Small children don’t always have a word for how they feel emotionally, but might recognise physical symptoms of that emotion such as crying and sadness. Reading together helps to explore feelings and start to put names to them. Frandsen believes this is an investment into their future, teaching them to have open conversations about emotions both with you and within their own adult relationships.

The book has lovely illustrations that introduce us to Alexander and his observations about monsters. He starts to make a list of all things monstrous – the monster under his bed, Daddy’s monstrous problems at work. Baby T is scared of his rumbling tummy and cries for his dinner. The neighbour is scared of finding poo in his garden. What he really wants to know though, is about Mummy, is she afraid of monsters? He finds out there are famous monsters and she’s not scared of those. He realises some monsters can be hidden, others can be seen and some live only in our heads. I think probably the most important thing he learns is that everyone’s monsters are different. They are in unusual shapes and different sizes, but what some people are scared of others don’t find frightening at all. We are all individuals with different monsters and that’s okay.

Frandsen’s experience as an artist makes this a thoroughly engaging book full of colour, different fonts, photographs and illustrations to engage young children. The story is funny – Alexander’s quest is started so he can avoid eating his broccoli. It showcases all of Frandsen’s skills in her field, working as a story while also helping parents foster better communication with their child. She has used the form of reading a book together, common in most households, so it doesn’t put pressure on the child to speak directly about their fears. It just opens the door to exploring what can be seen as a negative emotion, something that as adults we might dismiss (there are no monsters under the bed) or take away (mummy will keep the monster away). It is better to be there and help the child to conquer their own fear. Perhaps by inviting them to talk about what scares Alexander and whether it scares them. It could go onto interesting work in drawing or making their monster – something I’ve done just as successfully with adults who have disabilities. This lets the child know we all have things we’re scared of and ways of coping with that, the first one being to talk.

Posted in World Book Day

World Book Day! The Books That Shaped Me.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Oh how I wish dressing up for World Book Day had been a ‘thing’ when I was still at primary school. I would have wanted to be a Moomin or Little My with her triangular dress, furious eyebrows and little topknot. The best book related thing that’s happened to me so far this year was last weekend when my stepdaughters arrived for a few days and both of them had one of the books we’d bought them for their birthdays and spent part of their weekend reading. It made me tear up a little to see them popping their books on top of my tbr pile in the living room. There are things about the books we read as children that stay with us and I read furiously. I went to the library every Saturday and I’d always read everything by the next week. I’ve written before about how I was reading Classics by the age of ten when I’d read everything in the reading scheme. Jane Eyre was my first and I believe it gave me a love of all things Gothic and now a love of writers like Stacey Halls, Laura Purcell and Sarah Waters. However I started thinking about those first books we read as children, even as far back as when our parents read them to us. These are also our formative books and I started to think about how they’ve shaped my reading choices, and whether they’d shaped my character or life. So here are some well and lesser known books that I think shaped me a little.

The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr

This beautiful book was bought for me when I was very small, because I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t there. I know I’d started going for tea myself with my mum and dad. I must have been younger than four years old because my brother wasn’t born yet. On Sundays my parents would take me on an outing to the museum, Normanby Country Park to see the peacocks and the pet cemetery (which I weirdly loved) or we would go to the cinema followed by tea at a Greek restaurant next door. I remember feeling grown up and very posh indeed. Somehow that book has a similar feeling associated with it and I have always loved going for afternoon tea ever since. I loved the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party but this was even more exciting. A very posh seeming tiger wants some tea, so much so that he guzzled it straight from the teapot. Sophie and her mum are very polite but he is a naughty tiger and eats everything they have. I do have a lifelong love of things that are naughty and mischievous and I think this lovely book helped that blossom, as well as my next choice.

No Kiss For Mother by Tomi Ungerer.

When I mention this brilliant book to people there are a surprising amount who’ve never heard of it. It’s a shame because it really is an odd little gem and I think it fuelled my dark sense of humour, but also my fondness for grumpy, abrupt people. There is nothing that teenage cat Piper Paw hates more than having to kiss his long suffering mother. In fact this is a teenager’s manual – he hates being seen with or fussed by his parents, hates getting up in the morning, loathes fish and wants to be out with his naughty cat friends. The problem is that Piper has probably the most long suffering and doting mother in literature. The author has his cat’s teenage antics spot on and the family dynamics are brilliant. I loved the very dark illustrations, such as Piper’s alarm clock with all it’s insides hanging out after he attacked it with a tin opener. There are also inexplicable ones, such as Mrs Paw taking the scales off a fish with a comb! Me and my brother would laugh so hard at this naughty cat’s antics and we longed to name a cat Piper Paw. I remember when this was out of print, my mum went to great lengths to find a copy for her grandchildren and now the great grandchildren, ensuring mischief for the next few generations.

The Moomins Series by Tove Janssen

For a grown woman it’s quite ridiculous how much I love Moomins. This obsession is evident in my house where there is Moomin art, mugs, shadow frames, T-shirts, jewellery and soft toys. Rather like some people believe the Winnie the Pooh characters represent certain personality archetypes, I believe that most people can be summed up by likening them to a Moomin character. The most obvious one in my family is my brother, who is loving and loyal, but needs a lot of his own space and needs nothing more than a leisurely smoke in the open air with one or two fishing rods in the river. He is, quite obviously, a Snufkin (who I carry on my key ring as a reminder). I am soft, romantic, slightly round and worry a little about my weight like the Snork Maiden, but wish I was more feisty, bitey and intelligent like Little My. My late husband was rather studious and enjoyed calm and quiet like a Hemulen ( although I am at pains to point out he didn’t wear a dress). As a child my imagination was fired by all these wonderful creative creatures and this amazing house that looked like Rapunzel’s tower but painted blue. I loved that Moomintroll had these wonderfully loving parents who never ran out of food and would take in a stranger at a moment’s notice. There’s never any judgement so whether you wear a dress, like your own space or bite a little bit, you were welcome. Like all the best children’s books there has to be a little darkness in the background and there are disasters along the way – I’ve never forgotten the creepy hobgoblin, or the weird little hattifatteners who look like glow sticks and sting like nettles. I love the humour of these little hippo-like creatures and since I’m a Northener, one of my favourites is our toothbrush mug which depicts Moominpappa rowing a boat and saying ‘it’s a little warmer, do you think we’re nearing the South’ and Moominmamma replying ‘I’m afraid so dear.’

The Bagthorpe Saga by Helen Cresswell.

I wanted to live in the home of this rather rambunctious and eccentric middle-class family, possibly because they were quite different from us. The Bagthorpes are rather arty, with both parents being writers – although dad, Henry Bagthorpe, would disagree with that classification. His wife is an Agony Aunt in a national newspaper, whereas he is a ‘real’ writer. It seems that real writing is torturous and involves long hours locked in his office, but can anyone remember the last time one of his scripts was commissioned. His wife suspects it’s a way of avoiding the family and writing complaint letters to commissioning editors. The four children are encouraged to try new projects and hobbies (‘strings to their bows’). All apart from Jack, who doesn’t have one except for spending time with his dog Zero. William has drums and is a radio ham – involving long conversations about conspiracy theories with Anonymous from Grimsby. Tess plays music and is currently translating her own edition of Voltaire’s works. Even the baby of the family Rosie has some musical ability. The agents of most of the chaos are the Unholy Alliance formed by Grandma – who lives with them along with a malevolent ginger cat – and toddler Daisy, the Bagthorpe’s cousin. Aunt Celia is either naturally has her head in the clouds or is on prescribed medication and thinks Daisy is a creative who should be allowed free rein. Uncle Parker is a little more savvy about his daughter’s exploits, but doesn’t believe in punishing his daughter. He drives a red sports car and likes to needle his brother-in-law, on one memorable occasion writing a script in his ‘spare time’. Every book ends with a complete disaster of the flood and fire variety, and various rooms are in different stages of repair throughout the series. They are comical books and wry satirical look at a liberal, middle class family.

The What Katy Did Series by Susan Coolidge

Both this choice and my other American girl’s book, Pollyanna are really 19th Century moral plays, designed to instruct young girls on good behaviour, but also to guide them into making the transition into (an acceptable version of) womanhood. As a grown-up I looked at them again in light of my own disability and saw an even more sinister agenda lurking between the pages. On the face of it, What Katy Did was an enjoyable story of a young girl in a big family coping after the death of their mother. Katy Carr is the eldest sibling and is at heart a bit of a tomboy, still climbing up on the roof and running round the yard like her younger siblings. Their father is a doctor and he decides it would be better for his children to have a woman in the house, especially as he works long hours. So he brings his sister Aunt Izzie to live with them and restore order. Izzie is quite severe, very religious and disgusted at the way the children behave especially the oldest girls, Katy and her sister Clover. Yet Aunt Izzie’s methods don’t always get the desired effect. The person most likely to calm and restore order is Cousin Helen, who is a wheelchair user and uses her disability for good. When Aunt Izzie bans Katy from the swing in the yard without explanation, Katy defies her, but the swing breaks and Katy is seriously injured with some sort of spinal injury. Katy returns home from hospital in a wheelchair and now has to learn how to be a respectable young woman – quiet, gentle and obedient. It’s a harsh lesson and one that resonated in my own life when I had a spinal injury aged 11. I did buy some of life lessons in the this book, probably because we were church goers too, but I can see how damaging the premise is and it isn’t just used in this book.

Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter

There are a lot of similarities between Pollyanna and the Katie novels and not just the covers. Pollyanna is also being looked after by an aunt, after her missionary parents die leaving her an orphan. Aunt Polly is rather austere and certainly expects her new charge to be seen and not heard, but thankfully one of the staff called Nancy takes the orphan under her wing. Pollyanna is a character designed to teach children Christian values. She has a game she tries to teach everyone in their small town – no matter what happens, you have to find something to be glad about. When explaining to Nancy she talks about getting her Christmas presents from missionary barrels and how one year there was nothing inside, but a pair of crutches. Nancy can’t imagine what she found to be glad about, but Pollyanna got there in the end – she was glad she didn’t need them. However, this feels like a bad omen when Pollyanna has her own accident, like Katy she has a fall and injures her back. The local doctor organises for her to have an operation in the city, but can’t guarantee she’ll walk again. But before they leave, Pollyanna is visited by everyone in the city that she’s touched in some way, mainly by being her chatty, sunny, self. Both of these books are charming on the surface, but have a much darker and disturbing message beneath. It teaches young women that they should start to grow up, become young ladies and become quieter, ladylike, less free. I imagine the popularity of them has waned since I was an adolescent, at least I hope so, because I felt like quite a failure when I wasn’t as good or tame as these young ladies after my accident.

The Mary Plain Series by Gwynedd Rae

It was a Blue Peter ‘Bring and Buy’ sale that brought this book series into my life and I fell in love at once with this gorgeous little bear. So much so that I had to have my own cuddly toy bear who I named Mary Plain (and still have somewhere with my Snoopy and my ET). Written in the 1930’s in the U.K, the series features Mary, a very real juvenile bear, who lives with her family at the zoo in Bern, Switzerland. We meet her family, including a beautifully named Aunt Friske, but the book mainly concerns Mary’s adventures with her human ‘godfather’. Called The Owl Man by Mary, because he wears glasses, he seems able to converse with her, and takes her out on a special ‘svisit’ – the result of teaching Mary that if you’re talking about more than one visit you add an ‘s’. Mary doesn’t wear clothes, but occasionally likes a hat, and in the illustrations has an endearing little pot belly. She’s not always confident of how she looks and although she enjoys rubbing her belly, she does wonder if it’s a little big. Mary is well behaved, for a bear, and never intends to get into scrapes, but they do tend to happen anyway. I used to love reading about her picnics, going for tea, meeting important people and mostly just enjoying sitting in The Owl Man’s car with the top down and the wind in her ears. I still think these books are delightful and they must have been great reading for children back in the 1930’s.

Posted in Personal Purchase

Libraries Week

Posted on by thelotusreaders

If it hadn’t been for libraries this blog wouldn’t exist and I would be a very different person. I have my mum, another avid reader, to thank for this. Every Saturday morning my father would drop us in Scunthorpe and go off to play football. We would do some shopping in the market, pay Radio Rentals for the telly and then best bit – we would go to the library and change our books.

Scunthorpe Library

In the 70s/80s the library was a very odd looking building that visitors entered through a glass pyramid. A type of working class Louvre, usually covered in poo from all the pigeons in the square! However, it was the magic gateway to culture for me. A place where the message board advertised local gigs and theatre productions and downstairs housed an art house cinema, where Mum famously fainted after being overcome by Kevin Costner on the wide screen. We were a low income family, living in the middle of nowhere in Lincolnshire. Dad’s basic wage from the drainage board had to keep all four of us and the pets. Books were loved but not a priority in the budget, so I had to wait for Christmas and birthdays to get book tokens. This building was my holy grail of reading and I read classics, comedies, books about growing up. This was my window on the world and it didn’t matter if I didn’t like one, I could just put it to one side and take it back the following week. Mum would go upstairs to choose her books and I was left to browse on my own and I could take all the time I wanted.

After the library we would grab a sandwich and get the 336 bus to Ashby where my grandma and grandad lived. We would stay there until Dad picked us up at teatime. In spring and summer I might sit out in the garden or in Grandad’s shed which always smelled of shallots and had a pair of curtains at the window. While he pottered doing jobs and I would read my book. Or in the colder months we’d be inside, with the gas fire on so high it gave me a headache, and my Grandad in his red all-in-one (he was ahead of his time when it came to onesies). He’d watch rugby league or an old black and white film, while I read or we would read together. Grandad was very fond of pioneer stories, adventure novels and Wilbur Smith.

These are just a few of my book choices from those earliest days of picking my own books and cultivating a love of reading:

Little Women: This was the first book I read after completing the reading scheme at school. School had the first book, but I went to Scunthorpe Library to read the next stage of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy growing up in civil war America. I borrowed this series so many times that I still know each girl’s story off by heart. Of course Jo is my favourite. I wanted to be a writer and have a room to work in with lots of books. However, I also grew to love Amy despite her haughty character and snobbish tendencies. These early attempts to seem genteel were affected and often satirised by her older sisters. Yet, Amy grows from there. She keeps a certain steeliness and determination to succeed, but becomes kinder, softer and more vulnerable. Her interest in the finer things though give her a certain polish, she is cultured and this gives her opportunities. Good Wives shows this growth. I love how this series seems to stay relevant for every generation, with the latest film taking an interesting, more feminist slant than before. I love this Puffin ‘In Bloom’ edition of the book.

What Katy Did: I chose to read about more 19th Century growing up with Katy Carr and her house full of brothers and sisters. Katy’s mother had died and her father worked long hours as a local doctor, leaving the siblings to run a bit wild. Until her father’s sister, Aunt Izzy takes over as housekeeper. The strangest thing about reading this series was Katy’s accident on the garden swing that leaves her paralysed. I had an accident and broke my back at a similar age and was temporarily stuck in bed. I remember wanting to be like Katy or her mentor Cousin Helen who was always cheerful and helpful, even though she was in constant pain and a wheelchair user. In later years I wrote about the illness of Katy and other 19th Century heroines such as Beth March and Pollyanna. They all learn to be well behaved and Christian young ladies through suffering, if you read them from a feminist viewpoint. Back then though I just loved the sequels to Katy’s story – the secret societies at school, the trunks of goodies sent from home, Katy’s travels across Europe, particularly the Venice carnival. I’m sure it was this book that made me determined to visit Venice when I was older.

The Bagthorpes Saga: For humour I always enjoyed James Herriot’s stories, and later the Adrian Mole diaries, but the Bagthorpes were in a league of their own when it came to comedy. The four siblings William, Tess, Rosie and Jack were the children of writers – capable Agony Aunt Mrs Bagthorpe and the stressed out and highly strung scriptwriter Mr Bagthorpe. The whole family are always getting into scrapes with Grandma and their psychopathic four year old cousin Daisy behind all sorts of nefarious schemes. The siblings are all busy with accomplishments that Mrs Bagthorpe calls ‘strings to their bow’. All except Jack. Jack is the ordinary sibling, who enjoys walking his dog Zero and doesn’t really excel at anything. Aided by a hedgehog like housekeeper, Mrs Thorndyke, the Bagthorpe family lurch from one disaster to another; fires, floods, hauntings and kleptomaniac four year olds! I read these books over and over.

Pippi Longstocking: Pippi was one of those marvellous heroines who is an orphan so has no restrictions to her imagine or what she can get up to. Pippi Longstocking is only nine years old and lives all by herself with a horse, a monkey, a suitcase full of gold, and no grown-ups to tell her what to do. She’s wild and funny and her crazy ideas are always getting her into trouble! She devises adventures for her new found friends Tommy and Annika. Pippi performs at the circus, is reunited with her long-lost father, and takes her friends Tommy and Annika on a trip to the Canny Canny Islands. She also finds a squeazle, gives a shark a good telling-off, and turns 43 somersaults in the air. I loved her sense of adventure and wanted to feel as free as she did. I love the new gift editions illustrated by Lauren Child, they seem to capture the spirit of Pippi perfectly.

The Moomin Sagas: Oh how I love the Moomins! Today I have a Moomin dress, light box, mug collection and many other reminders of Tove Jansens eclectic characters. The Moomintroll family live in a tall blue house in Finland and are peaceful, happy creatures. Moominmamma is an earth mother type, always willing to feed another at her table and often taking in other creatures to help, such as the Hemulen – a tall, cross dressing botanist with depressive tendencies. Moominpapa likes nothing better than a quiet day fishing and smoking his pipe. Moomintroll is their son and has various friends such as Snufkin, a green clad, flute playing traveller who often wanders off to have adventures. Moomintroll’s love interest is the Snork Maiden, a Moomin with curly eyelashes, blond hair and a few cuddly extra pounds that she worries about (I feel a great affinity with her). There are adventures with eclipses, hobgoblins and comets, but it is the characterisation of these varied creatures that has always stuck with me and their philosophical musings on life. I’m considering a Moomin tattoo, perhaps Little My?

I’m thinking of a combi Moomin and reading tattoo to represent this childhood love of reading, all started with a library card.