No Cafés in Narnia (2000), by Nikki Tate

I am currently over in Victoria, BC, at a conference, and each day cycle past the gate in the hedge that surrounds the fields of Dark Creek Farm, where Nikki Tate lives with her turkeys and goats and bantams… So I really wanted, during this week, to re-read and review her No Cafés in Narnia, remembering how much I enjoyed it years ago when I first read it.

No Cafés in Narnia (2000)

When her beloved grandfather dies, Heather tries to escape into her literary worlds: the world she creates through her own nascent writing ability and the world of the books she reads. Sometimes she wants to “push through the coats at the back of an old wardrobe,” meet Mr. Tumnus, and “even find Lucy in the forest and the three of [them] could sit at a little table at the café together eating Turkish Delight and discussing how to solve all the problems of the world” (28): problems like how to manage when her mother slips into depression, and she has to face her troubling adolescent world, seemingly alone.  To top it all off, she has thoughtlessly insulted “one of the only people at school who has spontaneously said anything nice to [her]” (70). With the problems in her family, and her trouble with friends, Heather is sure: there are No Cafés in Narnia.

Heather is fascinating, very real child protagonist: her mind wanders; she can’t focus easily; she struggles with being an outsider on the little island her family has recently moved to. She articulates her world through the eyes of her own protagonist, Writer Girl. Her alter ego’s attitudes and responses actually help her to see herself more objectively, to understand the balance she must create between being the child and striving to find the maturity her family needs from her. Her imagination blossoms in her self-assessments, in her diary entries, and in her letters to her best friend in Toronto. Her narrative ability is far more vibrant in her thoughts than she is able to get down on paper—but she continues trying. Ultimately, with the help and guidance of those around her—young and old—Heather makes the right choices, and the crises in her life become manageable.

What I like best about No Cafés in Narnia is Nikki Tate’s complete presentation of her characters’ lives. Even though in general “people like to read about danger, excitement, and romance,” Tate knows that “real writers take advantage of every moment, every experience, to enrich their work. They use all the mundane details…” (90). While this knowledge does not stop Heather from trying to write a murder mystery, it does reveal Tate’s belief about a writer’s goal, and the artistry of Tate’s own fiction.

Truths I Learned from Sam (2013), by Kristin Butcher

Having really enjoyed Kristin Butchers Return to Bone Tree Hill (2009), I was excited to receive Truths I Learned from Sam to review. It was with a bit of trepidation that I began, though, having read the back cover, which informed me that “[i]n a story story about relationships [good] and about how bad things happen to good people [a bit disconcerting], Dani discovers that sometimes the only villain is life itself [ouch].” I wasn’t sure I was ready for another emotional rollercoaster of YA angst. I need not have been worried: my concerns were misplaced, where my excited expectations certainly were not.

Butcher’s depiction of life in rural BC shows a remarkable acumen, if not lived experience. Webb’s River is like so many small interior towns—Spuzzum, Malakwa, Yank, Moyer: little on the road but a gas station, but teaming with life in the woods and hills around them.  Dani learns to ride; she learns to drive an old standard transmission clunker. We can smell the sage in the air she breathes, feel the dust in our throats at the rodeo.

The foundation of Butcher’s novel, though, is her adeptness at character construction and development. Dani is a typical teen in a not-so-typical situation. Her mother is getting married. Again. For the fifth time, actually. We shouldn’t like her mother, and we can understand why Dani might have problems with the relationship. Throughout the novel, though, Dani’s mother shows her love for Dani—however self-centred she may be in some ways—and Dani relies on her mother’s affection and support, which she receives—albeit over her cell phone. Theirs is a sometimes-awkward understanding, but they do understand and love one another. So when Dani’s mother and her new husband go off on a honeymoon to Europe, and Dani is sent off to the Cariboo to her mother’s brother—the “black sheep” of the family whom Dani had never heard of—Dani is more worried about her six weeks in a strange place than she is upset by her mother’s seeming desertion.

Sam, Dani’s uncle, turns out to be one of the salt-of-the-earth individuals without whom the world (and YA fiction) could not survive. Sam’s obvious pride in Dani, his affection, and his hand’s-off parenting attitude help her to grow in a number of ways important to a teenaged girl. He treats her like a young adult, not a young girl, and she responds with the respect and maturity he takes for granted; it is obvious that he has never had a teenager before. When he finds Dani and her new boyfriend Micah kissing, for example, he merely asks “You kids having a good time?” (92): slightly protectively, but certainly not facetiously. Although he watches over her, he knows Dani is in a safe place, in safe hands, and he leaves her free to enjoy her youth.

We watch Dani grow into her place in this new community without the sense of dread that the back cover suggests… almost. There are just enough subtle clues for the reader to anticipate the emotional crisis that comes near the end—which I will not spoil the story by revealing. I knew what was coming, and was saddened by the inevitability. What I did not expect was the heart-wrenching yet beautiful twist Butcher throws in, causing tears of both joy and sorrow. Through the sadness, Dani is left in a calm and accepting emotional space, considering her future with hope and anticipation. While Truths I Learned from Sam provides a strong and satisfying sense of closure, I really want to know what happens in Dani and Micah’s future…

Awake and Dreaming (1996), by Kit Pearson

Theodora is the daughter of a single mother who is barely managing to keep herself—never mind her child—in food and clothing.  Theo dreams of having a real family, of not being a pariah at each of the subsequent schools she is sent to as her mother moves from place to place, bad job to bad job, all within Vancouver.  On the ferry to Victoria, when Theo’s mother is taking her to her Aunt’s home—giving Theo away so she can be with her new boyfriend—Theo falls into a dream of being with a family: but the dream is real.  She begins to fade in her new life, though, and awakes, still on the ferry.  Arriving in Victoria at her aunt’s, she finds that the life she knew, the family she was part of, do exist, but are not as ideal as in her waking dream. It is not until she meets the ghost of the author in whose house the family lives that she begins to understand what had happened to her.  Her new knowledge gives her the strength to stop only dreaming, and to work to make her own, real-life situation more endurable.

Despite others’ glowing reviews of this text, and an almost universal lauding of Pearson’s plot and technique, Awake and Dreaming is not—in my opinion—one of Pearson’s best. It does, however, present a unique premise and interesting relationship between the text and the real world.

Transmigration (2012), by Nicholas Maes

This review was first published in Resource Links Magazine, “Canada’s national journal devoted to the review and evaluation of Canadian English and French resources for children and young adults.” It appears in volume 17.5.

Transmigration

Whoa. What a ride! Nicholas Maes’s Transmigration is brilliant: a well-conceived fantasy with a unique premise and a gripping storyline. The novel begins with a talking bunny, but there is nothing cute or cuddly about the sinister alternative world history that Maes creates so carefully. It should perhaps have been a clue that a West Coast bunny talks with a Brooklyn accent, but I admit I found it only a bit out of place—until the plot progressed. In Maes’s history, a species of souls—bolkhs—coexists with humans as we have developed through the evolutionary process: a species that wants now to take back what was once theirs, destroying all human life. Young Simon Carpenter, of Vancouver, BC, is a tool they need for their war against humanity. When he learns this, his comfortable world is shaken to its foundations, and he must flee for his own safety and that of his family. The complicated relationships between players—different types of souls and their various connections with physical bodies—are adeptly explained to the reader through Simon’s own learning experience. I almost needed to create a rubric, but Maes brings in the terms just often enough to help the reader learn his nomenclature and the associated characteristics of his world.
The talking bunny seems an unlikely scenario for the introduction of a YA mystery-fantasy, but the bunny’s very cuteness is the first tool used against Simon by the bolkhs in their battle for supremacy. The bolkhs inhabit animals, as well as some humans, and their plan would have all bolkhs incarnate and powerful, at the expense of humankind. What ensues is a series of flights and confrontations that takes the protagonists from Vancouver to Europe—both of which the author obviously knows well—where Simon confronts the leader of the bolkhs, Tarhlo, who almost convinces him of the righteousness of the bolkh cause. Tarhlo’s logical argument is based on empirical scientific knowledge: the bolkhs argue that their ascendancy now is a natural part of the evolutionary process, as right and understandable as the Cro-Magnons prevailing over the Neanderthals. So well-crafted is Maes’s story that we are honestly not sure what Simon’s choice will be.
Ultimately, Simon travels to New York and a final confrontation, after which we are left with the protagonists safe for the moment, but still threatened: the final sentence assures us that “[w]hile the first confrontation with the bolkhs was over, the war was only getting started” (244). This is the one flaw in this otherwise spectacular piece of YA fiction: the end does not present any closure; it demands—rather than merely anticipating—a sequel. Please, authors: write novels that stand alone as narrative entities; refrain from publishing what amounts to the first installment of an indeterminately long narrative cycle. It is not fair to readers to create a book-length cliffhanger: leave such commercial tactics to the pulp serials. The degree of disappointment in the inconclusive ending is proportional to the level of engagement Transmigrations elicits: if it were a less engrossing story, we wouldn’t care so much that the ending disappoints.

Another Kind of Cowboy (2007), by Susan Juby

Susan Juby’s kind of cowboy is rather fine. Alex Ford has always been obsessed with horses, especially the structured control and exactness of dressage, which as a child he called “corsage” until corrected by his aunt, Grace. Like Grace, Alex’s father, Brian, understands but distinctly does not share the obsession. Nonetheless, when Alex is eleven, his father wins an old nag in a poker game and brings him home to Alex, and Alex’s real life begins. The horse, Colonel Turnipseed, “Turnip” for short, is trained Western and comes with Western tack, so Alex’s father arranges for Western lessons: he “loved having a cowboy for a son” (15). The degree of vicarious machismo Brian Ford felt watching his son compete—and win—in the “performance-based” competitions was not lost on his son, who nonetheless still dreamed of dressage. Eventually, circumstances conspire to present him with the opportunity to begin again: in dressage rather than Western. Alex’s strength of personality—a strength he possesses but does not believe in—coupled with his determination and natural riding ability set him on a new path, no less troubled but certainly more rewarding than his life to date.

Juby creates a community for Alex that will ring true, I think, for readers from all demographics. He is relatively poor, from a disorganized, broken home, but with drive and a dream. His fellow student is a spoilt rich girl sent to a private, girls-only riding school on Vancouver Island as “punishment” for her naïve lack of judgment concerning the family chauffeur. Alex’s twin sisters and aunt are the perfect foils for his up-tight insecurities, made worse by his alcoholic father.  The dynamic within the family is a brilliant balance of sibling intolerance, teen anger and angst, and embarrassment, underscored by compassion and understanding that is revealed in small glimmers throughout the novel. While we unequivocally like Alex, we also come to like and appreciate the people who surround him. There is no bully to contend with, no individual antagonist to stand up against; Alex’s life is complicated, troubled, and rewarding. Juby presents his conflicting concerns—continuing with dressage without a horse, and coming out to his family and friends—as similarly weighted in Alex’s mind, and I think this is one of the most refreshing elements in the book. Alex is gay; he knows that; he is highly insecure about letting his overly macho father know it. Alex loves dressage; he has worked hard to be in the ring; the horse he is using is taken away from him. Both to young Alex are monumental crises, and it is to Juby’s credit that Alex is permitted to find the strength within himself to own who he is, and his father is permitted to show his real love of his son by helping to solve the real problems: despite his own initial homophobic feelings, Brian Ford comes through, and both Alex’s worries are sufficiently alleviated.

That sounds, I think, like the relationship between Alex and his father is paramount in the text: it is not. It is a deep current underlying so much more going on. It is, however, for me, the most poignant relationship. If “it takes a village to raise a child,” Alex Ford lives in the right family and community. They are not perfect—none of them—but together they create (well, Juby creates) a community that while (like all the world) built of damaged, flawed human beings, is nonetheless supportive and real.

Wishing Star Summer (2001), by Beryl Young

A simple text telling of the visit of a young Belarus girl suffering from the unhealthy atmosphere of the post-Chernobyl landscape.  Tanya comes to Vancouver on a relief program to stay with Jillian Nelson and her family, but despite wanting to have a friend badly, Jillian finds it difficult to be a friend. The story is written with a young beginning reader in mind (ages 6-8?)—or rather, the narrative voice is simplistic enough that older readers will find it too young.  The highlight of the story is not in the plot, but in Beryl Young’s insightful portrayal of the tensions between the protagonist and her Belarus guest: I don’t think I have ever read a text which manages to portray the protagonist so successfully as a jealous, spoilt, 11-year-old and yet retain my interest and affection for the girl.  The characterization of the other members of the cast is equally powerful, and raise an otherwise banal and predictable story to one worth reading and sharing.

Return to Bone Tree Hill (2009), by Kristin Butcher

I found this book on my shelf. I have no idea where it came from, but I suspect from my friend Rob, who also reviews YA literature, being far more active in the children’s and YA academic literary scene than I am. If so, I will have to thank him, as it was a fascinating novel.
Set in Victoria, BC, Return to Bone Tree Hill appeals through the careful and affectionate descriptions of places that any local and even most visitors would recognize. Yet neither the title place—Bone Tree Hill—nor the opening scenes of the novel smack of local colour. In the opening lines, we are plunged into 18-year-old Jessica’s recurring dream: nightmare, in fact. Through her first-person description of the sleeplessness and trauma it is causing, we come to know Jess as a clever, caring girl, recently returned from six years with her family in Australia. Their emigration had been delayed for a number of weeks due to Jess’s contracting meningitis, which has left her with days of blankness in her childhood memories.  In this memory chasm lie the clues to Jess’s dream, a dream of murder and betrayed affection, emotions swirling together—inseparable—in Jess’s faulty, feverish memories. With the help of her pragmatic best friend Jilly, Jess struggles to regain the memories that she feels point to her murder of a childhood friend; given the strength of her dream, she can believe no other explanation.
Kristin Butcher presents her readers with clues carefully delivered to Jess’s increasingly troubled psyche in a way that is natural and believable. While one could anticipate paranormal elements at the outset, vision and reality slowly coalesce in Jess’s world until she and Jilly—and the readers—fully understand what happened on that fateful evening six years earlier. There is nothing paranormal in Jess’s recovered memory: only horror and fear and sadness.
Young readers who want a mystery with a solution that cannot easily be divined will really enjoy Return to Bone Tree Hill. It has all the right elements: protagonists who do not step out of believable activities for teens; a crime that is plausible and practicable; a solution that arises through natural processes. All is explained, and explained well; but that does not mean you will guess the end before you get there.

Julie (1985), by Cora Taylor

Cora Taylor’s first novel is an engaging look at the life of a young girl with paranormal abilities. The story is told mostly in flashback, the ten-year-old Julie’s memories of how she had learned to hide her gift, her visions of the past and future.  Through the course of the story, Julie learns what the wise woman of the village, Granny Goderich, tells her she will: “there comes a time when we have to act […] You have to decide, and that’s when the gift can be terrible. Wonderful and terrible.  […] You have to learn when … you have to be strong” (52).  Julie learns her own strength, and moves forward into her future (we are left to surmise) full of the power of her gift and the knowledge of how to use it.

A Fairy Garland of BC Flowers (194-), by Dorothea Allison

In my other life, I work for the Canada’s Early Women Writers (CEWW) project, headed by Dr. Carole Gerson at Simon Fraser University.  The project aims to construct an online database of all Canadian women who published—in any genre, in any forum—before 1950.  CEWW is one of the seed projects for the larger database project, the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), run out of the University of Alberta, and headed by Dr. Susan Brown.

Connecting my love of early Canadian literature with my love of children’s literature, I have been reading through the children’s texts written by some of our authors, with the intent of sharing them—if only superficially—with others.  The first such text was The Bells on Finland Street, by Lyn Cook; this is the fourth.

A Fairy Garland of BC Flowers

This captivating little book was written by a teacher in the North Okanagan Valley. She came to Canada in 1912 to visit her cousin, as part of a round-the-world tour that began with visits to her sisters in Burma and India. While in Oyama, she fell in love with her cousin’s neighbour, Robert Allison. She had accepted a teaching position in Okanagan Centre, but when the couple married in December of 1913, she gave up her position (as was required of married women at the time) but stayed involved in education and other community services in the Kalamalka area. Dorothea remained involved in North Okanagan community affairs for the rest of her very long life; she died in 1981, at the age of 103.

The volume itself comprises 28 short poems: an introduction, the 26 letters of the alphabet, and a farewell.  The cover, title page, and poems are decorated by delightful wood-cut prints, with a lithe little fairy flitting about the flowers. The copy I have in my hand is signed not by the author, but by the illustrator, Janet Macmillan, whose name when she signed it was Janet Macmillan Blench. The author thanks in her dedication a “Mrs. Helena Parham (Botanist, Vaseux Lake), who has taught us so much about the flowers of the Okanagan Valley.”

As an alphabet, the author tells us, it was difficult to find the right flower for each letter: some were hard to come up with, and for some letters there were too many options. I can well imagine, and modern readers will be surprised by some of the choices she has made: frittillary, kinnikinnick, pentstemon, urtica, and zygadena are not flowers I remember from my Okanagan childhood! The flowers she does include are all local wildflowers: no orchids or jasmine adorn these pages. The poetry is sometimes shaky in rhyme or meter, but at other times perfectly lovely. Description of the volume requires words that are sweet and diminutive: it is truly a “fairy book” of flowers, in tone and content, visually and poetically. If my children were younger, I would want a copy to keep, for it is a fine combination of art, simple poetry, and tribute to the valley I was born in.

Neil Flambé and the Crusader’s Curse (2012), by Kevin Sylvester

You won’t be able to buy this one quite yet. It is set for release on May 8th. You can pre-order copies from the large online retailers, or (my preference) KidsBooks in Vancouver. Or, if you are lucky enough to live in the Toronto area, you can meet Kevin at the Toronto Public Library (40 Orchard View Blvd, Toronto) at 9 am on 12 May 2012. Or so the Simon& Schuster website tells me. They even have a map…

Neil Flambé and the Crusader’s Curse

I am so used to Kevin Sylvester’s cast of characters representing the cultural diversity that I know as Vancouver that an important, subtly expressed, relationship in The Crusader’s Curse failed to surprise me sufficiently: or so I am told. It was called to my attention by another reviewer to whom I lent my copy, a reviewer who is prominent in the children’s literature world for his active support of GBLTQ literature for readers of all ages. In the penultimate chapter, Jean-Claude Chili comments that his friend Hugo Victoire “eez used to loud noises. I snore like a greezly bear” (274). They have been together for “many years” Jean-Claude admits, and he strove to keep Hugo, like his sister—the people he loves—out of what he knew to be a very dangerous situation. Nothing more. For years now GLBTQ critics have been asking for texts that aren’t about homosexuality, or about “coming out,” or focus on the conflicts raging within our strongly heteronormative society, but rather present alternative sexualities as a non-confrontational reality, as they should be. Such representation is slowly beginning to appear. Neil Flambé and the Crusader’s Curse, even more than the first two culturally diverse texts in the series, lies in the vanguard of social tolerance.

More than that, though, The Crusader’s Curse is another delectable taste of mystery and adventure: an international Stanley Park for children. When the Neil Flambé cookbook comes out (I mention the possibility purely from desire, not from insider knowledge), I will immediately cook the recipes from this novel (if I can get my hands on some fresh seagull)! If you ever need to seriously cook your Canada goose—or hedgehog, or garter snake—Neil Flambé is your man, or rather, boy.

But Neil is growing up. As he hits his fifteenth birthday, he seems to have lost his panache; the food he serves his guests appalls them, and the arrogant boy-chef learns to eat humble pie. The reader, privy to the historical backstory upon which Sylvester loves to construct his narrative palimpsests, knows that the curse of the Flambés has descended: Neil’s culinary senses have desserted him. He is almost overcome, and readers are on tenderhooks as they follow Neil’s vacillation between depression, anxiety, and anger, with only enough information (such is Sylvester’s admirable narrative control) to trust that the plot will not burst into flame in the oven. It almost does, and I must admit that the final scenes were hard to follow, relying as they did on the reader’s ability to create visual images from the barrage of action words required. But the failing, I know, lies in this reader: the children to whom I lent the book loved the ending with all of its excitement combined with Sylvester’s inimitable sense of humour. But it made me wonder if there are anime artists and producers waiting to create a film version for us? And would we want that…? Perhaps not: Sylvester’s language not only reveals his subtle, sardonic humour in a way that film could not, but also creates layers of narrative that replicate the nuances of culinary artistry, drawing on all of our senses, not only the visual. So, Mr. Sylvester, back into your garret to garnish Neil Flambé #4 (Neil Flambé and the Tokyo Treasure), or are you starting on that cookbook yet?