Reviewed by Frances Maclean

Joan Aiken’s A Necklace of Raindrops and other stories first appeared in our house in the early 1980s and soon earned its place amidst my most treasured childhood belongings, right up there with the butterfly-shaped wind chimes I’d received from my parents on my sixth birthday and the imitation mother of pearl pocketknife I was given later, emblazoned – importantly I felt since it symbolized the great responsibility entrusted to me – with a small green cartoon Robin Hood (as explanation I did grow up on a farm). True, there were other books I loved but these old favourites were generally battered and worn-down by the carelessness of my enthusiasm for them. A Necklace of Raindrops was different. A small elegant paperback – its front cover quite unlike the bright, bold and determinedly solid illustrations of the other children’s books I owned – this one was thickly framed in black, lending it what I considered to be a sophisticated air of mystery, and the image taken from the title story showed three dark silhouettes – a girl, a princess, and an Arabian king set against the warm yellows, pinks and oranges of a searing white hot sun. Swirling through this image was a colourfully transparent and god-like figure – the generous though rather unforgiving North Wind as it turns out. The scene, like the stories themselves I realize now, seemed to offer something of the wind chimes and the pocketknife combined. A sort of magically enhanced elemental beauty on the one hand – in one story a list of wondrous presents include a flower that can sing and a boat made out of a great pink shell. While there is the sense of being entrusted with these magical tales on the other; as a kid living in a world ruled by adults Aiken’s stories are an empowering antidote.

The knowledge that Joan Aiken was not only a children’s writer but a writer of adult stories – and among those and even scarier, a writer of ghost stories – only added to the book’s allure. (Although Aiken died in 2004, on her website she had cited Edgar Allan Poe as an early influence). I suppose there was the hope (and the fear) that Aiken, with all her vast writerly knowledge of the adult world, might accidentally let something slip through to ours. But in her book Way to Write for Children she explained the need to be very clear about her intended readers. While adults read for entertainment, bringing the history of their many years of reading to any book they open, children, she wrote, read “to learn”. Keenly aware of her child readers’ sincerity in their approach to books, Aiken clearly wrote for children with sincerity too. Her stories are simple, concerned with a child’s concerns without being child-centric. There are stories about children here of course, but there are also stories about cats and grandmothers and travelers and bakers – and danger too. For Aiken does not pretend that a child’s world is without fears. In the title story nine year old Laura, gifted a magical necklace by the North Wind when she was a baby and instructed never to take it off lest it bring bad luck, is forced to give up her necklace to the care of the teacher during school hours – only to have the precious necklace stolen by a jealous classmate. In submitting to school rules Laura, it seems, is disobeying the higher laws of nature. And here I will mention that the magic in these stories is not the far off impossible kind but what feels more akin to a near and natural (though no less wondrous) sort of magic. In the same story, Laura’s friends, fish and mice and birds, quickly come to her aid since she has always treated them kindly. In ‘The Baker’s Cat’ a cat with a cold is given warm milk and yeast and left to sleep by the fire – all the while rising like a loaf of bread. There is a simple ordinary logic to the way the magic works in these stories – a magic that might (almost) happen in our everyday lives.

In 2001 a new edition of A Necklace of Raindrops was produced with illustrations by Kevin Hawkes. More recently the book has been reissued in the U.K. with the original illustrator Jan Pienkowski – and it is the original edition that found its way into our home. Pienkowski, perhaps better known for his illustrations of the Meg and Mog series written by Helen Nicoll, matches Aiken’s simple fable-like stories with beautifully rendered black and white images throughout – static images that disguised as silhouettes seem to ripple and move and run and dance on the page. The effect is like listening to a very fine storyteller with your eyes shut – the language shapes the construction of a magnificently wrought tale but in your mind’s eye not only are you free to fill in the finer details with your own best imaginings, you are also perhaps more inclined to put yourself in the story too. That is to say, the silhouettes are most effective here precisely because they become the shadows of our own imaginations. The book being a product of the late 1960s however, Pienkowski periodically sets off firecrackers of lush colour (while retaining the silhouettes themselves), one for each story – and every one both an example and a revelation at the richness of Aiken’s storybook world. One of my own favorite images is from the story ‘The Three Travelers’ which shows Mr. Brown, a ticket-collector from a remote desert train station bounding happily around the green and bountiful oasis he has just discovered – when you strike out in your own direction, the story seems to suggest, the world will surprise and delight you.

Frog and Toad Are Friends
Written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel
HarperCollins
1970

Owl at Home
Written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel
HarperCollins
1975

Mouse Tales
Written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel
HarperCollins
1978

Reviewed by Frances Maclean

When I first decided I was going to write about old and/or otherwise overlooked children’s books – great stories that had since become either lost or forgotten – one of the first book memories that came to mind was a story about a boy (although something told me that the boy might have been a mouse, I couldn’t be sure) who was spending the day watching clouds in the sky. At some point in the story I remembered one of the clouds transformed into a menacing shape which frightened the living daylights out of the boy (maybe mouse). Without recalling the specific plot of the story, I mostly remembered the dreamy expansive mood; the spacious sky, the deliciously slow pace of time, and then the sudden (shocking) fright of the imagination. I spent a lot of time trawling through book searches online looking for children’s books about clouds (there are a surprising number) but found nothing that resembled the cloudy fragments of story I had in my head. Sadly, I began to believe this story was well and truly lost to me.

One of my favourite resources for learning about new (and old) children’s books is an ongoing radio segment on New Zealand’s National Radio. These illuminating conversations are between Kim Hill (high priestess of New Zealand public radio, as well as host of Saturday Mornings with Kim Hill) and Kate De Goldi, writer and children’s book critic who has an almost magical talent for finding book treasures and bringing them into the light. It’s during one of these conversations that I first heard about Arnold Lobel (you can find the audio link here: Kate De Goldi and Kim Hill discuss Arnold Lobel).

And like De Goldi, I was completely charmed by Lobel’s writing and illustrations. There was also something familiar about the pictures – some back-of-the-mind suggestion that they’d been around forever, although the books featured above were all created during the comparatively recent 1970s.

Frog and Toad Are Friends is a collection of stories about an amphibious friendship between reasonable, thoughtful Frog and the more emotional, sensory-seeking, and child-like Toad who possesses his own simple Toad-logic. In one of the stories, Letter, Toad is sad because he is waiting for the mailman who never brings any letters. Frog rushes home to write Toad a letter and then posts it to him. Learning that Frog’s letter is on the way (as well as learning exactly what the letter says), Toad happily waits with Frog until the mail finally arrives. As George Shannon writes in his book Arnold Lobel (published by Twayne Publishers in 1989 as part of their Twayne’s United States Author Series) “while most picture books about friendship (including many fine ones) deal with the issues of making friends, fighting and making up with friends, or losing friends, Lobel evokes Frog and Toad’s friendship by dramatizing their daily lives”. It seems that Lobel is not writing a friendship as he thinks it should be, rather a friendship that simply is.

Owl At Home, on the other hand, is about a lone owl navigating through his night-time world. With nobody to tell him otherwise, he must make sense of the world himself, but for a night creature he is unusually anxious and unworldy. In the story Strange Bumps, for instance, he is frightened by his own feet under the blankets, and in Tear Water Tea he purposefully makes himself cry, thinking of all the saddest things he possibly can (“spoons
that have fallen behind the stove and are never seen again”; “mornings nobody saw because everybody was sleeping”; “pencils that are too short to use”). All so he can happily drink a good cup of the special (if a little salty) tea.

As Lobel himself is quoted by Shannon as saying: “When I can put myself into a frame of mind to be able to share with the reader my problems and my own sense of life’s travail, then I discover that I am working in top form.”

About three-quarters of the way through Shannon’s book I slowly realized I had found my missing cloud story (in Mouse Tales). It was a Lobel story all along – in top form, naturally.

Un Lun Dun
Written and Illustrated by China Miéville
Published in the United States by Del Rey BooksReviewed by Frances Maclean

Strange things are happening to twelve-year old Zanna. Animals (except for cats) seem to be taking an unusual interest in her, and then there’s the weird unmarked letter that she received from the postman along with an odd-looking travelcard. Soon enough things become clearer (and then decidedly and deliciously murkier after that) when Zanna and her best friend Deeba find themselves drawn into UnLondon – a trashy upside down and inside out version of the London they have always known. Greeted like a savior, Zanna quickly learns that she has been chosen to save the mad city from an insidious and growing cloud of evil Smog. How exactly she’s supposed to do this she’s not altogether sure, but the prophecies are written in a very (self-)important talking book. Yet when those prophecies are challenged by an unexpected and disastrous turn of events, we learn that what counts is not so much whether or not you are chosen, but what you choose for yourself. Destiny, it seems, is what you make of it.

The pleasure of the book comes in riding the waves of Miéville’s surging imagination through the wonderfully bizarre urban landscape of UnLondon. And while an obvious message you can take from the story is the importance of recycling, public transport, and looking after the environment; this is also a story that celebrates the underbelly of a city for its rich diversity and creative possibilities. There is a strange beauty here in the unappreciated and discarded – an endearing empty milk carton that loyally follows Deeba as if it were a little dog; an old-fashioned bus conductor made obsolete in London but revered like a true hero in UnLondon. Even the currency is an assortment of outdated coins and notes from old Europe.

Books too are treasured in the city – librarians, recast as fearless adventurers, scale mountainous heights in search of out-of-print books on far-flung shelves. Miéville exhibits terrific wordplay yet he reminds us that words don’t always mean what we want them to; sometimes words can rise up, revolt, and go gallivanting about the city having their own adventures. The thrill of reading Un Lun Dun is letting the words lead you.

Freddy and Mr. Camphor
Written by Walter R. Brooks
Illustrated by Kurt Wiese

Published by Puffin Books, 2003 (75 years celebration)

Reviewed by Frances Maclean

In this new, modern era of unpopular bankers, dwindling newspaper staff, and factory‑farmed pigs, Walter R. Brooks’ robust porker, Freddy the Pig, is a lovable survivor from a time when things like bankers, newspapers, and pigs were all reassuringly simple. Relatively speaking. A good-natured pig with artistic ambitions and an accidental snout for adventure, as well as being President of the First Animal Bank and Editor of the Bean Home News, Freddy has a lot in his trough. Making his first appearance in 1927, on the eve of the last great you-know-what, it hasn’t all been plain sailing, however. Fortunately this also makes for a great series of adventures. In Freddy and Mr. Camphor it is the early 1940s and Freddy is craving a nice, cool, tranquil spot to escape the heat of the summer and pursue his painterly ambitions. Not so much quietly as vocally – as Freddy remarks to his animal friends; ‘Oh, what a terrible thing is ambition! Why could I not have been content to remain in obscurity, happy in the simple quiet round of daily tasks, busy with my books and my poetry? I might in time have made quite a name for myself as a poet.’

Since much of the rest of America’s eligible working population are otherwise engaged, off fighting WWII abroad, a job opportunity for Freddy arises as summer caretaker looking after wealthy Mr. Camphor’s country estate. Although Mr. Camphor is initially hesitant about entrusting this task to a pig – albeit a talking one – he is quickly soothed by Freddy’s fine banking credentials. Freddy, on the other hand, is soothed by his comfortable new lodgings in the houseboat on the lake, and the extra light workload. Mrs. Winch, the fearsome cook; some unwelcome and villainous visitors; and the trouble-making rats in the attic, however, prove much more difficult to handle.

Freddy is not the only famous talking animal that Walter R. Brooks has given the world; the popular television show Mr. Ed (that talking horse of course) was based on one of Brooks’ short stories; ‘Ed Takes the Pledge’. And on Bean farm there is a great menagerie of talking animals; from Jinx the quick-witted cat to Charles the pompous rooster. Mr. Bean’s non‑interventionist approach to running the farm also magnifies the animals’ personalities, enabling them to work things out – if not always actually working together – for themselves.

Brooks’ has a fond affection for wordplay and joyfully points out the ambiguities and silliness that can be found in abundance in the English language. Mr. Camphor, aided by his personal butler, Bannister, is on a quest to test proverbs for their validity. After Brooks’ magnificent volley of proverbial nonsense throughout, Bannister declares at last; ‘There is no friend like a good book’. But Freddy is certainly both.

The Daydreamer
By Ian McEwan
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 1994; First Anchor Books Edition, 2000

Reviewed by Frances Maclean

In the preface to The Daydreamer Ian McEwan asks if we adults really mean it when we say we like children’s literature or are we merely “speaking up for, and keeping the lines open to, our lost, nearly forgotten selves?” Mind you when he wrote this it was before the whole Harry Potter phenomenon – and there were plenty of adults who enjoyed curling up with that series. Still, the appeal to adults of Harry Potter might have been as much about the finely constructed plot and suspenseful narrative as the fantasy itself – its own inviting escape from the more mundane aspects of everyday adult existence. In contrast, The Daydreamer, McEwan explains, is a book for adults about a child in a language that children can understand. It’s a fantasy too as the title suggests, but it’s a fantasy that engages rather than escapes reality.

Peter, the almost decade old central character, is a dreamer, though his dreaming is not so much to take refuge from the world as it is a way to explore its curious and limitless possibilities. Peter’s dreaming is pure imaginative freedom – and it’s this propensity for quiet daydreaming that unsettles the grown-ups since they have no way to control what’s going on inside his head; “He could have been setting his school on fire or feeding his sister to an alligator and escaping in a hot air balloon, but all they saw was a boy staring at the blue sky without blinking, a boy who did not hear you when you called his name.”

The book is divided into chapters – each chapter its own story linked into the broader narrative of Peter and his family. During these adventures of the imagination Peter switches bodies with the ancient family cat and later his baby cousin. He plots how to catch the neighborhood burglar with Roald Dahl-like inventiveness; confronts an unconventional bully using fantasy logic; and inhabits the body of his young adult self. Through each of these transformations we get to share Peter’s pleasure of viewing the world from another person’s (or animal’s in the case of the cat) perspective and also come to experience empathy and understanding in the process. Not unlike the process of reading itself.

And although this might appear to betray the book with well-meaning adult moral purpose, the only real message that The Daydreamer imparts is; imagine. Like the baby overcome by the beauty of sunlight playing on a wall we are equally mesmerized by McEwan’s luminous storytelling – and the wonderfully real possibility of it all.

The Great Piratical Rumbustification & The Librarian and the Robbers
Written by Margaret Mahy
Illustrated by Quentin Blake
First Published in the U.K. in 1978 by J.M. Dent & Sons Limited

Reviewed by Frances Maclean

I’m not intentionally pushing books by New Zealand writers – it’s just that since these are some of the books I remember most clearly as a young lass growing up in that neck of the woods, then they’re also the ones that are elbowing their way to the top of my list right now. The Great Piratical Rumbustification & The Librarian and the Robbers is one of my absolute all-time favourites and holds two equally wild and wonderful stories. Anyway, it’s illustrated by Quentin Blake and he’s English.

In the first of these stories, The Great Piratical Rumbustification, a number of restless ageing pirates are longing to get together for a pirate party – a great piratical rumbustification to be exact. The only problem being that a pirate party must be stolen.

This is where the Terrapins enter the story. A family of nice and respectable non-pirates, with three adventure-loving sons, Alpha, Oliver and Omega, they too are restless. The boys are restless because they have just moved from a very small apartment (where there was no room for adventures) to a new large house (where there is room for adventures but none are apparently happening). Mr. Terrapin is restless too – on account of the price of the house which whenever he accidentally thinks of causes him to go green and limp.

When Mr. Terrapin arrives home from work with plans to take his wife out for a very important dinner – old rich Sir John will be attending and Mr. Terrapin plans to watch him very closely to see how he came to accumulate his vast riches – Mrs. Terrapin is at first unsure. “No, no”, she protests, “I can’t leave my children just to gratify a wish for a bit of idle pleasure.”

But after a swift telephone call to the Mother Goose Baby-Sitting Service a sitter is found, much to the boys’ annoyance. And this is where Mahy plants a lovely reminder that mothers need to be looked after too; the boys “did not complain or kick the furniture, for they were good boys and liked to think of their mother having a happy evening out.”

Orpheous Clinker, the retired naval gentleman who reports to the Terrapin home for baby-sitting duty looks and acts suspiciously like a pirate – and one with secret pirate party purposes.

In the second story, The Librarian and the Robbers, the sweet and beautiful librarian, Miss Serena Laburnum (Mahy is queen of bestowing the perfect name on her characters – we also learn that the Robber Chief was driven to a life of crime after being burdened with the name Salvation Loveday) is kidnapped by a band of wicked robbers. The Robber Chief tells Miss Laburnum, “The City Council will pay richly to have you restored. After all, everyone knows that the library does not work properly without you.” (It’s worth noting too that Mahy herself was a librarian for many years). But the Robbers get more than they bargain for when they are soon struck down with the dread disease of Raging Measles. If only Miss Laburnum had access to the library and her Dictionary of Efficient and Efficacious Home Nursing…and so begins the Robbers’ introduction to the magic of books.

Speaking of the magic of books – Mahy’s love of imaginative language is as infectious as, well, the dread disease of Raging Measles.

In each of these classic Mahy stories a satisfying balance in the world is restored. Villains reveal their soft-hearted side, while we learn that virtuous folk, even librarians, can be wild at heart.

Under the Mountain
by Maurice Gee
First Published by Oxford University Press, 1979
Published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2006

Reviewed by Frances Maclean

In his home country of New Zealand Maurice Gee is viewed as something of a living literary legend. Under the Mountain, published in 1979, is the first in a string of brilliant fantastical stories he has written for children; The World Around the Corner (Puffin Books) and The Halfmen of O trilogy are among these, and always against the backdrop of New Zealand’s imposing landscape and geographical isolation. Perhaps even because of this geographical isolation Gee’s fantasy worlds seem to offer a portal to experience and explore new places and peoples beyond the everyday reality of life in a small New Zealand country town. (I’m writing this as a New Zealander who grew up in such a town with the suspicion that should we manage to go ahead and slip right off the end of the earth then the rest of the global population would be none the wiser – i.e. as New Zealanders we have lingering isolation issues. We have Lord of the Rings now too, of course, so we’re happier, but still-)

I first started reading Under the Mountain when I was maybe 10 or 11 (maybe 12 or 13 when I could actually muster the strength of mind to read through all the scary parts and finish it) and it terrified me in the way that the best Dr. Who television episodes terrified me – a kind of 1970s, organic, sci-fi meets the apocalypse sort of terror.

This was, of course, back in a more innocent time when brainy slugs working in concert with gigantic worms could conceivably be a greater threat to humanity than any actual human. So what does a 1970s geo-apocalyptic children’s novel from an obscure nation offer the world in the next millennium? Quite a bit, I reckon.

Rachel and Theo Matheson, red-headed twins, are staying with their kind but clueless Aunt Noeline and Uncle Clarry, and their older adventure-seeking cousin Ricky, in a large swanky Auckland house with lots of clean architectural lines and plate glass windows. The house sits right beside the lake and Rachel and Theo soon begin to smell something fishy…or actually it’s rather more like rotten cabbages. But could it really be coming from the funny old couple, Mr. and Mrs. Wilberforce, living in the dark house across the lake? And what of peculiar old Jonesy, the bloke that spends much of his own time spying on the Wilberforces?

And then there is Lake Pupuke itself, deep, still, and secret – a maar basin carved from ancient volcanic activity. The idea of spending the holidays in a city perched on the edge of a cluster of volcanoes begins to make Rachel feel quite funny…

Rachel and Theo, we soon learn, have been chosen for the task that is earth’s only hope for survival. Faced with an enemy whose only purpose in life is to multiply and conquer – Rachel and Theo must try to set aside their own fears and doubts to face the mission they have been chosen for.

In the age of global warming, a story which centers on a ticking timebomb lingering beneath the earth’s surface, whether it be rising mud or rising sea-levels seems to me like it’s just as relevant as ever.

There is also a TV Series based on book. You can find out more about the TV Series at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Mountain