Anne Fine – The Tulip Touch

Winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (now the Costa Book Awards) in 1996, Anne Fine’s The Tulip Touch forms part of the oeuvre of her work for older children and teens. This is due in no small part to the more dark and challenging subject matter of this book, which explores childhood abuse and neglect, and at heart is a story about how we ignore the suffering of others for the sake of our own convenience.

The story’s narrator is the young Natalie Barnes, a girl of ten or eleven who is quiet, relatively studious and unimposing. Her family run hotels, and after moving into the Palace Hotel and moving schools once more, Natalie encounters Tulip Pierce, a strange, dishevelled and aggressive girl who lives nearby. In Tulip, Natalie senses excitement and danger; while  in Natalie, Tulip senses a willing playmate for her cruel games. The two girls become best  friends, and Natalie is drawn into Tulip’s increasingly bitter and mocking world. The novel turns on half-truths, glimpses and hearsay: we learn that Mr Pierce, Tulip’s father, is mean to her, that he makes her drown kittens and occasionally thrashes her. None of this is witnessed directly by the reader but is told through gossip and overheard conversations between people who heard it from other people. Tulip remains an enigma to us. While the adults around Natalie and Tulip (parents, teachers, guests at the Palace) seem to “understand” that Tulip “has had a difficult upbringing”, none of them are willing to truly take her on, preferring to get on with their own lives. Tulip becomes increasingly spiteful and cruel; and after a literally inflammatory evening, Natalie decides that she too has to start looking after herself and decides to “dump” Tulip as a friend. Thus the betrayal is set in motion and the scene is set for Tulip’s final revenge…

She tugged so hard at me, I had to go. But as I stumbled after her, still looking back, I knew I was bewitched. The Tulip Touch had really got me this time. I knew I’d dream of fires forever, and wake in the middle of my dull, dark nights to see the flames she might have lit in me still shooting up to scorch the sky. I’d see whole streets, entire cities, burning. I’d switch on my bedside light and, for a while, the old familiar pictures on the walls and clothes on the chair might blot out the smouldering visions. But I’d be sure Tulip was lying in wait in some bleak bedroom. And I’d know the minute my room was dark again, she’d pick up where she left off, and send more of her own imaginings into my boring dreams, to set them ablaze with her own growing frenzies.

The Tulip Touch is a smart and sad novel, bristling with danger and excitement. Aimed at children in their mid-teens, it deals with the cliques and (dis)loyalties of high school kids, with the carelessness of parents and the limits of our empathy for one another. It raises uncomfortable questions about all of us, about our apathy or complicity in social injustice, and – as the dark text on the novel’s sleeve reads – reminds us that no-one is born evil.

John Green – Paper Towns

.John Green’s Paper Towns has only just seen a British release, although it has been available in America and Canada for a couple of years now. Having been enthusiastically pointed towards it on various occasions, I was excited to finally get my paws on it a week or so ago. It’s one of the most fun, smart and touching books I’ve read for some time, and certainly one of the best YA novels I’ve ever enjoyed. The story revolves around the mercurial and enigmatic Margo Roth Spiegelman, a young woman about to graduate high school. She knocks on the door of her friend – and the novel’s protagnist – Quentin Jacobsen one evening and persuades him to join her on a crazy night of pranks and revenge. The next day, Quentin – who’s been head over heels for Margo for years –  finds out that Margo hasn’t turned up to school, and it soon becomes apparent that she’s run away or vanished. But Q quickly realizes that Margo seems to have left him some clues to her fate, and the narrative follows Q and his nerdy, quick-witted friends Ben and Radar as they try to find out what’s happened to Margo.

Green’s novel is eminently readable – I brushed through Paper Towns in just a few days – and extremely funny. I caught myself chuckling out loud on many occasions. “Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes diplomacy alone will not be sufficient and that force will be required.” The wit is one of the three things that make this novel so enjoyable: the others are a fast-paced and well-plotted narrative; and a genuine sense of profundity and thoughtfulness, as the motif of the “paper towns” is developed by first Margo and then, later, Q. (A “paper town” is a fictional place surreptitiously added to maps by cartographers in an attempt to “copyright” their maps; any other map they see which also contains this fictional place, they will know it’s a rip-off of their product). Green uses the idea to talk about the banality of suburban life and the feelings of helplessness and lack of self-understanding that these teenagers are feeling. The situation of these kids – about to leave high school, fretting over dates for prom and starting to realise that they will soon be leaving the school and one another for the final time, along with the maelstrom of emotions that leaving entails – will be familiar to everyone. It is a frequently genuinely touching novel interspersed with moments of hilarity and excitement, as well as John Green using the narrative to plug his favourite bands, which frankly I have no problem with at all when he has such good taste (the Mountain Goats, Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue, the Violent Femmes, all get a mention). Anyone who enjoys YA fiction, or really, anyone who enjoys exciting and intelligent writing, should read this book. I adored it.

Eoin Colfer – Artemis Fowl

Artemis Fowl (2001) won the WH Smith Children’s Book Award and the Children’s Book of the Year Award at the British Book Awards. It has spawned a whole series of Artemis Fowl stories and made Colfer’s name as a prominent writer of young adult fiction; a name he recently turned to good use writing the completed continuation of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series, And Another Thing.

The eponymous Fowl is a twelve-year old, suit wearing and hyper-articulate criminal mastermind (well, nearly), living in a large Lara Croft-esque mansion just outside Dublin. With his trusty bodyguard Butler he seeks to restore the Fowl clan to their previous days of vast criminal wealth. In this first installment, Artemis discovers the Book – an ancient document containing the secrets of the fairies, who in Colfer’s world are not Tinkerbells flitting prettily around lampshades, but a whole society living deep underground, with a crack squad of agents ready to deal with any trouble. We are introduced to the plucky Captain Holly, the first female fairy on the force, her disgruntled boss Commander Root, and – in a stroke of characterization immediately reminiscent to anyone who’s seen any action movies – the nerdy, paranoid but good-natured techie, a centaur named Foaly (I kept picturing Topher from Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse in this role). When Artemis Fowl reads a copy of the fairies’ Book, he resolves to steal their gold, no matter what the cost, and for the first time in history, launches a “hostile act” between the human and fairy species – he kidnaps Holly and holds her to ransom. Soon, Holly, Root, Foaly and more are caught in an exciting hostage escape, involving trolls, magic, guns, laser technology, and other tricks perfectly designed to get young readers’ hearts racing.

What makes the story touching are the glimpses of Artemis’ humanity peeking through the surface: his concern over the whereabouts of his father (missing at sea, presumed dead), the occasional twinges of conscience he “suffers” as he puts his Machiavellian and (almost) perfectly conceived plan into action. I will be teaching this novel soon to a group of Year 8 pupils, and look forward to how excited I predict my pupils will be to read Artemis Fowl: it is well-paced, witty, referential enough to raise knowing smiles and exciting enough to generate all kinds of childhood wish fulfilment fantasies; I want to be a fairy-battling criminal mastermind too! Well, let’s face it – who wouldn’t?