A Friend for Rachel
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Cover Story
This issue's cover is a photograph of Anne Frank whose diary is discussed by Michael Rosen fifty years after its first publication. Following the arrest of the Frank family and their companions, the secret annex in Amsterdam where they had been in hiding was locked up and everybody forbidden to enter it, since Jewish possessions became Nazi property and were carted away. Before this happened, the young woman, Miep Gies, who had provided those in hiding with food and who had a second key to the annex, risked herself once more by entering it. Miep retrieved Anne's diary from the devastation together with the Frank family photograph album.
Thanks to Penguin Children's Books for help in reproducing this cover.
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A Friend for Rachel
Rachel is having a miserable time - her vicar father has moved to a new church where his innovations, and his family, come in for much unfair criticism; Rachel has no best friend at her new school; her pregnant mum feels unwell a lot of the time but when Rachel tries to help she gets shouted at. As Septuagesima, the wise old church mouse, remarks, 'You feel so stretched you could snap'.
The three mice, Timothy and Titus (actually one mouse, named after a church festival), Candlemas and Septuagesima who befriend Rachel reveal to her that, like other children in previous centuries who have lived in this place, she has a task - to replace rot (which is literally found in the bell tower) and rumour (spite from entrenched parishioners) with renewal and reality (vision and acceptance of change). In this Rachel is to succeed in an adventure which links the present to the church's past.
Firmly and enjoyably rooted in the detail of parish life and with hints of social comedy a la Barbara Pym (Mrs Scott-Richard and Mrs Pickles are not keen on a vicar with happy clappy tendencies or a vicar's wife who paints bold posters), this highly imaginative first novel is also an assured and satisfying portrait of a child gaining in strength and inner knowledge as, with the mice's help, Rachel learns to live with problems whose resolutions may not be speedy or necessarily what she would like them to be.
