Love Lessons
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
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Love Lessons
Rachel is 15 and has a crush on her English teacher, Mike. During rehearsals for the school production of 'Romeo and Juliet' mutual admiration turns into a physical relationship. Belbin builds the interaction between the two characters in a convincing way, so that their liaison becomes as inevitable to the reader as it is to them. Discovery creeps upon the pair in a similarly invidious way, and emotions are explored honestly and minutely, with frequent references to the legal and moral implications of such a relationship. This is a brave novel, since it tackles a familiar problem head on: Belbin is always ready to show his characters' foibles. It is a thoughtful study of very young love and a clear-eyed appraisal of the selfishness of manipulative men.
