Not a Vintage Year

The circus around the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals continues to grow with the awards achieving extensive media coverage – and this can only be good news for children’s books. Meanwhile the Carnegie/Greenaway schools’ shadowing scheme goes from strength to strength and BfK is privileged to reproduce here reviews of the Carnegie shortlisted books by pupils from Bristol Grammar School. But what of this year’s winning books? Rosemary Stones investigates.

Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents is this year’s Carnegie Medal winner. I, however, am at one with Bristol Grammar School’s Martin Arcari when he hopes ‘that Pratchett soon has another book in the Carnegie shortlist, this time more like some of his better books’. Indeed. Carnegie/Greenaway judges often move in mysterious ways but awarding the UK’s most prestigious children’s literary award to a distinctly feeble Pratchett takes the biscuit. What could have won? As ever Geraldine McCaughrean, with two shortlisted titles, Stop the Train and The Kite Rider, is assured, challenging and original. While Terry Pratchett struggles to address what constitutes thinking, McCaughrean’s discussion of its nature in the luminous The Kite Rider emerges developmentally from within her most memorable characters. A triumph.

Peter Dickinson is on reasonable form with The Ropemaker although his characters (who grin and cackle their way through adventures) lack depth and thereby engagement. Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea with its stock goodies and baddies and clumsy attempts to present the culture of the Amazon Indians in a dignified way is a very old fashioned yarn in which ‘horrible’ children deserve cruel treatment. Liz Laird’s Jake’s Tower is accomplished and moving but not, to be picky, quite of the stature to be a winner. Virginia Euwer Wolff’s True Believer is a truly wonderful book by this American author. It is eligible, I am told, because co-published in the US and the UK. Why that should be so is another matter. Does it not undermine one of the functions of the Carnegie – to encourage high standards in publishing for children within UK copyright territories? Aren’t there plenty of US children’s literary awards to encourage high standards in US territories? Sharon Creech is also, of course, an American, but Love That Dog was first published (and therefore edited, produced, marketed and sold – those crucial processes that have everything to do with high standards) in the UK. It is both charming and moving if not, perhaps, a winner.

The Greenaway Medal

Chris Riddell is the winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal for Pirate Diary (written by Richard Platt). Riddell is a superb illustrator not at his best in this uneasy blend of story bristling with facts. When the characters have no inner life (the boy Jake is indifferent when his uncle is cast adrift in a small boat after a flogging) it must be hard for the illustrator to know whether his job is to convey goody goody information about fids and serving mallets or a dramatic visual narrative. The result is a number of technically accomplished spreads of battles which are quite devoid of atmosphere or light and shade – even, curiously, in the scene where a fire is burning. Every character’s face has the same rictus snarl and the same, relentless degree of focus. Riddell’s black and white drawings to illustrate the index are far more evocative.

Easily the most accomplished book on this shortlist was Bob Graham’s Let’s Get a Pup! It is a book full of drama, feeling and the domestic clutter of a real family. Graham can, via both his excellent text and well observed illustration, be full of sentiment but he is never sentimental. His drawings are minimal but it is the amount of drawing that is reduced, never a reduction of character. This is a book of effortless brilliance.

Caroline Binch’s Silver Shoes also deserved better. Her style has notably developed here and is far more expressive, relaxed and lively with some very good drawing. Nicola Bayley’s illustrations for Katje the Windmill Cat (text by Gretchen Woelfle) are less sharply focused than usual and benefit from being attached to a decent story. Amiable but perhaps not special enough. Charles Fuge’s Sometimes I Like to Curl up in a Ball (text by Vicki Churchill) is a technically adept if manic response to a manic text. A sense of scale might have made this book less exhausting. Helen Cooper’s Tatty Ratty is let down by mixed conventions and a jarring lack of visual discrimination between reality and dream. The muddy trees like tangled wool don’t help. Russell Ayto’s lively, mannered illustrations for The Witch’s Children (text by Ursula Jones) are perhaps a little too self-conscious and at the expense of the story. Jez Alborough’s Fix-It Duck has energy and humour but its lack of pretension in terms of colour or texture means that it is really not distinctive enough to be Highly Commended.

To conclude, some good books – shame about the winners.

The Carnegie Medal

Winner:

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday, 0 385 60123 9, £12.99 hbk)

Highly Commended:

Stop the Train by Geraldine McCaughrean (Oxford University Press, 0 19 271901 7, £10.99 hbk)

Commended:

Love That Dog by Sharon Creech (Bloomsbury, 0 7475 5616 4, £9.99 hbk)

Other shortlisted books:

The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson (Macmillan, 0 333 94738 X, £12.99 hbk)

Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson (Macmillan, 0 333 94740 1, £9.99 hbk)

Jake’s Tower by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan, 0 333 96215 X, £9.99 hbk)

The Kite Rider by Geraldine McCaughrean (Oxford University Press, 0 19 275157 3, £4.99 pbk)

True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff (Faber, 0 571 20702 2, £4.99 pbk)

The Kate Greenaway Medal

Winner:

Pirate Diary by Richard Platt, ill. Chris Riddell (Walker, 0 7445 6233 3, £12.99 hbk)

Highly Commended:

Fix-It Duck by Jez Alborough (Collins, 0 00 710624 6, £4.99 pbk) and Sometimes I Like to Curl up in a Ball by Vicki Churchill, ill. Charles Fuge (Gullane, 1 86233 253 3, £8.99 hbk, 1 86233 396 3, £4.99 pbk)

Other shortlisted books:

The Witch’s Children by Ursula Jones, ill. Russell Ayto (Orchard, 1 84121 551 1, £10.99 hbk)

Katje the Windmill Cat by Gretchen Woelfle, ill. Nicola Bayley (Walker, 0 7445 8016 1, £10.99 hbk)

Silver Shoes by Caroline Binch (Dorling Kindersley, 0 7513 2754 9, £9.99 hbk)

Let’s Get a Pup! by Bob Graham (Walker, 0 7445 7574 5, £10.99 hbk)

Tatty Ratty by Helen Cooper (Doubleday, 0 385 60006 2, £10.99 hbk)

Rosemary Stones is Editor of Books for Keeps.