Binny for Short

Few writers, if indeed any, write as warmly and accurately about family life as Hilary McKay, or with such humour.  With what seems a unique child’s eye view on the world she pin-points children’s peculiar logic, and describes the joyful, exhilarating sense of freedom and adventure represented by the outdoors – and the sea in particular – in a way that no-one has since Blyton. Her books feel both utterly timeless, and thoroughly contemporary.

Binny for Short has all that her readers have come to expect. It’s the story of the Cornwallis family: harassed mum; beautiful big sister Clem; six-year-old James, equally endearing and irritating; and of course Binny. 11-year-old Binny, short for Belinda, is a typical McKay heroine, determined, stubborn, generous, well-meaning but so often frustrated by the adult world. The sudden death of the children’s father when Binny was just eight, means that this McKay family is particularly close-knit, and the sense of terrible uncertainty that comes from that tragedy is never far away.  For Binny this is represented by the loss of her much-loved dog, Max, shockingly given away by Aunty Violet who deemed he was too much for them to look after.

McKay’s readers are used too to her characters finding themselves in life or death situations. Here the book opens with Binny at real and terrible risk, and the narrative moves back and forth in time, describing the events that led up to this climax, its development and, finally, its outcome too. In a flash of insight, Binny is suddenly aware of a pattern in her life, that her grief, anger, frustration and guilt have led to this moment. In McKay’s skilful hands, the reader understands it too, and witnesses Binny’s redemption, all this done with a wonderfully light touch, with moments of sheer comic genius, and no sense whatsoever of moralising. Typically of her novels too, the thing readers will want to do more than anything on reaching the end of this book, is to turn back to the beginning and start all over again.