extemporally

More books! Both ones I rly liked.

Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian.

Okay so I should talk about how Enid Blyton's Malory Towers series was pretty much a formative influence on me (I first read them when I was six), and consequently what I enjoy about WWII stories about wartime evacuee children is the resemblance to that; the good food and the countryside and the adventures except with a SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS* and an acknowledgment of the strangeness and joy and privilege of such an experience (fields! bicycles! village community! hardboiled eggs!) within the text. See also: Carrie's War.

(*perhaps not acknowledged as such but implicit in my experience/enjoyment of the text is the interaction between the urban poor and relative comfort if not wealth of the wartime evacuation - did you know that people voted for change after WWII for a more welfared government because rural people came into contact with kids who'd grown up in squalor and with malnutrition for the first time and then determined that something must be done?)

But aside from that.

'One sweet and one comic,' he said sharply. 'Choose.'

Willie was stunned.

'Don't you hurry, sonny,' said the old lady kindly. 'You jest takes yer time.' She pointed up at some of the many jars. 'We got boiled ones, fruit drops, farthin' chews, mint humbugs, there's lollies, of course. They'se popular. There's strawberry, lemon, lime and orange.'

Tom was annoyed at the long silence that followed and was just about to say something when he caught sight of Willie's face.

Willie swallowed hard. He'd never been asked to choose anything ever.

And oh, Willie ♥

'That's very good, Ruth,' she said. 'You're improving, Frederick. Another heroic rescue, Zach, only this time in the rain. Well tried.' She glanced down at Willie's painting and gave a start. She had heard that he was good but hadn't expected him to be quite as good as she perceived at that moment.

The painting was set at night in a gloomy back street in a city. An old lamp post stood alight on a corner. Squatting down by a wall was a blind beggar in a shabby raincoat, his white stick lying beside him. His cap lay on the street in front of him and he stared out with dead sad eyes.

The rain swept across the old man's face so that his white hair hung limply and rain trickled down his cheeks. Hiding in an alleyway on his right were two grinning boys. They were eyeing the money in the cap.

And also - on grief and its poignancy:

He stayed in the garden till dusk talking with Mrs Hartridge about books and ideas for obtaining paper and where you could buy the cheapest paint. He didn't mention Mr Hartridge and she didn't talk about his mother or Trudy. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation they would stop suddenly and look at each other with understanding.

And Zach, oh, Zach:

Zach licked his mouth.

'My mouth tastes salty, does yours?'

Will licked his lips and nodded.

'Mine too,' added Tom.

'I'm going to re-name this village Salt-on-the-mouth,' said Zach, sitting back and looking very pleased with himself.

Basically: THIS BOOK. ALL OF IT. From its first gruff sentence of an opening to its beautiful last line. <33333

The Frenzy, by Francesca Lia Block.

Boy, this really was a fix-it in the sense of "let's take Twilight and subvert it by writing a strong story with feminist overtones", wasn't it? So I basically love one thing about Francesca Lia Block, and that is how she takes relentlessly modern motifs (the Internet, texting, indie music, antidepressants) and makes mean more, makes them be more. And by more I mean magic. I thought she did it so well that even the whole "lycanthropy as a metaphor for the adolescent female condition", which might have been contrived and annoying - she made me buy it.

So my mother had done this to me somehow. My mother had looked out across the pale terrain that winter over seventeen years ago, seen the wolf in its freedom and in its glory, and she had shot that wolf down. And because of this I had been cursed. All the weirdness about me, all the wildness and the violence that my mother sensed and hated, and that I feared and hated, too - all that was her fault. It was as if she had put it all on me without realising it so that she could appear pure to the world, an angel. My mother had denied every dark part of herself and here was Sasha who lived it out in each breath of forest air and each bite of bloody meat.

(Other things I really really liked: Liv's vegetarianism and how that intersects with her, uh, lycanthropic leanings, and the fact that she & Pace & Corey were this uneasy trio of outcasts.)

And, oh, her and Corey:

Corey was the quiet, kind one. He told me he usually just felt invisible. He was one of a very few black kids in the school and I was always on the alert, waiting to pounce on anyone who made a racial comment. They never did, at least around me. Maybe they could see in my eyes what I would have done to them.

But sometimes people called Corey other names, maybe because he was so quiet and shy. He hardly said a word and had even been tested for autism because of it. When my mom's bridge club partner's son Dale Tamblin called Corey a retard I scratched him until he bled. I was suspended for a week but Dale Tamblin never bothered Corey again.