two hundred public words 6/30
Yikes... I feel like I am slowing down on this meme. But I'd like to try to complete the whole thing, sort of out of grim persistence. Also, I am not going to note the fact that it is after midnight and therefore not the 17th anymore. It is functionally the seventeenth of July, okay?
To keep with the writery/readery theme, then... Michelle Magorian. Michelle Magorian is a writer who found her happy place, in terms of setting and theme, and she's sticking with it. I am not complaining about this -- her setting is England just during and after World War II, and she does a brilliant job of showing what England was like at different class levels, in different areas -- urban, rural -- and for both genders. Her most well-known book is Good Night, Mister Tom, which became a made-for-tv movie starring John Thaw, the guy who played Inspector Morse, as a reclusive, cranky old man in a small village at the outset of the Second World War who is forced by circumstance to take in a child evacuated from a working class district in London. The child has been abused, and the story explores this as well as the chosen family that Mister Tom and Will Beech form. It's also a coming of age story, a story of the social changes wrought by the war, and a good (okay, something of a starry-eyed, brimming-with-nostalgia) portrait of both English village life in the 1940s and of the London Blitz.
Her other stories are all in that same world, or in the early 1950s, after the war, and they're equally good -- some even better, and longer. Only a few of them have been published in the US, but I ended up getting some of them from England, because I like them so much.
Titles:
Good Night, Mister Tom
Back Home -- about a girl who was evacuated to a bohemian American family in upstate New York, who returns to Britain after the war to find that she no longer fits into her stuffy middle class context -- and, throughout the story, it slowly becomes clear that her mother does not, either. Excellent. It works for me both as an entry in the girls-fantasize-about-going-to-boarding-school genre, though it is trying to explode that, AND as an entrant in a particular subgenre *I* like, about counterculture in the late 1940s and 1950s... the underside of McCarthyism, if you will. There is an interesting and odd bit of connection to C. S. Lewis, in that the experimental modern schools he EXCORIATES in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (I think... the book which introduces Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole, at any rate), Magorian extolls, and to the same degree. I appreciated this.
Not a Swan (this is called something else in its American version, I can't remember what) -- a teenage girl and her two older sisters go to stay for the summer in a rural area while their mother tours with the British version of the USO. They learn how to be more independent (again shedding a class background that will no longer work so well after the war) and the protagonist experiences a sexual and eventually romantic awakening. She also succeeds at writing for publication, and solves a sort of mystery. This story is great about blinkered experiences of gender in the past, and about the vexing question of premarital sex, and when experimentation around that became more commonplace.
Cuckoo in the Nest Working class boy in post-war England yearns to be an actor
A Spoonful of Jam His younger sister goes to a posh school and also gets drawn into acting
Just Henry A boy wants to work in movies -- actually a cameraman -- and his family has issues because of a mysterious war death.
I haven't give the last three such long treatments just because my entries are tending to get a bit long. But be assured they're just as good -- Magorian is, after all, on her home stomping grounds here as well.
In fact, they're all great. I don't care if she ploughs the same literary ground forever; I just wish she'd write some more.
To keep with the writery/readery theme, then... Michelle Magorian. Michelle Magorian is a writer who found her happy place, in terms of setting and theme, and she's sticking with it. I am not complaining about this -- her setting is England just during and after World War II, and she does a brilliant job of showing what England was like at different class levels, in different areas -- urban, rural -- and for both genders. Her most well-known book is Good Night, Mister Tom, which became a made-for-tv movie starring John Thaw, the guy who played Inspector Morse, as a reclusive, cranky old man in a small village at the outset of the Second World War who is forced by circumstance to take in a child evacuated from a working class district in London. The child has been abused, and the story explores this as well as the chosen family that Mister Tom and Will Beech form. It's also a coming of age story, a story of the social changes wrought by the war, and a good (okay, something of a starry-eyed, brimming-with-nostalgia) portrait of both English village life in the 1940s and of the London Blitz.
Her other stories are all in that same world, or in the early 1950s, after the war, and they're equally good -- some even better, and longer. Only a few of them have been published in the US, but I ended up getting some of them from England, because I like them so much.
Titles:
Good Night, Mister Tom
Back Home -- about a girl who was evacuated to a bohemian American family in upstate New York, who returns to Britain after the war to find that she no longer fits into her stuffy middle class context -- and, throughout the story, it slowly becomes clear that her mother does not, either. Excellent. It works for me both as an entry in the girls-fantasize-about-going-to-boarding-school genre, though it is trying to explode that, AND as an entrant in a particular subgenre *I* like, about counterculture in the late 1940s and 1950s... the underside of McCarthyism, if you will. There is an interesting and odd bit of connection to C. S. Lewis, in that the experimental modern schools he EXCORIATES in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (I think... the book which introduces Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole, at any rate), Magorian extolls, and to the same degree. I appreciated this.
Not a Swan (this is called something else in its American version, I can't remember what) -- a teenage girl and her two older sisters go to stay for the summer in a rural area while their mother tours with the British version of the USO. They learn how to be more independent (again shedding a class background that will no longer work so well after the war) and the protagonist experiences a sexual and eventually romantic awakening. She also succeeds at writing for publication, and solves a sort of mystery. This story is great about blinkered experiences of gender in the past, and about the vexing question of premarital sex, and when experimentation around that became more commonplace.
Cuckoo in the Nest Working class boy in post-war England yearns to be an actor
A Spoonful of Jam His younger sister goes to a posh school and also gets drawn into acting
Just Henry A boy wants to work in movies -- actually a cameraman -- and his family has issues because of a mysterious war death.
I haven't give the last three such long treatments just because my entries are tending to get a bit long. But be assured they're just as good -- Magorian is, after all, on her home stomping grounds here as well.
In fact, they're all great. I don't care if she ploughs the same literary ground forever; I just wish she'd write some more.