two hundred public words 7/30
There. If I save this now and edit it, it will come out on July 18th, Sunday.
Ha ha! Success, in time-stamping this entry. I just got back from Inception... what a cast -- at least, I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Cillian Murphy and that girl who played Juno --, ah, thank you IMDb, Ellen Page. And the guy who played the "chemist", Dileep Rao. And Ken Watanabe, for that matter. I TOTALLY did not recognize Tom Berenger... man, it's been a long time since I saw him in Platoon, in the theater. Apart from the cast though, the movie was much more McGuffin and concept than it was script or acting, sigh. Not an utter waste of time, but... what they call in Bollywood terms a 'timepass'. It was also (unexpectedly) of Bollywood duration, at almost three hours long.
Hm. It says 2 1/2 hours, but we didn't get out of the theater until almost 11:25, and the movie was billed as starting at 8:30.
Anyway. This entry was meant to be about the next YAF author on my list, who happens to be the British author K. M. Peyton. Peyton has been writing both historical and contemporary Brit YAF since the 1950s, with her more recent forays deeper into historical YAF. She has a book published as late as 2008, in fact, a trilogy set in Roman Britain, now, "for younger readers", and so far two books set in turn-of-the-19th-century Britain (and the new penal colony Australia), Small Gains* and Greater Gains.
Many of her earlier books are of the variety known as 'a girl and her horse' novels. Or her pony. I am not too into horses, so although I read those books -- like her Flambards series, which combines interest in horses with early (WWI) aviation -- I wasn't AS into them as the three she wrote about an Angry Young Man in the early 1970s. These three, Pennington's Seventeenth Summer**, The Beethoven Medal, and Pennington's Heir, are enjoyable both for their treatment of class -- the protagonist is the son of a bitter Irish woman and her labouring husband, I think in East Anglia-ish -- and of the period. I mean, the first book was published in 1970, but now they function almost as historical documents of the culture and politics of the period. At the outset of the trilogy, Pennington is in his final year at a comprehensive school where he is rebelling against the form masters by growing his hair long and playing "O Tannenbaum" at school assemblies, because it is the same tune as "The Worker's Flag" ("The workers' flag is deepest red/it oft has shrouded our martyred dead/So raise the workers' banner high/under it, we'll live or die/though cowards flinch and traitors sneer/we'll keep the red flag flying here"). The book also delves into the growing subculture of English folk songs -- the Child ballads and their rediscovery by folk artists of the sixties and seventies. Pennington, whose surname is used so consistently that it's hard for me to remember that his first name is Patrick, is a virtuoso piano prodigy, sprung from unlikely working class roots. But he has a volatile temper and deeply repressed angers that get him into constant trouble.
The whole trilogy has believable emotional depth, in Pennington's simmering frustration with feeling trapped by social expectations wherever he goes, and in the sort of hungering, hopeless romanticism that teenagers love (a more middle class girl, one of Peyton's pony heroines from at least one other novel, possibly two -- Ruth -- falls for Pennington and also does another sort of falling...). The books are hard to get hold of these days -- my mother and sister bought them used for me for last Christmas, but they're worth taking the trouble.
The last book of her more than sixty published works that I want to talk about is one from 1983, as Thatcher was consolidating her iron grip on Britain. It's called Who, Sir? Me, Sir? and is also a portrait of working class youth, in this case several misfits from a comprehensive school whose main teacher decides to enter them in a tetrathlon competition (some kind of 'athlon, anyway -- one with running, swimming, shooting, and horseriding) against kids from a local posh 'public school', as they insist on confusingly calling fee-demanding schools. This book does bring horses into it, but it's a great look at believable kids, from a weedy boy who is so self-doubting that he utters the titular sentence on such a regular basis that his nickname is Hoomey, to a Sikh boy whose grandfather was in the Cavalry, to a girl who hasn't quite got the hang of puberty yet, to a boy under constant threat of juvenile detention, or the borstal, whatever they call it.
Now I want to go find her recent books. I bet they're not available on any of my newfangled e-book reader forms -- not iBooks, not Amazon for Kindle, not Borders, not Kobe, or Barnes & Noble. Let's see. Nope, none of them are available in electronic-form, on any of the services I just listed. Sigh. But I can order them used from Amazon...
Anyway -- K. M. Peyton -- highly recommended!
*on Amazon, Small Gains is listed as selling NEW for ... $479.06. You can get it used from $4.55.
**in the US, I think the first one was also titled Pennington's Last Year. At school.
Ha ha! Success, in time-stamping this entry. I just got back from Inception... what a cast -- at least, I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Cillian Murphy and that girl who played Juno --, ah, thank you IMDb, Ellen Page. And the guy who played the "chemist", Dileep Rao. And Ken Watanabe, for that matter. I TOTALLY did not recognize Tom Berenger... man, it's been a long time since I saw him in Platoon, in the theater. Apart from the cast though, the movie was much more McGuffin and concept than it was script or acting, sigh. Not an utter waste of time, but... what they call in Bollywood terms a 'timepass'. It was also (unexpectedly) of Bollywood duration, at almost three hours long.
Hm. It says 2 1/2 hours, but we didn't get out of the theater until almost 11:25, and the movie was billed as starting at 8:30.
Anyway. This entry was meant to be about the next YAF author on my list, who happens to be the British author K. M. Peyton. Peyton has been writing both historical and contemporary Brit YAF since the 1950s, with her more recent forays deeper into historical YAF. She has a book published as late as 2008, in fact, a trilogy set in Roman Britain, now, "for younger readers", and so far two books set in turn-of-the-19th-century Britain (and the new penal colony Australia), Small Gains* and Greater Gains.
Many of her earlier books are of the variety known as 'a girl and her horse' novels. Or her pony. I am not too into horses, so although I read those books -- like her Flambards series, which combines interest in horses with early (WWI) aviation -- I wasn't AS into them as the three she wrote about an Angry Young Man in the early 1970s. These three, Pennington's Seventeenth Summer**, The Beethoven Medal, and Pennington's Heir, are enjoyable both for their treatment of class -- the protagonist is the son of a bitter Irish woman and her labouring husband, I think in East Anglia-ish -- and of the period. I mean, the first book was published in 1970, but now they function almost as historical documents of the culture and politics of the period. At the outset of the trilogy, Pennington is in his final year at a comprehensive school where he is rebelling against the form masters by growing his hair long and playing "O Tannenbaum" at school assemblies, because it is the same tune as "The Worker's Flag" ("The workers' flag is deepest red/it oft has shrouded our martyred dead/So raise the workers' banner high/under it, we'll live or die/though cowards flinch and traitors sneer/we'll keep the red flag flying here"). The book also delves into the growing subculture of English folk songs -- the Child ballads and their rediscovery by folk artists of the sixties and seventies. Pennington, whose surname is used so consistently that it's hard for me to remember that his first name is Patrick, is a virtuoso piano prodigy, sprung from unlikely working class roots. But he has a volatile temper and deeply repressed angers that get him into constant trouble.
The whole trilogy has believable emotional depth, in Pennington's simmering frustration with feeling trapped by social expectations wherever he goes, and in the sort of hungering, hopeless romanticism that teenagers love (a more middle class girl, one of Peyton's pony heroines from at least one other novel, possibly two -- Ruth -- falls for Pennington and also does another sort of falling...). The books are hard to get hold of these days -- my mother and sister bought them used for me for last Christmas, but they're worth taking the trouble.
The last book of her more than sixty published works that I want to talk about is one from 1983, as Thatcher was consolidating her iron grip on Britain. It's called Who, Sir? Me, Sir? and is also a portrait of working class youth, in this case several misfits from a comprehensive school whose main teacher decides to enter them in a tetrathlon competition (some kind of 'athlon, anyway -- one with running, swimming, shooting, and horseriding) against kids from a local posh 'public school', as they insist on confusingly calling fee-demanding schools. This book does bring horses into it, but it's a great look at believable kids, from a weedy boy who is so self-doubting that he utters the titular sentence on such a regular basis that his nickname is Hoomey, to a Sikh boy whose grandfather was in the Cavalry, to a girl who hasn't quite got the hang of puberty yet, to a boy under constant threat of juvenile detention, or the borstal, whatever they call it.
Now I want to go find her recent books. I bet they're not available on any of my newfangled e-book reader forms -- not iBooks, not Amazon for Kindle, not Borders, not Kobe, or Barnes & Noble. Let's see. Nope, none of them are available in electronic-form, on any of the services I just listed. Sigh. But I can order them used from Amazon...
Anyway -- K. M. Peyton -- highly recommended!
*on Amazon, Small Gains is listed as selling NEW for ... $479.06. You can get it used from $4.55.
**in the US, I think the first one was also titled Pennington's Last Year. At school.