Sarah Crossan - One

One was announced as the 2016 Carnegie Medal winner a few weeks ago, so I've interrupted my own working-backwards-from-the-most-recent-to-the-beginning approach to my Carnegie reviews project to include it here. One's USP amongst the rest of the 70-odd prior winners of the award is that it is the first winner written entirely in free verse. So, a rare victory for the increasingly marginalised forms of poetry and verse over prose, and happily, it is well-suited to Crossan's chosen subject matter.

One is concerned with twins Grace and Tippi - two separate bodies, minds and personalities, conjoined at the hip since birth and recently turned sixteen. Crossan doesn't shy away from the cruelties and casually invasive attitudes of strangers towards the twins - the nasty notes pinned to school lockers; the stares, whispers and slyly taken photos and videos taken when out in public. Nor are the twins' immediate family portrayed as holier-than-thou types who bend over backwards to give the girls a life as normal as possible (a pet hate of mine in this genre) - instead, Dad's struggling to find work and manage a drinking problem, Mum is trying to make ends meet while coping with the desperately high cost of the twins' medical bills (the story is set in the USA) and the girls' older sister, Dragon, appears to be suffering from an eating disorder and has to watch her own dreams of becoming a ballet dancer shunted to one side by the family as money gets too tight to mention.

One is not just an abject study of misery and medical drama, though: in fact, it can actually be wryly amusing in its own way. The twins are forced to attend a local school to save money (having been home schooled until 16), and Crossan observes the girls making friends, experiencing crushes, smoking and drinking and behaving like typical teenagers with an arched, non-judgmental eyebrow. There's no great revelation when the girls suddenly realise that maybe all this stuff might be bad for them and vow to behave better in future - they enjoy what they're doing; in short, acting like teenagers do in real life and experiencing all the things they are told they shouldn't do. And although the inevitable 'cruel twist of fate' does arrive midway through the story, this is where Crossan's choice of free verse comes into its own; rather than overstuffing the final pages of the story with weeping and emotion and OTT hysterics, the minimalist style leaves us to fill in many of the blanks ourselves, and is no less powerful for it - it is poignant and tragic without having to hammer the message home too hard to its reader.

One is a quick read - I'd finished it in a couple of hours, but it's the sort of work that could be transformed into something completely different by reading aloud, allowing its words and spaces and pauses to be savoured and contemplated, as opposed to my usual style of rush-reading without paying enough attention to the rhythm of the writing that this style demands. It's not perfect; Crossan tells the story entirely from Grace's point of view, when I would have liked to have seen Tippi's perspective on things from time to time; some of the family problems are a little too easily and conveniently resolved and a bit towards the end where the girls fulfil a lifetime wish of climbing a tree steers a little too close to twee cliché for my liking. However, it's heart-rending, sympathetic and knowledgeable of its characters' plight without making them appear as victims and maintains an undercurrent of humour and hope throughout. The Carnegie Medal has often pushed boundaries and rewarded the unusual, experimental and controversial; One is nothing ground-breaking in terms of its plot, but its free verse style makes it stand out from the 2016 crowd - probably not my choice for this year's winner, but not a terrible option for the judges to choose nonetheless.

Meg Rosoff - Just In Case

The inner cover of Just in Case explodes with publications falling over themselves to ejaculate praise on Meg Rosoff's second novel. "Unusual and engrossing", splutters The Independent. "Extraordinary", screams The Observer. "A modern-day Catcher in The Rye!" jizzes The Times. "Pretentious, indulgent, over-written wank!" says I. So what is it about the 2007 Carnegie winner that induced this extreme distaste in me considering all the hype?

Perhaps the clue lies in Rosoff's previous work, How I Live Now, a novel so good that every single one of her other books carries a by-line on the cover identifying her as the author of this "brilliant" book. I'll reserve judgement on it as a whole as I haven't read it in full, but my copy of Just in Case included an extract of the first two chapters of How I Live Now as a bonus and served to confirm what I'd already suspected of Rosoff upon finishing Just in Case: she's too self-consciously showy and experimental for me as a writer; every sentence of her work seems to beg for attention, hollering "Look at me! I'm written without regard for sentence structure or punctuation or speech marks (How I Live Now), or (Just in Case) I've got all these weird little elements like Fate being a character and talking intelligent babies and imaginary dogs that only some people can see - don't I stand out from your typical angst-ridden teenage whinge fest? Aren't I interesting?" Meg Rosoff's style is clearly literary Marmite.

Our protagonist is David Case, who tempts Fate after saving his baby brother from falling out of a window to certain death. Fate, being a jolly sort who likes a laugh, decides to have some fun with David throughout the book, including having him contract meningitis, amongst other such "hilarious" scrapes. Our Dave's not exactly the most well-balanced of young chaps as it is, and the near-miss with his baby brother sends him over a cliff mentally. He changes his name to Justin (as in Justin Case, hardy har har har), gets obsessed with an unconventional irritant of an older girl called Agnes who gives him his first sexual experience, befriends a somewhat more sensible lad in Peter, moves out of his parents’ house, and so on and so on yet spends the entire book unfulfilled and unhappy to the point that he can't even be bothered to come out of a coma at the end of it all (after wading through this book, I knew the feeling).

What annoyed me the most about Just in Case - aside from Rosoff's grating, OTT manner of describing every last little thing with the most over-analytical detail and constantly switching viewpoints between characters’ mid-chapter - is the manner in which David is treated by everyone around him. Agnes uses him and humiliates him publically, then expects him to just accept things as they are; his friends are flippant and blasé no matter how erratic his behaviour; his own parents don't seem to care much when their son ups and moves out and acts in a manner indicating a clear cry for help. David is not just a teenager with a few girl and growing-up problems; he is obviously suffering from undiagnosed anxiety disorder and depression - thanks to the fact that nobody around him ever seems to cotton on to this or care less, he barely wants to bother getting up and on with his life by the end. What could have been an interesting exploration of the under-discussed issue of depression in adolescents is lost amidst Rosoff introducing pointless elements such as David's fantasy dog (that a few others can see too) which add nothing to the plotline and serve only to distract from and trivialise David's problems.

Wishing for a storyline that sticks to its main character's issues and takes them seriously is wishing for a different book by a different author though. Meg Rosoff has her own unique way of writing and she has enough admirers and awards to justify her approach to her plotting and her verbosity. I like a bit of literary experimentation and pushing back the boundaries as much as the next reader, as long as it fits the style and content and doesn't feel forced and like it’s trying to be different for the sake of it. Carnegie Medal panellists and published authors be damned; I just can't see what it is about Rosoff that makes the literary world drop to its knees in admiration. I found Just in Case to be vacuous, turgid, badly plotted, babblingly wordy and borderline offensive in its offhand dismissal of mental health issues. Burn me at the literary stake for not getting what more sparkling writing talent than my own seem to think is a wonderful writer, but I'd need a hell of a lot of persuading to pick up another Rosoff novel again. Oh, and I'm one of the few people out there that can take or leave Marmite.

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book

Picking up The Graveyard Book after the exhilarating but exhausting Chaos Walking trilogy (see a few posts below) was both a relief and a slight disappointment. Relief as it was a nicer, more straightforward, easier read (notwithstanding the brutal murder of the protagonist's entire family in the first chapter), disappointment as whatever came next after the rollercoaster of Chaos Walking was going to feel somewhat lightweight in comparison. Only slightly disappointing, mind, as Neil Gaiman is obviously in the top class of authors of imaginative fantasy and knows what he is doing no matter the material.

Coraline is, to my mind, the superior novel by Gaiman for the younger market, a near-perfect blend of surreal fantasy and horror with a wide-ranging appeal that goes beyond its target demographic. However, it was The Graveyard Book that hoovered up all the prestigious awards in the children's/young adult sector for Gaiman, and made him the first author to even win both the Carnegie and its American equivalent, the Newbery Medal, for the same novel.

Gaiman has confirmed his major inspiration for The Graveyard Book was Kipling's The Jungle Book; only the slight twist of the abandoned orphan, Bod, being raised by ghosts differs from the basics of Kipling's plot. Through eight short, snappy stories, Bod meets a range of characters, both ghost and human, that vary from the nice to the sinister to the downright weird, gets into a number of amusing and scary scrapes in both the real and supernatural worlds, and learns a few lessons about people and places and growing up along the way.

One of Neil Gaiman's standout skills as an author is his ability to write for a wide range of audiences in a variety of genres and always maintain his own authorial voice while pitching his story and tone for his intended readership each time differently and seemingly easily - although it's a hell of a difficult trick to pull off. The Graveyard Book is no exception to this - it reads just right for 9-year-olds and up, just descriptive and wordy enough to be a challenge for this age range without bombarding them with anything overly complex or confusing. Gaiman is also a talented enough author to include incidents, jokes and sly little nods that can be enjoyed by an adult audience too; one of the chief things I enjoyed about this book was the fun Gaiman has with Bod's ability to slip in between the real and supernatural worlds - used to both clever and funny effect when Bod attends a local school and uses his skills to blend into the background, barely noticed by students and teachers alike (and haven't we all worked or gone to school with someone that seems to have faded into the ether just like this?)

The Graveyard Book's effortless style, witty invention and Neil Gaiman's well-established reputation as an excellent author all combined to make this an easy choice to sweep the awards circuit at the time. However, perhaps as a consequence of the book consisting of eight short unconnected tales rather than one wholly consistent plot, I was left wanting just a little more. The main villains of the book, introduced in the penultimate chapter, offer a dark and detailed glimpse at a fantasy world that Gaiman leaves mainly unexplored as we stay confined to Bod and his adventures in and around the graveyard. Flicking through the book again shortly before writing this review, the standout element of the project struck me as being Chris Riddell's illustrations; witty, well-observed, and perfectly suited to the material, I was left wishing there had been more commissioned to accompany the book rather than just the one at the beginning of each chapter.

The Graveyard Book is smart, well written and hits many of the right notes, but there's also unexplored depths here that Gaiman might have opened up to a fuller and more interesting extent in a longer or more intricately plotted work.