Day 8: Katya Balen

Day 8: Katya Balen

Well strictly speaking - or any kind of speaking - it's day 9, but I forgot again yesterday so am writing day 8 this morning and hoping to write day 9 tonight. Time is relative, let's not get too hung up on the details. Life is very busy at the moment, last night I was stewarding at an online gig with Mark Radcliffe and David Boardman and that finished way past my usual bedtime... Was marvellous though, organised to the fabulous Live toYour Living Room - check them out for excent online gigs!

This morning I read another chunk of my latest read, Katya Balen's Foxlight. I love reading children's books, but tend to shy away from the ones that are too fantasy-oriented. I did love some of the fantasy stuff as a child - Narnia, Earthsea especially - but my favourites were books like Lizzie Dripping, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anne of Green Gables. Katya Balen's books are amazing - written about and from the viewpoint of children facing hard things in life - hard family situations and dealing with relationships - but with a strong connection with nature and the imagination and other beautiful things. Foxlight is about two sisters, Fen and Rey, who live in a Foundling home. It's not a cruel place, they are safe, cared for, well fed (despite mouse stew, as they call it, for dinner). But they want to find their mother, who abandoned them there as babies, and one day they pack a bag and follow a fox, believing the fox will lead them to their mother.

They are learning that the stories they have always imagined about life and their mother may not match reality. The safety and warmth of the home they have grown up in are replaced by hardship, hunger, vulnerabiity, even death, and their own very close relationship is strained.

I don't yet know where it will end, but will find out tomorrow. My friend Himadri recently lamented how many blogs and reviews describe a book as 'beautifully written', and he is right, it's an overused phrase with no meaning, unless you explain what you mean by that. I do think Katya writes beautifully, and it's all to do with her choices of words, they way she can evoke both beauty and fear, adventure and vulnerability, in the same phrases. Crafted sentences, carefully-chosen and used words, an ability to put into words both the inner and outer world of children. I hope it ends well for Fen and Rey.

If you haven't yet read her book The Space We're In, I would recommend anyone to read it. It would be a wonderful book to read with a child who has lost a parent, or anyone close. Her writing is the sort that children can absorb it is just as enthralling for adults.

I am also grateful to my local library, where I get many of my books from, especially current things that haven't yet found their way to the bookshop second-hand - but I'll write about libraries another time!

Victoria Mier, 9 October 2024 (8am - meant for 8 October)