BOOKS @ VOLUME #135 (6.7.19)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER
Saturday, 6 July 2019
>>"A scalpel-sharp tale of misadventure."
>>"Would you consent to going under her scalpel?"
>>Shuker talks with Kim Hill.
>>Q&A with Carl.
>>"Carl Shuker is a novelist; a good one, too, an award-winning one."
>>Carl Shuker will be speaking with Naomi Arnold at the VOLUME MAPUA LITERARY FESTIVAL on 22 September. Book your tickets now.
>>Start reading.
>>Books by Carl Shuker.
"You’d think Carl Shuker couldn’t get any better, but A Mistake is the novel at its visceral and emotional best. This is the most compelling book I’ve read in years. It pulls you along at breakneck speed through questions of failure, exposure and manners. Shuker reinvents the form with every novel and A Mistake is a masterpiece which feels more like a body than a book — the life pumps and glugs and flexes inside its pages." —Pip Adam
 |
A Mistake by Carl Shuker {Reviewed by STELLA}
Medical misadventure is the stuff of shouty headlines and third-hand anecdote: told, embellished and finger-pointing. We all know mistakes happen in all professions but when it comes to medicine we are quick to blame and sharply condemn. Accountability is fine, but where is the line between personal responsibility and institutional culpability? In Carl Shuker’s A Mistake, his latest novel, we are in crisis mode from the opening pages. A young woman with severe abdominal pain is in A&E — immediate surgery necessary. Elizabeth Taylor, perfectionist, surgeon, 27 hrs on her feet, is in charge and the theatre is ready — the stage set. We know that this is just the beginning of a disaster, and just as we, the reader, are shunted into the midst of this medical freneticism, the author calls cut and the clapper board comes down and we are taken back to 1986 — to the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. The tension is the same, the anticipation and our watchfulness as the audience just as intense. From the small confines of the theatre and looking down through Elizabeth’s eyes at her patient (well, her patient’s body — her awareness of the woman sometimes seems absent), we are suddenly surrounded by the hype and immensity of space science and we are looking up at the sky in wonder — waiting and on tenterhooks as the countdown begins. Shuker cleverly moves between these two situations building an energetic forcefield — and what some readers will feel is a distraction is anything but: technical language — medical in our hospital theatre and astrophysical at NASA mission control, blow-by-blow action — as the surgeons operate and as the NASA team relay information (the as-it-happens variety), the power hierarchy — who’s in charge in each scenario, and the realisation of the error (too late to save anyone). It all piles up around us — the chaos growing. Yet it is what happens next that will reveal more: the consequences for the medical team and for the engineers. Shuker’s Elizabeth Taylor is not the easiest character to slide along with — she’s a perfectionist, dedicated, frustrating, sometimes a lousy friend, brash, dismissive of fools, and is described variously as a brilliant surgeon and a ‘fucking psychopath’. Yet she's loyal, takes the rap for the mistake and, unlike the bureaucratic nightmare she has to work under, she’s not looking for the ‘good’ PR story even when there is wriggle room for her to distance herself from the crisis. But it’s hard to tell whether she has been altered by the mistake or is ultimately only concerned for her own record. Ego, power and success are themes that you expect in this story, and with these comes the flip side: young doctor burnout and suicide, overwork, failed relationships, doubt, recklessness and the unrelenting pressure to be right always. Shuker’s new novel is a departure in style from his previous work. The Method Actors, his first novel, which I read back in 2005, was a big, brilliant, complex book. A Mistake is sharp, scalpel-fine. Shuker has pared this novel back to bone and gristle, letting the reader feel, by being stabbed repeatedly with attack language, reckless behaviour, fleeting insights and snide dialogue, the intensity of this life and this error. The ending is as abrupt as the start and you will be wounded — but intrigued by that scalpel cut. Long after you read this novel you will have a scar to remember it by. |
 |
Aftermath by Rachel Cusk {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“All my memories are being taken away. Nothing belongs to me any more. I have become an exile from my own history. I no longer have a life. It’s an afterlife; it’s all aftermath.” Does Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, published in 2012 on the brink of the three years of silence that preceded Outline, the first of the three books of Cusk’s completely remarkable ‘Faye’ project, provide any gleanings for readers of those novels as to the preconditions for their eventual production and for the austere perfection of their style? Aftermath is comprised of a series of personal essays (and one story) written in the painful period following Cusk’s separation from her husband and the father of her children, a period in which she tries desperately, obsessively, to make sense of the harm done to her indivisible concepts of herself and of her world. “Everything that was formless in our life together now belongs to me,” she writes. She surprises herself by declaring at the moment of crisis that her children belong to her alone and not to her husband. “The children belong to me: once I would have criticised such a sentiment, but of certain parts of life there can be no foreknowledge.” Cusk attempts to defend her unexpected claim with an appeal to a generalised form of biological privilege, though she is perhaps using the wrong wrench to grasp her situation (blame her therapist) and, in any case, the ambivalence between the particulars of her personality and the generic role of motherhood is suitably unresolved (and unresolvable): “I felt inhabited by a second self, a twin whose jest it was — in the way of twins — to appear to be me while doing things that were alien to my own character.” Cusk’s interpretative statements may flatten the pieces in which they appear, expelling the reader, but these pieces also contain details and descriptions as so sharp and enduring that they could only have been recorded in the vacuum created by the abandonment of pre-existing structures and approaches that accompany the self-abnegation that Cusk plays out in this book. The passage describing her visit to the dentist with her daughter, for example, or that describing the landlady of the place she stayed when she took her daughters on a horse-riding holiday in Devon, or that describing her boarder’s emotional disintegration, leave impressions against which a reader can have no defence. When Aftermath was written, Cusk had already repudiated most of the conventional novelistic crutches of fiction (plot, character, ‘invention’, &c) as “fake and embarrassing” and was convinced that the author’s own life was the only authentic subject for literature. Aftermath displays the perils of that approach but also shows the first stages of another, even more acidic ‘cleansing’ process: the removal of the author herself. When Cusk started writing again in Outline, this process is more or less complete (but can’t be more than complete): the author exists only as others say to her they see her to exist (self-definition is not possible, after all; we are only ever usefully — and non-definitively — defined by others) and, although the ‘Faye’ novels are full of ideas, they are not obviously imposed by the author as defining interpretations but are voiced at a degree’s or several degrees’ remove. In Aftermath Cusk suggests “the problem usually lies in the relationship between the story and the truth. … The closer the cut the more pleasing the effect,” and consciousness of this ‘problem’ is the impetus for her eventual production of the ‘Faye’ novels, which recalibrate the relationship between literature and life. At this stage, however, “it’s too late to run away from something whose nature I can’t in any case discern. It’s just a shape in the darkness, understanding or its opposite. I can’t tell.” She is approaching the silence that she will eventually pass through, shedding what will not serve.
|
Friday, 5 July 2019
Rachel Cusk's Aftermath scrutinises the transformative period of her life marked outwardly by her divorce. What are the effects on women of the tectonic pressures of connection and separation evident in contemporary society? Cusk's work, as always, bursts with sharp observations and sharp sentences. New edition.
>>"The gears of life had gone into reverse."
>>Unhappy all the time.
>>"I was heading into total silence."
After the Sickness has killed off her parents, and the bombs have fallen on the last safe cities, Monster emerges from the Arctic vault which has kept her alive. When she washes up on the coast of Scotland, everyone she knows is dead, and she believes she is alone in an empty world.Monster begins the long walk south, scavenging and learning the contours of this familiar land made new. Slowly, piece by piece, she begins to rebuild a life. Until, one day, she finds a girl: another survivor, feral, and ready to be taught all that Monster knows. But the lessons the girl learns are not always those Monster means to teach.
Amid the conflict and desolation of post-Communist Albania, teenage boys Agim and Bujar share restless dreams of escape. After Bujar's father dies and Agim's family discover him dressed in his mother's clothes, the pair flee to the Albanian capital of Tirana, hungry for a chance to shape their own lives. From Tirana to Rome, from Madrid to New York, Crossing charts the refugee's struggle for another identity and another story in a world that seems to offer only dead ends. From the author of My Cat Yugoslavia.
Climate change is happening and the potential long-term costs are incalculable. But how do we manage the short-term costs of mitigation? How do we undertake a low-emissions transition that won't undermine the public support that it relies upon? This book makes the case for a careful revolution and provides the tools to prepare New Zealanders for change.
What chances are there for a nonagenarian romance when the parties are either losing their mental and physical capacities or — worse — unable to leave their earlier life behind?
An exciting adventure from the author of Rooftoppers and The Wolf Wilder. "Vita set her jaw, and nodded at New York City in greeting, as a boxer greets an opponent before a fight." Fresh off the boat from England, Vita Marlowe has a job to do. Her beloved grandfather Jack has been cheated out of his home and possessions by a notorious conman with Mafia connections. Seeing Jack's spirit is broken, Vita is desperate to make him happy again, so she devises a plan to outwit his enemies and recover his home. She finds a young pickpocket, working the streets of the city. And, nearby, two boys with highly unusual skills and secrets of their own are about to be pulled into her lawless, death-defying plan.
Three decades of the application of Moore's sharp and quirky mind to every cultural manifestation from books to films to politics (and back to books) has left this marvelous residue of essays and criticism. Now in paperback.
>> "The route to truth and beauty is a toll road."
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that 'the Ripper' preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as Rubenhold has discovered, it has prevented the real stories of these women from being told.
"Daddy," Abiigail asks, "where did the sun and all the planets come from?" To find out the answer, Daddy invites Abigail on a magical journey through time and space. Together they explore the birth of all living things. By the next morning, Abigail has thought of another big question...
A rigorous examination of the insidious history and damaging consequences of race science — and the unfortunate reasons behind its apparent recent resurgence across the globe.
"Roundly debunks racism's core lie." - Reni Eddo-Lodge
Xuan Juliana Wang’s short story collection introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. From fuerdai (second-generation rich kids) to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, her stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging.
“An urgent and necessary literary voice.” —Alexander Chee
“Tough, luminous stories.” —New York Times
"Artful, funny, generous and empathetic. Xuan Julian Wang is a radiant new talent." — Lauren Groff
Ranging freely through literature, art, film and philosophy, Dressed tracks the hidden power of clothes in our culture and our daily lives. From the depredations of violence and ageing to our longing for freedom, love and privacy, from the objectification of women to the crisis of masculinity, each garment exposes a fresh dilemma. Item by item, the story of ourselves unravels.
Ridiculed for his slowness when he was young, John Franklin used those same qualities to explore the Arctic and pave the way for the discovery of the Northwest Passage.
"Offers all the pleasures of the best historical fiction." —Daily Telegraph
Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language; the places they worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lores of their people. In a bid to better understand his heritage, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the stopping places - the old encampment sites known only to Travellers.
Tells the story of the energy boom's impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia and of one woman's transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist.
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Using such models as Joseph Cornell's box constructions, crazy quilts, and specimen displays, Joni Tevis places fragments in relationship to each other in order to puzzle out lost histories, particularly those of women.
Anderson teaches step-by-step how to build a hive system developed to allow maximum idleness, harvest honey and extract honeycomb, make mead and beeswax candles, and to closely observe and understand these most fascinating and productive of insects.
>>Learning to love the music you hate.
>>Live in Amsterdam last month.
>>Why Tweedy wrote the book.
"The VERNON series is the culmination of a career spent scratching at scars and exposing society’s contradictions: the smarmy yet self-loathing middle classes, the complicit women, the men inside the patriarchal system who seem barely capable of being, let alone wanting to be in control. Despentes identifies these flaws and looks closer rather than turning away." — The White Review
Shatters mainstream consensus on politics and personhood, offering in its place a bracing analysis of a perilous world and how we should live in it.
>>What does an anti-fascist life actually feel like?
Burmese food draws techniques and ingredients from Thailand, India and China but has its own landscape of flavours.
McGlasson’s novel brings to life an odd slice of British history from 1926, when the Panacea Society flourished in Bedford. Largely made up of women who had lost husbands, brothers or sons in the Great War, the Society is centred on the figure of Octavia, a prophetess and self-proclaimed Daughter of God, who claims to have been sent to pave the way for the return of Jesus.
Humans are spending decades longer being 'old' than we did even a century ago. What implications does this have for our rethinking of society, our medical approaches and our intentions?
A graphic novel of Turing's life.
From the colourful markets of Mauritius to the aromatic spice gardens of the Seychelles, to the fishing coasts of the Maldives, to the lagoons of Mayotte and the forests of Madagascar.
Saturday, 22 June 2019
>> Come and hear contributors Donna McLeod, Sarah Lin Wilson and Kerry Sunderland and the book's editor, Naomi Arnold discuss what anxiety feels like, what causes it, what helps and what doesn't. This Thursday, 27 June, 5 PM at KUSH (5 Church Street, just down the street from VOLUME).
>>'Ghost Knife' by Ashleigh Young.
>>'In a Scorched Room' by Michelle Langstone.
>>Holly Walker tell us what her anxiety feels like.
>> Read 'Arise and Pass Away' by Danyl McLauchlan.
>>'We Are Loved, We Are Loved' by Aimie Cronin.
>>'On Being Sectioned on Friday the 13th' by Paula Harris.
>>"Naming' by Bonnie Etherington.
>>Naomi Arnold on Radio NZ.
>>Another interview with Naomi Arnold.
>>Breaking free from anxiety.
>>"Give me back my anxiety chair!" —Sarah Lin Wilson
>>'Ghost Knife' by Ashleigh Young.
>>'In a Scorched Room' by Michelle Langstone.
>>Holly Walker tell us what her anxiety feels like.
>> Read 'Arise and Pass Away' by Danyl McLauchlan.
>>'We Are Loved, We Are Loved' by Aimie Cronin.
>>'On Being Sectioned on Friday the 13th' by Paula Harris.
>>"Naming' by Bonnie Etherington.
>>Naomi Arnold on Radio NZ.
>>Another interview with Naomi Arnold.
>>Breaking free from anxiety.
>>"Give me back my anxiety chair!" —Sarah Lin Wilson
>> Out of the Woods by Brent Williams and Korkut Öztekin
>> First We Make the Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson [no relation]
>> First We Make the Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson [no relation]
 | Pill by Robert Bennett {Reviewed by STELLA} Another gem from the 'Object Lessons' series, Pill is a fascinating account of the history and consequences of psychotropic medications. Starting with the drug revolution of the 1950s, when the new wave of pills moved the treatment of mental health away from ECT and the asylum, Bennett takes us on a philosophical exploration through several developments. Chapters 1 to 5 are titled by their pill name: 'Thorazine', 'Valium', 'Lithium', 'Prozac' and 'Adderall'. He lays out his explorations within the cultural context of each period, delving into literature, film and television — those visible cultural markers that predict and reflect social behaviour. From Brave New World and its Soma to the Mom of The Brady Bunch — your very average American housewife, taking her valium to calm herself before the neighbours come over for a gathering — to the documentary Prozac Nationand several memoirs (Terri Cheney, Elizabeth Wurtzel), to well-known films, Silver Linings Playbook, and television, The Sopranos. He draws all this and more together, creating an interesting and revealing essay that reflects on the complex and diverse world of psychotropic medications and pills in general. Our decade has been described as “living in the most medicated era humanity has ever known”, and thinking about this makes one ponder the why and how of this explosion in taking pills. Some, of course, is the necessity for better drugs to help those who have mental illnesses cope in our everyday world, while other pills enhance or change our interaction with the world beyond ourselves, while other pills calm — mother’s little helper, Valium, and brother’s little helper, Ritalin (see The Simpsons and Bart’s dosing). The final chapter, entitled 'Coda', is equally absorbing. Bennett describes his own manic episodes — he is bipolar — and the effect of his different medications on his own functionality. Endlessly thoughtful and highly engaging, Bennett stresses that “Pill isn’t a book about mental illness, at least not directly; rather a philosophical exploration of how psychotropic medications...are used to treat mental illnesses and the larger philosophical implications of those medications’ abilities (and inabilities) to reconstruct the neuro-circuitry of the human brain.” Are we the same person when medicated? Which identity is dominant — the nature of the pill or the essence of ourselves?
(This review was written while listening to Johnny Cash’s 'Hurt').
|
 | Charges by Elfriede Jelinek {Reviewed by THOMAS} Who speaks for whom? And to whom? For whom is it appropriate to speak? For whom is it necessary to speak? For whom is it even possible to speak? Whose voices cannot be heard? Whose voices overspeak the voices of those who cannot be heard and take away the meanings of their words? Which is rather to say perhaps that they can be heard but not understood. Which is rather to say that they might as well not have been heard. What meanings do words have when those who speak them have been denied those aspects of their lives that provide the meanings for words? Who then owns or controls the meanings of words? Are there words for which the meanings cannot be taken away even by those who would take away the meanings of words? What do these words refer to? To what extent are words the weapons of all battles, especially of those battles for which there are no other weapons? To what extent are all crises also crises of language? To what extent can crises be addressed, assuaged or remedied in language? To what extent can crises not be addressed, assuaged or remedied at all if they are not addressed, assuaged or remedied in language, either first, or later, or in parallel with any other attempt to address or assuage or remedy such crises? Charges is comprised of three dramatic monologues, or, rather, choruses, or, rather, one dramatic monologue or chorus with a ‘Coda’ and an ‘Appendix’, spoken largely as a mutable plural first person, expressing the experiences of refugees reaching Europe during the urgent humanitarian crisis of recent years, but multivocal and restless enough between those multiple voices to encompass varying viewpoints and experiences. The text takes the form of a complaint, and has conscious parallels with Æschylus’s The Suppliants (in which, rarely for Greek theatre, the chorus are the protagonists, in that case the Danaids, who, having fled their home country to avoid intolerable circumstances, plead first with the ruler of Argos and then with its citizens, who ultimately grant them protection). Charges is remarkable for the obsessive propulsion, subtle shifts and emotional charge of its sentences, which move with such urgent necessity, both exploring and resisting all that is represented by the word “plight”, so often and so easily applied to refugees, who rather have common needs, very much the needs of all humans, than a plight, other than that their needs, these common human needs, are not met by those denying them through selfishness, hatred or fear, if we can distinguish between hatred and fear, and between these and selfishness. The refugees, in addition to seeking permission to have their needs, the common human needs, met, are resisting the single story applied upon them from without, both by those to oppose and by those who support them, seeking to retain their individual stories, their individual losses, despite being reduced to the level of concern almost exclusively for their common human needs, which are not met. Who would deny them? Who is in a position to deny them? It is in the nature of a crisis for the stories of the individual victims to be lost beneath the story of the crisis, for each active ‘I’ to be subsumed by the passive ‘we’ of those branded with the crisis. Jelinek’s text springs initially from anger at the ‘plight’ of a group of mainly Syrian refugees who reached Vienna, took refuge in a prominent church and were then moved by the authorities to a less visible location. The tone reaches a mocking pitch when addressing the authorities’ reluctance to provide for the basic needs of this group ("You have poured all your intentions into one formula and now you can't get your intentions out of this formula."), especially while blithely granting citizenship to individuals who are helped to sidestep the qualifications for citizenship. “Calculations always contain violence,” writes Jelinek. Language becomes the way not only in which needs are expressed but also the way in which needs are denied. A thing and its opposite may well be a pun, not only by homophony or etymology but by referent. There is not enough water to drink but plenty to drown in. Charges is evidence that it is possible, perhaps by aligning the particular and the general through the subtlety and force of its language, for the direct treatment of a political issue to deepen a work of art, both in its content and its form. Language is the battleground upon which writers must contest, or else upon which they submit. “The conquest of the world as image, that’s history.” |
Friday, 21 June 2019
NEW RELEASES
The Diary of a Young Girl in te reo Māori.
>>Published by the New Zealand Holocaust Centre to mark what would have been Anne Frank's 90th birthday.
>>Why it's significant Anne Frank's diary has been translated into Te Reo Māori.
A collection of outstanding non-fiction (essays, speeches, &c) written in the two-decade gap between The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a period in which Roy found that the urgency of her political and social convictions led her to engage with a wide spectrum of issues.
"Although Roy writes in her foreword that 'Not one iota of my anger has diminished' since the time of writing these essays, they do not come across as angry. Instead, their impact comes from their precision, research and damningly clear reportage." —Guardian
>>"Literature provides shelter."
"Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people."
In here sixties, Ernaux looks back to a time forty years previously, when she was unexpectedly pregnant and sought an abortion. Her text interrogates her memory for meaning.
>>Another edition.
>>Read Thomas's review of Ernaux's wonderful book The Years.
Crocodiles come from far and wide to seek Little Doctor's care. She treats each one with skill and kindness. Little Doctor marvels at these fearless beasts, listening to their stories, while she diagnoses and cures what ails them. But when she meets Big Mean, the largest crocodile in the land with jaws clamped tightly shut, Little Doctor can't figure out what's wrong. And she might be just a little bit afraid... Beautifully illustrated.
Stunning black-and-white photographs of underwater life.
A novel portraying the activism and subversion that were everyday realities in the darg communities of New York in the 1980s and 1990s, as remembered by a group of drag queen 'mothers'.
"Niven Govinden is a true force of fierceness and beauty." —Olivia Laing
When Rosie and Jules discover a ground-breaking clinical trial that enables two women to have a female baby, they jump at the chance to make history. Fear-mongering politicians and right-wing movements are quick to latch on to the controversies surrounding Ovum-to-Ovum (o-o) technology and stoke the fears of the public. Can Rosie's and Jules's relationship survive?
A very accessible and well illustrated history of the series of conflicts between the Crown and various groups of Maori between 1845 and 1872, conflicts that form the often unacknowledged background to much else in New Zealand history. From the author of the monumental The Great War for New Zealand. Reprinted and back in stock!
On-the-ground documentation of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities. Here is an alternative map of the continent, taking the reader to places like Cova Da Moura, the Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon with its own underground economy, and Rinkeby, the area of Stockholm that is 80 per cent Muslim. Johny Pitts visits the former Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where West African students are still making the most of Cold War ties with the USSR, and Clichy Sous Bois in Paris, which gave birth to the 2005 riots, all the while presenting Afropeans as lead actors in their own story.
Almost twenty-five years ago, Raphael wrote Never Mind the Bollocks, which recorded the extra obstacles women faced in rock and popular music. In this book, she finds that, although the names and faces may have changed, the obstacles remain disappointingly similar.
Allison has run away from home and with nowhere to live finds herself hiding out in the shed of what she thinks is an abandoned house. But the house isn't empty. An elderly woman named Marla, with dementia, lives there — and she mistakes Allison for an old friend from her past called Toffee.
A new edition of this important work by the fine radical historian.
"A triumph of complex interpretation and delicious prose." —Guardian
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories. Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories — of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster — are interwoven with reimagined classic tales of the Middle East.
Twelve-year-old Shane Woods is just a regular boy. He loves pitching for his baseball team, working on his graphic novel, and hanging out with his best friend, Josh. But Shane is keeping something private, something that might make a difference to his friends and teammates, even Josh. And when a classmate threatens to reveal his secret, Shane’s whole world comes crashing down.
It will take a lot of courage for Shane to ignore the hate and show the world that he’s still the same boy he was before. And in the end, those who stand beside him may surprise everyone, including Shane.
The Yukon River is almost 2,000 miles long, flowing through Canada and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Weymouth journeyed by canoe on a four-month odyssey through this wilderness, encountering the people who have lived there for generations. The Yukon's inhabitants have long depended on the salmon who each year migrate the entire river to reach their spawning grounds. Now the salmon numbers have dwindled, and the encroachment of the modern world has changed the way of life on the Yukon, perhaps for ever. Weymouth's portraits of these people and landscapes offer an elegiac glimpse of a disappearing world.
"Weymouth combines acute political, personal and ecological understanding, with the most beautiful writing reminiscent of a young Robert Macfarlane." —Sunday Times
It's the night of the annual Autumn Equinox Festival, when the town gathers to float paper lanterns down the river. Legend has it that after drifting out of sight, they'll soar off to the Milky Way and turn into brilliant stars. This year, Ben and his classmates are determined to find out where those lanterns really go, and they made a pact with two simple rules: No one turns for home. No one looks back.The plan is to follow the river on their bikes for as long as it takes to learn the truth, but it isn't long before the pact is broken by all except for Ben and (much to Ben's disappointment) Nathaniel, the one kid who just doesn't seem to fit in. A graphic novel for children, full of magic, wonder, and unexpected friendship.
Follow! Point! Press! Interact with the bright, bold artwork to complete simple activities using your fingers. Follow the wiggly dog to pat him on the head, help the butterflies get to the flowers and lots more. Features tactile embossing on every page. These activities are perfect for encouraging the development of fine motor skills.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)