Guest review by Nicola Davies: GROWING PAINS: MAKING SENSE OF CHILDHOOD: A PSYCHIATRIST'S STORY, by Dr Mike Shooter

"For me, and I think for others who write for children, perhaps the greatest inspiration in Growing Pains is in the power and value of story itself."

Nicola Davies is the author of more than 50 books for children, fiction, non fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in more than 10 different languages and has won major awards in the UK, US, France, Italy and Germany. Nicola trained as a zoologist and her work focuses on nature and human relationships with the natural world. She has been a senior lecturer in Creative Writing, and now regularly runs workshops for children and adults to help them find their voices as writers and advocates for nature. She was the first recipient of the SLA’s award for Outstanding Contribution to Children’s Non Fiction in 2017 and in 2018 has four picture books longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Award.

Mike Shooter has been helping children and young people through every kind of crisis, from the ordinary wear and tear of family life, to some of the most horrific experiences that human beings can endure, for all of the four decades of his professional life.But this book, drawn directly from his difficult and demanding clinical practice, is not the voice of the arrogant practitioner handing down pills and judgment from a place of safety: Mike Shooter has battled against depression, and knows about mental health problems from the bottom up. This personal experience, plus a healthy scepticism about received wisdom, has informed his work and made him into an extraordinary listener. Listening to what children say about their lives has been the heart and soul of his work. The stories that he has heard and the insights he’s gained, are retold in Growing Pains with a clarity and honesty that is moving and powerful. It is also at times disturbing - not always because of the nature and magnitude of the mental health problems, but because of their mismanagement through poor practice in the NHS and society as a whole. Dr Shooter isn’t a sensationalist, but he doesn't mince words about the fact that the UK has one of the poorest records of child and adolescent mental health in the developed world: a culture increasing focussed on a narrow vision of success and a health service run by and for bean counters.

These are, of course, not all stories with happy endings, but they are inspiring at many levels. First there’s the ability of humans to heal, not just themselves but their relationships: adolescents apparently hell bent of a path of self destruction find better ways to express anger and frustration; parents and children living like enemies in a war zone build bonds of love and support. Then there’s the way that children can make brave and powerful decisions about their lives, their bodies and even their own deaths, when adults include them in all conversations, even the most difficult.

For me, and I think for others who write for children, perhaps the greatest inspiration in Growing Pains is in the power and value of story itself. Symbols and metaphors help children and young people to understand their own lives: the disturbed adolescent finds the root of his unhappiness when the broken heart of a Russian doll reminds him of his dead twin; the little boy who acknowledges the loss of his father and the fact that life goes on through the way the snowflakes settle in snow globe. Growing Pains has re-inspired me to go on trying to write stories that reflect children’s real experience in all its difficulty and to find the comfort and magic that can lie in the heart of the most traumatic situations

Growing Pains is published by Hodder and Stoughton.

Guest review by Sheena Wilkinson: THE DARK CIRCLE by Linda Grant

Described in The Irish Times as 'one of our foremost writers for young people', Sheena Wilkinson writes both contemporary and historical fiction for young adults. She has won many awards, including the Children's Books Ireland Book of the Year. Her most recent novel is Street Song (Black and White). 

I blame the Chalet School. Linked to an Alpine TB sanatorium, it sparked off in me a lifelong obsession with all things tubercular. In real life, I am too squeamish even to watch a hospital drama, and flinch from every cough in the street; in the pages of a book no medical detail is too vile. As long as it is about something I am pretty safe not to encounter in real life. So, no to cancer, yes to cholera; no to stroke, yes to scarlet fever.

But TB, of course, is the best. And a novel set in a TB sanatorium, thus combining medical beastliness with the enchantment of the closed community – bring it on! Add in social change, the dawn of the NHS, lesbians and twins – could Linda Grant’s The Dark Circle tick any more of my boxes? I’ve enjoyed several of her novels before, but I would have picked this one up regardless of who wrote it, simply because of the setting and subject matter. It very quickly became my favourite book of the year so far. I finished it reluctantly and have been busy recommending it to everyone I know.

It’s hard to define what makes a book compelling, but from the moment I started The Dark Circle, I really couldn’t put it down. Grant introduces us to eighteen year old twins, Lenny and Miriam, coming of age in post-war London. It’s a grey world of austerity and anti-Semitism but change is in the offing, and Lenny, who ‘had slept with three birds already’ and ‘had his own London drape with two pairs of trousers’ is determined to dodge his national service and be part of the coming boom. He doesn’t expect to be told he has TB and that his twin sister Miriam is also affected. Though the novel spans a wide cast of characters, from patients to doctors to the inimitable Uncle Manny, it is to the twins that we always return, and around their bond that the action spins.

This being the dawn of the NHS, these working class characters are swept off to the Gwendo, formerly an exclusive private sanatorium but now ‘opened … to anyone.’ Everything is alien to them – the strict regime; the threatening landscape; the still mostly genteel backgrounds of the patients. They make connections with people they would never otherwise have met, ladies and army captains, girl graduates and even an American sailor.

What binds these characters is quite simply their shared experience of their disease: a horrible thing, traditionally a death sentence, but, by the early 1950s, starting to respond to new drugs. Grant acknowledges the romantic cult which has always surrounded TB, but sets this against the reality of symptoms and treatment. Her characters cough, and bleed, and sweat and spit. They grow bored and cold on bed rest open to the elements. They have their lungs collapsed and, in one of the most horrifying scenes, their ribs broken and removed, leaving permanent disfigurement. They grow podgy under the enforced rest and milky diet. A far cry from Keats and even the Chalet School.

Grant brilliantly captures vicissitudes of life in this isolated community, poised always between boredom and high drama. Who will live and who will die? Until now, this has mostly been a matter of luck but as the novel progresses, a new treatment becomes available: ‘Streptomycin… It’s supposed to be as compete a cure as you can hope for.’ But stocks are limited. Who will be offered it, and on what grounds?

At first I was slightly disappointed when the action of the novel moved on from the intensity of the Gwendo; I had become, like the characters, institutionalised. And that first long section, ‘Each Breath You Take’, remains my favourite. But as I read about the developing fortunes of our heroes, into almost the present day, I decided that this was one of the book’s strengths: to show how close we are to that time which might otherwise seem so distant. It reminds us that Lenny and Miriam and Valerie are our own parents and grandparents. And with a health service in crisis and the terrifying rise of antibiotic-resistant infections, The Dark Circle is a great deal more than a brilliantly-observed period piece.

The Dark Circle is published by Virago.

THE TIDAL ZONE by Sarah Moss, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"Her writing, never showy, is always fresh and insightful"

The stories we make for ourselves are a preoccupation of this absorbing novel: the sense and structures we want to impose on events that would otherwise seem random. The ability to hang on to life itself begins to seem random to narrator Adam Goldschmidt, when – and for ever after – his fifteen-year-old daughter Miriam has an anaphylactic attack in which her heart stops beating. There is no diagnosis, no known cause, so Miriam and her parents are left with the knowledge that it could happen again at any time.

Understandably, Adam becomes frightened by silence, compelled to keep listening at Miriam’s bedroom door in case she's stopped breathing. When other parents say that they can’t imagine what he’s going through, he wants to tell them (though “I didn’t say” becomes the refrain of his unspoken thoughts) “It is exactly as you imagine it. What you imagine is correct.” But “This is not what they, the parents, wanted me to say” – their professed lack of imagination is a kind of screening. And for Adam there is the new worry that his mother, who died young, could have had the same affliction, and has possibly passed it on to his younger daughter, Rose, as well as to Miriam.

Adam is a stay-at-home father, an 'unemployed PhD' who does a few hours’ university teaching but otherwise occupies himself in looking after his family and home. Topically, his wife Emma is an overstretched, over-conscientious GP who works such long hours that she barely has time for civility or eating. It’s Adam who takes care of school runs, laundry and family catering, in spare moments researching the building of the new Coventry Cathedral after its devastation in the Blitz. The competition, the winning design by Sir Basil Spence, the technical problems of acoustics and glass before the new cathedral could soar from the ruins, all seem to mirror the rebuilding of normality, or rather the new version of normality, after Miriam’s near death.  At first hospital routines dominate – the formidably intelligent and highly articulate Miriam seeming out of place in a children’s High Dependency Unit. Sarah Moss conveys a sense of removal from everyday concerns which will be familiar to anyone who’s attended a medical emergency in hospital. “How do you do it, I wanted to ask nurses, how do you return every day to this place where it is normal for children to die and parents to grieve?” But “The nurses’ world, the hospital version of normality, is true and what most of us here and now regard as ordinary life is a lie.” When he leaves the hospital, “Outside had been impossibly far away, like the memory of a country before the Revolution.”

On the face of it, Sarah Moss’s novel sounds grimly serious, dealing with Adam’s obsessive fear and his struggle, once Miriam returns home, to strike a balance between protecting and stifling her. But there’s an acerbic wit to Adam’s reflections (his awareness of how he’s seen by other men; his sense of compromise between socialist views and comfortable middle-class entitlement; his account of a university department meeting in a run-down classroom) and his interactions with Miriam. Perhaps implausibly precocious, she lightens the novel with her quickfire retorts; refusing to go to a cathedral service with her father, she tells him: “It’ll take more than coloured glass and old music to make me sign up to homophobia, misogyny and the grandfather of all patriarchal institutions.”

The repetitions of day-to-day life, newly precarious, are interspersed with the story of Adam’s father, the son of Austrian Jewish refugees who met in the States – again, the chanciness of family connections and heredity – who travelled from one commune to another in the sixties before reaching England. Some of his anecdotes – for example the tale of Adam’s mother and the connection she felt to the sea, to its tidal zones – have the feeling of folk-tale, here recalling selkies with their strange but often unhappy interactions with humans and their tendency to slip away unexpectedly.

Two-thirds of the way through, wondering where the plot would lead – will Adam’s marriage survive? Will there be another crisis for one or other of his daughters? – I realised that it didn’t matter: not because of any lack of concern for the characters, but because Sarah Moss is a writer I will happily follow wherever she chooses to go. Her writing, never showy, is always fresh and insightful. If you could know your loved ones’ futures, Adam wonders near the end, would you? “No. You think you want a story, you think you want an ending, but you don’t. You want life. You want disorder and ignorance and uncertainty.”

Linda Newbery
www.lindanewbery.co.uk