National Year of Reading
In this very special year, the slogan, Go All In, excites me greatly and I can’t think of better message to get across to children. Find out what sparks your imagination or interest and read it. But this call to reading action applies equally to me. I may have branched out over the years, tried different genres and encouraged myself to read books that are ‘worthy’ but, in the end, I have always gravitated to those books that resonate with me.
Reading loyalties
My deepest reading loyalties were formed from around six years old, and I have stuck with them faithfully during my reading journey. Mine were uncomplex and obvious from the start. I craved books in which children slipped the parent leash and became masters of their own destiny: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Famous Five, Swallows and Amazons, Pippi Longstocking, Stig of the Dump, What Katy Did. These were not cosy stories. They had talking animals, a caveman, witches, islands, injury, pirates and few authority figures. Best of all, they celebrated ordinary children, finding themselves in extraordinary situations and managing perfectly well.
Reading as an adult
It’s easy for me to draw a line from those books to the ones I have loved more recently: Northern Lights, Journey to the River Sea, The Island at the End of Everything, The Last Wild. Although categorized as books for children, they share the same sense of scale, atmosphere, jeopardy and immersive worlds that I continue to love. As an adult and a writer, I also now appreciate the deeper threads, themes and messages that are skilfully woven into these thrilling stories.
I do read outside children’s fiction. It is healthy, broadening and often fun to wander into other genres. But I always return to the most exciting, boundary-breaking children’s books, because they do something many adult novels do not attempt. They take wonder seriously. They trust young readers with risk, strangeness and moral complexity. These books, whether past or present, shaped the kind of writer I became.
I write adventure fiction because I still believe what those books taught me: that the ordinary world is never quite as ordinary as it looks, and that children, given the chance, can still astonish us.
