Girl on a Plane By Miriam Mos

Based on the true story of a hijacking, this YA novel describes the reactions of a fifteen year old girl  travelling on her own when her flight is boarded by Palestinian guerrillas.
The book is a nice easy read for young adults. In fact, it was a set text for my eldest child at 11,  which technically falls into middle grade. I have no hesitation recommending it for children from year 7 upwards. Children will be able to relate to the characters, though at times I wondered if the author put too much of her adult self into the child, an understandable choice when it's autobiographical.

Whilst this book is based on an event from the 70's, terrorism is a current issue for our children today.
Reading about how other children have coped when terror visited their lives provides a safe way for children to work through how they might cope if something difficult happened to them. The drama of the plot, and the constant threat of the plane exploding, keeps the pages turning. I'm also impressed with the marketing savvy of the title though I'm sure that'll go over most kid's heads.

(and okay... I'll admit it, because the book is based on a hijacking that happened back in 1970, it's also a sneaky way to get the kids reading about some world history.)

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Re-reading treasured favourites

We've all been there. Reading the same material over and over to obsessed children. And it's always the book that bores, us, or has rubbish illustrations, or in some way drives you up the wall. When they are young, we tolerate it but as they age there seems to be a collective disgust at children 'not moving on'.

A current report into what kids are reading suggests that children are consistently reading below their reading age when they reach senior school.  This is not because they are incapable, but because they like to return to old and familiar favourites. So the boy in senior school who excelled at primary is often found to be reading books he loved back then. Instead of moving on to the classics as encouraged by his English teachers, he's rereading Kinney and Walliams.

This kind of thing encourages panic in well meaning parents and educators. We could all do with a healthy dose of chill-axing. We spend years encouraging children to read for pleasure and for relaxation, and when they finally do - they are given a hard time about it!

The time to worry is when children stop reading. Rereading is good for children and induces a sense of security. Instead of telling them off we should praise them. They've chosen to read in their down-time. They've all the time in the world to read difficult literature (a whole adult lifetime) but childhood is short, and the pleasure to be found in escaping into worlds created by greats like Roald Dahl, all too brief.

If you want to see the full report follow this link new report .

(The title picture from this blog is the one my four year old is currently demanding nightly. It's great, but don't read it after a heavy dinner, as it may make you queasy.)

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Pinterest for Writers

I thought I would post some of my favourite writing tools here. One of my top 10 is Pinterest. For the uninitiated, it's basically an online cork board where you can pin images and articles that take your fancy. You can choose if you want to share your boards with others, a select few, or keep them private.

I use Pinterest for my setting research and have one for all of my novels (as well as every room of my house). You can either search Pinterest itself for images you like, find pictures via Google or wherever and add them yourself, or pick from the recommendations based on your viewing history (my current recs are a combination of beautiful staircases, educational activities for kids and - bizarrely - sexy clowns). It's really simple and a great way of gathering images and bookmarking research articles all in one place.

In a previous post, I mentioned a book I wrote inspired by Ballard's A Drowned World. This is a Pinterest board I made when imagining the setting, plus there's a screenshot below.

As an aside, Pinterest have introduced a newish tool in which you can take a smartphone picture of anything and it will find you similar images online. I just tested in on my cat and found his doppelgängers from around the world. It will probably prove more useful in other, yet to be discovered, ways.

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Flooded Cities and Future Worlds

Climate change is redrawing the map of the world. When UN climate change experts met up at the end of last year, it was to discuss a new three-degree future in which rising sea-levels will wipe numerous cities from existence. So today's writing inspiration is of the flooded city variety, courtesy of some 1960s' science fiction and our shortsighted habit of polluting our poor planet.

J.G.Ballard's A Drowned World is one of my favourite books. Considering he wrote it back in 1962, it is scarily prophetic when it comes to the sweltering tropics of what used to be London, turned into a watery wasteland populated by reptiles and giant insects.

"Already many of the surrounding buildings had disappeared beneath the proliferating vegetation. Huge club mosses and calamites blotted out the white rectangular faces, shading the lizards in their window lairs. Beyond the lagoon, the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate into enormous glittering banks, here and there overtopping the shoreline like the immense tippings of some distant goldmine."

It both scares and humbles me to imagine that Ballard's vision may, one day, come true. Our current global climate change interventions had aimed at keeping global warming to a toasty 2C above pre-industrial levels. Only, the latest projections suggest we are on track for a 3.2C and that means a whole lot of water will be coming our way thanks to melting ice-caps. The areas at risk of flooding are currently home to 275 million people, most of them living in Asia.

Projections by Surging Seas show how the coastal regions of the world are likely to change. Large areas of London are among those at risk, in scenes reminiscent of A Drowned World.

A 3-degree increase in global temperature will see much of London flooded

A few years back, artists were asked to imagine what London could look like in 2100. Some of the scenarios they envisioned saw landmarks half-submerged, turning London into a city reminiscent of Venice.

There's more on the three-degree world in this Guardian article here.

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And here's some book recommendations featuring flooded cities. I will add to the list if anyone wants to comment below with their favourites.

The Drowned World by J.G.Ballard follows just a couple of characters as they regress through the aeons as nature reclaims an abandoned London. “The trouble with you people is that you've been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life,” says one of the characters.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson features a flooded version of New York, so I had to include it on the list (even if the level of the sea level rise is a bit extreme). The bad guy here is capitalism and parts of Manhattan are nicknamed SuperVenice, which is brilliant.

Exodus by Julie Bertagna is the first YA on my list. Rising sea levels, a sky city and the Netherworld—a flooded Glasgow cast in shadow by the sky city overhead. My last novel featured a similar shadowy undercity, so finding this book was both exciting and distressing that there are no new ideas. 

Floodland by Marcus Sedgwick is a middle grade novel set in a flooded version of England in which Norwich is now an island and the main character has misplaced their parents.

The Sea and Summer by George Turner has been compared to The Drowned World with its watery vision of the future. It was Sci-Fi back when it was written; now it feels more like a warning.

Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich has great cover art and a lot of maths, plus it manages to be funny in the face of a city's annihilation. (I'm in the process of reading this one, and love it so far).

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Glamorous Decay as a Lifestyle

Interesting read for writer types: The fantasy of the writer's lifestyle

I do love the whole glamorous decay trope when it comes to writing, both on and off the page. Sadly, I know of no one whose writer's lifestyle in anyway matches up with an Anthropologie catalogue. Maybe I need to remind myself that it's possible to be a 'real writer' even if you don't feel like one.

I liked this quote from the article:

There is no writer’s lifestyle; your lifestyle is determined by what that other work is. I’m baffled when I come across interviews where writers laughingly allude to the solitude, say, or the introspection of the novelist’s life. No matter how solitary or introspective you are while you’re writing novels, you are likely spending many more hours each week at another job, or commuting, or raising kids, or trying to keep your house clean.

Anyway, somewhat fittingly, I had to run off to collect my daughter half way through writing this. Now that I am back, I thought I would share these Anthropologie mugs as a potential gift for the writer in your life:

And their books and stationary section isn't half-bad either. 

(p.s. I'm just sharing products I like here, not trying to trick you into clicking on affiliate links). 

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