Children's books review: Three titles to fire young imaginations

This month’s releases bring tales of explorers, young love, and unbridled creativity, writes Pet O'Connell

With improving weather comes the chance to enjoy a read in the sun. File picture

• Giant 
• Judith McQuoid 
• Little Island €9.99 

CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, though decried by some for perceived sexism or Christian didacticism, represent for many readers the opening of a door into a world of childhood imagination.

Published in the years following the Second World War, Lewis’ stories are a meeting of the magical with the mundane, where good eventually overcomes evil, and light shines through the darkness.

Much of Lewis’ own childhood was spent in a large, rambling house in Belfast, into which his family had moved, where half-empty rooms and attics were waiting to be explored and worlds such as Narnia might easily be dreamt up.

Now, Judith McQuoid, a fellow native of Belfast whose grandfather was a contemporary of Lewis and from the same area of the city, has blended fact with her own newly-created fiction. 

Drawing on biographical detail from Lewis’ life, including his Cork-born mother’s death from cancer when he was aged nine, McQuoid creates an imaginary friendship between the author and her own grandfather.

Giant is set beneath the shadow of the colossal Belfast shipyard gantries and in sight of Cavehill, whose crags resemble a reposing giant and are thought to have inspired Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. They also fire the imaginations of the young Lewis and his new friend Davy, a working-class boy from the shipyard area of the city, the character being based on McQuoid’s grandfather.

Through Lewis, known by his self-styled childhood nickname ‘Jacks’, Davy explores a world of books and stories far removed from the hardships of his daily life, discovering his own artistic talent along the way.

With his father no longer fit for work and his mother worried about where the next day’s pay will come from, Davy’s sights had been set on securing a job at the shipyard. 

But while initially delighted to be hired, he realises at the age of 13 that his future now holds nothing but hard labour in appallingly dangerous, life-threatening conditions.

It’s a deliberately stark contrast with the material comfort of Jacks' childhood, where his chief job is to amuse himself with play, free to wander in the kind of make-believe worlds that will one day enchant generations of young readers.

A story of friendship, set in the years immediately prior to the First World War, there is a sense of foreboding hanging over McQuoid’s tale; of an age of innocence whose days are numbered, as they are for the human adolescents’ stay in Narnia.

It certainly strikes a chord in our own age of uncertainty, when the idea of stepping through a wardrobe door into an imaginary world appears more attractive than ever, the magic of stories, especially for readers within sight of the end of childhood, providing an important escape from reality.

• Matched Up 
• Jenny Ireland 
• Penguin €9.50 

Soccer is Lexie’s life. Like her twin brother Niall, with whom she has a seemingly unbreakable bond, she eats, sleeps, and breathes the sport, her chief ambition being to be picked for Westing and shine as brightly as Niall does on the boys’ team.

Despite the practice football pitch the twins’ parents paid to have installed at the back of their swanky house, however, and all the hours of extra training Lexie puts in, she knows she doesn’t possess the raw talent of her best friend Megan.

Megan barely has to break into a sweat to be brilliant and her place on the team is assured. Lexie, who no matter how hard she tries, is never included in the starting line-up, is not jealous. Not much, she’s not.

So far, so standard sporting storyline, but this is a Northern Irish young adult novel with added sporty spice.

When she discovers that Megan, with whom she shares her most intimate secrets, is sharing a bed with her twin brother Niall, Lexie’s world is turned on it axis.

As it turns out, however, soccer might not be the only love of Lexie’s life either, and when she first sees super-cool striker Shane, who has just joined Westing, it’s not just his fancy footwork that catches her eye.

The attraction is mutual and things escalate quickly, every conversation, every kiss filled with the intensity of emotion that typifies teenage romance. It looks unlikely, though, that her twin will take kindly to Lexie dating the new kid on the block whose life he is already making difficult, since it is Niall’s place on the team that is threatened by Shane’s arrival.

Though keeping their love under wraps adds an extra frisson of excitement, it brings its own strains and when Shane appears to be concealing secrets of his own, it seems the relationship could be over before it has properly begun.

In this tangled tale of first love’s emotional rollercoaster, Antrim author Jenny Ireland digs deep into the social pressures and anxieties of young adulthood.

Sporting ambitions, college choices, and relationships with friends and family come under scrutiny, with Ireland at her most insightful with regard to the often self-imposed burden of living up to unrealistic or misperceived expectations.

• Tom Crean: Irish Antarctic Hero 
• Michael Smith and David Butler
• O’Brien Press €14.99 

Having survived his heroic Antarctic expeditions aboard the Terra Nova and Discovery with Captain Scott and being honoured for his lifesaving bravery, Tom Crean’s third venture, joining Kildare explorer Ernest Shackleton on the Endurance, became truly the stuff of legend.

Before they could begin their 2,800km mission to cross Antarctica by land, via the South Pole, the party’s ship became trapped in pack ice and after being carried for months on strong currents, it was crushed by an ice floe and sank. With the nearest land nearly 400km away, no one aware of their location, and no radio to call for help, the crew were stranded.

When, with food supplies dangerously low, they were eventually able to launch their lifeboats through an opening in the ice, Crean and his colleagues voyaged in terrifying seas, first to Elephant Island and then another 1,300km to South Georgia Island, trekking over mountains and glaciers to a whaling station in search of help for their companions left behind.

Almost as incredible as the feats of the farmer’s son from Annascaul, Co Kerry, is the fact that Crean’s story was little known until recent years. His return from his travels and British naval service coincided with the War of Independence, during which his brother Con, an RIC sergeant, was shot dead.

Perhaps fearing his own family’s safety was similarly under threat, Crean did not speak of his naval service or Antarctic exploration, his bravery and death-defying adventures becoming more widely known posthumously thanks to biographers including Michael Smith, whose work now appears for the first time in graphic novel form, illustrated by David Butler.