October, October by Katya Balen (illustrations by Angela Harding)

2020

October lives in the woods with her father. They have a house and it even has central heating and freezers.  They get milk and eggs form a local farmer. Despite this certain measure of civilisation they do enjoy the wild.  October’s mother left long ago as she missed the city.  

October’s father has an accident one day. He falls from a tree, damaging his spine. October has to go and live with her mother.  She finds London difficult and for the first time she has to go to school. Yet she gradually becomes reconciled to school, makes friends with Yusuf, becomes a mud lark and gradually accepts that her mother cares for her.  She even begins to find some affection for her mother.

Her father does recover and he and October return to live in the woods. Now though she keeps contact with her mother and the friends she has made in London.  

At the beginning of the story October rescues a baby owl. Somewhat reluctantly her father helps her to care for it. When she moves to London the beast plan is to take her owl, Stig, to an owl sanctuary where she is further looked after and trained to be released into the wild. October accepts in the end that this is the best plan.

The text is quite literary and Katya Balen is very skilled in her use of language. It is 291 pages in blocked text in and adult font but double-spaced. There are a few monochrome illustrations.  It is written mainly in prose but there are some verses.  

Watership Down by Richard Adams

2014 first published 1972

As you can see from the labels for this post, Richard Adams’ Watership Down is a difficult text to place. Indeed, it was all the rage when I completed my PGCE in 1973-74 and many students, i.e. adults aged at least twenty-one, were reading this instead of preparing lessons and studying pedagogy. 

Adams himself in the introduction to this piece admits that it was difficult  to find a publisher because he was told time and time again that “older children wouldn’t like it because it was about rabbits, which they consider babyish; and younger children wouldn’t like it because it is written in an adult style” (loc 174).  Yet it was a story based on one he told his own daughters as they went on a long car journey. 

There is also some symbolism in it which Adams declares in unintentional. He admits however to basing some of his characters on people he met, some of whom he encountered during  World War II.  This is what may make it more suitable for teenagers than for the fluent reader.  

  

The story explores some twentieth and twenty-first century complex social issues and therefore requires a mature reader.   

The text uses sophisticated language. It is blocked and the default font in the Kindle version is an adult one – as it is in the paperback book which has a 3.9 centimetre spine and is over 400 pages long.