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Book Review: Green Fingers, by Paul May

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Kate is not happy about moving to the countryside, leaving her friends behind, and having to start over at another new school, but she’s just a kid, what can she do about it? She really wants her parents to be happy, but she finds reading so hard, and the teachers think she’s stupid. Dad loves the new house, and insists he will be able to fix it up and make it into their ideal home, but he lacks the DIY skills and one disaster follows another. After much arguing, Mum decides she can’t cope with it, and she is needed at work back in London, so she leaves.

Suddenly Kate realises that she has to do something. She has to try to learn to read and to make things better at school, and she also decides that she will do her bit towards making the new house a home and sort out the garden, which her Mum was attracted to when she first saw the house, but remains a mess. With the help of her new friends, Louise and her grandfather Walter, Kate plans to create a beautiful garden and save her family.

I read a lot of teen/YA fiction but I hadn’t read any younger children’s literature for a long time, and when I decided to read this short novel as it has similar themes to the YA book I am writing, I didn’t expect to be absorbed by it. To my surprise I loved Green Fingers! The characterisation is great, lots of serious issues are explored but the tone is optimistic, and I kept turning the pages and cried at the end! Kate is a sympathetic, determined girl and I really enjoyed my time with her. It’s nicely modern too – Kate’s Mum has a job in the city that she loves, whilst her Dad works from home on his computer and takes care of the children.
I think it is just the right length, although I was sad to leave the characters and put the book down.

I think this book is aimed at 8-13 year old children, and it strikes me as a particularly good book for reading aloud. There are illustrations at the start of each section and chapter, these were drawn by Sian Bailey. Paul May has written seven other fiction books and seven non-fiction books for children, and on his website he says that Green Fingers is his favourite book. I would definitely recommend this to my own cousins!

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Book Review: The Mammoth Cheese, by Sheri Holman

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From The British Library

The Mammoth Cheese is rather a mammoth story (sorry, I know…). It’s about a small town in Virginia, called Three Chimneys, and the people who live there during the time after the town first gets a lot of media attention when one of the women gives birth to eleven babies.

Manda Frank, didn’t want eleven babies, who would? She wanted one, having already had one daughter, and generally preferring her dogs to people. But she gives birth to all eleven, after the local pastor convinces her not to selectively abort any, and as a result makes the national news, and is bombarded with gifts and offers of help that she would rather not need. Her old house was too small and a new one is being built around her as she lives in it, but when some of the tiny, weak children die, the gifts and help stop coming, and she, her husband, her first daughter and her village are left to deal with everything (including a court case brought against her “on behalf” of the children who didn’t survive).

Meanwhile, Margaret Prickett’s cheesemaking farm is failing, and she decides to make the mammoth cheese of the title and take it to Washington to get media attention for herself and other struggling small farms and to hold the newly elected president to his promises. She is so busy with this and the electoral campaign for the man she thinks will save her, she fails to notice that the pastor’s son August Vaughn is in love with her, and her daughter Polly is falling in love with her charismatic, rebellious history teacher, Mr March.

There are a lot of characters to keep track of, and the story moves point of view a lot which made it hard for me to empathise with all the characters and make up my mind what I thought about them and their actions. The plots don’t interweave as much as I expected them to, which was disappointing, I though the characters should have had much more impact on each others lives.

It’s a very American story. Its location is vitally important, a character itself. The nature of American politics is an important ‘theme’ in this novel, with characters discussing it in conversation as well as plotlines being based around an presidential campaign. I didn’t think this was particularly well introduced, this book was intended primarily for an American audience and as a British reader I didn’t get some of the references or understand how the system worked, but I do know more about Thomas Jefferson now than I did before!

I never really felt pulled into this story. At no point was I really excited to find out what happens next, I finished it because I found the descriptions of cheesemaking interesting and I don’t like to leave a book unfinished. I also didn’t like the Christian point of view lots of the characters had, I am not religious myself and so I felt really alienated. The particularly religious characters didn’t even feel bad about encouraging Manda Frank to have all the babies despite the consequences for more than a few pages. Some details about the characters were repeated far too often, and I didn’t feel that the author got Polly’s characterisation right. Even when the story was focused around her, it felt like her actions were being described by an distant adult, and that her thoughts were much too simplified.

I was glad to finish this book, and still have mixed feelings about it. I didn’t really enjoy the book as a whole and I thought the plots could have been stronger, but I did like learning about all the little details of rural life. I probably won’t read any other books by this author or this one again. I would only recommend it to readers who regularly enjoy stories set in small-town rural America, or who find the plot description really appealing.