The Zone by Morag Macrae

Published by Completely Novel, February 2015

100 pages in proof copy

Cover art by Karen Ronan

Teenage Drama, Teenage Lives

Zac runs away from home to his escape his mother’s abusive partner, Lucas is challenged to jump off a cliff, and Josh learns his girlfriend is seriously ill.

Reviewed by K. M .Lockwood

This collection of nine short stories is linked by characters who each belong to The Zone, a youth drama group. The author’s experience in similar settings comes through: these stories are full of the reality of many teenagers’ lives. That doesn’t mean they are either preachy or unremittingly bleak - there is warmth, humour and enough deliberate ambiguity to let readers make their own minds up.

The cover refers to the first story - and leaves it to the viewer to decide who is in the picture. This makes it plain that the stories invite a range of readers - not just the Hollywood-perfect.

Although difficult issues with complex choices are at the core of the stories, the writing style is simple and easy-to-read. The drama is often driven by dialogue and would make ideal source material for creating play-scripts or improvisation. 

I would recommend this collection for groups working with young people, including as a classroom resource. It would also suit those wanting a quick read with plenty of naturalistic drama and topics well worth discussing.

Rowena House and the War Girls.

Debut author and fellow Book Bounder, Rowena House, recently won a writing competition. The winning story was chosen to be published alongside some very well known YA authors in War Girls, which was published on the 5th of June. I am really pleased to welcome Rowena onto the blog to tell us all about how her story was chosen. 

I’ll never forget the buzz in the lecture room at Bath Spa University when we learnt that Andersen Press was running a short story competition just for us - the Masters students in creative writing for young people. 

The rules turned out to be simple: it had to be set during World War One, the main character had to be a girl, and the story had to be suitable for 11+ readers. The prize? Publication!  I jumped at the chance, not only because I really wanted to be published, but also because I already had an idea for a story.

A few years earlier I’d seen a TV documentary about a terrible event that began at a British military camp in northern France. (I won’t say what because that’s the point of the story!) I immediate began wondering how a young French girl might have been caught up in this event.

Before I could begin, however, I had to give myself permission to write about a subject as appalling as World War One. After all, I wasn’t there so how could I possibly know what it was like?  I was already researching the history of the war, but that wasn’t enough. I needed a closer, more personal connection. So I studied my grandfather’s diary from the Dardanelles, listened to veterans on the Imperial War Museum’s sound archive, and trawled the internet for letters and diaries. Then I took a copy of the complete works of Wilfred Owen to Étaples, the town where I knew my story had to end. 

Owen’s war poems had upset me hugely when I read them at school, and they still colour my attitude to war today. Reading them again in streets where he walked, where soldiers and nurses dealt daily with death, and the townspeople heard heavy artillery pounding the Front: these things created an emotional bridge to the past, and allowed me to ‘become’ my main character, Angelique Lacroix, and to imagine how she would have felt coming to this town.

Her story starts hundreds of miles south of Étaples, deep in the countryside. She is a 14-year-old peasant girl who works hard, helping her mother run their small family farm. She’s already left school, and only meets her friends once a week when she takes their washing to the village lavoir - a big stone trough where all the local women do their laundry and gossip. 

One day, the postman delivers fateful news: her father is dead, killed on a distant battlefield. After mass, Angelique makes herself a promise: the farm will remain exactly the same until her brother comes home from the Front. ‘I think of it like a magical spell. If I can stop time, if nothing ever changes, then maybe Pascal won’t change either.’ But a storm spoils their harvest, her mother falls sick, then the soldiers come ... As Angelique struggles across war-torn France, in a desperate bid to save her home and her brother’s inheritance, a new danger stirs - a danger more deadly than World War One. 

When Andersen Press emailed to say my story had won the competition, and would I like to come to London to sign a contract and discuss edits, I felt so happy it was almost unreal, like an adrenalin rush of pure joy. It took several months to tighten the plot, copy edit and proof read, but then in the post came two copies of War Girls.

Tearful and excited, I opened the beautiful front cover and there it was: my story, The Marshalling of Angelique’s Geese, alongside tales from Anne Fine, Melvin Burgess, Theresa Breslin, Sally Nicholls and four other authors I very much admire. I felt tremendously proud, not just to see my name next to such amazing writers (which is, of course, fantastic) but also to think that each of our characters is a guide to one fragment of the great and terrible story of the ‘war to end all wars’. 

What a beautiful and inspiring post!

The War Girls is available to buy right now.

On The Day I Died by Candice Fleming

Reviewed by Caroline Hodges (@musingdragon)

Pages - 208

Published by Corgi Books in September 2012

It was after midnight and Mike Kowlaski was driving fast - too fast - down County Line Road. He glanced at the dashboard clock and groaned.

He was late.

Again.

His phone rang. It didn’t take ESP to know it was his mother. “She probably wants to get a jump start on her griping,” Mike muttered to himself. Earlier that evening, she’d told him to be in by midnight “or else.”

Mike didn’t even want to think about what “or else” meant.

Ignoring the call, he mashed down the accelerator. Maybe if he was only a little late...

That was when the girl appeared in his headlights.

Goodreads Summary

Set in White Cemetery, an actual graveyard outside Chicago, each story takes place during a different time period from the 1860's to the present, and ends with the narrator's death. Some teens die heroically, others ironically, but all due to supernatural causes. Readers will meet walking corpses and witness demonic posession, all against the backdrop of Chicago's rich history—the Great Depression, the World's Fair, Al Capone and his fellow gangsters.

******

My younger sister and I were pretty fascinated with the macabre growing up. All I could think about was how much we would have loved this collection of short stories by Candace Fleming back then. Sadly, as an older reader, the stories didn’t really creep me out, but, I can certainly remember a time when they genuinely would have had me sleep with the light on after putting down my book for the night. And this ultimately, is the age group the book is aimed at; teen readers who like a good scary story.

Mike is on his way home when he has a ghostly encounter with a long dead girl. The night twists and turns until he finds himself at the graveside of the girl. There he meets a variety of child ghosts, all wanting to share their stories, and so the novel is split into these stories but held together with Mike’s storyline.

I think what I enjoyed most was the varying age of those in the graveyard; it meant that each story was set in a different time period of Chicago history and so the events and manner in which each ghost tells their story is reflective of that. We visit the famous Chicago World Fair with Evelyn and her twin sister, experience a deadly act of revenge for the gangster-accented Johnnie, and of course, there’s a visit to an abandoned insane asylum. Believe it or not, there’s even a clever story involving an old flame of Al Capone’s.

The stories are each unique and believable with the exception of one which borrows, as if to cover all bases, heavily from the sci-fi genre. But actually, ultimately this story just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the collection. Whereas the others touch on real history which adds to their credibility, this one story just wasn’t believable in the way the others were. And I tend to think if a scary story can seem believable, it adds that extra element of fear!

My favourite tale was Edgar’s; a boy born with a strange ability which he cannot control and is shunned for it, inevitably leading to tragedy. The terror in this is subtle, not the outright “things that go bump in the night” horror, but the fear of oneself.

It’s a small book at just over 200 pages, but I found it and the stories within it the perfect length. Short and scary; perfect for camp-fire re-telling, or reading to younger siblings.