Tag: young adult fiction

Beautiful edition of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Autobiography | Blue Remembered Hills

Anthony Lawton8 Comments

Issue 35, Autumn 2012Slightly Foxed is, in their own words, “a rather unusual quarterly book review”, as I posted last year. It professes to be “unaffected by the winds of fashion and the hype of the big publishers” as it introduces readers to “some of the thousands of good books that long ago disappeared from the review pages and often from bookshop shelve.”  “Companionable and unstuffy”, its contributors – some well-known, others not – all write “personally and entertainingly about the books they choose”. It appeals to me that it is “not so much a review magazine as a magazine of enthusiasms – some of them quite quirky”.

In the autumn of 2011 they launched a new paperback series, putting into paperback those Slightly Foxed Editions that have now sold out. I remain delighted that Rosemary Sutcliff’s autobiography Blue Remembered Hills was released. It is pocket-sized and very elegantly produced.

Blue Remebered Hills by Rosemary Sutcliff

Illustration of The Old Woman by John Vernon Lord | from Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset

Anthony Lawton2 Comments

An illustration by John Vernon Lord for  Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset, Edito-Service Geneva, 1975. Reproduced at the blog johnvernonlord.blogspot.co.uk a couple of days ago.

Reproduction of an illustration from an edition of Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword st Sunset

To read Rosemary Sutcliff is to discover what reading is good for

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

… The Shining Company (1990) … (is)  a vintage volume, the work of a writer who has a distinctive view of her readers, a view which many may not know that they can have of themselves. To read Rosemary Sutcliff is to discover what reading is good for.

…. this accomplishment make me ask what might be the contemporary appeal or, more simply, the enduring attraction of the historical novels for the young. After all, much has clearly changed in children’s books and reading since television became their more immediate storyteller, and novelists, now more matey and informal, adopted a more elliptical vernacular prose, in which the readers’ ease is more visible than the challenge to read.But, given her isolation, Rosemary Sutcliff needs her readers. Like her characters they people her world, so she devises means of coming close to them and drawing them into the worlds she makes out of the dark places in history.

Sometimes the trick is a first-person narrative: `I am – I was – Prosper, second son to Gerontius, lord of three cantrefs between Nant Ffrancon and the sea.’ Or there’s a dedication, `For all four houses of Hilsea Modern Girls’ School, Portsmouth (my school) who adopted me like a battleship or a regimental goat.’ The first page swings the characters into action in a situation as clear as a television image. The names of the people and places set the rules of belonging; the relations between the sexes are formally arrayed; the battles are long and fierce. Readers who are unaccustomed to the building up of suspense in poised sentences may need a helping hand. Again, the best way into a Sutcliff narrative, a kind of initiation, is to hear it read aloud. Then you know what the author means when she says she tells her tales `from the inside’.

Source: Margaret Meek in Books for Keeps, Issue 64. Reproduced with permission.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s recreation of the past is effortless | Returning to The Lantern Bearers

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The Lantern Bearers by historical novelist and children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff, first published in 1959, won the prestigious  Carnegie Medal that year. An American reviewer wrote some twenty years later …

I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff in my early teens, and she quickly became one of my favorite authors. I can still vividly recapture the magic of reading her books. It was a real pleasure to return to The Lantern Bearers, which I first read when I was about thirteen, and find the magic still intact. … The Lantern Bearers is a wonderful book. Sutcliff possesses a unique gift for character and description, evoking a sense of place and person so intense that the reader can almost see her characters and the world in which they move. She has a matchless ability to establish historical context without a surfeit of the “let’s learn a history lesson now” exposition that mars many historical novels for young people. Her books are never less than meticulously researched, but her recreation of the past is so effortless that one has no sense of academic exercise, but rather of a world as close and immediate as everyday.

…  The Arthurian theme was one of Sutcliff’s favorites: she produced several young adult books on the subject, as well as a beautiful adult novel, Sword at Sunset, to my mind one of the best ever written in this genre. But the Sutcliff’s Arthur is rooted as much in history as in myth–not just the tragic king of Le Morte d’Arthur or the heroic/magical figure of traditional Arthurian fantasy, but a man who might actually have existed, heir both to the memory of Rome and to the last great flowering of Celtic power in Britain.
…  her enduring popularity … is richly merited: she is, quite simply, one of the best.

Copyright © 1997 Victoria Strauss

(First posted, April 29th, 2009)

Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novel ‘Bonnie Dundee’ | American 1985 Review

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

In a brief review in The Dallas Morning News in 1985 (12 May)  Cherie Clodfelter commented that the historical novel for children and young adults, Bonnie Dundee by Rosemary Sutcliff (published in USA by Dutton) was:

… historical fiction at its very best, a blend of fact and fiction. The writing style is immensely informative and engrossing, although the American teenager may lack the knowledge of British history to appreciate the complicated plot and the Scottish idiom. John Graham of Claverhouse (called Bonnie Dundee by his followers) was a Scottish Royalist who died fighting to keep the House of Stuart on the throne. Both the legendary leader whom King James entitled the Viscount Dundee and the period of history where battle was both elegant and horrible is carefully developed to maintain the pace of a suspenseful adventure story.