The Accidental Princess by Jen Storer

I’m busy writing and rewriting, not much time to stop and blog, but I had to mention this gem of a chapter heading I came across while reading Jen Storer's The Accidental Princess.

The Accidental Princess is a wonderful modern take on old fashioned story-telling for middle-grade readers.  Boys, don’t be put off by the title, there’s plenty of gory bits and slime.

Best bit of The Accidental Princess – Chapter Sixteen: Wherein there is dancing and other horrors.

The Theory of Everything

When the kids start back at school, I have a not-strictly-adhered-to tradition of going to the cinema on my own for a little me-time.

And so it was today, after a much-needed haircut, I went with my $11 online ticket to see The Theory of Everything.

The story is based on the book Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen written by Stephen Hawking’s first wife Jane Wilde Hawking.  The two leads, Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, are superb in this heartbreaking romance.  The story follows the couple’s meeting, romance, Hawking’s diagnosis with motor neurone disease, his subsequent physical decline, marriage, children, Hawking’s success as a brilliant theoretical physicist and the difficult decisions that Stephen avoided, but inevitably had to be made (ultimately by Jane).

I was moved to tears many times during the film and I was still quite emotional on the drive home.  I’m not sure why.  The film has a happy ending: Stephen, who was given two years to live from diagnosis, is now 72; both Jane and Stephen remarried but have remained good friends.  Perhaps it’s the fact that love couldn’t conquer all.  It didn’t matter though because, as Stephen says in the movie, ‘Where there is life, there is hope.’

The best bit of The Theory of Everything (spoiler alert): Stephen’s last computer generated words in the film when he and Jane are watching their children play in the grounds of Buckingham Palace: ‘Look what we made.’

Best Bits of 2014

These are my highlights of 2014.  They weren’t necessarily new this year; they were just new to me.

Best Book:  A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, Ill. by Jim Kay (see post earlier this year).

Best TV show: Outlander (Gorgeously shot on location in Scotland, it has everything I love in a story – history, time-slip, adventure, romance and the added bonus of Sam Heughen as Jamie Fraser.  Thank you Foxtel for switching channel numbers around in November so I could happily, inadvertently, stumble upon this.)

Best Movie: The Fault in Our Stars (This is one of those memorable movies that makes you laugh and cry at the same time.  Read what I thought of the book here.)

Best Song:  Unfortunately it was played to death on the radio, as good songs often are, but after complaining about a dearth of love songs, I have to pick Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran.

Best wishes to one and all for a great year in 2015.

Lyrical Lesson 2: Assonance with Pink Floyd

Assonance is the resemblance of sounds. 

Besides an awesome bass riff, brilliant guitar solo, and tongue-in-cheek rebellious lyrics, what makes Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall one of the most memorable rock songs of all time is its use of assonance.  You will notice in the example below that none of the words strictly rhyme (unlike the refrain: All in all you’re just another brick in the wall where ‘all’ and ‘wall’ are a perfect rhyme). 

Assonance is not the same as rhyming; rather it is the repetition of similar sounds within a sentence or piece of writing.  Pink Floyd use a long ‘e’ sound, a long ‘o’ sound and long ‘ah’ sound in repetition throughout the song as follows:

We don’t need no education (We need)

We don’t need no thought control (don’t no control)

No dark sarcasm in the classroom (dark sarcasm classroom [if you sang this line with an American accent, you’d find two lots of assonance with sarcasm and class])

Teachers, leave them kids alone (Teachers leave picks up the long ‘e’ sound and Alone picks up the long ‘o’ sound from the first two lines.

Assonance can be used to great effect in both poetry and prose.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

I’m in the middle of rewriting a manuscript and am trying to dedicate as much time as possible to it, but I must mention this fabulous book I read recently.

A Monster Calls was developed from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd who died from cancer before she was able to write the story.  It’s gorgeously illustrated by Jim Kay; he and Patrick Ness won the Greenaway and Carnegie Medals respectively for this book.

Conor lives with his mother who is ill.  His father has moved away to America (from the UK) and Conor does not get along with his grandmother.  One night Conor is visited by a monster, who returns repeatedly to tell him stories.  The stories don’t make sense to Conor, they seem unfair and anger him.  The monster says after the third story, Conor must tell his own story.

After the monster tells each story, Conor is ‘possessed’ by the monster with frightening consequences.  But in spite of the bad things Conor has done, he is not punished. 

When Conor finally tells his story, he accepts the unfair truth: his mother is going to die. 

Having lost my own mother to cancer when I was young, I related to this story in almost every detail (apart from a giant yew tree visiting in the middle of the night).  It’s a rare thing to find a wonderful book that feels like it’s your story there on the page.  I highly recommend this book to everyone, but particularly for anyone who’s lost someone to a terminal disease.

Best Bit of A Monster Calls:  It’s hard to choose:  the superb writing, the outstanding illustrations, or the truth-seeking monster that lives in us all.

Can’t wait to see the movie: Liam Neeson is signed on to play the monster.

Lyrical Lessons

I’ve decided to make an occasional departure from my usual ‘Best Bits’ posts, to share some light-hearted lyrical lessons.

Lyrical Lesson 1: Simile vs Metaphor

A simile is a comparison of one thing to another, often using the words as or like.

A metaphor is when a term is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable, in order to suggest a resemblance.  (Thanks to my poor, coverless, rendered-into-two-volumes Macquarie dictionary for that definition.  I asked for a new dictionary for Christmas but instead got Macquarie’s A-Z of People and Places, which tells me Simitis became Greek prime minister in 1996 and Meta is a river in Colombia.)

But back to Lyrical Lesson 1:

When Nellie Fertado tells us she’s like a bird and will only fly away, she’s singing in simile.  The Blues Brothers, however, tell us to shake our tail feathers implying we are actual birds with tail feathers to shake (metaphor).

Elton John compares Norma Jean (Marilyn Monroe) to a candle in the wind, something flickering and fragile, never destined to last (simile).  Katie Perry sings, Baby you’re a firework.  There is no comparison; Baby is that explosion in the sky (metaphor).

Jordin Sparks questions why love always feels like a battlefield (simile).  Well, Jordin, Pat Benetar had the metaphorical answer back in the eighties: 

Love is a battlefield.

Op Shops

I’ve just returned from a visit to my local Op-Shop, where for six bucks I purchased a winter jumper and four books for the princely sum of six dollars and ten cents.  It’s been at least a year since my last visit there and I was dismayed to see the children’s book section had reduced quite considerably. 

I’ve picked up some great classics there over the years, such as Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Peter Pan, the first three Narnia books and Treasure Island.  Today I purchased a copy of Oliver Twist, because Dickens is one classic author whose books I’ve never read.  I tried to read A Tale of Two Cities many years ago, but couldn’t get much further than the first paragraph.  I’m hoping Oliver will grab my attention a little better. 

It’s true that a lot of these classic books can be downloaded for free on tablets or e-readers these days, and I have read quite a few that way this year – particularly some obscure ones – but I find it easier on the eyes, and more comfortable for overworked hands to read from the printed page.  The last thing I feel like doing after staring at a computer screen all day is stare at another screen. 

Flicking through the books today, I considered purchasing Robinson Crusoe until another title caught my eye and made me gasp aloud.  What induced me to abandon Crusoe on his desert island?  The Riddle of Trumpalar by Judy Bernard-Waite.  Of all the books I was forced to read for high school, this was the one I loved most (the only other one I recall enjoying was Sally Morgan’s My Place).  I kept all of my high school English books – despite the fact I didn’t enjoy most of them – but back in year eight or nine I loaned my copy of Trumpalar to someone with the initials SG.  When I asked for it back, SG said she’d given it to NM.  When I asked NM for it back, she said it was her book.  She showed it to me.  The cover, which had had a sticker with my name on it, had been completely peeled off.  As much as I love The Book Thief, I was not impressed with these book thief bullies for stealing my favourite high school English book (not to mention the difficulties I had finishing my assignment on it).

I am looking forward to reading this time-slip adventure once more, and sharing it with my kids.  I remember loving the riddles and poems at the beginning of each chapter, and it’s a well-established fact that I love a book with a map.

Best bit of Op-Shops:  Finding pieces of your childhood in hidden corners.

Questions can sometimes be answered

Storm clouds be swift blown away,

The weft of a dream can be held in the heart,

A memory that lives and will stay. – From The Riddle of the Trumpalar by Judy Bernard-Waite