The Rabbit Back Literature Society, by Pasi Ilmar Jaaskelainen

Laura White’s “Creatureville” novels are bestsellers, but what if the mythological beings they feature are based on real beings living in Rabbit Back? Why is the Rabbit Back librarian burning books? And why only now, after so many years, has a new member been invited to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society?

After the end of a disappointing relationship, Ella Amanda Milana has returned to her home town of Rabbit Back and taken on a teaching position in the local school. Everything seems mundane and normal, except perhaps for the part where her father claims he can see gnomes in the garden (but he has Alzheimers, so he’s not an entirely reliable witness), the part where library books are rearranging their stories, and the part where her town is populated by the infamous Rabbit Back Literature Society, an exclusive and rather secretive group of nine acclaimed writers brought together and nurtured from a young age by bestselling children’s author Laura Winter.

And so The Rabbit Back Literature Society is at once a slightly strange and yet fairly regular story of a young woman finding her feet in life. It is peopled with eccentric characters and set in a town with a magical undertow, yet Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen makes this seems all perfectly normal. It does come as a surprise to everyone when Laura White, after reading a story Ella has published in the local paper, invites Ella to join the Literature Society, the first new member in something like twenty years. But when Ella is initiated into the group not only does Laura White mysteriously disappear, but Ella is introduced to The Game: a sacred spilling of internal truths. Is this her chance to uncover the Society’s mysteries? Her own mysteries? Can she, or will she, use them to form her own, new future? What will she have to give up in return, and how far will the society go to prevent her from spilling their secrets? Will she wish, afterwards, that she never knew them?

A lot goes on in this book, each new chapter, each new ‘spilling’ in The Game, revealing another level of mystery. There’s not only the mystery of Laura White herself, of the complicated relationships the society members have with each other, but also of the elusive first tenth member and his powerful notebook. Although they never talk about him, this young boy’s notebook has an intense hold over the society, particularly Martti Winter. But is it actually what they remember it to be?

This is a strangely magical book, but the magical aspect of it not only goes unresolved and unexplained, but also never directly mentioned. It simply exists, underlying the thoughts and words and deeds of this small Finnish town. This, of course, makes the whole thing even more magical and interesting. Perhaps I should read some Finnish mythology – perhaps then I would more clearly understand the significance of the Emperor Rat, be able to divine whether Laura White was actually Mother Snow. It’s a wonderful and unusual story, quite dark in places, ultimately both resolving things and leaving much unresolved. Quirky is perhaps one way of describing it, but it doesn’t really come anywhere near; it’s much more fluid than a single description or term can accomplish, much like Laura White, The Game, and the Society themselves.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, by Leslye Walton

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender tells the story of three women: Ava herself, a young girl who was born with a pair of softly feathered wings; her mother Viviane, heartbroken and shy of the world; her grandmother Emilienne, haunted by the sorrows of her lost brother and sisters. When Ava was born they called her The Living Angel, but where did this magic come from? As Ava traces her family’s history, the lives of her mother and grandmother, their choices and their fates, she spies a thread of magic that runs through them all – but what love, magic and tragedy awaits Ava herself?

I love the cover on this book, the beautifully engraved feather design. And the title is apt too: the story is one of strange and beautiful sorrows. But, while quiet tragedy does run through the pages, it is not all sorrowful. And it is not just Ava’s story either. Much of the first half of the book is taken up with Emilienne’s story, and then Viviane’s, and I have mixed feeling about this. Their histories are relevant and they have a part to play in the events that follow, but it meant the story took a long time to really get going, especially for a title that’s billed as Ava’s story. Although, of course, their story is a part of Ava’s story – but Ava is a much more engaging character than either her mother or grandmother, each of whom feels the toll of lost love heavily and whose choices I found slightly irritating and naïve in places. But perhaps Ava can break the cycle?

Once Ava herself came to the foreground of the story I was much more interested – a young girl like any other, she just wants to be accepted for who she is inside. But when she ventures beyond her garden gate will people see her for who she is or will they see only her wings? Will they be afraid? Or awed? As she gradually begins to expand her world it’s inevitable that someone out there will react badly. Will it destroy her? Or give her new beginning?

Leslye Walton writes with a style that reminded me strongly of Alice Hoffman, one of my favourite authors, whom I read a lot of in my early twenties, as she weaves in natural magics and gives her characters a quiet sort of sensitivity to the world. Just here and there, though, she lets it get a little out of control – one and half pages on the smell of rain, for instance, felt a little overcooked.

This is a book being marketed for teens/young adults, yet it doesn’t feel like a young adult book. Maybe this is a good thing: teens, after all, are more than capable of reading and engaging with ‘adult’ books, and why should teen books have a certain ‘feel’ about them anyway? The genre should definitely not be restricted in this way. However, I would only recommend it to older readers because of the sweeping sexual references and because, honestly, a younger reader is likely to get bored pretty quickly by the heavy beginning – this is not an action adventure book, it is not a romance or a dystopian thriller. I do love the magical realism aspect, though, and perhaps it’s time the young adult section had something a little different added to its shelves.

While I wasn’t completely overwhelmed, I did enjoy reading The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender; it was satisfyingly predictable in places and nicely unpredictable in others, and as the story built towards it’s conclusion I was most certainly gripped. And it has a slightly ambiguous ending, with a little surprise tucked inside it, as well as giving the feeling that all is right with the world as each of the three women overcome their sorrows and look to the future.

The Great Unexpected, by Sharon Creech

The Great Unexpected is a strange and magical story in which I was never entirely sure what was real and what was imagined. Two apparently separate storylines run alongside each other, one surrounding two elderly ladies in Ireland plotting some sort of grand revenge for who-knows-what, and one surrounding two odd little girls in the dusty little American town of Blackbird Tree, a town with what must surely be an abnormally high number of orphans, peculiar residents and unusual happenings.

It all begins when a body falls out of a tree and lands at Naomi’s feet. Who is this strange boy, Finn? Where did he come from and what is he doing in Blackbird Tree muttering about gold, rooks, and orchards? Finn himself is obviously somewhat unexpected, and a good number of other unexpected things take place in the following pages, some of them good and pleasant surprises, some of them sad ones, as Naomi and Lizzie both go about their daily lives whilst getting gradually more caught up in the mystery of Finn.

As for the unexpected events, they are each and every one, for the most part, entirely normal happenings, and yet Sharon Creech makes each one special and strange and magical, and exactly how she manages to do so is as much a mystery as many of the little connections flowing throughout the story are. I think perhaps life is full is full of mysterious and wondrous things, certainly if you take each thing at face value without trying to interpret or place too much emphasis on them, and Creech captures this feeling, this innocence, in her characters, especially the young ones, Naomi, Lizzie and Finn. They are able to turn the littlest, everyday things into something magical and special – an especial achievement for children whose lives are far from easy – and pass this on to the reader. Much like books by Neil Gaiman, you feel as if anything could happen inside this book, that everything is connected...

“I thought about all the things that had to have spun into place in order for us to be alive and for us to be right there, right then. I thought about the few things we thought we knew and the billions of things we couldn’t know, all spinning, whirling out there somewhere.” (pg. 219)

Meanwhile, what is this wondrous plan that old Mrs Kavanagh is cooking up across the ocean? What is her connection to Blackbird Tree? And, if any, is Finn’s connection to Mrs Kavanagh? The Great Unexpected is a slow burner of a story with a fairytale ending, an apt title, and a mysteriouser and mysteriouser middle. Strange yet lovely, and beautifully packaged.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is such a wonderful book. It’s a book that makes you question worlds and question reality, and yet everything it makes you question feels innately true and real. It’s simple but intense, magical but scary, dark but hopeful. It’s perfect.

It’s been well publicized that the story of Ocean began to form in Neil Gaiman’s mind when he discovered that a lodger in his childhood home had, one night, stolen their car, driven it down the road, and committed suicide inside it. And, essentially, this is where Ocean begins too. When our narrator’s lodger commits this very same act, it opens up a rift, awakens an old sort of evil, and mistakes compounding mistakes brings it into our world. But is it truly evil? What does it want? Can our narrator avoid its clutches? Can they put the world back to rights? And what will be the price to do so?

“I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. 

But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them” 

        – Maurice Sendak, 1993

This choice of introductory inscription to Ocean speaks volumes, somehow encompassing all that is to follow. Our young narrator is about to learn terrible things about the world. It has the same sort of creep factor that Gaiman created in his earlier book, Coraline – you know that something is terribly, terribly wrong with what is happening, but no-one else seems to notice. Only the Hempstock family, who live on the farm down the lane and on whose ground the ocean lies, can help. They are a family who are as equally unknowable as they make perfect sense. It seems entirely normal - and right - that the strange Hempstock family should exist.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is beautiful and terrifying and touching and utterly, totally, overwhelming good. Everything is up for question and yet it is hard to pinpoint exactly what I should be questioning. Gaiman writes about a world in which the abnormal, the magical, the mysterious, makes perfect sense. Knowing the origins of the story and the way in which the narrator remains unnamed leads us quietly to question how much of this story is based on reality. But it can’t be – can it? In any other circumstances such a thought would be preposterous, and yet Gaiman’s beautiful evocation of this tale makes it seem not only entirely valid but a completely reasonable possibility.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

“Find the bird. In the loop. On the other side of the old man’s grave. September third, 1940.”

These are Abe Portman’s last words.

Jacob has always been close to his grandfather, but as he has gotten older he’s learnt to interpret Abe’s strange tales as little more than embellished stories. The tales of strange children with strange abilities, of monsters with rotting skin, black eyes and twisting tentacles, of an enchanted children’s home watched over by a bird are just too absurd to be true. Aren’t they? But when his grandfather phones him in a panic one afternoon, saying the monsters are after him, Jacob’s life is changed forever. Not only is he left with a set of cryptic last words, but with the image of a monster seared into his brain, and nightmares and shakes he can barely begin to comprehend.

As he tries to piece together his grandfather’s life, to understand Abe’s last words, and to escape the horrors that confront him in his own dreams, Jacob journeys to the remote island off the Welsh coast where his grandfather grew up. Here he finds the bombed out ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and soon discovers that there is a lot more to this place than at first meets the eye.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a masterfully created work, combining adventure with time travel, words with images, and blending reality with the fantastical. It’s a book that just jumps off the shelf, asking to be flicked through: beautifully presented, with a slightly old-fashioned black and white cover - showing a photograph of a little girl wearing a twenties-like dress, Mary-Janes, and a crown pushed down on her brow - it is full of sepia toned photographs that, once you get reading, compliment the story. Each photograph, though, is a little odd. The little girl on the cover, for instance, is floating. Dig deeper and find strange children, a woman who appears to have no arms yet is smoking a pipe, contortionists, light-filled caves, a boy in a bunny suit. They all have a purpose, and a role to play in Ransom Riggs’ story.

Pulled into another world, Jacob meets many of these Peculiar children, and learns that his grandfather was one of them. It’s a seemingly idyllic existence that they lead, but time is running out for them. Jacob’s arrival brings the things they are hiding from closer to home and soon he will be called upon not to help them escape, to help himself too. And how is he going to reconcile this new world with his old one?

Ransom Riggs, it turns out, is a collector of odd photographs, sorting through antique markets, flea stalls, and the collections of friends, to find the strange, stand-out images that inspired Miss Peregrine’s Home. How they came to be - what is doctored and what is real - is a question that goes unanswered, though this particular interpretation is definitely a gripping and well-imagined one. The photos are not the only mysteries he has created an explanation for though: one part of the story refers to “a catastrophic explosion that rattled windows as far as the Azores” in early twentieth century Siberia. “Anyone within five hundred kilometres surely thought it was the end of the world,” Miss Peregrine informs us. This sounds awfully like the mysterious 1908 Tunguska fireball to me: a massive explosion in this area of Siberia for which many theories abound, but none have been outrightly proven.

Opening Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Given the strange images scattered throughout, I thought it would be creepy - I thought it might even be a horror story - but what I actually was I found an unusual coming-of-age story with a twist, an adventure, and a writer’s imagination that knows few boundaries. Not only does it look gorgeous on the bookshelf, it’s gripping, enjoyable and original, and I will certainly be looking out for the second instalment.