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A friend’s teenage daughter recently asked me ‘Why don’t you ever feature books for children in your Book Club column?’ It was a reasonable question. The book club has been going almost a year and has been very adult orientated. So, not afraid to show my ignorance, I went to all four of the major bookshops in Norwich and asked for advice on ‘a summer read for a teenager’ with the proviso that anything they suggested had to have an East Anglian connection either through the author or by setting or ideally by both. Maybe I asked the wrong sales assistants but all I got was the usual suspects - Anna Sewell and Arthur Ransome. My friend’s daughter wasn’t very impressed she wanted something much more contemporary. The Millenium Library in Norwich went one book further suggesting the late Jan Mark’s first novel Thunder and Lightenings although they thought that this was now out of print. Then, unusually for me I had a brain wave. I had once visited the wonderful Norfolk Children’s Book Centre at Alby, between Aylsham and Cromer, surely they would be able to help. A quick e-mail to them through their website at www.ncbc.co.uk/ asking for help produced a quick response from Marilyn Brocklehurst who suggested the following two books for the older reader.
Firstly Phosphorescence by Raffaella Barker published in paperback by Macmillan Children’s Books in May of last year. Raffaella Barker is well known as a writer for adults with six books published in the last ten years starting with Come and Tell Me Some Lies published in 1995 and her latest being The Perfect Life published this year. All of these books are based in Norfolk where she lives. Phosphorescence is her first book for teenagers and is set on an imaginary version of the north Norfolk coast close to where she grew up with her parents the poet George Barker and the novelist Elspeth Barker. In the story Lola loves her life in the coastal Norfolk village where she has grown up but her mother moves to London and takes Lola with her. She manages to settle into her new school in London but a school trip to her village leads to all sorts of complications and a quite dramatic conclusion.
Marilyn Brocklehurst’s second suggestion was Boy Soldier by Andy McNab and Norfolk based Robert Rigby, published in paperback in May this year by Corgi Childrens Books. Any McNab is well known for writing about his military experiences, mainly in the SAS, in two bestsellers, Bravo Two Zero and Immediate Action. More recently he has joined up with Norfolk based writer Robert Rigby, former writer of Byker Grove and the writer of Goal! Boy Soldier is the first in a series which has just seen a third book, Avenger, published. Boy Soldier begins in the jungles of Columbia and leads onto a thrilling climax on the coast of north Norfolk. The book is not for the younger reader as it has the odd ‘choice’ word and some scenes of violence but it is a book for young adults which will grip from page one to page 320. If you want to know about SAS surveillance techniques this is the book for you!
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