lying on the sofa engaged with – you guessed it – a screen. When the little girl’s attempts to lure each of them out to play come to nothing, she drifts to her room and slumps on her bed. But then she notices a stick of crimson chalk . . .
The wood she finds through the door she draws on her wall is enchanting: lanterns swing from the branches and a river threads between the trunks. At the end of a dock, she draws a crimson boat that carries her downstream to a city full of spires and domes. Uniformed guards welcome her in with waving arms. Architectural complexities abound as we follow her across a raised canal, complete with locks, down which city-dwellers are propelled in Venetian-style gondolas, shaded by fringed parasols. Waterfalls cascade from great heights. When her canal ends, mid-air, it catches her out – but she quickly draws a hot-air balloon as she falls . . . The absence of words makes this picture book and its sequels gloriously untaxing for the irritable brain, while there’s enough detail in the watercolour fantasyscapes to warrant a careful poring-over of each page. A cure for boredom in itself, Becker’s work is also brilliant for launching kids into their own inner landscapes.
boring relatives, having
SEE: bored, being • grannies, having to kiss
| CURE FOR GROWN-UPS | Harry and the Wrinklies ALAN TEMPERLEY |
If you’re the boring relly, do everyone a favour and read this hilarious romp. When Harry spots his two ‘decrepit’ great-aunts on the station platform, he thinks, ‘Please let it not be them!’ One is thin and tall with a large straw hat and looks like a standard lamp. The other is short, plump and looks like a pink meringue. But Harry is in for a big surprise. Aunt Bridget and Auntie Florrie – with whom he has come to live – immediately suggest they drive home by way of the aerodrome. ‘Seat belt fastened safely?’ Auntie Florrie asks, before snapping a switch beneath the dashboard of the ancient Mercedes. A powerful roar throbs to life and, as the car gathers speed on the disused runway, the speedometer edges up: 90, 95 . . . 130 . . . Harry feels the leather press against his back as the wind slams in and the countryside turns to a blur. ‘Lovely! Blow the cobwebs away!’ cries Aunt Bridget.
Afterwards, Harry’s two wrinkly aunts take him home for a nice glass of sherry (he’s ten), and show him his tower room at Lagg Hall, the stately home they share with various other ‘prehistoric’ folk. As Harry luxuriates in the space, the woods and the dog, it soon becomes clear that these two old biddies are far from innocent and are, in fact, incapable of being dull. Read this, and you won’t be dull either.
bossiness
Bossy children will squirm in the presence of twelve-year-old Tim, the eldest of the Willoughby children in this delightful parody of literary children’s classics. The Willoughbys are an ‘old-fashioned family’; and as befits an old-fashioned eldest boy, Timothy makes all the decisions for his siblings, ten-year-old twins ‘Barnaby A’ and ‘Barnaby B’, and six-year-old Jane: what game they’ll play, what the rules are, how they will behave in church and whether or not they will like the food on their plates. According to Timothy’s design, they each start the day with fifty points, which are then deducted if they do anything he doesn’t approve of. The other children are so much in his thrall, they even ask if they can ask a question.
You can see how he got to be this way. The kids are landed with terrible parents who have a poor opinion of their offspring. Tim, they say, is ‘insufferable’, the twins are ‘repetitive’ and Jane – well, they seem to be unaware that they have a fourth child at all. The children have begun to realise they’d be better off without their parents, and when Mr and Mrs Willoughby, having reached more or less the same conclusion about their children, abscond on a global adventure, hiring a nanny (see: babysitter, not liking your) and putting the house on the market (see: moving house), the four siblings prepare hopefully for imminent orphanhood (see: orphan, wishing you were an). Meanwhile, Tim puts himself in charge.
Luckily, their firm and capable nanny sees how to help, first relieving Tim of his point-system duties, then finding a way to integrate households with their near-neighbour, Commander Melanoff – who also takes in Ruth, the abandoned baby they found on their doorstep. Under Melanoff’s influence, Tim pulls himself up ‘by [his] bootstraps’ and although he doesn’t lose his bossiness completely (he goes on to become a lawyer, after all) he does become nice enough to win the heart of baby Ruth once she grows up.
A story best enjoyed by those well versed in the classics it parodies,9 use it to initiate a discussion on the issue of bossiness. Would Tim have become bossy if his parents had taken more of a role in their children’s lives? What’s the difference between being bossy and being a leader? Do you think anyone really enjoys being bossy?
SEE ALSO: boots, being too big for your • in charge, wanting to be • precociousness • share, inability to • told, never doing what you’re • unfriendliness
brainwashed, being
The potential for the mass seduction of the young via digital media is a disturbing phenomenon, and today’s teens must wise up to the self-serving propagandists of our time if they want to hold on to their own ideals and identities. Madeleine l’Engle’s cult classic will help them do so.
When the mysterious Mrs Whatsit and her friends whisk siblings Meg and Charles Wallace off on a quest to find their missing father – an eminent physicist at work on ‘tesseracts’ – their mother, also a scientist, doesn’t stand in their way. It’s a journey that takes them through time and space to a planet that’s controlled by a larger-than-life being – a giant, bodiless brain called ‘IT’. The hypnotic pulse of IT – removing all responsibility and angst, but also one’s ability to act of one’s own accord – has everyone trapped in its thrall, their father included. Charles Wallace, a boy possessed of such a luminous, unusual intelligence that he’s considered by all but his family to be an idiot, is confident his own brain will be strong enough to resist; but he proves as fallible as his father. It’s up to Meg to find the way out of IT’s overpowering influence – and the key turns out to be not a high IQ but something she carries in her heart. Teens should take note of Meg’s revelation. When everyone around them is succumbing to the will of another, this newfound knowledge will help keep them securely grounded.
SEE ALSO: astray, being led • peer pressure
bras
Acquiring a first bra can be fraught for a teen or pre-teen girl. Get it too early, and they might be mocked; get it too late, and they might be mocked even more. Vidya Samson’s hilarious spin on the subject is a welcome de-stresser.
Veena is a fifteen-year-old Indian girl living in Bahrain
