School Explained

Over the past few months I have written quite a lot of material for a company called School Explained which aims to help parents understand school life.

It's aimed at parents of primary school children and offers useful advice and detailed information about subjects and skills covered in each year running from Nursery through to the end of Year 6.

The company website is now up and running and some of my articles are available to the public as is a cartoon image of me... which made me laugh. Not sure it resembles me all that much, but I may be wrong!

Here is a link to one of the publicly available pages with some of my written material (and the cartoon image).

A Monster Calls

Patrick Ness is one of only two writers to win the Carnegie Award twice. Having already read and liked The Knife of Never Letting Go, I decided to read A Monster Calls which is very different in so many ways, in subject matter, style and meaning. Its original idea came from novelist Siobhan Dowd who died in 2007 from cancer.

It tells the story of Conor whose mother is dying of cancer and of a monster who visits him. The symbolism in the book and some of the ideas resonated with me and I think would do with many who had lost people close to them. It really is a moving novel which is worth reading. I got through it in little over a day.

It was clearly written and had a fable like quality to it, with an interesting monster which I interpreted as a symbolic representation of Conor's own anger, the monster within him. Its relation to the yew tree was intriguing and I am sure that different readers will put different interpretations on what they read but for me, the story really was about the helplessness one feels in the face of mother nature, the hopelessness of grief, the irrationality of life: the fact that not all stories have a happy ending; the deserving do not always win and sometimes things do not make sense.

Anyone who has been humbled by life's adversities will appreciate this.