The Magic

There is a kind of artist whose illustration work does not simply accompany a text but seems to excavate it, revealing what was always latent within the story instead of merely sitting beside it. Victor Ambrus belonged firmly in this category, and his drawings did not decorate history so much as uncover it, restoring life and texture to what might otherwise remain inert on the page.

To encounter Ambrus’s work is to be struck first by its movement, since even in stillness his figures feel caught mid-action. For example, a horse turning sharply under a rider, a soldier shifting weight before the charge, a child leaning forward with unmistakable (and often mischievous) purpose. His line work is alive in more than one sense; both in its skill at representing the physical and imaginary world and its likeness to the conundrum of being a human person with a self - it is restless and searching, rarely static. Where many illustrators aim for compositional neatness, Ambrus allowed for looseness and for the suggestion of motion rather than its containment. It is this ability to rend what are materially frozen images full of the movement of the world that gives his work its particular and enduring vitality.

There is an immediacy to his mark-making that feels almost improvisational, since his ink lines, often rapid and sometimes deliberately uneven, carry the trace of the hand that made them in a way that allows you to see the drawing in the act of happening. This is not what some modern illustration has become driven by corporate and market needs (polished rather into anonymity and homogenisation), but drawing as a physical process as well as a finished product, in which the line hesitates, doubles back, thickens and thins, and records the decisions being made in real time, drawing the viewer into the process itself.

This quality is I think most evident in his historical reconstructions, where the boundary between art and archaeology dissolves entirely. Ambrus became widely known to British audiences through his long tenure as resident artist on the beloved Channel 4 archeology television series Time Team, which he joined at its pilot stage in 1994 and on which his drawings were used to visualise ancient sites as they might once have appeared. These were not speculative fantasies rendered with cinematic gloss but earthy, messy, provisional interpretive works. Ambrus’s particular genius lay in his ability to take fragments (often frustratingly incomplete ones) and build a world that felt plausible and genuinely inhabited, and his reconstructions never appear overdetermined, always leaving space within them as well as a persistent sense that the past is being approached with care rather than definitively captured.

I think this is partly a consequence of his life, which was marked by the ruptures that were ubiquitous in 20th century Europe and left permanent traces. Born in Budapest in 1935 as László Győző Ambrus, he experienced the upheaval of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution at first hand, studying at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts when the uprising interrupted his education and his accommodation came under fire from Soviet forces. He fled to Austria in December of that year before choosing to settle in Britain, attending Farnham School of Art in Surrey before earning a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London between 1957 and 1960. This movement from one cultural and political world to another left a definite mark on his work. Throughout his life he had a sensitivity to displacement and to the fragility of structures both physical and social, and to the ways in which history is lived rather than simply recorded.

His training placed him within a British tradition of illustration that valued draughtsmanship, narrative clarity, and a certain restraint of palette, but thankfully Ambrus never became entirely assimilated into that tradition, and his work retained a distinctly Central European sensibility, more expressionistic and more attuned to the emotional charge of line than the prevailing conventions of mid-century British illustration.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of figures. Ambrus’s people are rarely idealised and are often slightly awkward with their bodies caught in transitional states of bending, twisting or reaching, while their faces are suggested rather than meticulously rendered (and yet carry an unmistakable individuality). There is a democratic quality to his gaze, since kings and labourers, warriors and children are all afforded the same attentiveness, and history in his hands becomes not a procession of great men but a dense and intricate fabric of human activity.

This extends to his use of composition, since rather than centring a single heroic figure, Ambrus frequently disperses attention across the page, allowing the eye to move from one cluster of activity to another, from a group of figures in conversation to an animal tethered nearby to a distant structure half-obscured by atmosphere or distance. The result is a kind of visual polyphony in which multiple narratives coexist within a single image and each contributes to a broader and richer sense of lived reality. Colour serves to anchor the line rather than overwhelm it, with none of the high-saturation brightness that characterises much contemporary illustration. Instead, the palette feels historical, mirroring to my eye medieval tapestries as though drawn from the materials of the world being depicted: soil, stone, fabric and wood.

There is a subtle playfulness in Ambrus’s work that comes out in small details such as the posture of a dog, the tilt of a hat, or the interaction between figures at the margins of the main scene, and these moments prevent the work from becoming overly serious or “instructional” by reminding us that history is not only a sequence of events but a texture of everyday life.

His children’s book illustration, though perhaps less widely discussed than his archaeological work despite his having won the Kate Greenaway Medal twice and illustrated well over four hundred books in total, carries these same qualities throughout. Whether working with folklore, historical narratives or adventure stories, Ambrus brought to each project a commitment to the integrity of the world being depicted, and he did not simplify history for the child reader but invited the child into its complexity.

This is a crucial distinction since much children’s illustration operates on the assumption that clarity requires simplification and detail must be reduced and ambiguity eliminated, whereas Ambrus resisted this consistently. His images are rich, sometimes even dense, and they invite prolonged looking while assuming a reader who is capable of curiosity, of patience and of engagement with nuance.

In this sense, his work aligns with a broader tradition of mid-twentieth-century illustration (and one which I passionately believe we are due a return to) in which the child was regarded not as a passive recipient of simplified information but as an active participant in meaning-making, and there is an implicit respect here that feels increasingly rare.

Why This Still Resonates With Modern Childhood

To consider the relevance of Victor Ambrus’s work today is to confront the conditions under which contemporary children encounter images. We are living in a moment saturated with visual content that is slick, high-resolution and algorithmically optimised, and images arrive rapidly, demand immediate comprehension and are just as quickly replaced, making the qualities that define Ambrus’s work, his slowness, his ambiguity and his materiality, feel not only distinctive but genuinely resistant to the dominant logic of contemporary media.

First, there is the matter of attention, since Ambrus’s illustrations require time and do not yield themselves instantly, compelling the eye to move, return and reconsider as details emerge gradually: a gesture here, an object there, a relationship between figures that was not initially apparent. This mode of engagement stands in stark contrast to the scroll-based consumption patterns that dominate children’s media today, and for a child accustomed to rapid visual turnover, encountering an Ambrus illustration could be disorienting but also, potentially, transformative, because it asks something different of them and asks them, above all, to linger.

This act of lingering is not just aesthetic but cognitive, since to spend time with a complex image is to practise a form of looking and attention that is increasingly under threat, to develop the capacity to hold multiple elements in mind, to notice relationships between them and to tolerate the uncertainty that arises when a picture resists easy summary. These are not trivial skills but foundational ones, underlying deep reading, critical thinking and the kind of sustained engagement that underpins developing a whole self.

Ambrus’s work also offers a counterpoint to the flattening of history that often characterises contemporary educational materials, in which history is presented as a series of simplified narratives, clean and linear and easily digestible, while the visuals that accompany them tend towards the schematic or the spectacular, reducing complexity to diagrams or prioritising drama over accuracy. Ambrus occupies a different space entirely, since his illustrations are neither reductive nor sensationalised, embracing instead the messiness of the past and acknowledging that history is constructed from fragments, that it involves interpretation and that it is populated by ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities.

For children, this has profound implications, since it shifts their relationship to history from passive reception to active inquiry, given that an Ambrus illustration does not tell the viewer everything but invites them to ask questions about who these people are, what they are doing, how the various elements connect and what might be happening just outside the frame. In this way you could say his work aligns closely with the aims of serious historical pedagogy, fostering curiosity rather than premature closure and encouraging the child to see history not as a fixed body of knowledge but as something that can be explored, questioned and even reimagined (and even, reimagined by them).

There is also a material honesty that is increasingly significant in an era when the process of image-making is so thoroughly hidden, since his drawings foreground their own construction, making the line visible and the wash evident and keeping the hand of the artist present in every mark. This stands in direct contrast to the polished, all too often digitally rendered images that dominate contemporary visual culture, and for children who encounter images that reveal their making, there is something genuinely empowering in the experience, since it demystifies the act of creation, suggesting that images are not products of inaccessible technology but the result of human effort, of looking, thinking and drawing, and opening the possibility that they too might make such images.

His own biography adds another layer to this relevance, since as someone who experienced political upheaval and displacement at first hand, watching friends shot by Soviet forces before fleeing his country entirely, Ambrus brought to his work an understanding of history as lived experience rather than as something safely distant. In an era where questions of migration, identity and cultural memory are increasingly prominent, this perspective feels particularly pertinent, and for children growing up within these contexts, his work offers a way of engaging with history that takes seriously both its complexity and its human impact.

Finally, there is the question of beauty, not the polished and idealised beauty of much contemporary illustration but a more elusive quality that resides in the line that is not quite straight, in the figure that is slightly off-balance, in the composition that resists perfect symmetry, and that emerges from attention and skill rather than from the pursuit of perfection. To offer children this kind of visual experience is I think to offer them a different standard by which to judge the images that surround them, suggesting that value does not lie solely in immediacy or surface gloss but in depth, in texture and in the visible evidence of human thought, feeling and motion.

Victor Ambrus’s work does not demand nostalgia and does not ask us to return to a past moment in illustration. It offers something far more useful: a set of possibilities that show what illustration can be when it takes both its subject and its audience seriously, and that demonstrate and assume, with consistent and generous clarity, that children are capable of engaging with complexity, of appreciating nuance and of finding genuine pleasure in the act of looking closely at art. In a cultural landscape that so often underestimates them, this is no small thing.

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There is a particular kind of stillness that lives inside the work of Chihiro Iwasaki, not silence exactly, but something more like a held breath, a pause suspended between moments. Her children are rarely caught in action as we might expect from Western traditions of illustration, running or shouting or tumbling through narrative arcs; instead, they seem to exist in a state of becoming, turning their heads, watching something just beyond the frame, holding a flower, leaning gently into the wind. They are not performing childhood. They are inhabiting it.

Iwasaki’s medium, primarily watercolour with ink, lends itself to this sensibility in ways that feel entirely natural rather than contrived. Her lines are delicate, often incomplete, dissolving at the edges as if the figure might vanish if you looked away too quickly. There is a looseness that resists control: hair is suggested rather than defined, clothing bleeds into the surrounding paper, and faces are rendered with the lightest possible marks, two dots, a soft curve, the tilt of a cheek. And yet nothing feels unfinished, because the sparseness becomes the work’s central discipline, an insistence that childhood cannot be over-explained.

Born in 1918 in what is now Fukui Prefecture and raised in Tokyo from the age of one, Iwasaki came of age during a period of profound upheaval, with her early adulthood shaped by war, nationalism, and the long shadow of post-war reconstruction. These contexts matter, not because her work is overtly political in the way of protest art, but because it is insistently, unwaveringly human. After the devastation of the Second World War, to draw children as soft, dignified, and worthy of contemplation was itself a kind of refusal.

Her illustrations appeared throughout post-war Japan in children’s books, magazines, and educational materials, with the magazine Haha no Tomo (”Mother’s Friend”) among the publications that sought to reimagine childhood and parenting in a recovering nation. These were not trivial commissions; they were part of a broader cultural effort to reconstruct not just infrastructure but the emotional and moral life of society.

What distinguishes Iwasaki’s children above all else is their interiority. They are not flattened into symbols of innocence, nor are they sentimentalised into decorative objects; instead, they possess a gravity that is rarely afforded to children in visual culture. A child looks down at their hands. Another gazes into the middle distance. A baby clutches a stem of grass with focused, unhurried concentration. These are not narrative climaxes but moments of attention, and in Iwasaki’s world, attention is everything.

Her use of negative space is central to this effect, with large areas of untouched paper surrounding her figures and creating a sense of openness that feels simultaneously expansive and fragile. The child is not hemmed in by environment or plot; instead, they are placed in a kind of visual breathing room that invites the viewer to slow down. In a contemporary context where children’s imagery is often saturated with colour, detail, and movement, this restraint feels almost radical.

There is also a deep sensitivity to the physicality of children running through every image she made. Iwasaki understood the weight of a toddler’s body leaning forward, the imbalance of early steps, the softness of limbs not yet fully coordinated. Her children do not pose; they inhabit their bodies with all the awkwardness and grace that entails. You can feel the slight instability in a standing figure, the way a child might sway before finding their footing, and this quality transforms observational work of the highest order into something that feels not just seen but genuinely felt.

Flowers and plants recur throughout her work, often held gently by the child or growing alongside them, and these are not decorative motifs so much as extensions of the child’s world, fragile, transient, and alive. A dandelion held between small fingers becomes an object of immense significance, and a sprig of green suggests both growth and ephemerality. There is an ecological sensitivity at work here, though it is never didactic; nature is not something to be explained to the child but something they are already, instinctively, part of.

It is worth noting that Iwasaki began her formal training with sketching and oil painting under Saburōsuke Okada from the age of fourteen, before going on to study calligraphy and traditional Japanese painting techniques at eighteen. This background is evident in her line work, which carries the influence of brush-based disciplines where every mark must be intentional and there is no room for excess. Each stroke carries weight, and this economy of line is precisely what allows her work to feel so alive despite its apparent simplicity.

Simplicity, however, is the wrong word. What Iwasaki achieves is not simple but distilled, removing everything inessential and leaving behind an image that feels both immediate and enduring. It is a form of visual editing that mirrors the way memory itself works, fragmentary, selective, and emotionally charged.

There is, too, a tenderness that runs through her work, but it is not saccharine and it does not collapse into nostalgia or idealisation; instead, it feels attentive, almost ethical. To look at a child this closely and this carefully is to take them seriously, acknowledging their presence in the world not as future adults but as people in their own right.

Why This Still Resonates With Modern Childhood

To understand the continued relevance of Chihiro Iwasaki’s work, it is necessary to consider what has happened to childhood in the intervening decades.

We live in a culture that increasingly treats childhood as a site of optimisation. From early years settings to primary education, children are often positioned within systems that prioritise measurable outcomes: literacy benchmarks, phonics screening results, developmental milestones tracked and quantified. The language of childhood has become managerial, with progress charted, gaps identified, and interventions applied.

Within this framework, the child risks becoming an object of improvement rather than a subject of experience.

Iwasaki’s work offers a counterpoint to this logic, because her children are not shown achieving or demonstrating skills or completing tasks; they are simply being. And in that being, there is an implicit argument: that childhood has value independent of its utility.

This is not a sentimental claim but a structural one. When children are primarily understood through what they will become, as future students, future workers, future citizens, the present tense of their lives is inevitably diminished. Iwasaki refuses this temporal displacement, and her work insists instead on the now.

There is also a significant contrast in how attention is depicted. Contemporary children’s media, and particularly digital media, is characterised by speed, stimulation, and constant engagement: bright colours, rapid cuts, and interactive elements designed to capture and hold attention. The child is positioned as a consumer of stimuli.

In Iwasaki’s work, attention flows in the opposite direction, because the child is not being stimulated but attending, looking, touching, holding, noticing. The world is not something that performs for them; it is something they encounter.

This distinction matters because attention is not a neutral faculty but one shaped by environment. When children are habituated to high levels of external stimulation, their capacity for sustained, self-directed attention can be diminished over time. Iwasaki’s images, by contrast, model a different relationship to the world, one in which attention is slow, embodied, and internally motivated.

For parents and educators navigating questions around screen time, overstimulation, and the erosion of unstructured play, this visual language carries particular weight. It does not offer a prescriptive solution, but it does articulate an alternative vision of childhood, one that is less mediated and more rooted in direct, unhurried experience.

There is also an important ecological dimension to her work. In recent years, children’s literature has increasingly engaged with themes of environmental crisis, often with an explicit educational agenda, and while this is understandable, it can sometimes lead to a kind of instrumentalisation of nature, presenting it as something to be learned about, protected, or saved.

Iwasaki’s approach is different, because for her, nature is not a problem to be solved but a context to be lived within. The child holding a flower is not being taught about biodiversity or climate change; they are simply in relation to the natural world. And it is precisely this quality of unself-conscious relationality that underpins any meaningful ecological consciousness.

For modern children, many of whom have limited access to unstructured outdoor environments, this representation carries a particular kind of urgency, reminding us that a love of nature is not primarily cultivated through information but through experience, through small, repeated encounters that build familiarity and genuine care.

There is, too, a social dimension that resonates with contemporary concerns. In an era marked by increasing anxiety around childhood, shaped by safety fears, academic pressure, and mental health challenges, Iwasaki’s work offers an image of children that is neither idealised nor pathologised. They are not depicted as fragile beings in need of constant protection, nor as resilient mini-adults navigating complex systems; they are simply children, attentive, embodied, present.

This may seem modest, but it is not, for it is in fact a recalibration of how we see children at all.

For a UK audience, particularly those engaged in conversations around home education or alternative approaches to schooling, Iwasaki’s work aligns with broader critiques of standardisation and over-structuring, and the emphasis on observation, presence, and unhurried development echoes pedagogical traditions that prioritise the whole child over narrow academic metrics.

It also intersects with a renewed interest in slower forms of culture, including vintage books, analogue play, and tactile materials, which resist the pace and disposability of much contemporary media. In this sense, Iwasaki’s work does not feel dated. It feels newly legible.

There is a temptation, when encountering work like hers, to frame it as nostalgic, a window into a gentler, simpler past; but this framing risks missing what is most vital about it. Iwasaki is not offering an escape from the present. She is offering a way of seeing that remains available, if we are willing to adopt it.

To look at her illustrations is to be asked to slow down, to notice, to attend, and perhaps most importantly, to take children seriously: not as future projects but as present realities.

In a cultural moment that often struggles to grant children this kind of recognition, that is no small thing.

Her work endures not because it belongs to a lost world but because it articulates something that has never stopped being true: that childhood, in all its gentle complexity, is worthy of our full attention.

THE MAGIC

Jill Paton Walsh (1937–2020) occupies an uncertain and instructive position in the history of literature for young people. Widely admired within the world of children’s and young adult fiction, particularly by other writers and by the more attentive kind of critic, her work has never quite received the canonical status it deserves in broader literary discussions. This is not accidental. Paton Walsh did not write about adolescence as confusion to be resolved, or as innocence to be protected, or as a problem awaiting the solution of adulthood. She wrote about it as a form of consciousness: acute, vertiginous, and irreversible. Goldengrove, published in 1972 and set on the Cornish coast near Godrevy lighthouse, is the purest expression of that vision, and it remains one of the most formally accomplished and emotionally serious novels ever written for a young readership.

Educated at St Michael’s Convent in North Finchley and subsequently at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she read English, Paton Walsh came to writing with the instincts of a literary critic and the sensibility of someone who had absorbed the great tradition of English prose with genuine care and attention. She also brought something more personal to Goldengrove: as a young child during the Second World War, she had been evacuated from London to live with her grandparents in St Ives, Cornwall, the very landscape in which the novel is set and from which it draws so much of its particular emotional texture and visual specificity.

What is immediately striking about Goldengrove is its prose, which operates at a level of intensity and precision rarely encountered in fiction aimed at young readers. Paton Walsh described the composition of the novel as an attempt to enact, rather than merely illustrate, the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem from which its emotional architecture is drawn: “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” in which a girl called Margaret is told that her grief at the leaves falling is, at its deepest level, grief for herself and for all human mortality. The novel’s central character is called Madge, a deliberate near-echo of that Margaret, and the text’s relationship to Hopkins is not decorative but structural, shaping the movement of the narrative in ways that attentive readers of any age can feel even when they cannot fully articulate what they are feeling.

The story, on its surface, is simple enough to summarise. Madge and her cousin Paul spend their annual summer holiday at their grandmother’s house, Goldengrove, on the Cornish coast near Godrevy lighthouse. A blind professor called Ashton has taken the adjoining cottage to complete a manuscript, a study of the novels of Jane Austen, and Madge finds herself drawn into a complicated relationship with this stranger, whose dependence on others to describe the visual world around him forces her to begin seeing that world, and herself within it, with an entirely new kind of attentiveness. Meanwhile a letter arrives from her mother that carries information about the wider adult world and its capacity for disappointment and betrayal, and the summer tips from a place of holiday freedom into something far more demanding and far less comfortable.

Paton Walsh divides none of this into conventional chapters. The narrative moves from scene to scene in a way that has been compared, with some precision, to the techniques of cinema, deploying cuts and dissolves and sudden shifts of attention to create an effect that is simultaneously fragmented and cumulative. This formal choice is not merely aesthetic. It enacts the experience it describes, since the loss of innocence that the novel dramatises is itself not a single event but a series of cuts, each one small enough to seem survivable, all of them together irreversible. The reader experiences, in the structure of the prose, something of what Madge experiences in the structure of that summer.

Crucially, the novel is saturated with the act of looking. Ashton, because he is blind, relies on Madge to tell him what she sees, and her attempts to do so, halting and inadequate and then slowly more assured, constitute one of the novel’s central working-through exercises in what it means to perceive and to describe. When she lies in the grass and tries to give him an account of the sky, or of the way light falls across the sea, she discovers that seeing and saying are not the same thing, and that language reaches always toward experience without ever quite arriving. This is not a lesson about disability. It is a lesson about consciousness, and about the gap between the inner life and any attempt to communicate it, a gap that adolescence makes newly and painfully visible.

Paton Walsh writes the Cornish landscape with an authority rooted in genuine familiarity, the kind that comes not from research but from the accumulated sensory memory of having been a child in that particular place. The sea and the lighthouse are permanent throughout the novel in a way that human arrangements are not, and this contrast between geological time and the brevity of individual feeling gives the book much of its emotional weight. In this, Paton Walsh is in direct conversation with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, another novel set in a coastal house where a lighthouse offshore measures the distance between aspiration and arrival, and where the central events of consciousness are precisely those things that cannot be fixed or captured. The comparison is not merely critical shorthand; it reflects a genuine literary inheritance that Paton Walsh absorbed and transformed rather than imitated.

The treatment of Ashton is the novel’s most complex achievement. He is not a figure of pathos or of uplift, and the novel refuses the sentimentality that attaches to fictional blindness in less careful hands. He is intellectually demanding, emotionally opaque, and capable of a cruelty born of his own damaged pride, his masculinity injured by dependence in ways he cannot acknowledge without further damage. His conversations with Madge about Milton, about Jane Austen, about the nature of perception and the life of the mind, are conversations between equals who are not, by any conventional measure, equal at all, and the tension this creates is precisely the source of Madge’s education. She learns not how to be good, but how to see, and the distinction matters enormously.

What gives the novel its particular authority is its refusal to resolve. Madge does not emerge wiser and more reconciled to the nature of things in the way that the conventional coming-of-age narrative demands. She emerges changed, and the change is presented as loss as much as gain. The final pages have a quality that is close to elegy, not for the characters or for the summer, but for the particular quality of consciousness that preceded the summer’s knowledge, a consciousness that cannot be recovered because the knowledge that has ended it cannot be unfelt. This is the Hopkinsian insight rendered in prose: that grief for the falling leaves is, at its deepest, grief for oneself, and that growing up is not a process of acquisition but of understanding what has already been lost.

WHY THIS NOVEL STILL MATTERS

Goldengrove feels increasingly urgent at a moment when fiction for young readers is frequently asked to perform a therapeutic or instructional function, to provide models of resilience, to affirm identities, to demonstrate how difficulties can be surmounted with sufficient self-belief and the support of a community. All of these are understandable aspirations, and some of the books that pursue them are genuinely valuable. But they are not the aspirations of Goldengrove, and the contrast illuminates something important about what literature can do when it is not required to be useful in those particular ways.

Paton Walsh was working in a tradition that understood literature as a form of thinking rather than a delivery system for lessons, however sensitively those lessons might be packaged. In the context of 1972, when Goldengrove appeared, the young adult novel was still finding its identity as a genre distinct from both children’s fiction and adult literary fiction, and the most serious practitioners were those who refused to accept that the distinction required a corresponding reduction in literary ambition. Paton Walsh, alongside writers such as Alan Garner, Leon Garfield, and Penelope Fitzgerald, whose own profound and economical fiction shares something of Goldengrove’s compressed intensity, was establishing the possibility of a fiction for young readers that made no concessions to the supposed limitations of its audience.

This has everything to do with how the novel handles the question of loss. Contemporary young adult fiction tends to treat loss as a wound to be healed, a trauma to be processed, a crisis to be survived and eventually incorporated into a larger narrative of recovery. This is psychologically coherent and often emotionally generous. But Goldengrove offers a more difficult and, in the long run, more truthful proposition: that some losses are not recoverable, and that part of what it means to grow up is learning to inhabit that irrecoverability with grace and without illusion. This is not a bleak message. It is an honest one, offered with the tenderness that only genuine literary seriousness can produce.

There is also a political dimension to what the novel refuses. By insisting that Madge’s experience cannot be neatly resolved, by declining to offer her, or the reader, the comfort of closure, Paton Walsh is making an argument about respect. She respects her young readers enough to believe that they can tolerate ambiguity, that they do not require the world to be tidier or more manageable in fiction than it is in experience, and that the encounter with a difficult book is itself a form of preparation for the encounters that life will require. This is a political position in a culture that routinely underestimates the emotional and intellectual capacities of the young.

The novel’s treatment of disability deserves particular attention in this context. Ashton’s blindness is not presented as an affliction to be overcome or as an occasion for the sighted characters to demonstrate their compassion. It is presented as a different relationship to the world, one that illuminates, by contrast and by the specific demands it makes on those around him, the nature of sight itself. Madge’s prolonged effort to describe what she sees to someone who cannot see it is the novel’s central pedagogical act, and what it teaches is not pity but attention, the discipline of looking properly at a world that most people move through without ever quite seeing, because sight is available to them without effort and therefore without thought.

This is why the Cornish setting matters so profoundly to the novel’s meaning and not merely to its atmosphere. Cornwall, with its specific quality of light, its geological drama, its perpetual dialogue between land and sea, is a landscape that demands to be seen on its own terms rather than as a backdrop to human action. Paton Walsh, who spent her wartime childhood in St Ives and absorbed that landscape during the years when sensory impressions are most formative and most lasting, writes it from inside rather than from observation, and the result is an environment that feels fully dimensional in the way that only places known through lived experience can feel. This is not picturesque Cornwall but inhabited Cornwall, a place where the lighthouse offshore at Godrevy is not a decorative feature but a permanent marker of distance and of the gap between where one is and where one desires to be.

The connection to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which critics and attentive readers have consistently noted, is worth dwelling on rather than simply acknowledging. Both novels are set in coastal houses where a lighthouse functions as an emblem of aspiration deferred and of the distance between the imagination and its objects. Both novels are concerned with the nature of perception and with the specifically female labour of attending to others. Both novels move between the consciousness of multiple characters in ways that dissolve the conventional boundaries of narrative. And both novels understand that growing up and growing old are not different in kind but only in the length of time over which the same fundamental losses accumulate. Paton Walsh was not imitating Woolf; she was working in the same tradition of lyrical, consciousness-centred prose and finding her own way through it toward concerns that were entirely her own.

For contemporary readers and writers, Goldengrove makes a challenge that is simple to state and difficult to meet. It asks that fiction for young people be held to the same literary standards as fiction for adults, not because young people and adults are the same kind of reader, but because the experiences being described, grief and desire and the slow dissolution of the self that one was before understanding arrived, are universal experiences that deserve to be rendered with the full resources of the language. To write about those experiences with less than the fullest available literary seriousness is to suggest, by implication, that the people to whom they are happening do not quite deserve that seriousness, and that is a form of condescension that Paton Walsh never permitted herself.

Perhaps most importantly, Goldengrove reminds us what it means to trust a young reader. Not to trust them to reach the right conclusions, or to draw the appropriate lessons, or to feel the correct emotions in the correct sequence, but to trust them to inhabit the full difficulty of a complex literary experience and to find in that difficulty something that is genuinely useful to them, even if they could not yet say, and might never be able to say, precisely what it was. That trust is the most radical thing about the novel, more radical than its prose style, more radical than its refusal of resolution, more radical even than its explicit literary ambition. It is the trust that says: you are already capable of this. You do not need to be protected from it. You need to be given it.

In an age of carefully managed reading experiences, of content warnings and age-appropriate gatekeeping and fiction designed to make its readers feel seen and safe, that trust may be Paton Walsh’s most enduring and most necessary gift.

Pulak Biswas (1941–2013) occupies a curious and telling position in the history of children’s illustration. Revered within India as a pioneering figure and one of the foundational forces in Indian picture-book illustration, his work is nevertheless almost invisible in Western discussions of the picture-book canon. This absence is not accidental. Biswas did not illustrate childhood as fantasy, escape, or innocence sealed off from the world. He illustrated childhood as socially, politically, geographically, and culturally embedded. His work resists the universalising tendencies of mid-century Western children’s publishing and instead insists that children belong to particular places, languages, histories, and visual traditions.

Trained at the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta, and later at Hornsey College of Art in London and the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, Biswas stood at a crossroads of artistic traditions. He absorbed the pedagogical seriousness of European design education while remaining deeply rooted in Indian folk art, miniature painting, mural traditions, and street visual culture. Unlike many postcolonial artists who felt compelled to choose between “modern” Western aesthetics and “traditional” indigenous forms, Biswas refused the binary with great conviction and consistency. His illustrations do not perform hybridity as a statement; they embody it as a lived condition.

What is immediately striking about Biswas’s picture-book work is its tonal confidence. There is no sense of apology or explanation for the visual language he employs. Children in his books inhabit landscapes dense with pattern, texture, and visual rhythm. Figures are flattened yet expressive; perspective is suggestive rather than literal; colour is symbolic rather than decorative. These are not concessions to simplicity, but invitations to visual literacy, offered with a generosity that assumes the child viewer is entirely capable of rising to the occasion.

Biswas trusted children to read images the way they read the world: intuitively, emotionally, and relationally. His illustrations do not isolate a central figure against a neutral background in the manner of much Western picture-book art. Instead, children appear as part of an environment comprising villages, streets, fields, and marketplaces, all of which are alive with human and non-human presence. Animals wander in and out of scenes without symbolic or overtly moralistic heavy-handedness. Trees, rivers, walls, and doorways are not backdrops but participants in the unfolding of each visual narrative.

This compositional philosophy reflects Biswas’s deep engagement with Indian storytelling traditions, where narrative is cumulative rather than linear, and meaning is distributed across an entire visual field rather than concentrated in a single focal point. Like temple friezes or scroll paintings, his illustrations reward lingering. The eye moves slowly, discovering small details: a gesture between siblings, a half-open window, a dog asleep beneath a cart. These moments are not incidental decorations or background filler, they are the story.

Crucially, Biswas’s children are never abstracted into archetypes. They are recognisably culturally specific without being made objects. Clothing, posture, domestic spaces, and public life are rendered with affectionate specificity. Yet there is no anthropological distance, no sense that the illustrator is explaining a culture to an outsider. Biswas illustrates from within, addressing his readers as co-inhabitants of the world he depicts rather than curious visitors to it. The viewer is not positioned as a tourist but as a participant in something already underway.

This internal point of view is what gives his work its authority and warmth. In it, Biswas presents childhood not as a universal stage but as a lived experience shaped by class, labour, geography, and community. Children play, but they also work. They observe adults closely and absorb the texture of shared social life. They navigate shared spaces rather than protected ones. None of this is moralised or offered as social commentary. It is simply shown, with the directness and clarity of someone who trusts the image entirely.

Stylistically, Biswas’s line is disciplined but humane. There is a warmth to his figures that resists sentimentality at every turn. Faces are expressive without being exaggerated. Bodies are grounded, weighted, and capable of conveying a full range of physical and emotional states. Even very young children are drawn with physical presence and agency, an insistence that they are not cherubic ornaments waiting to grow into full humanity, but people whose inner lives and outward actions deserve serious pictorial attention.

His use of colour deserves particular attention. Biswas does not employ colour to soothe or delight in the conventional picture-book sense, where palette choices are typically calibrated to appeal to adult buyers or to signal simplicity and safety. Instead, colour carries emotional and cultural weight throughout his compositions. Earth tones anchor scenes in material reality and in the textures of everyday life; bursts of saturated red, blue, or yellow punctuate moments of social or narrative intensity. This is colour functioning as language and as argument, not as decoration or reassurance.

There is also an unmistakable pedagogical seriousness to his work, and it is important that this should not be confused with didacticism. Biswas was deeply committed to children’s education, particularly through his long association with the Children’s Book Trust of India, and he believed passionately that visual culture was foundational to intellectual development in ways that formal educational policy consistently undervalued. His books assume that children are capable of complex visual interpretation and that illustration is not subordinate to text but rather a parallel and equally rigorous system of meaning-making.

In this sense, Biswas belongs to a lineage of illustrators including Leo and Diane Dillon, Errol Le Cain, and Chihiro Iwasaki, all of whom understood the picture book as a site of aesthetic formation in which the choices made by the illustrator carry genuine consequence. These artists did not see childhood as a holding pen before “real” culture began. They saw it as the place where cultural literacy begins and where the habits of seeing that last a lifetime are first formed.

What makes Biswas distinct within this lineage is his refusal to separate aesthetics from social reality. His illustrations do not float above material conditions; they are anchored in them with patience and precision. Poverty is not erased, but nor is it sensationalised or offered up as picturesque hardship. Labour exists, but it is not framed as tragedy or as an obstacle to be overcome. Community life is shown as dense, interdependent, and morally complex, a fabric of mutual obligation and everyday encounter that sustains the children who move through it.

This is where the particular power of his work lies: in the balance it maintains between beauty and truth. Biswas’s work is neither escapist nor bleak. It offers children a world that is recognisable, meaningful, and visually rich, a world that repays sustained attention and rewards the effort of looking carefully and at length.

WHY THIS WORK STILL MATTERS

Pulak Biswas’s work feels increasingly urgent in the context of contemporary children’s publishing, which has become dominated by a narrow visual language shaped by global markets, digital optimisation, and brand recognition. Today’s picture books are often designed to be immediately legible, instantly shareable, and culturally frictionless, optimised for speed rather than depth. Biswas’s illustrations ask for the opposite: time, attention, and an openness to cultural specificity that current publishing norms do little to cultivate.

In an era where children’s books are frequently tasked with representing diversity through surface markers such as skin tone swaps, token cultural references, or simplified “global” aesthetics designed to travel without friction across markets, Biswas’s work offers a more profound model of what it might mean to illustrate human life with honesty and care. He does not illustrate diversity as inclusion; he illustrates particularity as value. His books do not say, “Children everywhere are the same.” They say, “Children belong somewhere, and that somewhere matters and shapes who they are becoming.”

This distinction is not trivial. The erosion of place in children’s culture has real consequences for how children understand themselves and their relationship to the wider world. When stories and images become untethered from geography, history, and social structure, children are subtly taught that identity is interchangeable and context irrelevant, a lesson that serves global markets very well but serves human development rather poorly. Biswas’s work resists this flattening with every compositional choice he makes. It shows us that childhood is shaped by environment, physical, cultural, and economic, and that understanding this shaping is itself a part of growing up.

There is also a political dimension to Biswas’s legacy that deserves considerably more attention than it has yet received. Working in post-Independence India, he participated in a broader project of cultural reconstruction whose significance cannot be overstated. The creation of children’s books in regional languages, illustrated by Indian artists drawing on Indian visual traditions, was not merely educational in the narrow sense; it was nation-building in the most intimate and foundational sense, a project of shaping how an entire generation would come to understand themselves and the society they inhabited. Biswas understood that visual culture shapes how children understand themselves in relation to power, and he took that responsibility seriously.

Unlike colonial educational materials, which often positioned Indian children as peripheral observers of European modernity or as passive recipients of an alien civilisational inheritance, Biswas’s books place Indian life at the centre of the visual world with complete and undefensive assurance. Streets, homes, festivals, and crafts are not presented as heritage artefacts preserved under glass but as living systems in which the child reader is already an active participant. This matters profoundly in a global publishing landscape still marked by colonial hierarchies of taste and legitimacy that too often go unexamined.

For readers outside India, encountering Biswas’s work can be a genuinely destabilising experience, and a productive one. It challenges the assumption that Western illustration styles are neutral or universal, a default visual language available to everyone and belonging to no one in particular. It reveals how deeply aesthetic norms are tied to economic and cultural power. And it begs uncomfortable questions about whose childhoods are considered worthy of artistic seriousness and whose are treated as requiring translation or simplification before they can be deemed suitable for a picture book.

Biswas also complicates contemporary debates around childhood innocence in ways that remain highly relevant. Much current discourse oscillates between the impulse toward over-protection and episodes of moral panic, with children either being shielded comprehensively from reality or burdened with the full weight of adult anxieties about the state of the world. Biswas charts a different course with great consistency throughout his body of work. His children are observant, capable, and emotionally resilient, not because they have been hardened by exposure to difficulty, but because they are embedded in community and in the relationships and shared understandings that community makes possible.

This vision feels particularly relevant at a moment when childhood is increasingly privatised and mediated by screens and algorithms that curate experience in ways that erode exactly the kind of communal embeddedness Biswas spent his career depicting. His illustrations are resolutely communal in their orientation and their visual grammar. Children share space with each other and with adults of different generations. They interact across ages in ways that contemporary childhood in many parts of the world rarely permits. They move through public environments as inhabitants and actors rather than as supervised and protected spectators. The absence of screens is not ideological nostalgia; it is simply historical circumstance. Yet the effect of seeing those images now, at this particular moment, is genuinely striking and not without its own quiet power.

There is also something radical in Biswas’s respect for children as visual thinkers whose capacities for perception and interpretation deserve to be stretched rather than accommodated. In a culture obsessed with early literacy metrics and measurable outcomes, his work reminds us that looking is a form of thinking, and that the ability to navigate complex visual environments, noticing relationships, patterns, and contexts, is cognitive work of a high order that rarely receives the acknowledgement it deserves in educational policy. The dense, layered compositions of his illustrations train the eye to do exactly this kind of work, building capacities that are transferable far beyond the page.

For contemporary illustrators and educators, Biswas offers a model of professional and artistic integrity that stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing conditions of children’s publishing. He did not chase trends or adapt his visual style to the requirements of global markets. He worked within public institutions, collaborated with educators who shared his commitments, and treated children’s books as a civic responsibility rather than a commercial opportunity. This orientation places him at a considerable distance from the current commodification of childhood aesthetics, in which visual style is frequently a brand asset before it is anything else.

Perhaps most importantly, Biswas’s work asks us to reconsider what we mean by representation as both a political aspiration and a creative practice. Representation is not merely about visibility, about ensuring that certain faces appear in certain books. It is about how lives are seen, framed, and valued, about whether the choices made in depicting a particular childhood communicate that the life in question is fully real, fully complex, and fully deserving of the most serious artistic attention available. Biswas did not simplify Indian childhood to make it palatable to external audiences or to render it legible to a market he was not part of. He trusted children and, by extension, all readers, to meet the work on its own terms and to find in it something genuinely valuable.

In doing so, he affirmed something deeply unfashionable in contemporary publishing: that children deserve art that is culturally grounded, aesthetically demanding, and morally serious. Not art that flatters them, distracts them, or markets to them as a demographic category, but art that respects them as the perceptive and intelligent human beings they already are.

Pulak Biswas reminds us that illustration is not a secondary language of childhood, a simplified or decorative supplement to the real business of text and learning, but one of childhood’s primary forms of thought and one of the most direct routes available to us into how the world is understood at its most formative stages. His legacy is not an exercise in nostalgia for a simpler time or a more rooted culture. It is a challenge addressed to everyone who makes or cares about books for children: to make work that believes in children as perceptive, situated, and fully capable human beings who deserve nothing less than our best efforts.

In a publishing world that grows increasingly afraid of complexity and increasingly skilled at mistaking accessibility for condescension, that belief may be his most enduring gift to all of us.

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A Castle of Bone is a book that slipped through the cracks of literary history despite being, as one contemporary called it, “Penelope Farmer’s finest achievement.” It’s time we looked at it again.

The premise is deceptively simple. Hugh, a dreamy adolescent boy, reluctantly goes on a shopping trip with his (equally reluctant) Father to purchase a cupboard in which to store his clothes. They buy an old cupboard from a junk shop run by a mysterious, querulous old man. When Hugh’s pigskin wallet is placed inside, it emerges as a living, terrified pig. Dried raisins become grapes. Brass buttons melt into puddles or revert to raw ore. The cupboard, it turns out, has the power to reverse time, to send objects backward through their history to earlier states of being.

Things become truly frightening when Hugh’s friend Penn accidentally falls into the cupboard during roughhousing and emerges as a toddler, then regresses further into infanthood. The four friends who are the central characters of the story (Hugh, his sister Jean, and neighbours Penn and Anna) find themselves in a desperate race to restore Penn to his proper age, all while keeping their predicament hidden from adults who would never understand.

The Magic

What makes A Castle of Bone extraordinary isn’t its premise (though that’s compelling enough) but the peculiar atmosphere Farmer creates and sustains throughout. This is not an adventure story in the traditional sense. There are no heroic quests, no clear villains, nor triumphant battles. Instead, Farmer has written something much stranger: a meditation on identity, mortality, and the terrifying instability of selfhood, all wrapped in the trappings of a children’s magical realism novel.

Farmer’s prose has a dreamlike quality that suits the material perfectly. When Hugh drifts into one of his characteristic reveries, Farmer writes: “it left him with an extraordinary, strange, creative ache; a beautiful yet unbearable sense of growing out of himself, exploding skin and bone.” This is the experience of adolescence captured with uncommon precision of language; that vertiginous feeling of transformation, of becoming someone you don’t yet recognise, of your body and mind conspiring to unmoor you from childhood without offering any clear map to adulthood.

The cupboard itself becomes a perfect metaphor for the adolescent experience. Like the teenage body, it changes things unpredictably, sometimes dangerously, with no regard for whether the subject wants to change or not. You can’t control how far back the regression will go. Will the brass buttons become molten copper or the original rocks from which the metal was extracted? This wild unpredictability mirrors the chaos of puberty, where you don’t know what you’ll wake up as tomorrow.

But Farmer goes deeper than metaphor. The book’s title refers to a castle that Hugh visits in his dreams - a structure made entirely of bone. It’s both protective and imprisoning, and the old man from the junk shop eventually reveals (in his cryptic way, for he’s something of a Tiresias figure) that the castle is a representation of the self. We are all, Farmer suggests, castles of bone; our identity both housed and constrained by our physical being, our mortality, our particular incarnation (or, incarceration).

This gets at something profound about identity that few children’s books dare to address. In one of her other works, Charlotte Sometimes, Farmer wrote: “Were you some particular person only because people recognised you as that?” A Castle of Bone tackles this question from a different angle: are you the same person you were as a baby? As a child? If the cupboard could reduce you to your infant self, would you still end up being you?

The old man in the junk shop serves as a warning about one wrong answer to this question. He’s used the cupboard to achieve a kind of immortality, but it’s fragmented him - he exists as multiple artefacts of his former selves, scattered throughout his shop like so much junk. He hasn’t preserved his identity; he’s shattered it. The lesson is clear: one must accept mortality, commit to a single life trajectory, and see it through. The alternative is to become a collection of remnants rather than a whole person.

What’s remarkable is how Farmer trusts her young readers with complexity. The book doesn’t explain everything (or, indeed, very much at all). The final journey into the cupboard, when the children try to restore Penn, is genuinely strange and surreal. The resolution doesn’t tie everything up neatly. Contemporary reviews described it as “soft-toned” and noted that some of what Farmer was saying “may elude some of her younger readers,” but the reviewers also recognised that “the story holds its own every step of the road back.”

Farmer’s characterisation deserves special mention. These four teenagers are wonderfully real, bound together not by deep friendship but by proximity and a vague, mutual tolerance punctuated by bouts of irritation. They find their parents incomprehensible and are equally incomprehensible to them. The dialogue captures the rhythms of actual teenage conversation, complete with awkwardness and resentment and the occasional moment of unexpected connection.

The book’s structure is deliberately unbalanced. The first two-thirds consist largely of experimentation with the cupboard (what changes into what?) and the mundane details of Hugh’s daily life. Some modern readers may find this tedious, but it serves an important purpose: it grounds the fantasy in reality, makes the stakes feel genuine, and allows the strangeness to build slowly, almost imperceptibly, until you’re in very deep waters indeed.

Why This Still Resonates With Modern Childhood

To understand why A Castle of Bone remains relevant (and why it deserves rediscovery) we need to consider how radically young adult fiction has changed since 1972.

Farmer was writing during what scholars call the “first golden age” of YA literature. The 1970s and early 1980s saw authors like Judy Blume, Robert Cormier, and Lois Duncan creating books that spoke directly to teenage experience in unprecedented ways. These weren’t the sanitised, moralistic books of earlier decades. They dealt with death, sexuality, divorce, drug abuse, all the real stuff of teenage life. Cormier’s The Chocolate War was celebrated precisely because it had a dark ending, because it didn’t resolve neatly, because it respected its audience enough to give them difficulty.

A Castle of Bone sits slightly apart from its contemporaries in the YA category. While books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret addressed the immediate, physical realities of adolescence, Farmer chose to work in a more symbolic register. She wasn’t writing about getting your first period or having physical feelings for someone or navigating secondary school (though those elements are present in the background). She was writing about the metaphysics of identity during that crucial transition period. It’s a more literary, philosophical approach closer to Alan Garner’s Red Shift than to the emerging “problem novel” genre.

This is why the book can feel contemporary to modern readers. We’re living through another transformation of YA literature, one that’s been dramatically accelerated by social media specifically BookTok. Since 2020, TikTok’s #BookTok community has reshaped the publishing landscape in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1972. Books become bestsellers based on viral videos. Readers discover books through algorithm-driven recommendations. The most successful books are often those that can be easily described through their tropes: “enemies to lovers,” “chosen one,” “love triangle,” “dystopia.”

The contrast is striking. Where Farmer’s generation of YA authors was praised for literary complexity and willingness to leave things ambiguous, today’s most popular YA books often follow more predictable formulas. The BookTok era has brought tremendous energy to reading (YA fiction sales increased nearly 70% by mid-2021) but it has also created echo chambers where the same handful of books (primarily by white authors, featuring white protagonists) dominate the conversation.

This isn’t to romanticise the 1970s publishing landscape, which had its own severe limitations around diversity and representation. Books published in that era “dealt almost exclusively with white, middle-class values and morality,” according to scholars. But there was a different kind of aesthetic freedom; authors like Farmer could write books that defied easy categorisation, that couldn’t be reduced to a TikTok pitch about tropes.

Yet A Castle of Bone speaks to contemporary concerns in surprising ways. The book’s central anxiety about the instability of identity, the fear that the self is more fragile than we imagine, feels remarkably current in an age of social media where identity is constantly performed and curated. Farmer’s protagonists are terrified by the cupboard precisely because it strips away their agency over who they are and who they’re becoming. In an era where teenagers craft online personas across multiple platforms, where they’re bombarded with conflicting messages about who they should be, this resonates deeply.

The book also prefigures contemporary YA’s growing interest in mental health and neurodiversity. Hugh’s “spacey moments,” his tendency to drift into “dreamy abstractions,” his difficulty maintaining focus on the mundane world would likely be recognised today as symptoms of a particular cognitive style, perhaps ADHD or simply a creative temperament. Farmer doesn’t pathologies these traits; she presents them as part of who Hugh is, integral to why he’s drawn to the cupboard in the first place.

There’s also something refreshing about Farmer’s refusal to provide easy answers. Modern YA, shaped by the need to perform well on social media, often favours clear emotional catharsis, satisfying resolutions, and messages that can be extracted and shared. A Castle of Bone offers none of these comforts. The ending is ambiguous. We’re told the castle of bone is “himself” - meaning Hugh, meaning all of us - but what exactly this means remains tantalisingly unclear. The cupboard’s origin and purpose are never fully explained. The old man remains mysterious.

This opacity is, paradoxically, what makes the book feel more honest. Adolescence doesn’t come with clear explanations or neat resolutions. You don’t emerge from it with answers about who you are, you emerge with more questions and, if you’re lucky, the beginnings of an acceptance that you’ll be figuring it out for the rest of your life.

The book also speaks to the current moment’s anxieties about AI and technological transformation. The cupboard is, in a sense, a machine that runs backward, a device that undoes progress, that reveals the earlier states hidden within finished products. In an age where we worry about being reduced to data points, about algorithms knowing us better than we know ourselves, about technology stripping away our agency, Farmer’s magic cupboard feels less like fantasy and more like metaphor for very real concerns.

What’s perhaps most striking from a 2026 perspective is how the book handles the relationship between children and adults. The four protagonists hide everything from their parents not because their parents are villains but because they operate in completely different conceptual universes. The adults are pragmatic, literal-minded, concerned with daily life. The children have stumbled into something numinous and strange that their parents simply cannot comprehend. This generational divide (not antagonistic but fundamental) mirrors contemporary discussions about how teenagers navigate digital spaces that adults struggle to understand.

There’s a lesson here for contemporary YA. The genre has become increasingly self-conscious, aware of its commercial potential and its responsibility to address social issues. Books are expected to “do work”; to represent marginalised identities, to address important topics, to provide positive messaging. These are worthy goals, but they can sometimes crowd out the literary value of something stranger and more ambiguous. A Castle of Bone reminds us that young readers can handle complexity, ambiguity, and even a bit of genuine weirdness. They don’t always need everything explained. They can appreciate a book that asks difficult questions without pretending to have all the answers.

The evolution of YA from the 1970s to today has been shaped by many forces: the emergence of teenagers as a distinct demographic, the rise and fall of various subgenres (problem novels in the 70s, horror in the 80s, dystopia in the 2010s, romantasy in the 2020s), changing attitudes about representation and diversity, and most recently, the revolution wrought by social media platforms like TikTok. Through all these changes, certain constants remain: teenagers want books that take them seriously, that don’t condescend, that acknowledge the genuine difficulty and strangeness of becoming an adult.

A Castle of Bone does this in its own peculiar way. It’s not an easy book. It won’t go viral on BookTok. It doesn’t fit neatly into popular tropes or subgenres. But it offers something increasingly rare: a YA novel that trusts its readers to sit with mystery, to tolerate ambiguity, to contemplate the vertigo of transformation without demanding immediate reassurance.

In this sense, Farmer’s strange little book about a cupboard that changes things might be exactly what contemporary YA readers need - not as a replacement for the books they love, but as a reminder of different possibilities, different ways of addressing the central questions of adolescence. Sometimes the best answer to “who am I?” is not a declaration but a dream, not a conclusion, but a castle made of bone.

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The premise of the story is so familiar it barely needs stating anymore: take away adult supervision and children will turn savage. Civilisation is just a costume. Violence is always waiting in the wings. But here’s the thing, though. This idea (that children are basically barbarians-in-waiting) is actually a really unhelpful way of positioning childhood in literature.

And while we can make a claim that The Lord of the Flies is not a children’s book in the sense that the intended audience is not necessarily the same age as the child protagonists, how we as a society culturally position childhood and our expectations of children (whether in creating for them or about them) we set the tone for how we are projecting our children will grow into adulthood.

Its this idea that drives my passion for showcasing books that treat childhood in ways that are optimistic, hopeful, empowering (but not overtly moralising), nuanced yes, but hopeful, and certainly not doom laden or reductionist or patronising (think all the lowest common denominator poo joke picture books if you need a reference for how early this stuff is being pushed out to children).

For over a century, books written for and about children have been deliberately arguing something completely different to the premise of LOTF. Not in a saccharine, everyone-gets-a-trophy kind of way. In a serious, philosophical sense. They’re making a different claim about what children actually are, and what happens to morality when the adult world collapses. One of the purposes of literature is to show us the best of what we can become.

Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in 1954, still reeling from World War II. His pessimism makes sense in this context; he’d watched supposedly civilised societies descend into industrial-scale horror. Fair enough. But also its here that we come to the failure of Lord of the Flies, because it isn’t really about children. It’s about fear - what adults fear children (and us all underneath) might be.

Golding’s working from a Hobbesian playbook in that morality exists because authority enforces it, and without that enforcement, we get chaos. It’s a top-down model. Remove the enforcers, and the whole thing collapses. What’s interesting is how many children’s books, written before and after Golding, just... don’t agree with this. Even when they’re depicting situations far worse than a tropical island with plenty of fruit and fresh water.

Take Children of Winter by Berlie Doherty. It’s set in brutal conditions alright, displacement, scarcity, cold. But the children don’t turn on each other. Instead, they become more careful with each other. More attentive. Hardship doesn’t erase empathy; rather it sharpens it. Or The Silver Sword. Ian Serraillier’s children are wandering through post-war Europe. Everything has failed - governments, adults, infrastructure, all of it. And yet what emerges isn’t savagery but something like ethical seriousness. The children take care of each other not because anyone’s making them, but because they understand that’s what survival actually requires. These books aren’t pretending everything’s fine. They’re just refuting the premise that children need to be dominated to behave decently.

Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo gets at something Golding misses entirely. Being alone doesn’t automatically lead to moral collapse. What breaks people down is abandonment i.e. not just the absence of authority, but the absence of relationship. Michael Morpurgo’s story is about a child who survives through patience, paying attention, learning to communicate across difference. Humanity isn’t enforced from above; it grows through care, routine, respect for another person’s life.

Terry Pratchett’s Nation might (unsurprisingly from Sir T) be the most direct philosophical middle finger to Lord of the Flies. After disaster hits, Pratchett’s children don’t wait around for civilisation to be handed back to them. They build it themselves. They create systems, ethics, shared responsibility. Civilisation isn’t a veneer that slips off when things get hard, it’s something you make, every day, through choice and effort. Pratchett gives his young characters what Golding refuses: actual moral agency.

You can’t really talk about Lord of the Flies without mentioning The Coral Island, the Victorian adventure story Golding was explicitly reacting against. Ballantyne’s children aren’t perfect or unrealistically noble. But they’re assumed to be capable; of self-control, cooperation, growth. Golding found this assumption naive, maybe even offensive. His whole novel is designed to dismantle it.

But the fact that books like The Coral Island persisted, and that the twentieth century produced so many works echoing its basic confidence in children that tells us Golding’s vision isn’t inevitable. It’s just one argument. A rebuttal, not a revelation.

Why This Still Matters

We’re getting another Lord of the Flies adaptation at a moment when childhood is increasingly defined by anxiety. Moral panic, helicopter parenting, surveillance, shrinking freedom. Children are trusted less and monitored more.

When we keep presenting Golding’s vision as a truth about children, we’re teaching something potentially damaging: that children can’t be trusted with freedom, that morality has to be imposed from above, and that control matters more than care.

This, plus the question of what children do when adults fail them isn’t academic but more urgent than ever. In the US, ICE operations are separating children from parents, leaving young people to navigate systems designed to intimidate and exclude. In the UK, racist mobs (emboldened by Reform Party rhetoric) have gathered outside hotels housing asylum-seeking families, waving flags and chanting slogans while children watch from windows above.

These are not hypotheticals about islands or distant wars. These are children, right now, experiencing adult and societal abandonment. Experiencing the collapse of systems that should protect them. Watching adults choose cruelty. And what we teach children about human nature, what we tell them people are really like when things get hard, shapes how they understand these moments and how they respond to them. Whether they see cruelty as inevitable or as something that can be resisted.

If we keep presenting Golding’s vision as the truth about childhood, if we keep saying that order requires domination, that morality must be imposed from above, that children can’t be trusted, we’re not preparing them for standing up. We’re teaching them that abandonment is natural. That brutality is what humans do and there isn’t another option for them to chose. That there’s no point in choosing otherwise.

The books that answer Golding differently (the ones that show children making moral choices in the face of adult failure) aren’t naive but necessary. They show young people that even when systems collapse, even when adults choose xenophobia and violence, even when you’re frightened and alone, you still have choices. You can still refuse to participate in cruelty. You can still choose care over control.

That’s not sentimentality, that’s the literacy we need for the world we’re living in. Because right now, children are watching adults wave flags outside the windows of their peers. They’re watching families torn apart by uniformed officers. They’re learning what people do when things get hard. And what we’ve taught them about human nature, what stories we’ve told to them and about them matter, will shape what they choose to do next.

The other tradition in children’s literature (the one that includes The Silver Sword and Nation and Kensuke’s Kingdom) doesn’t deny that darkness exists. It just denies that darkness is inevitable. It suggests that ethics don’t come from fear of punishment. They come from belonging, responsibility, meaning.

Lord of the Flies shows us what adults fear children might become.

These other books ask something more: What happens when we don’t abandon children, when we actually trust them to rise to the occasion?

As the BBC invites us back into Golding’s nightmare, it’s worth remembering that children’s literature has been offering a different vision all along. Better, less sensational, more hopeful.

Not because children are perfect.

But because they’re human.

Randall Jarrell’s prose is spare yet emotionally exacting. Maurice Sendak’s decorations do not narrate, dramatise, or soften the text. They accompany it, slightly apart, as though careful not to intrude. Together, writer and artist created a book that behaves more like a philosophy of the world than a piece of entertainment. It is a book concerned with how families are formed, how love accumulates love, and how meaning and relationships arises not through declaration but through honest repetition and time.

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Oliver “Ollie” Harrington (1912–1995) had already achieved a formidable reputation long before he entered the realm of children’s literature. As a political cartoonist, his nationally syndicated Bootsie comic and his incisive visual commentary on Jim Crow America positioned him not merely as an artist but as an interpreter of systems; systems of race, class, bureaucracy, state power, and the absurd symbolic theatre that often sustains them. Where many cartoonists of the era worked in gag humour and caricature, Harrington traded in structure. He mapped how power moved. He mapped how people manoeuvred within its channels.

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Penelope Farmer’s body of work occupies an unusual place in twentieth-century British children’s literature. Neither wholly canonical nor wholly forgotten, her novels linger at the edges of readers’ memories, resurfacing through recommendations, school libraries, and (in the case of Charlotte Sometimes) in the unexpected cultural references of later decades. Farmer wrote with a tone that seemed to distrust the easy comforts of childhood fiction. Her worlds were not just vehicles for plot but chambers for feeling.

Born in 1939 to a generation shadowed by war and reconstruction, Farmer belonged to the cohort of authors who started to reconfigure British children’s books away from Edwardian adventure and Narnian allegory and towards something which we now recognise as more psychologically modern. Farmer offered dreams that ran parallel to history rather than above it, and children who bore witness to eras not their own.

Charlotte Sometimes, published in 1969, would become her most enduring work, although “enduring” in this case describes not mass readership but a persistent hum of admiration. The novel gained a second life in the 1980s when (bizarrely) the band The Cure borrowed the title for one of their most haunting singles which spread the book’s name across record sleeves and concert posters. For a time, music fans encountered Charlotte first as an enigmatic figure in Robert Smith’s lyrics before realising she was also a schoolgirl passing between 1960s England and the winter of 1918. Reprinting in Virago Modern Classics, occasional revivals in school syllabi, and ongoing whispers on book forums helps the story circulate once more among young readers, librarians, and adult nostalgics who had once encountered it under the yellowing spines of a classroom bookcase.

The novel’s afterlife is proof that influence can be measured in a atmosphere felt rather than numbers. Farmer’s work never became a cultural franchise. It spawned no merchandise, no cinematic universe, no heroic archetype. But instead it occupied other channels of culture; namely music, memory, and the literary subconscious which I feel is where stories that are either too strange or too interior or too subtle in their strangeness often survive. Many classic children’s novels endure because their adventures thrill or their morals uplift, Charlotte Sometimes endures because it shows us glimpses of the indistinct terrain of dream, identity, and time, and I think these spaces are as relevant to the digital century as they were to the postwar one.

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Within the history of twentieth-century illustration, Errol Le Cain occupies a peculiar corner. He stands downstream from the golden-age fabulists (Dulac, Nielsen, Clarke) yet upstream from the later fantasy revival of Froud and Alan Lee. He was parallel to, but never absorbed by, modernist minimalism. He shared a century with Disney and the vast commodification of children’s imagery, yet he remained devoted to a quieter lineage: to the tapestry, the miniature, the illuminated page. He was not out of step with his contemporaries so much as playing a different rhythm, the rhythm of ornament, distance, and dream.

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The Magic

The Wind on the Moon by Eric Linklater was one of my stand-out bedtime story experiences as a child. The story follows sisters Dinah and Dorinda. On the eve of their father leaving for war, a “wind on the moon” sets their behaviour to “naughty” for the foreseeable future. The story is hard to define, neither domestic nor especially or “epically” adventurous, it takes us through the unfolding of their naughtiness as defined (by the adults) in the opening chapter. This leads them to conspiring with a suspected witch, transforming into kangaroos, and travelling with their dancing teacher to save their father, among other episodes.

It was published in 1944, and while the tone of the book and the narrative are undoubtedly influenced by the War, it is not a story about it. It has elements of magic, but it is not a fantasy story. It involves a lot of subversion by the child characters, but it is not a satire or part of the “horrible children for the sake of it” trope.

Many children’s books, particularly from the 20th century, teach obedience, whether implicitly or explicitly. Some reward clever disobedience, but very few question whether authority deserves obedience at all.

The Wind on the Moon does something stranger: it treats authority as something that must constantly justify itself or risk being ignored, mocked, or dismantled. At the heart of the book is a philosophical problem disguised as farce: If adults wield power badly, do children have any obligation to cooperate?

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A Letter of Introduction

Hello everyone :) I’m starting this substack to share my love of vintage children’s literature. From the moment I had enough skills to be able to read for pleasure

(irritatingly at a much later stage in childhood than my twin sister)

I’ve always found it extremely hard to keep my nose out of books. My love for stories was shared with my Mum, who in turn shared some of her favourite books with me. I carried on reading all through my teenage years, twenties, the habit has survived into my 30s and becoming a mother, and now I share stories with my boys too. As well as training and working in education, I have also spent time in a secondhand bookshop, which was heaven. Over the last few years I have become quite fed up with many and much of the books that are currently being published for children. I feel that the growing need for sales and commercialism has slightly

(hugely)

killed the art and the magic that I remember from my childhood reading, particularly older books published before I was born. I started posting on Instagram about my love of children’s books, and a rant about the children’s publishing industry got an awful lot of engagement - it seems like I’m not the only person disenchanted with modern mainstream children’s books and is looking for alternatives. That’s why I’m starting this newsletter

(once I have finished working out exactly how one “substacks”. I’ve barely got to grips with instagram)

for parents, teachers, and librarians. And you, If you’re looking beyond bestseller lists and the modern publishing industry. I want to write about forgotten chapter books for children aged 5–12 and mid-century UK picture books (1940s–1970s). By focusing on the lost magic of works that were created before the digital age and how these books worked for children then, I hope to inspire people to see how they can still support thoughtful, confident childhood reading today.

(And stick it to the man by buying secondhand)

If this is you, please join me on the journey. I’m hoping to build a cosy little corner of the internet where we can all share beauty, inspiration, memories, and most importantly, stories.

In the works for subscribers

• A bi monthly newsletter focusing on a forgotten or under appreciated vintage chapter book for middle grade readers

• A bi monthly newsletter curating illustrations, illustrators and picture books from the 20th century

• A monthly newsletter going into whatever topics I think my community would be interested in on the history of children’s literature and illustration

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Let’s take back childhood.

All the best.

Jenny

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