Hi!
And a very Happy New Year to everybody out there - hope you had a great holiday!

First of all HUGE congratulations to Philip Pullman for winning the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. It's the very first time that a children's book has won, and it's great news. (I have to confess right here that I won £5, so I'm feeling remarkably smug and Told-You-So ish about the whole thing.)
(This is probably using too many brackets, but here's another aside - and don't bother to read it if you already know how the Whitbread prize works. They begin by awarding five prizes for different categories of books; four of them are for adult books - novel, first novel, biography and poetry, and the fifth prize is for the children's book. The Book of the Year is the BIG prize, and that's given to one of the five winners - so Philip Pullman has really won two prizes.)

I'm not only delighted for Philip, but for children's books in general - you and I know that many of the stories written for kids are among the best there are, but it's taken the world at large a while to catch up with us. Maybe now we'll see more and more and more grown ups sitting on buses and trains and benches reading fantastic books like The Amber Spyglass. It's been great to see so many mums and dads and uncles and aunts and so on reading Harry Potter - but it would be good to help them realise that there are LOADS more exciting, funny, scary, mind bending books out there by a vast range of children's authors. For starters, try telling them about Eva Ibbotson's Journey to the River Sea. It was one of the other books on the Whitbread children's shortlist, and my testers simply couldn't put it down. One of them has a large bruise on her head because she was trying to keep on reading as she walked to school, and a lamppost got in the way .... but even that didn't stop her. (OK. I was just as bad. I was reading it in my bath, and the water went stone cold because I could bear to put the book down to get dry ... ) You could also look back and read some of the children's books that have won a Whitbread award in the past, like Diana Hendry's Harvey Angell. It's still a brilliant read; Great Aunt Agatha is one of the most splendid Terrible Aunts ever, and I've always been hugely fond of Henry, the hero. The hot news is that it's being made into a film - HURRAH!!! (And I've also heard that Debbie Gliori's Pure Dead Magic is going to hit the screen, AND Annie Dalton's Angels Unlimited books - so dash out and read those too ... )

Now - COMPETITION!!! (you get only the best here on the Jubilee Books site!)

Just so's you can encourage the adults in your life I've got a couple of books by Philip Ardagh to give away; the first one is called Awful End, and it's a side splittingly funny story about Eddie Dickens ... and his remarkably gruesome relations. (Look out for the stuffed ferret. And don't miss the hot water bottle.)
The first person to e-mail me the name of the SECOND story about Eddie will win copies of both books - and they'll be signed by Philip Ardagh too! And make it a mission in your life to see that at least TWO adults read them - but also make sure that you get them back.

(H'm. Interesting that there are two Philips mentioned in this column ... and of course there's the incredible Philip Ridley. Have you read Scribbleboy? Or my favourite - Krindlekrax?)

I've been doing a lot of travelling recently; I've been in Dundee, and lots of the villages and towns in Angus, and Swansea, and Edinburgh. (This is actually a sort of holiday - I'm not running all day workshops in schools at the moment, which is what I'm usually up to at this time of year.) (Probably the weirdest holiday I've ever had - gale force winds blowing over trees ... six inches of snow ... )
While I was in Swansea I met two different groups of children, and both groups wrote stories with me - I've put them on the end of this column so you can read them too. The children were aged six to nine - and I think they did amazingly well!

Thanks again for reading this - and GET THOSE ADULTS READING! They need it ...
Love,
Vivxx



THE RABBIT THAT LOST ITS HOUSE.

Fluffy the rabbit was cold. The wind was blowing hard, and his house (made all of carrots) was very draughty.
"I'll have a cup of tea," he said to himself. "That'll warm me up."
As Fluffy sipped his tea the wind blew harder and harder. At last it blew so hard that it blew the carrot house down ... and all the carrots flew away over the hill.
Fluffy frowned. He twitched his nose and whiskers. His ears went back. He huffed and he puffed and he blew out his breath and he ground his teeth together. He scrunched his paws into fists, and he jumped up and down - and he SCREAMED,
"MY HOUSE HAS GONE!!!!"

Fluffy didn't know what to do. His friends, Kangaroo, Tortoise and Dog, had all said he was foolish to build his house out of carrots. Fluffy thought they were wrong. "I'll always have something to eat if the walls are carrots!" he told them, but now he didn't have a house, and he didn't have anything to eat either!
Fluffy felt sad, and began to panic.
"I've nowhere to live! And nothing to eat!" he said, and then he had an idea. "I'll go and see my friends."

First of all Fluffy hopped along to Kangaroo's house. He knocked on the door, and Kangaroo opened it.
"Can I spend the night with you?" Fluffy stuttered. "My house has blown away."
"NO!" said Kangaroo. "I said you were a bit strange when you built your house out of carrots. It's your fault it's blown away."

Fluffy skipped away. "I'll go and see Tortoise," he said, but when he knocked on Tortoise's door Tortoise wasn't pleased. "What are you doing here?" he said. "It's MIDNIGHT!"
"Can I spend the night with you?" Fluffy yawned. "My house has blown away."
"NO!" said Tortoise. "I told you that you don't build houses out of carrots. It's your fault if your house has blown away."

Fluffy slopped off to Dog's house.
"Dog! Dog! DOG!" he bellowed. "My carrot house has blown away!"
"You're pretty stupid, you know," said Dog. "It's after midnight!"
"Can I spend the night with you?" Fluffy asked.
"Yes," said Dog, but he didn't have any carrots for Fluffy to eat ... only bones.

The next day Fluffy went to look for his house, but he couldn't find it. That night he came back, and he knocked on Kangaroo's door at midnight AGAIN.
"Can I spend the night with you?" he asked.
"NO!" said Kangaroo, and Tortoise said "NO!" as well.
Fluffy spent the night at Dog's house, but in the morning Dog and Tortoise and Kangaroo were all very tired.
"We've got to help Fluffy," they decided. "He needs a house so he doesn't keep waking us up at midnight!"
"Yes," said Dog. "Look at the bags under my eyes!"

So they all began to build Fluffy a beautiful house of bricks, and Fluffy was very happy.
"I know!" he said. "I know JUST what to make the front door out of!"
"What's that?" asked Dog. "What are you going to make the front door out of?"
"CARROTS!" said Fluffy ....



THE DRAGON WHO COULDN'T BREATHE FIRE

Little Dragon was very sad. He couldn't breathe fire because he had asthma, and the other dragons laughed at him because he was different.
When they played flying races they left him out.
When they played touch they wouldn't let Little Dragon play.
Sometimes they played blowing fire at a bullseye, and little Dragon couldn't do that so they laughed even more, and then blew fire at Little Dragon's wings.
Little Dragon went away to hide at the bottom of the castle. He huddled up in a corner, his ears were dropped. His tail was lopping right down to the triangle at the end. His eyes kept on watering ...
... in fact he was crying. Tears were trickling down his cheeks.

Outside the castle the selfish dragons were hunting for the Little Dragon. They blew fire everywhere, and burnt everything down. The animals were scared, because the world was so hot. The tiger had burnt black stripes on his orange coat. The kangaroo had to learn to jump instead of running around because the earth was so hot. The snow white cheetah was burnt black. The leopard had black spots burnt onto his fur. They went to hide in the bottom of the castle, and Little Dragon came tiptoeing out to see what was going on.
"It's too hot out there," said the animals. "We can't live there any more."
"I'll help you," said Little Dragon, and he went out of the castle to fetch some water. He didn't mind touching water because he didn't breathe fire, not like the other dragons. The other selfish dragons were tired out and had no fire left, so Little Dragon collected the water and put the fires out.
God came down to see what was going on.
He was angry with the selfish dragons, and told them that they couldn't live on earth any more. They had to live in the sky. God also said the tiger would keep his stripes, the leopard his spots, the kangaroo his bounce and the cheetah his black coat to remind everyone how bad the dragons had been.
The selfish dragons were very sorry.

God also did a little miracle.
"You can breathe fire three times a week," he told Little Dragon. "You can breathe fire on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturday evenings."
The Little Dragon flew off to play touch and flying games with the other dragons - and he was very happy.

vivian.french@jubileebooks.co.uk

APRIL 2002

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