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Product Description
Review
'a book of startling quality and tremendous beauty'
(The Bookbag )'Another brilliant novel from a master storyteller.'
(Carousel )Unsettling but, as ever, beautifully written.
(Daily Mail )'... exceptional, delicate writing ... make a moving and thoughtful story told with exceptional elegance.'
'exquisite prose which sparkles off the page'
(Writeaway )BACKLIST REVIEWS:
'Almond manages to make a work of art out of the simplest words.' (Amanda Craig, The Times )
'a master novelist' (Independent )
'There really is nobody quite like Almond writing in children's or adults' fiction today.' (The Times )
'a writer of subtle, page-turning and daring exactness.' (Times Educational Supplement )
'David Almond's novels all have a unique, mystical thread running through them. He weaves a story web, spiderlike, that holds the reader spellbound while he spins new though-threads on universal themes.' (Carousel )
'David Almond is a fine writer, one of the very finest we have. He is simply incapable of writing a bad sentence.' (Michael Morpurgo )
'One of these days, someone is going to notice that David Almond has been kidnapped by children's publishing and demand him back for adults. But until then, we must rejoice in every new offering of his.' (Sunday Telegraph )
"superb coming-of-age novel from one of our master story-tellers."
(Bookseller )"This is a novel of power and beauty."
(The Daily Telegraph )'Higgins writes in a dead-on emulation of a teenage girls voice, her prose salted with pithy observations.'
(Financial Times )Almond skilfully handles the issues and writes beautifully in this contemporary masterpiece.
(Independent )Product Description
A long hot summer
A wild boy
An abandoned baby
An act of violence
Every summer Liam and Max roam the wild countryside of Northumberland – but this year things are different. One hot summer’s day a jackdaw leads the two boys into an ancient farm house where they find a baby, wrapped in a blanket, with a scribbled note pinned to it: PLESE LOOK AFTER HER RITE. THIS IS A CHILDE OF GOD.And so begins Jackdaw Summer. A summer when friendships are tested. A summer when lines between good and bad are blurred. A summer that Liam will never forget ...
A stunning novel from the author of the modern children's classic Skellig - winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's Book Award. David Almond is also winner of the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen award. (20081206)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
David Almond is one of the most distinctive writers of junior fiction in the UK and probably the world right now. His books are at once accessible and yet profound. They stir emotion, ask questions, introduce mysteries - and sometimes resolve them.
An over-riding theme is often conflict of one kind or another, and this is never more true than in this book. This book sees conflict between friends falling out, between people with different views, between governments and soldiers in Iraq and Liberia. All this in the back drop of beautiful Northumbria in a glorious summer.
But it is more than just conflict. Liam, the son of an artist mother and writer father, discovers an abandoned baby that he is led to by a Jackdaw. With the baby is a jar of money. this mystery sets in train other events which lead inexorably to the novel's conclusion.
David Almond will not be everyone's favourite author. He is an author to make you think "what was that book about"? And the answer is that it is about many things. But anyone who really enjoys reading should love what he does with language - so simply wrought and yet so profound - not one word out of place.
I enjoyed this book very much.
An over-riding theme is often conflict of one kind or another, and this is never more true than in this book. This book sees conflict between friends falling out, between people with different views, between governments and soldiers in Iraq and Liberia. All this in the back drop of beautiful Northumbria in a glorious summer.
But it is more than just conflict. Liam, the son of an artist mother and writer father, discovers an abandoned baby that he is led to by a Jackdaw. With the baby is a jar of money. this mystery sets in train other events which lead inexorably to the novel's conclusion.
David Almond will not be everyone's favourite author. He is an author to make you think "what was that book about"? And the answer is that it is about many things. But anyone who really enjoys reading should love what he does with language - so simply wrought and yet so profound - not one word out of place.
I enjoyed this book very much.
Format:Paperback
It's summer, and it's hot. Liam is on the edge of his teenage years, wandering with his best friend Max through his coutry Northumberland home town in a landscape rural and idyllic but defined by conflict, Border Reivers, Romans, soldiers on exercises and jets screaming overhead as Blair and Bush take the UK into war in the Middle East, trying to avoid the savage bully Nattrass.
They are playing in the garden when Liam digs up an old knife and indulges in the fantasy of it being an ancient relic. But a chattering jackdaw yelling at them as they wander the village seems far more intent, they follow it and find an abandoned months old baby. Taking it home they become overnight celebrities and the baby changes their lives in small ways, like the pebbles that start an avalanche.
As the baby, now named Alison, is fostered Max and Liam begin to grow apart as their interests diverge, and visiting Alison brings Max into contact with foster children Crystal, orphaned by fire, and Oliver, a Liberian war refugee. Liam is largely left to his own devices by his writer father and artist mother and the bruising war games he plays with the other boys of the village lead to the climax in the hills above the village.
Almond writes with a deceptive simplicity, the narrative is told by Liam and has the directness of a young boy's experiences, but there is a complex web of themes and nuances about war, savagery, responsibility, conflict, innocence and childhood.
They are playing in the garden when Liam digs up an old knife and indulges in the fantasy of it being an ancient relic. But a chattering jackdaw yelling at them as they wander the village seems far more intent, they follow it and find an abandoned months old baby. Taking it home they become overnight celebrities and the baby changes their lives in small ways, like the pebbles that start an avalanche.
As the baby, now named Alison, is fostered Max and Liam begin to grow apart as their interests diverge, and visiting Alison brings Max into contact with foster children Crystal, orphaned by fire, and Oliver, a Liberian war refugee. Liam is largely left to his own devices by his writer father and artist mother and the bruising war games he plays with the other boys of the village lead to the climax in the hills above the village.
Almond writes with a deceptive simplicity, the narrative is told by Liam and has the directness of a young boy's experiences, but there is a complex web of themes and nuances about war, savagery, responsibility, conflict, innocence and childhood.
Format:Paperback
Almond always write with lyricism, even when his subject matter is dark, and here, in Jackdaw Summer, he gets very dark indeed. In the heat of a Northumbrian summer, with helicopters whirring overhead and war kicking off in the far east, Liam is a young boy with violence on his mind. He wrestles with the changes that young adulthood bring, as his more serious friends mature too quickly for him and his resentment and inability to follow leads him to fall back on the dubious relationship he has with a disturbed young man who likes to test the very edges of acceptability. Liam discovers life, in the form of a new baby, mysteriously discovered by him and a friend on a walk one day, and death in many, many forms. He balances precariously between the two, testing his way on a literal knife edge, fuelled by adrenaline, confusion and bigger emotions he cannot seem to contain.
This is much edgier than Skellig, and more suitable for older teenagers who can grapple with the serious content of the book and the questions it throws up, rather than for younger teens. The language is sparse and beautiful. Each scene is drawn with a few mesmerising paragraphs, and you become immersed in Liam's journey of discovery.
A powerful book.
This is much edgier than Skellig, and more suitable for older teenagers who can grapple with the serious content of the book and the questions it throws up, rather than for younger teens. The language is sparse and beautiful. Each scene is drawn with a few mesmerising paragraphs, and you become immersed in Liam's journey of discovery.
A powerful book.
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