It's Only a Game... (Kit's Wilderness - David Almond)

Member Name: lily7star

Product:	Kit's Wilderness - David Almond
Date:	04/09/01 (1725 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: wonderful book

Disadvantages: I haven't any more of his to read until he writes another one!

“ They thought we had disappeared, and they were wrong. They thought we were dead, and they were wrong. We stumbled together out of the ancient darkness into the shining valley. The sun glared down on us. The whole world glistened with ice and snow… Who could have known that we would walk together with such happiness, after all we’d been through?
It started with a game, a game we played in the autumn. I played it first on the day the clocks went back.”

So begins David Almond in his inimitably evocative and powerfully descriptive style.

“Kit’s Wilderness” is the second of David Almond’s wonderfully magical children’s novels. Having read his first and third thanks to their excellent reviews (read them!) here on dooyoo, and loved them both, I was half expecting “Kit’s Wildernesss” to be somehow disappointing. To say that both “Skellig” (his debut novel and winner of both the Carnegie medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year!) and “Heaven Eyes” were un-put-downably readable is to understate their raw but beautiful power. For me, however, “ Kit’s Wilderness” out-magics them both…..

David Almond grew up in a small pit village near the river Tyne. It was a place of “ancient coal mines, dark terraced streets, strange shops, new estates and wild heather hills” to use his own words, and a place which finds its echoes over and over again in his work. The words and the local dialect are wound seamlessly into stories which are both ancient and yet very much of today. Like a rich coal seam, they shine in the darkness which lurks at the edges of this story perhaps more than the others, waiting to be brought up and turned over and used as a source of warmth and wonder…

“We came to Stoneygate because Grandma died and Grandpa was left alone. We bought the house at Stoneygate’
s edge, one of a long line that faced the wilderness and the river.” So Kit tells his story. In Stoneygate he meets Askew, the local wild boy from a family whose name has been linked with trouble for generations and begins to play the game called “Death”. Unlike his new friend Allie Keenan, who plays the game simply to learn about life for her future career as an actress, and for whom it is all pretend, Kit plays the game in earnest and begins to see the things that Askew and only a few others see.

Ok, so this is a kid’s book? None of my children have read it yet, and when I’ve been asked by them what it’s ABOUT, I’ve told them they need to read it to understand, so I’m not really about to tell you what it’s about either. That’s one of the beauties of Almond’s writing – to simply recount a basic narrative falls so far short of his story-telling magic as to be almost a waste of time.

He is a true story-telling genius. A real story-teller. His stories have the powerful magic of tales containing essential truths and questions. About life and death, darkness and light, goodness and badness and the meaning of collective experience and understandings crossing history and race.

The power of any truly great story is to be found in what it says to the reader about themselves and their lives, in what it evokes of their history and future and the thoughts and dreams which are given flight by the words and concepts portrayed. Almond’s stories have the depth of myths and legends, stories which are told for us to wonder at and never quite be able to put into neat and definable boxes…..

I love David Almond’s books. Only my 12 year old has so far caught the same magic that I see….these are books for older children. The children in Almond’s stories tend to be around 13, and the concepts are beyond what most children under 10 or 11 would be able
to understand. I think it’s a shame to label these books as books for kids though. They’re some of the best books I’ve read in a long long time, and “Kit’s Wilderness” feels, perhaps more than any other, like it’s a part of me.

My history too began by the Tyne. As kids we talked like the kids in this story, we lived like them in many ways, and forever I had felt somehow linked to the mining community in a strange and inexplicable way. There was a sense of belonging. I never understood this feeling until I was sorting through my father’s papers after he died. Among them I found my grandparents’ birth certificates and found that his grandfather had been a miner from a mining family – something no-one among the generations I grew up with had ever known.

Dismiss is as pure coincidence, explain it away as mere wish-fulfilment, but for me there’s a link as mysterious but as real as any in Kit’s story, for this is what Kit’s story is about. The links drawing us back and simultaneously pushing us on. The links between us and our history, us and our ancestors, the ones who bore our family name, and the ones who didn’t, the ones in the stories we heard as children, and the ones in the stories we made up in our heads….

David Almond says he believes stories are living things. This one is vibrant while in part dark and repelling, sad and yet full of joy while it draws us ever on to who knows what conclusion…. Of course you could begin imagining the conclusion and what has gone before it from the first paragraph of the story which is the one with which this review begins...

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