This is a wonderful book with lots of depth, I allready look forwards to rereading it at some point and getting even more out of it. It tells the story of Madge and Paul, relatives who only see each other once a year at their grandmother's house, Goldengrove. It is a story about a lot of things including growing up and how we react to disability.
Madge is slightly older than Paul and trying to find her place in the world. I loved a scene where Madge, left alone, ponders on a conversation at school about being your true self when you are alone before rejecting this as she sees herself as a mirror to other people. This desire to efface herself plays out in her relationship with Ralph, the blind neighbour who she finds herself drawn to helping, if she can focus herself around a single person she doesn't have to decide who she is but can help them be better. Ralph, somewhat like an early Harriet Vane, is torn between resenting and appreciating this help, consequences of his blindness have at times made him bitter. Madge's attempts at empathy with him are mirrored in the reader by lucious descriptions of the beauty that surrounds Goldengrove. Interestingly there are no internal illustrations, perhaps to echo that feeling of seeing things only through anothers description. The scene when Madge is attempting to see what it would be like to be blind is wonderfully done and Paul's contribution to it is very thoughtprovoking about how much value these dramaticised exercises in empathy actually have.
Paul, in contrast, wants the holidays to be just like they always were and Madge is often torn between him and Ralph, childhood and adulthood, innocence and pain. The theme of optimism and innocence is key, Madge for much of the book believes in her power to make a difference, confident in the face of adult scepticism. By the end she is left much less certain and the book poses the question of whether this is a natural result of growing up. The other significant adult character, their grandmother, certainly seems to struggle with this. She worries a lot but also tries to change things within her own limits.
Paul resents them spending less time together, for him Goldengrove - as it was and sometimes still is to Madge - is a perfect unchanging moment and he feels hurried into change before he is ready. Jill Paton Walsh uses characters' internal monologues frequently to set up this dissonance, even when they are engaged in nostalgic pursuits their thoughts sometimes tell a different story. Almost like the contrary narratives of many well written picture books, Goldengrove might make a very interesting graphic novel addaptation - there would be some interesting things to be done with colour too.
It is a book full of a delicious heavy tension, created by these confounded expectations grinding against each other and the knowledge that the holiday must end and that things will come to a head. There are also some very interesting twists and turns that I don't want to spoil in this review. Read it for yourself!
Written by Jack.