THE THINGS WE DID FOR LOVE publishes in two weeks.  I am fighting the temptation to bury my head in the sand by burying my head in a book instead.  I'm going through a Penelope Lively phase right now, having been given HOW IT ALL BEGAN for Christmas: I'm on holiday in a friend's cottage in lovely Salthouse in North Norfolk, and from her well-stocked bookshelves I have plucked AFTER NATURE, ART, a delightful novel about a "creative retreat" in a run-down ancestral home in the British Countryside.  There wannabe artists are conned into believing that they will become better painters/experimental sculptors/poets/potters whilst the loathsome owner of the home holds secret conversations with "the man in London" as he tries to sell off the house and secure financial backing to expand his business.  It's funny and witty and wry, but with an unmistakeable sense of menace provided largely by descriptions of the nature which surrounds the house. Owls hunt.  Small animals scream. Stinkhorn mushrooms give off corpse like odors. There are all sorts of other things I should be reading - about a hundred manuscripts for work, the editorial revisions of my own book (AFTER IRIS, more on that in a few months time!), the book prescribed by my book group (THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ and no, I can't get into it).  But all I want to do is curl up with Penelope and find out what happens next to her host of unpleasant, quarrelsome, very human and (in some cases) very endearing characters.  This is how I want to write - stark, limpid, evocative prose which has the reader feverishly turning pages.  Penelope, I salute you!

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

It seems fitting to begin a blog about kids' and YA books with the YA book everyone is talking about.  John Green is currently on tour in the US, where he is being mobbed by hysterical teenage girls in a manner normally reserved for rock stars.  I admit, I'm jealous (I have always dreamed of being mobbed by teenage girls:)).  Seriously: I'm jealous because he writes so well, and yet I found myself perplexed by this book.  John Green and the media surrounding him write that this is not a cancer book, and yet it is a book about teenagers with cancer.  Spoiler alert: one goes blind, one dies, one is still alive at the end of the book but we know there is little hope of her surviving. In the meantime, they fall in love, they have furious conversations about books and life and literature, they travel to Amsterdam to visit their hero, an unpleasant drunk writer who is mourning the loss of his own teenage daughter to, you guessed it, cancer.  This book is raw. And funny.  And a little bit self-indulgent in its cleverness and wit.

And it's about cancer.

But it's not a cancer book. It's about more than cancer.

Just as people with cancer are not cancer people.

That's the point, of course, and it's a point well made.