CANR
WORK TITLE: THE RUINOUS SWEEP
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Jones, Tim Wynne; Wynne-Jones, Timothy
BIRTHDATE: 8/15/1948
WEBSITE: http://www.timwynne-jones.com/
CITY:
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
LAST VOLUME: SATA 317
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 12, 1948, in Bromborough, Cheshire, England; immigrated to Canada, 1952; son of Sydney Thomas and Sheila Beryce Wynne-Jones; married Amanda West Lewis (a writer, calligrapher, director, and teacher), September 12, 1980; children: Alexander, Magdalene, Lewis.
EDUCATION:University of Waterloo, B.F.A., 1974; York University, M.F.A., 1979.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator, and editor. PMA Books, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, designer, 1974-76; University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, instructor in visual arts, 1976-78; Solomon & Wynne-Jones, Toronto, graphic designer, 1976-79; York University, Downsview, Ontario, instructor in visual arts, 1978-80; Red Deer College Press, children’s book editor, 1990-96. Vermont College, instructor in M.F.A. in writing for children and young adults program, beginning 2002; Humber School of Writers, instructor in correspondence program, 2007—. University of New Brunswick, instructor in maritime workshop; Children’s Literature New England, lecturer in summer institute, 1997-2006; writing instructor at Banff School of Fine Arts, Red Deer College, St. Lawrence College, Algonquin College, and University of Ottawa. Writer-in-residence, Perth and District Public Library, Perth, Ontario, 1988, and Nepean Public Library, Nepean, Ontario, 1993.
AVOCATIONS:Cooking, cross-country skiing, crosswords.
MEMBER:Writers Union of Canada, Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada.
AWARDS:Seal First Novel Award, Bantam/Seal Books, 1980, for Odd’s End; I.O.D.E. Award, 1983, and Ruth Schwartz Children’s Award, 1984, both for Zoom at Sea; Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television, and Radio Artists Award for best radio drama, 1987, for St. Anthony’s Man; Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature, and Canadian Library Association (CLA) Children’s Book of the Year award, both 1993, and Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Fiction, 1995, all for Some of the Kinder Planets; Notable Books for Children citation, American Library Association (ALA), and Mister Christie Award shortlist, both 1994, both for The Book of Changes; Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature, 1995, and CLA Young-Adult Book of the Year designation, Mister Christie Award shortlist, and Books for the Teen Age citation, New York Public Library, all 1997, all for The Maestro; Vicky Metcalf Award, Canadian Authors Association, 1997, for body of work; CLA Children’s Book of the Year designation, 1998, for Stephen Fair; Books for the Teen Age citation, New York Public Library, 1999, for Lord of the Fries; Arthur Ellis Award, Crime Writers of Canada, and Edgar Allan Poe Award shortlist, Mystery Writers of America, both 2001, and Ruth Schwartz Award shortlist, Ontario Arts Council, Red Maple Award shortlist, Ontario Library Association, and London Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize shortlist, all for The Boy in the Burning House; Rocky Mountain Book Award, 2005, for Ned Mouse Breaks Away; Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award shortlist, CLA Book of the Year for Children Honour Book selection, TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award finalist, and Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor Book designation, all 2007, and ALA Notable Children’s Books designation, and Outstanding International Books listee, U.S. Board on Books for Young People (USBBY), all for Rex Zero and the End of the World; Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award shortlist, 2007, Violet Downey Book Award shortlist, IODE Canada, 2008, and International Book Award Honor Book selection, Society of School Librarians, and USBBY Outstanding International Books listee, all for Rex Zero, King of Nothing; Governor General’s Award shortlist, ALA Best Books for Young Adults designation, and Arthur Ellis Award finalist, all 2009, all for The Uninvited; named officer, Order of Canada, 2011; Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award shortlist, ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults designation, and Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, all 2011, and Arthur Ellis Award, 2012, all for Blink and Caution; Hans Christian Andersen Award nomination, 2012.
WRITINGS
Author of libretto for children’s opera A Midwinter Night’s Dream and a musical version of Mischief City. Contributor of book reviews to Toronto Globe & Mail, 1985-88, and to periodicals including Chickadee, Horn Book.
SIDELIGHTS
During his lengthy career, Tim Wynne-Jones has proven himself to be a versatile and perceptive writer. The British-born Canadian author of more than thirty books for children, teenagers, and adults, Wynne-Jones has received numerous honors for his literary achievements, including three Governor General’s awards, a Vicky Metcalf award for his body of work in children’s literature, and the honor of being named to the Order of Canada. “I write because I love mysteries,” Wynne-Jones remarked to Steve Bramucci in a Rain Taxi online interview. “Every book I write is a mystery in some sense because I love the adventure of solving the riddles it creates. But I want the adventure to lead somewhere and I want the solution to be some form of redemption. I’m interested in how any of us makes sense of this thing we do called living.”
Considered one of Canada’s most popular authors among preschoolers and primary graders, Wynne-Jones captures the mystery, fantasy, and wonder of childhood in his books while also addressing such realistic concerns as the conquering of personal fears and the relationship between children and their parents. He is known and appreciated for his rich language, zany plots, and a sophistication of theme that does not proclaim itself didactically, but that “reverberates beneath the simple surface of image and dialogue,” as Gwyneth Evans noted in Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers.
Madeline and Ermadello and Zoom at Sea
Wynne-Jones’s first book highlights the elements of fantasy and wonder that many critics cite as characteristic of his work for children. Madeline and Ermadello was described as a “quietly charming story about a young girl’s fantasies” by In Review contributor Linda Smith. Ermadello is Madeline’s friend, the third in a trio that includes her carpenter father, Ernie, and her next door neighbor, Barnell. Ermadello is special: because he is imaginary, Madeline can make him be anything she wants him to be. The quiet climax to this picture book comes when Madeline introduces Ermadello to her real-life friends at a tea party. A Children’s Book News reviewer concluded that Madeline and Ermadello “is a charming story of friendship that younger readers are certain to enjoy.”
Although a visual artist himself, Wynne-Jones does not illustrate his own books. Rather, he collaborates with other artists whose work he respects. One such artist is Ken Nutt, an acquaintance whose artwork (sometimes credited under his pseudonym Eric Beddows) Wynne-Jones believed would be a good fit for picture books. The direct inspiration for this collaboration was the author’s family cat, Montezuma—or Zuma for short. While busy early one morning, Wynne-Jones observed Zuma sitting on the kitchen counter batting at water from a dripping faucet. The idea for an adventure-loving and water- loving cat came to the author quickly. Brought to life in Nutt’s art, Zoom the cat goes to the home of the mysterious Maria, a woman who helps him realize his lifelong dream of going to sea. Linda Granfield, writing in Quill & Quire, noted that Zoom at Sea features a “perfect balance of text and illustration” that combine to inspire children and adults alike to “live our dreams.”
Zoom Away and Zoom Upstream
In a sequel, Zoom Away, a trip upstairs to Maria’s attic becomes the magical metaphor for a trip to the Arctic. Zoom goes in search of the nautical tomcat, Uncle Roy, who set sail for the North Pole and has not been heard from since. Again, Nutt’s simple black-and-white illustrations “complement … perfectly” Wynne-Jones’s text, according to Bernie Goedhart in Quill & Quire. Goedhart concluded that the two “seem destined to carve themselves a permanent niche in the world of Canadian picture-books.” Sarah Ellis, writing in Horn Book, commented that “ Zoom Away is one of those rare picture books that combines absolute simplicity with mythic resonance” because its “story is bigger that its plot.”
If Zoom travels to the Arctic via Maria’s attic, the next obvious question—and one posed to Wynne-Jones by a student: What would a trip to the basement hold in store for Zoom? The answer comes in the third “Zoom” book, Zoom Upstream. Set in ancient, cat-revering Egypt, Zoom Upstream has Zoom following a mysterious trail through a bookshelf to the land of the pharaohs, where he joins Maria in a further search for Uncle Roy. When Maria shows Zoom five silver buttons from a sailor’s coat, these clues ultimately lead the two to Uncle Roy and safety. The book’s ending was described by Janet McNaughton in Quill & Quire as “more like a beginning,” with the trio sailing away in search of the source of the Nile. Zoom Upstream is “a very special book,” concluded McNaughton.
I'll Make You Small and Builder of the Moon
With I’ll Make You Small Wynne-Jones moves away from the voyaging world of cats to the more prosaic but no-less-dangerous world of the suburban neighborhood. Young Roland’s next- door neighbor, crotchety old Mr. Swanskin, threatens to make Roland shrink in size if he catches the boy trespassing on his property. When Swanskin is not seen for several days, Roland is sent by his mother to investigate, only to find the eccentric old man repairing the toys he broke during his own childhood. The gift of a pie saves Roland from Swanskin’s threats, and he learns the man’s secret: that he was made to feel small as a child. “A child who likes scary stories, but is too young for [Edgar Allan] Poe or [Alfred] Hitchcock, should enjoy this book,” commented Bernie Goedhart in Quill & Quire.
Another popular picture book from Wynne-Jones, and one that Five Owls contributor Anne Lundin compared to Maurice Sendak’s popular Where the Wild Things Are, Architect of the Moon was published in the United States as Builder of the Moon. In this story young David Finebloom receives an urgent message one night via moonbeam and soon he is flying up into the sky, building blocks in hand, to repair the moon. Lundin noted in her review that “Wynne-Jones’s text is spare, simple, poetic,” while Walker wrote in Canadian Children’s Literature that the author’s “subtle work” “does not enclose but encourages the child to take a decisive step toward change.” Also writing in Canadian Children’s Literature, Michael Steig noted that Architect of the Moon features a “visual text” in which pictures and text “achieve … a highly gratifying level of literary and artistic complexity and interest.”
Some of the Kinder Planets and The Book of Changes
Turning to short fiction, Wynne-Jones has produced several collections that have a special appeal for young readers. His award-winning Some of the Kinder Planets contains nine stories in which children make encounters with other worlds, both metaphorically and realistically. Reviewing the work, Deborah Stevenson commented in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books that the writing “is thoughtful, inventive, and often humorous,” while a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that “ordinary moments take on a fresh veneer in this finely tuned short-story collection.”
More short stories are offered up in The Book of Changes, a work described as a “fine collection” by a Kirkus Reviews critic and “a delight” by Quill & Quire contributor Annette Goldsmith. Told from the point of view of male narrators, the seven stories in the collection “hold wonder and fascination for inquisitive readers,” according to School Library Journal reviewer John Sigwald. “Wynne-Jones deals in moments, and these are carefully chosen and freshly realized,” Sarah Ellis remarked in Horn Book. In “The Clark Beans Man,” for instance, a boy employs his Donald Duck impersonation to fend off a schoolyard bully, while in “Dawn” a teenager on a bus trip develops a brief friendship with a tough-looking older girl. Nancy Vasilakis, also writing in Horn Book, concluded that in The Book of Changes “Wynne-Jones tells his readers … that we all have the power to create the music of our own lives.”
Other story collections by Wynne-Jones include Lord of the Fries, and Other Stories as well as the edited collection Boy’s Own: An Anthology of Canadian Fiction for Young Readers. A reviewer in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books observed of Lord of the Fries, and Other Stories that the author’s “creative plotting and faith in the power of imagination … keep … events sparking along in absorbing and unpredictable ways.”
The Maestro and Stephen Fair
With the young-adult novel The Maestro Wynne-Jones again broke new ground. The story focuses on fourteen- year-old Burl and his struggle for survival after he flees his brutal father and seeks shelter in a remote cabin by a Canadian lake. The cabin is inhabited by Nathaniel Gow, a musical genius who is himself attempting to hide from the mechanized world. Gow—patterned after real-life Canadian musician Glen Gould—allows Burl to stay at his cabin while he travels home to Toronto. When Burl learns of Gow’s subsequent death he tries to claim the cabin for himself, then goes on a mission to save Gow’s final musical composition, confronting his abusive father along the way. Roderick McGillis, writing in Canadian Children’s Literature, noted that while The Maestro is “redolently Canadian,” it also offers much more. “Its prose is dense and its themes move into challenging areas for young readers,” McGillis remarked.
The author turns to psychological suspense in Stephen Fair, a novel about a fifteen-year-old who is plagued by nightmares. With the support of his friend Virginia, Stephen ultimately begins to question his troubled family life, including his mother’s erratic behavior and the disappearances of his father and older brother. “Wynne-Jones is an impressive stylist,” remarked a critic in reviewing Stephen Fair for the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, “and his depiction of Stephen’s family, friends, and thoughts are unforcedly deft.” A Kirkus Reviews writer noted that the author reveals his characters’ feelings “through quick, telling details and comments, or heavily symbolic background events,” and a Publishers Weekly reviewer declared that Wynne-Jones “maintains the suspense while Stephen slowly unveils family secrets.”
The Boy in the Burning House and A Thief in the House of Memory
Taking place in rural Ontario, The Boy in the Burning House focuses on Jim Hawkins, a teen who lives with his mother. Maintaining a living on the family farm has been difficult since the disappearance of Jim’s father, and the young man is quick to anger when neighboring teen Ruth Rose starts rumors about the death of Jim’s dad and the complicity of her upstanding minister stepfather in the man’s disappearance. Although most people ignore the troubled young woman’s stories, Jim takes portions to heart, beginning an investigation that uncovers arson and murder and resolves a mystery that “spins out taut as a bow string,” according to Booklist critic GraceAnne A. DeCandido. In Publishers Weekly a contributor dubbed The Boy in the Burning House “an action-packed thriller” in which Wynne-Jones’s “swift-moving plot will keep the pages turning,” and Horn Book reviewer Lauren Adams wrote that the book’s “gripping, fast-moving” storyline “offers the pure adrenaline rush of a thriller.”
Described by a Publishers Weekly contributor as a reading experience akin to “entering a dream,” A Thief in the House of Memory introduces readers to sixteen-year-old Declan Steeple, a boy who is, like Jim in The Boy in the Burning House, also dealing with parental abandonment. Since his mother’s departure six years before, Declan has lived with his father and little sister Sunny and, more recently, with his father’s girlfriend Birdie. As questions about his mother’s disappearance draw him into the past, the teen is compelled to return to the family’s large estate, Steeple Hall, which now stands empty atop a hill overlooking his new home. On one visit to the mansion, Declan and Sunny discover the body of a housebreaker. When the dead man turns out to be someone who once knew his mother, his appearance generates revelations that ultimately became key to unlocking Declan’s own past. Wynne-Jones’s novel serves as “part mystery and part psychological study of how the past affects the present,” according to the Publishers Weekly contributor, while in Horn Book Vicky Smith called A Thief in the House of Memory “equal parts tricky and haunting,” and “unambiguously memorable.”
The Uninvited and the "Rex Zero" Series
A chilling tale for young adults, The Uninvited centers on Mimi Shapiro, a college student who heads to her father’s remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness after an emotional freshman year. To her surprise, she finds the cottage occupied by Jay Page, a half-brother she has never met. Mimi and Jay soon form a close bond and agree to share the space, but they are alarmed to discover that someone has been watching them and, worse, breaking into the cabin. The surprising identity of the stalker adds to the suspense in this “tale of twisted family ties,” as a Publishers Weekly contributor described The Uninvited .
Based on Wynne-Jones’s childhood and geared for preteen readers, the “Rex Zero” stories include Rex Zero and the End of the World, Rex Zero, the King of Nothing, and Rex Zero, the Great Pretender. Set in 1962, Rex Zero and the End of the World introduces readers to Rex Harrison as the eleven-year-old and his family adjust to life in their new home in Ottawa. As Canadians grow concerned over the possibility of a nuclear Armageddon sparked by cold-war tensions between the United States and the USSR, Rex finds those fears filtering down into his own world. When he discovers a strange creature, his first thought is that it has been mutated by exposure to radiation. However, when it turns out to be a panther named Tronido that has escaped from the local zoo, efforts to capture the creature help the boy make new friends and adjust to a new way of life.
In his humorous and lighthearted present-tense narrative, Rex “paints a universe both hopeful and realistic, one that readers may well want to visit,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, while in Horn Book Julie Roach wrote of Rex Zero, the King of Nothing that Wynne-Jones’s “timely piece of historical fiction … casts a haunting light on kids growing up in a world filled with fear.” Praising the novel as “delightfully nerve-wracking, eccentric and optimistic,” a Kirkus Reviews writer took special delight in the many details of mid-twentieth-century popular culture that salt Wynne-Jones’s story. “Any distance created” by the nostalgic setting of Rex Zero and the End of the World “is more than made up for by the intricately flavored details of Rex’s life,” the reviewer concluded.
In Rex Zero, the Great Pretender, the next installment in the popular series, the now twelve-year-old protagonist devises a clever (albeit exhausting) scheme to avoid leaving his friends after his parents announce that the family must relocate for the eighth time. Volunteering to deliver the necessary enrollment forms to his new school, Rex ditches the paperwork and instead rises early each morning to catch the cross-town bus to his former neighborhood. Although the plan works for a while, the preteen’s guilty conscience eventually begins to bother him. “Family dynamics and friendships are skillfully fleshed out, with fully developed characters to whom readers will readily relate,” Kim Dare explained in her School Library Journal review of Wynne-Jones’s entertaining story.
Blink and Caution
Wynne-Jones received the prestigious Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Blink and Caution, an “elegantly constructed noir mystery and love story,” in the words of a Kirkus Reviews critic. Brent “Blink” Conboy, a homeless teen surviving on the streets of Toronto, witnesses the fake abduction of a prominent businessman and becomes obsessed with investigating the mysterious circumstances surrounding the event. He soon crosses paths with Kitty “Caution” Pettigrew, a street kid who is fleeing her abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend, and the teens realize that by helping one another, they can each find a measure of peace.
“Blink and Caution‘s gradual need to trust each other to heal drives the story forward,” a contributor in Publishers Weekly observed, and Horn Book reviewer Christine M. Heppermann similarly noted that the protagonists’ “relationship deepens as they help each other survive immediate dangers as well as the aftereffects of past trauma.” “This is gritty, sure, but more than that, it’s smart, and earns every drop of its hopeful finish,” Daniel Kraus asserted in his review of Blink and Caution for Booklist.
“The part about being a writer I like best is the time between books,” Wynne-Jones stated in his Boston Globe/Horn Book Award acceptance speech for Blink and Caution. “It’s when you allow yourself to imagine that the next book will really be good; the next book will be the one you were meant to write. No story is as full of promise as the one that’s in your head. You get over this heady sensation soon enough, once you actually start writing, but the time before writing is … well, it’s rather like being in love.”
The Emperor of Any Place
A grieving teen named Evan is one of the protagonists of the 2015 young adult novel, The Emperor of Any Place. The book’s title refers to an inside joke between Evan and his dad, who recently died. For solace, Evan reads a manuscript he finds on his dad’s desk. It tells the story of his grandfather, Griff, whose efforts to save a fellow American soldier during WWII may have inadvertently killed a Japanese soldier named Osamu. Though it is initially difficult, Evan eventually forges a bond with his grandfather.
“Alternately terrifying and inspiring, The Emperor of Any Place is a masterful entwining of what has been and what is to come,” asserted Karyn Saemann in Reviewer’s Bookwatch. Susannah Goldstein, critic in School Library Journal, commented: “Offering a unique take on the World War II period, this intergenerational tale is an excellent addition to most YA collections.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer suggested: “Wynne-Jones … deftly blends realism and fantasy in this eerie tale.” Writing in Voice of Youth Advocates, Debbie Wenk stated: “Teen readers will devour this book. Tension, adventure, mystery, and fantasy combine to make this a page-turner.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “Wynne-Jones achieves an extraordinary feat: he illuminates the hidden depths of personalities and families through a mesmerizing blend of realism and magic.” Booklist critic, Carolyn Phelan, described the volume as “a riveting, remarkable novel by a reliably great Canadian writer.” “Literary master Tim Wynne-Jones has penned another outstanding book for adventurous readers, combining history and horror to grip the imagination,” opined Diane Colson in BookPage. In a lengthy assessment of the volume in Resource Links, Joan Marshall asserted: “It could have been very heavy and sad but the moments of lightness provided by Osamu’s writing and Evan’s inner self-talk move the action along and will be appreciated by the intended reader. Osamu’s survival and his tracking and finding of Derwood are very dramatic, pulling the action along so quickly that it will be difficult for readers to put down this excellent book. Highly recommended.”
Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes
Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes is a picture book written by Wynne-Jones and illustrated by Brian Won. The protagonist, S.A.M., is a young aspiring spy. He goes with his mom, whom he calls K, to the shoe store. There, he acquires a fancy pair of sneakers with tiger stripes. His shoes later help him run to K’s rescue during a thunderstorm.
Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst, contributor to School Library Journal, remarked: “Children will enjoy sharing Sam’s clever, creative adventure.” Whitehurst described the book as “a terrific read-aloud with bold, dynamic art.” A Publishers Weekly writer commented: “Wynne-Jones … creates some lovely, offhanded rapport between mother and son.” “Energetic compositions and appealing artwork bolster this spy-friendly text,” asserted a critic in Kirkus Reviews. Jeanne McDermott, reviewer in Booklist, suggested: “This spirited story captures the enthusiasm of make-believe games, not to mention the appeal of brand-new sneakers.”
The Ruinous Sweep
In The Ruinous Sweep, a teenager named Donovan Turner is injured in a hit-and-run accident. Bee, his girlfriend, rushes to be by his side as he is treated at the hospital. Bee is also shocked to learn from police that Donovan is the lead suspect in the murder of his own father, an abusive alcoholic. She decides to find out what really happened during the two incidents.
Writing in School Library Journal, Emily Moore commented: “This murder mystery is highly recommended and would make for a great book-club read.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews asserted: “Suspenseful and complex, this will mesmerize readers patient enough to stick with it.” “Believably quirky characters and genuinely terrifying moments will keep readers enthralled until the bittersweet finale,” predicted a Publishers Weekly critic. Jessica Anne Bratt, reviewer in Booklist, remarked: “Readers will love putting together the puzzle pieces to figure out what is really going on here.” Voice of Youth Advocates writer, Aimee Ambrose, suggested: “Young adults who enjoy crime dramas will be enticed to pick this book up.” “Fans of thrillers will find plenty of suspense in this story with vague echoes of Dante’s Inferno,” wrote Sharon Verbeten in BookPage. Christina L. Dobbs, contributor to the Horn Book Magazine, stated: “The reader will be engrossed, like Bee, in unraveling the mystery and piecing together events.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Children’s Literature Review, Volume 21, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.
Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1995.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2001, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of The Boy in the Burning House, p. 97; March 1, 2005, Carolyn Phelan, review of A Thief in the House of Memory, p. 1186; March 1, 2007, Hazel Rochman, review of Rex Zero and the End of the World, p. 86, and Gillian Engberg, review of The Boat in the Tree, p. 90; May 1, 2009, Gillian Engberg, review of The Uninvited, p. 41; December 1, 2010, Hazel Rochman, review of Rex Zero, the Great Pretender, p. 60; February 1, 2011, Daniel Kraus, review of Blink and Caution, p. 76; September 15, 2015, Carolyn Phelan, review of The Emperor of Any Place, p. 63; May 15, 2016, Jeanne McDermott, review of Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes, p. 60; May 15, 2018, Jessica Anne Brett, review of The Ruinous Sweep, p. 52.
BookPage, October, 2015, Diane Colson, review of The Emperor of Any Place, p. 29; July, 2018, Sharon Verbeten, review of The Ruinous Sweep, p. 26.
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, May, 1995, Deborah Stevenson, review of One of the Kinder Planets, p. 328; October, 1996, Deborah Stevenson, review of The Maestro, p. 81; March, 1999, review of Lord of the Fries, and Other Stories, p. 260; May, 2005, review of A Thief in the House of Memory, p. 412; April, 2007, Elizabeth Bush, review of Rex Zero and the End of the World, p. 349.
Canadian Children’s Literature, number 60, 1990, Ulrike Walker, “A Matter of Thresholds,” pp. 108-116; number 70, 1993, Michael Steig, “The Importance of the Visual Text in Architect of the Moon: Mothers, Teapots, et al.,” pp. 22-33; number 81, 1996, Roderick McGillis, review of The Maestro, pp. 58- 59.
Canadian Literature, spring, 1987, Jon C. Stott, review of Zoom Away, p. 160.
Canadian Review of Materials, January-February, 1994, Joyce MacPhee, “Profile: Tim Wynne-Jones,” p. 4.
Children’s Book News, June, 1979, review of Madeline and Ermadello, p. 2.
Emergency Librarian, January- February, 1988, Dave Jenkinson, “Tim Wynne-Jones,” pp. 56- 62.
Five Owls, May-June, 1989, Anne Lundin, review of Builder of the Moon.
Horn Book, May-June, 1987, Sarah Ellis, review of Zoom Away, pp. 378-381; January- February, 1995, Sarah Ellis, reviews of Some of the Kinder Planets and The Book of Changes; February, 1996, Nancy Vasilakis, review of The Book of Changes, pp. 76-77; November-December, 2001, Lauren Adams, review of The Boy in the Burning House, p. 759; May-June, 2005, Vicky Smith, review of A Thief in the House of Memory, p. 334; March-April, 2007, Vicky Smith, review of Rex Zero and the End of the World, p. 207; January- February, 2008, Julie Roach, review of Rex Zero and the End of the World, p. 26; March-April, 2008, Vicky Smith, review of Rex Zero, the King of Nothing, p. 222; May-June, 2009, Jonathan Hunt, review of The Uninvited, p. 311; November-December, 2010, Dean Schneider, reveiw of Rex Zero, the Great Pretender, p. 108; March-April, 2011, Christine M. Heppermann, review of Blink and Caution, p. 129; January-February, 2012, Jennifer M. Brabander, review of Blink and Caution, p. 33, and Tim Wynne-Jones, transcript of Boston Globe/Horn Book acceptance speech, p. 33; November-December, 2015, Sam Bloom, review of The Emperor of Any Place, p. 94; September-October, 2018, Christina L. Dobbs, review of The Ruinous Sweep, p. 99.
In Review, winter, 1978, Linda Smith, review of Madeline and Ermadello, p. 70.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 1995, review of The Book of Changes, p. 1032; April 1, 1998, review of Stephen Fair, pp. 503-504; April 1, 2005, review of A Thief in the House of Memory, p. 429; February 1, 2007, review of Rex Zero and the End of the World, p. 131; February 15, 2007, review of The Boat in the Tree; March 15, 2008, review of Rex Zero, the King of Nothing; April 15, 2009, review of The Uninvited; October 1, 2010, review of Rex Zero, the Great Pretender; February 1, 2011, review of Blink and Caution; September 1, 2015, review of The Emperor of Any Place; April 15, 2016, review of Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes; April 15, 2018, review of The Ruinous Sweep.
Kliatt, September, 2001, Paula Rohrlick, review of The Boy in the Burning House; May, 2005, Michele Winship, review of A Thief in the House of Memory, p. 19.
Publishers Weekly, May 1, 1995, review of One of the Kinder Planets, p. 59; March 16, 1998, review of Stephen Fair, p. 65; September 24, 2001, review of The Boy in the Burning House, p. 94; February 3, 2003, review of Ned Mouse Breaks Away, p. 76; May 9, 2005, review of A Thief in the House of Memory, p. 71; February 5, 2007, review of Rex Zero and the End of the World, p. 60; May 4, 2009, review of The Uninvited, p. 51; January 17, 2011, review of Blink and Caution, p. 50; July 20, 2015, review of The Emperor of Any Place, p. 194; December 2, 2015, review of The Emperor of Any Place, p. 114; March 14, 2016, review of Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes, p. 76; April 16, 2018, review of The Ruinous Sweep, p. 94.
Quill & Quire, August, 1985, Bernie Goedhart, review of Zoom Away, p. 38; October, 1986, Bernie Goedhart, review of I’ll Make You Small, p. 16; December, 1986, Joan McGrath, “Poems for Kids Conjure up a Cockeyed World,” p. 15; November, 1992, Janet McNaughton, review of Zoom Upstream, p. 33; October, 1994, Annette Goldsmith, review of The Book of Changes, p. 38; December, 1995, Maureen Garvie, review of The Maestro, pp. 36-37.
Resource Links, February, 2008, Teresa Hughes, review of Rex Zero: King of Nothing, p. 14; February, 2010, Myra Junyk, review of Rex Zero, the Great Pretender, p. 14; December, 2015, Joan Marshall, review of The Emperor of Any Place, p. 34; June, 2018, Lesley Little, review of The Ruinous Sweep, p. 21.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, February, 2016, Karyn Saemann, review of The Emperor of Any Place.
School Library Journal, March, 1984, Linda Granfield, review of Zoom at Sea, p. 72; October, 1995, John Sigwald, review of The Book of Changes, pp. 141-142; October, 2001, Alison Follos, review of The Boy in the Burning House, p. 176; April, 2003, Eva Mitnick, review of Ned Mouse Breaks Away, p. 144; April, 2005, Karyn N. Silverman, review of A Thief in the House of Memory, p. 144; May, 2007, Caitlin Augusta, review of Rex Zero and the End of the World, p. 146; June, 2007, Ieva Bates, review of The Boat in the Tree, p. 127; May, 2008, Connie Tyrrell Burns, review of Rex Zero, King of Nothing, p. 142; July, 2009, Joyce Adams Burner, review of The Uninvited, p. 96; October, 2010, Kim Dare, review of Rex Zero, the Great Pretender, p. 129; February, 2011, Misti Tidman, review of Blink and Caution, p. 122; October, 2015, Susannah Goldstein, review of The Emperor of Any Place, p. 118; June, 2016, Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst, review of Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes, p. 86; June, 2018, Emily Moore, review of The Ruinous Sweep, p. 96.
Voice of Youth Advocates, February, 2007, Alison Follos, review of The Boy in the Burning House, p. 503; April, 2007, Angela Semifero, review of Rex Zero and the End of the World, p. 59; April, 2011, Kim Carter, review of Blink and Caution, p. 72; August, 2015, Debbie Wenk and Sarah Phillips, review of The Emperor of Any Place, p. 86; June, 2018, Aimee Ambrose, review of The Ruinous Sweep, p. 67.
ONLINE
Open Book, http://open-book.ca/ (July 25, 2018), author interview.
Rain Taxi Online, http://www.raintaxi.com/ (September 1, 2011), Steve Bramucci, interview with Wynne-Jones.
Tim Wynne-Jones website, http://www.timwynne-jones.com (November 12, 2018).
Toronto Star Online, http://www.thestar.com/ (May 10, 2011), Vit Wagner, “Tim Wynne-Jones: In the Running for the ‘Little Nobel.’”
Series
Zoom the cat
Zoom at Sea (1985)
Zoom Away (1987)
Zoom Upstream (1992)
The Zoom Trilogy (omnibus) (2001)
Rex Zero
1. Rex Zero and the End of the World (2006)
2. Rex Zero, King of Nothing (2008)
3. Rex Zero, the Great Pretender (2010)
The Rex Zero Series Bundle (omnibus) (2016)
Novels
Odd's End (1980)
Odd's End No-Name (1980)
The Knot (1982)
Le Matou Marin (1984)
Fastyngange (1988)
Mischief City (1989)
Hour of the Frog (1990)
Voices (1990)
Mouse in the Manager (1993)
The last piece of sky (1993)
The Maestro (1995)
Mouse in the Manger (1995)
The Book of Changes (1995)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1997)
Rosie Backstage (1997)
Architect of the Moon (1998)
Lord of the Fries (1999)
The Boy in the Burning House (2000)
Ned Mouse Breaks Away (2003)
A Thief in the House of Memory (2004)
The Survival Game (2006)
Click (2007) (with David Almond, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Deborah Ellis, Nick Hornby, Margo Lanagan, Gregory Maguire, Ruth Ozeki and Linda Sue Park)
The Uninvited (2009)
Blink & Caution (2011)
The Emperor of Any Place (2015)
The Ruinous Sweep (2018)
Omnibus
The Tim Wynne-Jones Bundle (2016)
Collections
Some of the Kinder Planets (1993)
Picture Books
Builder of the Moon (1988)
I'll Make You Small (1988)
Boat in the Tree (2007)
On Tumbledown Hill (2008)
Pounce de Leon (2009)
Zoom (2009)
Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes (2016)
Anthologies edited
Boys' Own (2000)
Tim Wynne-Jones
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Tim Wynne-Jones, OC (born 12 August 1948) is an English–Canadian author of children's literature, including picture books and novels for children and young adults, novels for adults,[1] radio dramas, songs for the CBC/Jim Henson production Fraggle Rock,[2] as well as a children's musical and an opera libretto.[3]
For his contribution as a children's writer he was Canada's nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2012.[4]
Contents
1
Biography
2
Writing
3
Works
3.1
Children's picture books
3.2
Juvenile and Young adult fiction
3.3
Adult fiction
3.4
Co-Authored
3.5
Radio plays
4
Awards
5
References
6
External links
Biography[edit]
Born on August 12, 1948 in Bromborough, Cheshire, Great Britain, Wynne-Jones emigrated to Canada in 1952. Wynne-Jones was raised in British Columbia and Ontario. Wynne-Jones currently lives in Perth, Ontario.
Wynne-Jones was educated at the University of Waterloo and Yale University, after having graduated from Ridgemont High School in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.[5] An additional formative experience was his participation in the St Matthew's Anglican Church choir of men and boys, of which he was for a time the Head Chorister.[6] He is a faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts, teaching in the Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA program.[7]
Writing[edit]
Tim Wynne-Jones' first book was Odd's End which is said to have been written over the space of five weeks while his wife was away.[8] It was published By McClelland & Stewart in 1980 and won the $50,000 Seal First Novel Award.[9] Since then, Wynne-Jones has written more than 20 books, including picture books, novels for children and young adults, as well as three novels for adults. His work has been widely reviewed and he has won several awards, including two Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards from The Horn Book Magazine for children's fiction published in the U.S. (1995, 2011);[10] three Governor General's Literary Awards in Canada (1993, 1995, 2009);[11] three Canadian Library Association Prizes; the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada (2001);[12] and the Edgar Award for Young Adult Mystery from the Mystery Writers of America (2002).[13]
Works[edit]
Children's picture books[edit]
Madeline and Ermadillo - 1976
Zoom at Sea - 1983
Zoom Away - 1985
The Hour of the Frog - 1985
I'll Make You Small - 1986
Mischief City - 1986
Architect of the Moon - 1988 (U.S. title: Builder of the Moon)
Zoom Upstream - 1992
The Last Piece of Sky - 1993
Mouse In the Manger - 1993
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - 1996
Dracula - 1997
On Tumbledown Hill - 1998
Ned Mouse Breaks Away - 2002
Juvenile and Young adult fiction[edit]
Some of the Kinder Planets - 1993
Rosie Backstage - 1994 (with Amanda Lewis)
The Book of Changes - 1994
The Maestro - 1995 (Australian title: The Flight of Burl Crow, UK title The Survival Game)
Stephen Fair - 1998
Lord of the Fries and Other Stories - 1999
The Boy in the Burning House - 2000 (Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel, 2002)
A Midwinter Night's Dream - 2003 (Libretto, commissioned by the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus)
A Thief in the House of Memory - 2004
Rex Zero and the End of the World - 2007
Rex Zero, King of Nothing - 2008
The Uninvited - 2009
Rex Zero, the Great Pretender - 2010
Blink and Caution - 2011
Adult fiction[edit]
Odd's End - 1980
The Knot - 1983
Fastyngange - 1988 (UK title: Voices)
SilabGarza - 2010
Co-Authored[edit]
Click - 2007
Radio plays[edit]
"The Thinking Room" for CBC Radio's Nightfall - 1982
"The Road Ends at the Sea" for CBC Radio's Nightfall - 1982
"The Strange Odyssey of Lennis Freed" for CBC Radio's Nightfall - 1983
Awards[edit]
1980 - Seal First Novel Award, Odd's End
1983 - Ruth Schwartz Award of The Canadian Book Sellers Association, Zoom at Sea
1993 - Governor General's Award for English language children's literature, Some of the Kinder Planets[11]
1995 - Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for children's fiction, Some of the Kinder Planets[10]
1995 - Governor General's Award for English language children's literature, The Maestro[11]
1995 - Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book of the Year, The Maestro
1997 - Vicky Metcalf Award
1998 - Canadian Library Association Children's Book of the Year
2001 - Arthur Ellis Award, Best Juvenile Crime Book, The Boy in the Burning House
2002 - Edgar Award for Best Young Adult book, The Boy in the Burning House
2009 - Governor General's Award for English language children's literature, The Uninvited[11]
2011 - Officer of the Order of Canada "for his contributions to Canadian literature, notably as a writer of children's fiction".[14]
2011 - Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for children's fiction, Blink & Caution[10]
Tim Wynne-Jones is the accomplished author of numerous young adult novels, including The Emperor of Any Place, which was short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award; Blink & Caution, winner of the 2012 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award; and The Uninvited, which was short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. In 2012, Tim Wynne-Jones was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for his services to literature. He lives with his wife in Ontario.
Tim Wynne-JonesWriting a bio in the first person always makes me think of those boring people who back you into a corner at a party and tell you about themselves. The worst part is that they invariably situate themselves between you and the chips. I like chips. I like food. I love cooking. And crossword puzzles and cross-country skiing, although I make a point of not trying to do these activities at the same time.I started writing when I was in my twenties. Never dreamed of becoming an author. Oh, I loved reading, but I had known since I was eleven that I was going to be a world-famous architect when I grew up, so I never took my writing very seriously. Besides, I failed high school English. But the university where I was training to become a world-famous architect thought it might not be such a good idea for me to design buildings into which real people might actually stray by mistake. So I turned to making art, which led to an M.F.A., which is when I realized that if I wasn’t careful, I was going to end up being offered a teaching job! So I wrote a novel very quickly. Winning the $50,000 Seal First Novel Award in 1980 convinced me to put aside my designing, acting, singing, painting, teaching career and take writing seriously. Twenty-six books later, I’m still doing it and still loving it. I’ve won lots of awards. Oh, here -- can I get you the chips? You just munch away and I’ll tell you all about my honors: a couple of Governor General’s Literary Awards in Canada; three Canadian Library Association Prizes; the Arthur Ellis Award -- that’s from the Crime Writers of Canada; the Edgar Award for Young Adult Mystery from the Mystery Writers of America; the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; and I’ve twice been short-listed for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in the U.K. . . . Are you feeling woozy yet? I’ve written three adult novels, but I got over that. I’ve also written a dozen picture books, three collections of short stories, and five novels for older readers, including A Thief in the House of Memory. The last novel before that was The Boy in the Burning House. Notice the house thing? You see? I’m still obsessed with architecture. The next title almost had a house in it, but I changed it to Rex Zero and the End of the World. It’s pretty funny, I think, considering it’s about the end of the world. I’ve already written the sequel, Rex Zero, King of Nothing. Oh, don’t go. Please! I haven’t told you about my three very talented grownup kids and my wonderful wife and the cats and the seventy-six acres of land just outside of Perth, Ontario. I’ve got lots of pictures. Some other time? Okay. Tim Wynne-Jones lives near Perth, Ontario, with his wife, Amanda, in a house he designed himself.
Get to Know Children's Literature Star Tim Wynne-Jones on Food, Happiness, & Favourites
Date
July 25, 2018
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Tim Wynne-Jones Proust Questionnaire Young Readers
Tim Wynne-Jones is the author of more than 30 beloved books for young readers, from picture books to YA adventures. His latest is The Ruinous Sweep (Candlewick Press), a young adult story that opens explosively, with Donovan Turner being thrown out of a car on a deserted highway, unable to remember his name or the previous 24 hours. Things go from bad to worse and soon Donovan is on the run with a dead man's briefcase, as he searches for his girlfriend, Bee.
A dark adventure that takes inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Ruinous Sweep is a tale of redemption anchored in the unforgettable characters of Donovan and Bee, who readers will root for even when the odds seem stacked against them. You can read a sample chapter from the Candlewick website.
We're incredibly excited to welcome Tim, an icon of kids' lit in Canada, to Open Book to get personal with our version of the famous Proust Questionnaire, a series of personal questions beloved by Proust and his friends.
Tim paints a delicious picture of his favourite colours, tells us about the joy of sad music, and shares a tasty motto we can definitely get behind.
The Proust Questionnaire with Tim Wynne-Jones
What is your dream of happiness?
I dream of living simultaneously in splendid isolation in a black house on the shores of the Isle of Lewis, with the North Sea crashing about outside and a peat fire inside, while also living within shouting distance and a good coffee shop of my grown-up children in Toronto and London, England.
What is your idea of misery?
Well, there are the big and horrible miseries of war and famine and brutish infantile presidents. Then there is the misery of a long flight with nothing to read.
What qualities do you admire most in a man?
The ability to tell the difference between a ’56 and ’57 Chevrolet Impala and to wonder what went so terribly wrong in ’58.
What qualities do you admire most in a woman?
The extraordinary ability to get along with men – or, at least, to try their best.
What is your chief characteristic?
My laugh. I’m a really good audience. It’s what I plan to be when I grow up.
What is your principal fault?
Not being able to remember people’s names. I’ve also been accused of overly long hugs. Sometimes I hug a person too long in order to give myself time to remember their name.
What characteristic do you dislike most in others?
Regrets. Everybody’s got them but they shouldn’t be allowed to create so solid a foundation that you can afford to dwell on them.
What is your favourite virtue?
Bravery. Is bravery a virtue? Well, anyway, I remember when I was young and brave and then suddenly wasn’t any more. Afraid to leap from one rock to another. Afraid to stand up to tyrannies, large and small.
What is your favourite occupation?
Writing. But a close second is the New York Times crossword. And reading a juicy murder mystery, of course.
What is your favourite colour?
The orange of mango, the yellow of saffron, the red of Spanish paprika. My favourite colours are food.
What is your favourite flower?
The ones that grow wild along our country road.
What is your favourite bird?
The brown thrasher for all his thousand songs.
What historical figure do you admire the most?
Willian Shakespeare.
Who are your favourite prose authors?
Always: A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, John Wyndham, John Le Carre, Graham Greene, Philip Pullman, Douglas Adams, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami.
Right now: Mick Herron, Bernard Cornwell, Jo Nesbo, Robert Harris.
Who are your favourite poets?
Lorna Crozier, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Ron Koertge, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Amanda Jernigan.
Who are your favourite heroes in fiction?
Ratty, Eeyore, Pinky, Hermione Jean Granger, Elizabeth Bennet, George Smiley, Holly Martins, Lyra Belacqua, Will Parry, Xavier March, Kathy (in Never Let Me Go), Young Tommy (in Angel Square), Tom (in How Tom Beat Captain Njork and His Hired Sportsmen), Heck (in Heck, Superhero), and so many more…
Who is your favourite painter?
Joseph Cornell, who paints with things rather than colors and reminds me of life’s small and important mysteries. Edward Ardizzone and Quentin Blake, whose picture book art endlessly informs my heart of where it lives.
Who is your favourite musician?
Music is my biggest inspiration, especially sad music. To start this list would be to commit to a happily endless task. Let me give a handful of examples: Yo Yo Ma playing Ennio Morricone’s “Gabriel’s Oboe;” John Lennon singing “No Reply;” Dawn Upshaw singing in Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs; kd lang singing “Constant Craving;” and just about anyone playing the first of Erik Satie’s “Trois Gymnopédies.” Oops! Oh well, there are people with six fingers.
What is your favourite food?
Paella, and Greek lamb fricasse with lemon and artichokes, and pasta with cauliflower, anchovies and salt-packed capers, and Thai fish stew with eggplant and oyster mushrooms, and everything Oaxacan, and everything Middle Eastern and anything at all in Yatim Ottolenghi’s fabulous cook books! Hmm. Maybe food is my biggest inspiration…
What is your motto?
There’s always dinner.
________________________________________
Tim Wynne-Jones is the accomplished author of numerous young adult novels, including The Emperor of Any Place, which earned seven starred reviews, Blink & Caution, winner of the 2012 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and The Uninvited. In 2012 he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for his services to literature. Tim Wynne-Jones lives in Ontario.
An autobiographical sketch that appears in
Something About the Author, Volume 136, published by the Gale Group
When I was three, I ran away from home with a tea cosy on my head. That was in England. A few months later I ended up in Canada. I like to pretend that these two events were connected; that somehow this intrepid three-year- old made it all the way to northern British Columbia in his gray flannel shorts, red tie and open-toed sandals. The thing is, I don’t know what my destination was that spring day, let alone what my motive for leaving might have been. It is not really my memory but a piece of family lore.
We were staying with my mother’s parents at the time. They lived in a grand house called “Ravensheugh.” It stood on the Spital Road in the town of Bromborough, Cheshire. Many years later, reading a book about Cheshire, I would learn that the Spital Road was named for an eleventh century leper’s hospital (ho’spital) to which it led. I don’t think that was where I was heading.
Probably I was angry. We were staying with my grandparents because we were about to leave for Canada. A few days before my flight in the tea cosy, I was sitting in the upstairs window of our own house, “Just Home,” a few miles from Bromborough in the village of Little Sutton, when my next-door neighbor, Nicky, came over to play. I opened the window and called down to him.
“I can’t come out today,” I said. “We’re moving to Canada.”
I remember Nicky nodding in an “Oh, I see” kind of way and then heading home. It was as if I had said, “Sorry, today we’re moving to Canada but I’ll see you tomorrow.” A few days later at Ravensheugh maybe the penny dropped. We were never going back to Just Home; I would never see Nicky again. That would be a pretty good reason for running away. Saying goodbye to Nicky is my only real memory of England.
We came to Canada on a Cunnard ocean liner, the Ascania, my four sisters, my mother and I. My father had gone on ahead. He was always going on ahead. He was an engineer. Whatever it was he was building always had to get built right away and so Mum was left with the task of packing and closing up house.
My one memory of the Atlantic crossing is tomato soup. My family was seasick and bedridden. I remember going to the dining hall all on my own. The place was almost deserted and I was asked to join the Captain at his table. It was like something from an Edward Ardizzone picture book. I was Brave Tim!
I had tomato soup. It was sweet and rich and creamy and perfectly satisfying. Everything tastes better at the Captain’s table. In my picture book Zoom Away, Zoom the cat and Maria stop in a snow covered sitting room on their way to the Arctic and have cups full of piping hot tomato soup. It had stayed warm all those years in the thermos of my memory.
Kitimat was a little boy’s dream come true. It stands at the head of the Douglas Channel, south east of Prince Rupert and less than a hundred miles south of the southernmost tip of Alaska. The town, such as it was, was named after the Kitamaat Indians, the “people of the snow” as the Hudson’s Bay Company traders had dubbed them a hundred years earlier. The Kitamaat were still there. My father and I went hunting with them. Well, Dad hunted and I plucked feathers.
I remember one hunting trip. We had stopped in an abandoned, roofless, log cabin. It was raining. It’s always raining on the northwest coast. We strung up a tarp and waited for a break in the weather. I played soldiers with shotgun shells while the men chatted and smoked their pipes. Mum had sent along egg, onion and tomato sandwiches. Her thinly sliced homemade bread was soggy from the tomatoes, but then everything else was soggy, too. The sandwiches were just like the day.
What few houses there were in Kitimat had been shipped by barge all the way from Vancouver. We bought our supplies at the Hudson’s Bay Company. There was a place called the “town site” that became what is present-day Kitimat. So, here we were, living on the edge of a place that didn’t yet really exist. We had come from a place where the houses had names to a place where there were so few people nobody even bothered with numbers. We had come to a pioneer town from a city founded by King Alfred’s daughter, Aethelfred, in 912. Maybe Bromborough seemed like Kitimat to Aethelfred. There were probably tall trees in England back then and bears, too. But no Mounties.
My older sisters tell me what they expected to find in the new world: giant green trees, big black bears and tall red-suited Mounties. Miraculously, that’s exactly what we did find. I once got paid for painting the rocks around the Mounties headquarters. I painted the rocks white.
Bears would wander down into the settlement now and then. I remember one scratching his back against the side of our house. The house rocked! I also met a bear once with my mother. (Actually, the bear wasn’t with my mother, I was.) We were walking on a path through the woods. The mama bear had a cub with her. That usually means trouble, but I think the two mothers came to some kind of unspoken agreement. It was kind of like Blueberries for Sal without the blueberries.
As for trees, you couldn’t see the forest for them. A few years ago I wrote a radio piece for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about my memories of that time. I talked fondly about the twig huts we built in the steep woods, huts that looked exactly like Ernest H. Shepard’s ink drawings of the house at Pooh Corner. My sister Wendy wrote to me after hearing the radio piece. She and her friends had built those twig houses, she explained, not me. She must have been right. After all, she was nine and I was five. Which brings up an important point: memory is untrustworthy; it is like a not-so-real estate magnet confiscating the territories it desires.
I spent a lot of time with a tugboat operator and his wife. The Douglas was a deep channel, deep enough for ocean-going freighters. There was a gigantic aluminum smelter at Kitimat. It was the tugboat captain’s job to bring those freighters into harbor. And it was my job to help in all the many ways a five-year-old can. I remember eating fresh apple pie cooked right on board. But an even better memory than the pie was an American destroyer.
I didn’t question why an American destroyer was parked in the Douglas Channel. When you’re five the world is just one miracle after another. I remember boarding the war ship from the tug and a sailor showing me around. He sat me in the seat of a turret gun. I remember swiveling the gun so that it pointed towards our house. What a surprise for Mummy!
The firing mechanism, as I recall, was made of red rubber and was roughly the shape of the squeezer at the end of a turkey-baster. I remember firing off a few imaginary rounds, the sailor laughing as I blew up Kitimat. Kitimat kind of looked bombed out, anyway, a series of prefab houses on a bulldozed scarp. I realize now that the destroyer must have been over from the war in Korea. Maybe the sailors needed a little down time building twig houses.
I started school in Kitimat but I don’t remember going very much. I distinctly remember playing hooky one day and discovering an enormous shark washed up on the beach. It was already rotting and fabulously stinky. Sharks seldom washed up on the shore of my classroom. Only Ritz crackers and apple juice. But it was in that classroom that I first performed in a dramatic role. I was cast as a stalk of celery. I still remember my line.
“Celery from a seed. That is what you need.”
Presumably, my teacher had discovered like the RCMP officers before her my gift for the arts.
We were only in Kitimat three years but it holds enormous sway over my life. Though I am a city guy in many ways, Kitimat created in me a love of nature that many years of urban life never rooted out. It would be thirty-four years before I would escape to the country where I now live but the yearning was in me from those days onward.
I might have grown up more of the outdoors type if my father hadn’t started to suffer from gout, a painful affliction he endured on and off for the rest of his life. He sold his hunting rifles and shot guns. We fished from time to time but didn’t get out into the wilderness together much after Kitimat.
Children, who have read my novel The Maestro, often ask if I was an abused child. I wasn’t at all. But, having said that, I did model Burl’s father on my own dad to some degree. I just exaggerated a lot. It’s what fiction writers do. My father was large – stout – and gruff at times. He had been a major in the British Army and was used to giving commands. He could be the life of the party, wickedly funny, and a singer of bawdy songs. But when he was angry, he was pretty scary, although he never hit me. I gave Cal Crow some of these characteristics. Fictional characters seem livelier when they are modeled on real flesh and blood people and my father was a man of considerable flesh and blood.
But I also gave Burl some of my good memories of my father. The soggy hunting trip mentioned above, for instance. Burl talks about a time “when he could still get close to the man.” Though my father was around all the years of my growing up, he was moody and consumed by his work. It couldn’t have been easy keeping a big bunch of children clothed and fed.
The Greek Titan, Prometheus, stole his father’s fire. I stole my father’s Welsh moodiness and his love of awful puns. But the best thing I got from him was words. He was not university educated but he spoke wonderfully well, and he sang and told stories.
I did not set out to be a writer. From the age of eleven I was bound and determined to become an architect when I grew up. I leaned towards the visual arts, in any case. I drew all the time. I drew on the cardboard sheets the drycleaner put inside my father’s starched white shirts. I pestered my mother: “What should I draw now?” I would ask.
“Your last breath,” she would reply, exasperated. My mother is pretty handy with language, herself.
No, I did not set out to be a writer, but you use what building material you have. And so the buildings I was destined to design were made, not of mortar and steel, but of language. I wrote a picture book called Architect of the Moon (retitled Builder of the Moon in the U.S.A.) The moon was the kind of thing I tuned out to be okay at building. In my first novel, the adult thriller, Odd’s End, the house is one of the main characters. And in my young adult novel, Stephen Fair, the Fair family live in a wonderful ark in the middle of the woods. It is not just a house, of course, but a metaphor of Stephen’s journey into his own disturbing past. Metaphors are the nails that hold up my buildings.
My home was always littered with books and vibrant with conversation and song and jokes. Diana would sing duets from Gilbert and Sullivan with my father. Jennifer would do her very regal impersonation of Queen Elizabeth. She once stood on the table to do it! If things really got out of hand, my father would say, “Kindly contain your hilarity with a modicum of restraint.” And we would all roar with laughter and pay no attention.
Story telling was expected in my family. Indeed, we younger children were not allowed to sit at the dinner table until we were “suitably interesting enough.” I remember the supper-hour banishment to the TV room with my younger sister and brother, where we sat, gloomily, at little tray tables watching television and eating dinner, wanting only to join the grown-ups chatting and laughing in the dining room. Is that why my favorite memories are so often connected with food?
Our family grew to fullness in Kitimat. Giles Philip was born there. There were now six children: Jen, who was nine years my senior; Di who was two years younger than Jen; Wendy, who was two years younger than Di; then me; and then Bryony, three years my junior and finally G.P., as we called him. This was the troop my mother hauled off to Vancouver in 1955. My father was already there. There was a bridge to build.
By the time I graduated from high school I had lived in twelve different houses and never in any one of them longer than three years. I don’t know how my mother coped. But I know how I did. I learned to make friends quickly and not to expect to keep them. I am jealous of people who still know childhood friends. Perhaps that is why many of my stories feature sturdy friendships: Fletcher and Shlomo in Tashkent, Carrie and Sam in Lord of the Fries. But equally present in my writing are difficult friendships: Burl and NOG in The Maestro or Jim and Ruth Rose in The Boy in the Burning House, for example.
The golden dream of childhood continued for about another year. We moved into a wonderful old house, 2212 Bellevue Avenue in West Vancouver. It seemed a mansion to me but anything would have seemed palatial after living in a prefab. There was an upstairs. I played in a little nook underneath the first floor landing.
I fell down the stairs once. I remember it vividly. My mother holding me, while I bawled, then my father arriving and saying how sad he was to have missed my fall and would I consider doing it again. He made me laugh and I hated him for it.
The house was right on the sea. There was an overgrown path, sharp with black berry bramble and alive with garter snakes that led from our back garden down to a rocky beach. All the children who lived along Bellevue owned parts of that otherwise inhospitable shoreline. We each claimed a boulder that was our very own pirate flagship. When the tide came in you could get stranded on your boulder. It was like being at sea without the fuss of going anywhere. It was a brilliant time. I had good chums, a huge and verdant garden, the Pacific Ocean. Life was grand.
Then my father had a fall and it wasn’t down the stairs. He was working on the construction site of the Oak Street Bridge and a girder crushed his leg. He was put out of commission for a year. He had no insurance; there was no workman’s compensation. We had to leave Bellevue Avenue. When I returned there some twenty years later, the house was gone and in its place stood a pink apartment building with semi-circular windows. They had taken away the raging ocean of my pirate-youth, as well, and replaced it with some tame inland sea.
“As one door shuts another one closes.” One of my father’s favorite expressions.
The year of my father’s injury we lived in a basement. My mother divided up the space into rooms with sheets on clotheslines. One day, baby G.P. ate a pound of butter left on the back step by the milkman. I remember my mother crying in her curtained room like a patient in a hospital. My mother’s greatest gift to this day is patience.
When my father recovered and got back to work, we moved to a little house on Haywood Avenue just a few blocks away. It was half the size of Bellevue but luxurious after living in a cotton-walled labyrinth. Several important things happened there. I entered grade three at Irwin Park School and met Miss Schultz, the world’s best grade three teacher. She let me and another boy named Graham stay in at recess and draw. She gave us tons of paper. We drew nothing but war scenes, mostly Indians and cavalry. Graham was good at horses. I specialized at dramatic deaths: soldiers shot through with arrows. The painter of rocks had graduated to gore.
It was while we were at Haywood that I got my first bicycle. It was a green Raleigh three speed and I burst into tears when I saw it.
But the gift that outshines all the rest was the day my father brought home the collected children’s writing of A.A. Milne. Four books in a boxed set: Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. It wasn’t for any event I can recall. It must have been my father’s way of trying to make up for the hardships of the previous year. In any case, to this day, The House at Pooh Corner ranks among my favorite books, right up there with A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Golden Compass.
Were I to list all the books I have read that have moved me and all the sad songs I have ever loved, it would make a pretty good autobiography all by itself. I’m sure that when science finally has good enough equipment they will find that the universe is really made out of music.
If Miss Schultz was the epitome of a kind and inspired primary teacher, the following year at Pauline Johnson School I met the archetypal bully of a principal. His name was Mr. Egbert. We called him Eggbeater. I remember Eggbeater hanging over me while I scrambled the alphabet and simultaneously peed my pants. The boy who sat next to me was the only one other than the principal who saw the steaming puddle at my feet. That boy spent an eternity of recesses tormenting me, threatening to expose me. Bullying begets bullying.
I recall another incident where a Vancouver classmate beat me up because I said “garage” in the English way as if it rhymed with “carriage” instead of with “barrage.” Which only goes to show that the inspired bully always finds a reason to pound you out without even resorting to things like race, creed, or color.
As a sub species, bullies figure prominently in many of my stories. I delight in thinking up imaginative ways of dealing with them. I’m not into Stephen-King-like revenge, but it is never the less true that writing is a great way of getting back at someone!
The ultimate bully of my childhood was Howie in grade six. I got him back but good in “The Clark Beans Man,” (in The Book of Changes.)While Howie’s fictional stand-in straddled poor weak Dwight, the hero of my story, drooling spit on his face, Dwight suddenly let loose. He started quoting Wordsworth’s poem, “The World is Too Much With Us,” in the voice of Donald Duck. What defense would a bully have for that?
When did I begin to write? The answer varies. My first published book came out in 1977. The oldest manuscript I have in my possession is from 1970, The Fable of the Lady on the Hill, a painfully sentimental little love story. I was twenty-two when I wrote and illustrated it. I had just failed out of architecture school. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. It was a scary time. I know I started several novels around then and never got farther than fifty pages. There is a quotation from Peter London’s No More Second Hand Art that my wife calligraphed and put up on her studio wall. “Reflect upon that quality of yourself without which you would no longer be the person you take yourself to be.” I suppose, in a way, that was what I was doing in the early seventies. I sang in a band. I drew a lot. I started writing stories. Writing and drawing and singing – that’s who I am.
I began to write song lyrics at that time, both for the band and for a “folkie” friend with whom I ended up forming a singing duo. The duo, Raffi and Tim, played cafés and college pubs around Toronto. Raffi went on to a fabulously successful career as a children’s performer. I ended up back at school. Art school. I still didn’t take my writing seriously.
But writing lyrics was a good start. Since we were going to perform the songs live I remember thinking that the words really mattered, which is a pretty important step in becoming any kind of a writer. Mark Twain puts it this way: “The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and a lightning bug.”
The difficulty in saying exactly when I began to write is that there are various component parts to the process that have to come together. I was always imaginative. But if imagination provides the impulse for artistic creation, there still has to be an opportunity for that impulse to kick in, to pick up momentum. There has to be a condition in which the germs of ideas begin to shape themselves into stories. And those story-making conditions began for me a long, long time before I actually put pen to paper. This condition, which marks the beginning of my life as a story came the summer my family moved from Vancouver to Ottawa, Ontario. It was 1958. I was ten. I knew no one.
I was bored out of my mind.
The nation’s capital. Big deal! What good are parliament buildings when you haven’t got a friend to parley with?
We lived in a particularly peaceful neighborhood called the Glebe (an old-English word referring to land granted to the church.) We lived on Clemow Avenue, a wide, tree-lined street of brick houses. In Brian Doyle’s wonderful novel Easy Avenue, I’m pretty sure the title refers to Clemow. I had my green Raleigh, so off I rode to explore the dappled avenues of the Glebe, busy Bank Street, the Rideau Canal, which winds through the heart of Ottawa, and Lansdowne Park where the stock cars used to race on Wednesdays. You could get into the races for six bottle caps if your Dad took you. My favorite car was “Duff’s Taxi.” It was yellow.
There were ponds in the Glebe where you could catch tadpoles and then leave them frying in the sun, we had a dog to run, a milkman you could ride with in his horse-drawn cart, and there was always a ball to bounce against a wall. It was the most boring times in my life!
Boredom, however, has its up side.
I am not by nature a solitary person. But solitude, finally, is the necessary state for creative writing. (I mean, if you’ve got a life, why bother making one up?) Anyway, acute, sluggish, what-do-I-now boredom is like a kind of bargain-basement solitude. And I had a lot of it that summer of ’58. I have tried to recapture something of the feel of that time in my story “Hard Sell” (in The Book of Changes). That’s where the story making began. Observing the games you are not a part of, eavesdropping on other people’s fun, manufacturing events out of borrowed experience and a story out of a shapeless summer day.
Mercifully there was the library. I was a reader. In fact, when we unpacked after the move east, I found a library book from West Van. It was an adventure story set in the Yukon with dogs in it. I lived in real terror that the Library Hit Squad would track me down. Now I wish I still had that purloined book. My daughter lives in Vancouver; I could get her to take it back for me. It would be so cool. I can see Maddy approaching the librarian with her perfect ballerina poise. “My dad asked me to bring this back,” she would say. And then pulling out her purse, she might add, “How much will the fine be?”
My greatest joys were the various adventure series written by Enid Blyton, and the Freddy the Pig stories of Walter R. Brooks. They weren’t good literature. But whenever I get uppity about bad children’s books, when my critic’s hat gets too tight and cuts off my circulation, I try to recall the sheer comfort and exhilaration of Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars or The Mountain of Adventure.
One Sunday morning wandering about the Glebe with nothing to do, I ran into a schoolmate who was on his way to Saint Matthews Anglican Church where he sang in the choir. They got paid! So I went, too. I ended up singing in that choir for four years. I didn’t get rich, but under the guidance of Gerald Wheeler, Saint Matthews became the best boy’s choir in Ottawa and I eventually became the head boy. I won at the Kiwanis Music Festival three years in a row as a treble soloist.
Success can make you giddy. Too much of it is intoxicating. I have won some awards as a writer and that has been very gratifying. But you have to write what you want to write, not what you think people expect you to write. My worse writing comes when I try to write like Tim Wynne-Jones.
But when I was eleven, how great it was to win at something. What a confidence booster. Later, when I was plagued by adolescent insecurity, there was always buried inside me the idea that it was possible to do better. That it was possible to come out on top.
I am terribly competitive. I realized just how bad this affliction was when my eldest son, Xan (Alexander) was playing a lot of soccer. I coached his teams for a number of years and the nastiness of my winning-is-everything attitude shocked me. At its worst, my rabid competitiveness seems a needy kind of thing. I think it might stem from always being the new boy. One reaction is to make yourself invisible. Not me. My approach was to stand up and shout, “Hey, look at me. Quick! I won’t be here long.”
There were other better lessons I learned singing in the choir: the way a lyric rides a melody line, the hard work it takes to excel at anything, how to entertain yourself through a mind-numbing sermon, and this important safety message: when you have just carried a tall candle in a procession around the church, don’t let a tall boy blow it out!
But perhaps, best of all, at Saint Matthews I experienced the thrill of singing in harmony. Neurologists have done test and apparently your brain lights up all over the place when you sing in harmony. I believe it.
And choir was fun. The hockey broadcast scene described in my story “Fallen Angel” (in Lord of the Fries) really happened.
Choir also added a note of continuity to my life. In the four years I was at Saint Matthews my family lived in three different houses in three different suburbs of Ottawa and I went to four different schools.
My favorite school year ever was grade eight at Connaught Elementary in the west end of Ottawa. I made a best friend, Danny Sigler; became a champion receiver at schoolyard peewee football, got the role of the romantic lead, Frederick, in The Pirates of Penzance, and fell in love with Mabel, the other romantic lead. I even got pretty good grades.
We started going to Ocean Park, Maine for summer holidays. All eight of us and a dog in one car. Those sixties cars were big.
I loved Ocean Park. We would rent a cottage for two weeks. One cottage had a piano. I remember coming home from the beach, one day, and hearing someone playing the piano. Really well. My mother had come up earlier to fix dinner and, to my great surprise, it turned out to be her. Who knew she played? When she realized I was there, she blushed and immediately retired to the kitchen. Apparently, she had done her grade ten musical exams back in England. But nothing more was said about the matter. My mother kept her ego in close harness. My father’s ego took up a lot of room. And when, as a teenager, my own ego started to emerge, all gawky and full-of-itself, I remember thinking how little space there was – how little air there seemed to be around our house.
I read my last Hardy Boys book in Ocean Park, Maine. For a couple of years, I was a big fan of Bayport’s famous detectives, gobbling up the stories as fast as I could lay hands on them. There was a little lending library in Ocean Park. I remember arriving at our cottage one summer, changing into my beach clothes, and racing to the library. The Missing Chum. Perfect.
But it was not perfect. I didn’t get past page two. A profound lack of interest swept over me like a wave and just as devastating in its own way. Suddenly, I didn’t care if anyone ever found Chet. I didn’t care if the Hardy Boys crashed their new coupe and burned to death. It was over between us. Sadly, I retuned the book and perused the shelves for something to fill the void. Travels With Charley, by John Steinbeck looked okay. I had never heard of Steinbeck but the story had a dog in it. And so I spent the summer of 1966 reading nothing but John Steinbeck. As far as I know Chet is still lost at sea.
That summer I stayed on in Ocean Park working in the kitchen at the Bassett Guest House. It was the first time I had ever lived away from home. Now, I thought, I’ll get to do what the cool teens do: party on the beach, hang out ‘til all hours of the night. Mostly what I did was spend a lot of time reading Steinbeck.
When I got to high school, I had one ambition: I wanted to be in with the in crowd. It seems pretty fatuous, but I have tried to forgive myself. It wasn’t really me, I tell myself. An alien took over my skinny body. I was transmogrified into a joiner of clubs, a desperate poseur, and where girls were concerned, a heat-seeking missile. I had no beliefs beyond girls, parties, button-down, madras shirts and the Beatles.
I was part of the Ridgemont Rubies, a commando cheer-leading squad prone to raiding assemblies and cheer-leading competitions dressed in drag. Put that way, it sounds like we were anarchists. We weren’t. We were just having fun. I think I was having fun. I’m not sure. I know I spent a fair amount of time watching myself from the sidelines. I think a lot of teens feel that way.
For a long time I have been contemptuous of my teen years, how superficial and supercilious I was. It wasn’t me, I protest. I was the pimply host of some alien whose greatest care in the world was whether his jeans were as tight as the Beach Boys’ jeans.
Why the denial? Was I really so absurd? Why this betrayal? Why is my adult self, now almost as stout as his father, trying to distance himself from that skinny boy? Meanwhile, the boy in me feels like a kid alone in a room with a broken teacup. “I didn’t do it,” he shouts. “Honest.”
There were good times at Ridgemont High. There were parties and girls and madras shirts. Then the English wave came along led by the Beatles and we all became mods. For the first time ever, I actually got to stay at the same school right to the bitter end. True, my parents moved to the States but I stayed on. I had lots of friends. At least, it seemed that way. Strangely, when I returned from university for commencement, I didn’t go to any parties. Maybe my old friends didn’t recognize me behind the beard I had grown that summer. Or, maybe the guy behind that beard failed to recognize them?
In my last year of high school,1966-67, my family split in two. My parents didn’t separate, but my father’s business collapsed and, when the dust had settled, he and mum and Bryony and G.P. were living in Radnor, Pennsylvania, while the rest of us were still in Ottawa.
The Vietnam War was on and I would have been eligible for the draft had I moved. My father tended to tell funny and exciting stories about World War II but he kept a lot of bad stuff to himself. I learned much later that he had been among the first troops to arrive at the Bergen-Belsen Death Camp. As a Royal Engineer, it was his job to clean the place up. How those experiences must have haunted him. In any case, as poorly as he and I were getting along at the time, he was in no hurry to see me going off to fight in somebody else’s war.
Wendy had been the first of my sisters to marry. I moved in with her and her new husband. The arrangement lasted less than three months. Who could blame them? One of the least favorite wedding presents you can give a young couple is a teenage brother. So I moved in with Jen and Di in their apartment downtown for the rest of the year. They were single and fun. If I cramped their style, they were kind enough not to mention it. I, myself, had no style to cramp. But I sure was working on it.
One last important footnote about high school. I failed English. I got 46% on my final exam. Ironically, my science marks were high enough that the school bumped my up to a pass so I could go to architecture school.
But what is more ironic is that I loved everything we read in English. It took me years to understand what my problem was. I just can’t stay on the outside of a story.
One day in Mr. Partridge’s senior English class, a crow flew into the room. How keenly I tried to convince the teacher that this was an event of real importance, that it was apt, somehow, considering we were discussing Hamlet.
“Don’t you get it, sir?” I wish I had been able to say. “Elsinore is in Denmark, right? And in Norse mythology, two crows – well, ravens, actually -- sit on either shoulder of Odin, the God of war and culture. One of those crows is Hugin, which means thought; the other is Munin, which means memory. Maybe this crow knows something we don’t?”
Of course, I didn’t know anything like that. What I knew but could not articulate was that when I am reading, the story is happening to me, just like the crow. Or the air, for that matter.
Later, in my twenties, I read all of the works of the British novelist, Graham Greene. He refers to his first memoir as “a sort of a life” partially because he has, as he says, “spent almost as much time with imaginary characters as with real men and women.” I know the feeling, both as a reader and a writer. When I am in the middle of writing a novel, my characters are with me all the time. I am always listening for what they are going to say next. When I see something, I wonder what Burl or Stephen or Jim or Declan might make of it. They don’t see things from the same point of view, as me. How could they? Not with the mess they’ve got themselves into! In writing, finally, I am allowed to live inside the story without flunking!
An autobiography can be many things. This one is almost three quarters done and I have barely gotten out of my childhood. But since I have made childhood my profession, so to speak, for the last twenty odd years, maybe that is as it should be. When I say profession, I don’t simply mean my livelihood; I mean that I profess to this renewable resource called childhood. I affirm my faith in it, my allegiance to it. I guess in some ways I’m still trying to get it right. Maybe it’s my way of hanging out indefinitely at all those schools I merely visited while passing though my childhood.
Entering the University of Waterloo in 1967 I was still ten years away from publishing a book and thirteen years from writing anything half good. How did I get there? How did the painter of rocks, the celery boy, the angelic chorister, the flunking English Lit senior, the would-be Master Builder end up pushing a pen for a living?
The last stage of the journey began, I guess, with a grumpy, troubled, but brilliant English professor.
You have to study all kinds of things to be an architect: design, systematic layout planning, structural physics, math, psychology, sociology, and, mercifully for me, cultural history. I had two fine instructors in that wide-ranging subject, but I credit the first of them, Murray MacQuarrie, with getting me to think. My classmates and I were a bit of an experiment, the first year of architecture students at the University of Waterloo. The faculty weren’t quite sure what to do with us. Professor MacQuarrie wanted to ring our necks. He was astounded at how stupid we were. So, he gave us a monumentally long reading list. The Bible, for beginners, and then Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Dante’s Diving Comedy, Machievelli’s The Prince, and so on and so on, ending up some twenty books later with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. All to be read in one term.
He made us watch movies, too. With subtitles. Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, Renoir’s the Rules of the Game, Fellini’s 81/2. I fell in love with the films of Ingmar Bergman, especially with Liv Ullman, who was featured in many of Bergman’s movies. My friends and I would go around pretending to speak Swedish.
To use a phrase coined around that time, MacQuarrie blew my mind. Structural physics didn’t stand a chance. The writing, as they say, was on the wall.
Though I managed to stave off getting kicked out of architecture for a couple more years, I eventually left Waterloo and went to Toronto where I sang for a time in a band called Boogie Dick. We were hippies, outrageous, irreverent. We burned things on stage, I painted my face paisley, played electric baseball bat. Don’t ask. For a while, we had a regular gig at a club called the Paramount on Spadina Avenue, until an enterprising journalist wrote a piece about us in the Globe & Mail, revealing what we thought of the club’s management. The article got us fired and we took our mad act on the road.
Writing kept me sane. Which, in Boogie Dick, was no mean trick. We were all crazy, some more than others. One of the band ended up a few years later in a hospital for the criminally insane.
I left Boogie Dick one cool summer morning, after a gig in Pembroke on the Ottawa River. It was a long way from Toronto, my new home, but only a couple of hours from my old home, Ottawa. I stole away without saying goodbye. I hitched to Ottawa to my sister Diana’s place. Her baby daughter was frightened of me with my afro and my bushy beard. I think I was a little frightened of me, too. I hurried back to the safety of Waterloo. The following fall, I enrolled in visual art.
Back in Waterloo, I moved with my buddy Doug Jamieson, another ex-architecture student now a composer, into a house full of nutty musicians. Nutty isn’t the same as crazy. Nutty is fun.
The house was called the Toadstool. One morning I counted sixteen guitars in that house. Sometimes there were that many people. We were all in bands or between bands. We were all in school or between schools. We all read Herman Hesse and Richard Brautigan. We listened to everything from Bach to the Beatles. We listening to Frank Zappa’s “Hot Rats” and Antonin Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” We pretending the New World Symphony was the score to a movie and made up the story to go along with it. The story changed with every listening.
I got a new band, Alabaster: a good band, a sane band. We didn’t burn things on stage. We enjoyed each other’s company. We played all over South Western Ontario and I earned enough from that, plus working in the university library, to pay my way through school. Our drummer, Klaus Gruber, is to this day a great friend. I dedicated Some of the KinderPlanets to him and his wife, Margie, “two of the kinder people you could ever hope to meet.” When you are licking your wounds it’s nice to find a nice safe, friendly place to do it.
I kept writing. My lyrics were pretty pretentious. My biggest problem was in trying too hard to be clever. Growing up on Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, I was attuned to patter songs and so I piled way too many words into my lyrics.
Meanwhile, a new professor arrived in the fine arts department. He was from Chicago. Virgil Burnett was a graphic artist who worked primarily in pen and ink. So did I. (Rapidographs—my drafting pens from architecture. I had to use them for something!) Virgil was something of a surrealist. Me too. He wrote stories as well. It hadn’t occurred to me you could get away with doing both!
I suppose Virgil became something of a father figure for me. I seldom saw my parents after they moved to the States. They kept moving: to Dover, Delaware; Dallas, Texas; Ridgewood, New Jersey. Virgil and his wife Ann were worldly and sophisticated. Ann taught at the University of Chicago and “commuted” to Stratford, Ontario. They had a place in France as well, in Flavigny-sur-Ozerain, where the movie Chocolat would later be filmed.
It was while they were in France, in the summer of 1974, that I stayed in their beautiful home in Stratford to look after the dog and cat. Virgil also had a horse, which he kept at a stable out of town. He asked if I would mind sharing his Volkwagen bug with a girl who was going to groom and ride his horse. How could I refuse? The girl, as it turned out, was an acting student at York University, working backstage at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival that summer while also working in her grandmother’s beautiful bookstore and, of course, riding Virgil’s mare. She thought I was a friend of Virgil’s from Chicago, which made me seem a lot more exotic than I really was. Her name was Amanda Lewis. It still is. We’ve been together ever since.
I think introducing you to your future wife goes well beyond the duties of a first-rate mentor, but that was what Virgil did and was. He gave me a glimpse into a world I had only imagined existed. People who wrote and drew and acted for a living.
I moved with Amanda to Toronto that fall where I found work in a small publishing company as a book designer. I didn’t know anything about book design but PMA Books was a very small company. We were all kind of making it up as we went along. Besides, as luck would have it, Amanda’s mother was a very good book designer for the University of Toronto Press. So my introduction to the book world was from the other side of the table, so to speak. I worked on manuscripts for several years before I sent one off with the hope of getting it published. I knew a little bit about what drives editors crazy. That’s useful information.
I left PMA after a year and a half, the longest day-job I ever held. Amanda and I traveled to Europe and upon returning I set up a graphic design company with a friend from Waterloo, Michael Solomon. He is now one of the truly great children’s book designers in Canada.
Amanda finished theatre school in 1978 and I decided it was time to go back, myself. I went to York to do a Master in Visual Arts. I didn’t much enjoy it but there were several good teachers there, especially Toby McLennan, a performance artist. She asked me to be in several of her pieces. It was great – even better than being a stalk of celery. It was art and music and theatre all rolled into one.
Nobody at York much liked my drawing. So I started writing my own performance pieces. My performances tended to be weird little fanciful narratives with scores and furniture. I think that is when the final puzzle piece fell into place. A performance piece, you see, doesn’t have any particular structure. It can be anything you want it to be. So, if there are words involved, they just have to be the words you need. I realized, for the first time, that this was exactly what all writing should be: whatever is needed, no more, no less. It seems a simple enough idea. It had taken a long time to get it.
Upon graduating from York, I gave myself the summer off. That’s a big gift when you have no money. I had been offered a part-time teaching post at York the next fall, so I got a bank loan to tide me over, rented a little Smith Corona electric typewriter and wrote a novel. Amanda was away. She was driving across America to visit relatives in California. I was all alone.I had no responsibilities, no deadlines, no one to have to be nice to or to feed. I wrote a mystery thriller called Odd’s End. It only took six weeks to write the first draft. I loved every moment of writing it, climbed right inside the story—lived it. I scared myself silly, but it was good scary.
I entered Odd’s End in the Seal First Novel Competition run by Bantam Books and McClelland & Stewart. And it won.
The prize was fifty thousand dollars and a three publisher book contract which saw Odd’s End come out inCanada, the United States and England. It later came out in Germany as well, and was made into a movie in France many years later. The movie is called, The House that Mary Built. Don’t go out of your way trying to find it. Maybe it’s better in French than it is in English.
Nowhere in that original book contract did it say anything about having a baby. But that’s what we did. Amanda and I call Xan, the Seal First Baby Award. He just seemed to come right along with the prize. If we had hoped to have a family before then, we knew it wouldn’t be for some time. Amanda was acting and directing; I was teaching art. Who could afford children? The Seal Award changed all that, although it must be said that fifty thousand doesn’t last long when you start buying things like a house and a car and, most important of all, a washing machine.
Xan turned out to be such a good idea that we had Maddy and then Lewis. Since Amanda was an only child and I had come from a family of six, we split the difference. Mind you, we didn’t plan it that way.
One morning, when Amanda was already pregnant with Xan but only guessed that she might be and hadn’t bothered to tell me about it, I sat at my kitchen table in our first floor flat on Sackville Street in Cabbagetown, Toronto and wrote Zoom at Sea. I was watching our cat Montezuma playing in the sink with the drops of water that fell from the tap, batting them back up the spout. Zoom, as we called him, loved water. And that’s how I began my story about a cat who goes to sea in a miraculous house. When it was done, I showed it to an artist I had met who worked at the art gallery in Stratford. He had never illustrated a book but I had a feeling he would be good. His name was Ken Nutt although he later changed it to Eric Beddows. We did three Zooms together over the years.
In retrospect, Zoom at Sea made a bigger splash in my life even than Odd’s End. It was my first children’s book and while I went on to write two more adult novels, I became, over the years, a dedicated writer of children’s books. Picture books at first and then, increasingly, short stories and novels. People wonder if I wrote for my children, but that isn’t really true. I wrote because of them. I wrote because they reminded me of my own youth.
The titles of all those books appear on the bibliography that follows. But such a list represents only the barest facts of a working life. This story, so far, has been about the part of my life that launched me into a writing career. I like to think of it like that, as a launch. The first part of one’s life is the rocket, the huge energy-packed vehicle that strains against the tug of gravity to get you up there, then falls away, used up in having released its tiny payload. But that makes it sound almost as if life after writing one’s first book is some kind of effortless floating orbit. Not so. In truth, every book is a new launch. Gravity is always around.
There have been many professional highlights. In Canada I have won the Governor General’s Award, twice: for Some of the Kinder Planets in 1993, and for The Maestro, in 1995. I have also won the Canadian Library Association’s Children’s Book of the Year Award three times and the CLA Young Adult Book of the Year Award once. In 1997, I was given the Vicky Metcalf Award from the Canadian Author’s Association for my body of work. In the United States, I am most proud of having won the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, for Some of the Kinder Planets; and in 2002, The Edgar Allan Poe Award presented by the Mystery Writers of America, for best young adult crime fiction, for The Boy in the Burning House. My books have been published in all kinds of languages all over the world.
My love of music has resulted in writing the book and libretto for an opera called A Midwinter Night’s Dream, the score for which was written by the preeminent Canadian composer, Harry Somers. With my good friend, John Roby, I wrote the book and lyrics for a musical based on my book of poems, Mischief City. Mischief City is the only thing I have written directly about my own children and family life in general. It isn’t all true, mind you. Family life is far too complicated a business to be represented by something as formal and proper as the truth! The Truth is about what happens. Fiction gives what merely happens some kind of shape. That’s what I like about fiction. Life, after all, can be a pretty messy business.
I was fortunate to co-write sixteen songs for the Jim Henson show Fraggle Rock. I worked with composer, Phil Balsam, filling in for the wonderfully zany poet, Dennis Lee, when he got fraggled out for a bit.
Amanda and I lived in Toronto for fourteen years. She did theatre and I wrote books and a dozen or so radio plays for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I love radio drama. Like books, so much of it is up to the listener to imagine.
Now and then Amanda and I worked together. She directed a play of mine called Death of a Mouth in the Rhubarb, Rhubarb Theatre Festival. I performed in the George F. Walker / John Roby musical, Rumors of Our Death. Amanda was the assistant director. I got to play a punk terrorist. In those days, terrorism was something you could poke fun at, something that happened somewhere else.
We lived, by then, on Winona Drive in a tiny house in a lovely neighborhood with good friends and a good school but the city was beginning to get me down. I found, increasingly, that I was noticing the bad side of it rather than the good side: the desperate street people, the lost people, the angry people.
Kitimat loomed large in my memory. I had no particular desire to move back to northern B.C., but I wanted my children to experience the country so that when they grew up they would know there were choices a person could make. In 1988, a job offer came along, to be the writer in residence for ten months at a library in the little town of Perth, Ontario. I accepted, we rented out our home in Toronto and moved. We never left.
It is not dramatic countryside around here. No mountains, no ocean. No destroyers or sharks. We live on the southern end of the pre-Cambrian Shield, the oldest mountain range in the world. Those mountains are pretty well worn right down.
We live fifteen minutes from Perth in Brooke Valley on seventy-six acres of mostly scrubby, swampy bush land, of cedar and ironwood, tall white pines, and, in the meadow, juniper and prickly ash. There are deer and coyotes, and pesky porcupines. Lately, a black bear has been knocking over our composter. We think it’s a sow. I should get my mother to have a talk with her.
But if the countryside isn’t dramatic, the change it has brought to our lives certainly is. Amanda left behind professional theatre but has gone on to create a wonderful children’s theatre camp here. Lately her theatre work has taken her to Ottawa, as well, both to teach and direct. But she has over the years concentrated more on her visual art and also her writing. She has written five books mostly on calligraphy and crafts. We wrote a book together, Rosie Backstage, an exploration for children of the theatre and how it works in the form of a story. The book is set at the Stratford Festival where we met. We are currently working together on turning two of my short stories into oneact plays.
The last book I wrote in Toronto was the dark and gloomy adult novel Fastyngange. The first book I wrote in Brooke Valley was Some of the Kinder Planets. No two of my books could be more different. Ironically, the advance copies of Fastyngange arrived by courier at my door on Winona Drive just as my friend Doug Barnes was helping me pack up the van for the three hour trip to Brooke Valley. Amanda and the kids had gone ahead. (A reversal of the way my dad did things!) Though the book received some critical success and went on to be published in England and Spain, it was not a high point in my life. Typically, by the time I finish writing a book I am glad to be done with it. In the case of Fastyngange, I could hardly believe I had written it! “Who is this guy?” I would ask myself, later, flipping through the pages. “What’s his problem?” Well, whatever the problem was, writing the book got me over it. Writing is a great form of therapy.
And ridding myself of all that darkness evidently cleared the way for Some of the Kinder Planets, my happiest writing experience ever. It was in writing Planets that I became my favorite writer. That might sound conceited; let me explain. I came to realize when I was working on Planets that I would never be anyone else. That’s an important thing to figure out. I was able to happily concede that I would never be John Le Carré or Graham Greene or Jane Austen or Timothy Findley or any other of my literary heroes. It is important to emulate writers you respect; they are like trainer wheels on your bike. But at some time the trainer wheels have to come off. I felt, when I was writing Planets, that I was riding on my own at last.
I owe a lot of that feeling to Brooke Valley. It is a very special place. I felt an overwhelming sense of peace as soon as we moved here. Driving into the valley in the rental truck that very first time, we came to a low swampy area and a blue heron flew across our path. It was like a sign. I’m not sure of what, but an elegant one.
Our lives centered around little Brooke Valley School for several years. It is a co-operative one room school house built in the woods with a student enrolment that varies but never gets much above sixteen. All the parents were involved – the whole community was involved. That was the best thing about Brooke Valley. Community was something I had yearned for in all the restless years of my youth without even knowing it.
Roots. A sense of belonging.
I still play rock ‘n roll from time to time with my favorite band ever, The Usual Suspects, sometimes known as Louis the Dreamer. With Franc van Oort and Jack Hurd and Cam Gray, I’ve written forty songs or so. I still pack to many words into my songs. Sometimes there are so many, I end up writing a story instead.
I like to cross-country ski. There are old logging roads through our property and that’s where Amanda and I go, out to the high meadow and the swampland. Sometimes there are coyote tracks in the snow.
The winters are long here. We heat with wood; there’s lots of it. I like to cook and do crossword puzzles or read in front of the fire. It is so quiet you can hear yourself think. I like that best of all. That and the full moon. You can see the shadow of chimney smoke on the snow.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem quite far enough away. So we have bought a cabin on the Lake of Many Narrows, a couple of hours north of Sudbury, Ontario where the only human sound you are likely to hear is the train to White River or the occasional float plane. Our good friends the Mason family introduced us to the lake. We have spent quite a few summers there now with them. There are no roads. You have to fly in or take the “Budd Car” and ask the conductor to stop at the trailhead. Then it’s a half hour hike. The trail is ten thousand years old. I kind of feel that old myself after carrying in a heavy pack!
I designed the house we live in here in Brooke Valley, so my three years of architectural training were not a waste of time. But nothing you do in putting a life together is truly a waste of time. That would suggest there was some designated path you were supposed to be traveling and if you had stuck to it you would have arrived at your destination more quickly. There is no such path. There is no destination. This is where I am now and happy to be so. It would be a very good life indeed if one could say the same every step along the way. But if that were the case, how would you know when you had arrived somewhere just right?
Maybe you will understand why I am a person who doesn’t really like to travel. But I wonder if you could explain to me why I often wish that I were somewhere else? I guess I just never learned how to unpack properly. As a writer I have traveled all over North America. I’ve done readings as far south as Miami and as far north as Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories. I’ve been to Bologna, Italy for the Children’s Book Fair, to Melbourne Australia for their International Writer’s Festival and to Cambridge University in England to deliver a talk. I could imagine living in any of those places. In your imagination you can travel light and you don’t need a passport.
Where next? There’s only Lewis at home, these days. He’s in grade ten as I write this with dreams of becoming an actor. Amanda sometimes daydreams about us moving to Manhattan where she was born. I talk about England, a little cottage on the coast somewhere. We both kind of like Toronto all over again. Who knows? As glad as I am to have landed somewhere, there’s still a part of me who wants to run away. I keep a tea cosy near at hand, just in case.
Oh, yes, and I did see Nicky again. On television. And then, many years later, for lunch when I happened to be in London. It was good to be able to explain to him, after forty-seven years, that moving to Canada had taken longer than I expected. He understood. He had been pretty busy himself becoming a successful actor.
And on another trip to England with Amanda and the children in the spring of 1997, I visited Little Sutton one afternoon and found Just Home. No one was home. But there was a lady next door tending her roses. She had lived in the same house all of her eighty plus years. Just as I was about to explain who I was and why I was there, she got a startled look in her eyes all of a sudden. “Why, you’re Sid Jones’s boy,” she said.
What a shock. Was it my gray flannel shorts, red tie and open-toed sandals? Hardly. But I was just about the age my father must have been when they left for the new world. She graciously thought to invite me into her house where she led me to the landing of the stairs. There was a large window there looking down on the back yard of Just Home.
“You’ll want to see your garden,” she said, smiling. It was as if she knew something about me I didn’t know myself. I wonder…
Favorite Stuff
Maestro Territory:
Me up at the Lake Of Many Narrows. That's not its real name. But if you can speak Ojibway, it's a pretty good hint.
I love to cook. I can happily spend all day creating a meal that might get gobbled up in fifteen minutes. As long as you like the people doing the gobbling, it’s worth it. Come to think of it, I’ll happily spend a year or two writing a book that I hope will get gobbled up in one night, which is sort of the same thing.
When you’re cooking you can listen to music, especially Tom Allen on CBC’s Radio Two Morning: the start to a perfect day. Then on Saturdays you have to time the run to the garbage dump and picking up the newspapers so that you don’t miss a moment of Quirks & Quarks, the weekly science journal. Thank God for CBC Radio.
You have to pick up the Saturday paper, not because of the news, but so that you’ve got the New York Times Crossword, which takes me days to finish, but which I’m convinced is keeping my brain from turning into tapioca. My dream is to create a crossword puzzle good enough to be accepted by Will Shortz, the crossword maven at The New York Times.
But I also really like the Cyberquotes in the Ottawa Citizen. Here’s one I made up myself. It’s easy, a line from a children’s picture book. See if you can figure it out.
H S G B G Q M X Q A K M M B M A A W X B S D X J
H S G B G Q R H T M Q D M J, W X J – H – X J
-- S K. W M N W W
Where was I? Oh, yeah, in the kitchen. I especially like Paella. It’s a Spanish dish with shrimp and chorizo sausage and saffron and … so many good things. You have to use a huge paella pan to cook it and it takes up most of the top of the stove. Fabulous! I also love Thai cuisine with all that basil, cilantro, cocoanut milk and Nam Pla, which is fish gravy. But you know what: Italian, Greek, Mexican, Lebanese, Indian and Japanese cuisine – I love it all! Truth to tell, I’ve never met any kind of cuisine I didn’t like. Except fast food. I’ve got no time for fast food. (Okay, a shawarma now and then, but that’s all.) And I’ve got all the time in the world for slow food. That’s a paradox, I guess. A tasty paradox.
I don’t watch much TV, except I love NFL Football and Masterpiece Theater. A strange mix, I know. I also love real football, the kind played with your feet – the kind that the rest of the world outside of North America calls football. My favorite team is Liverpool, because I was born right across the Mersey River from that famous city.
Mostly, however, I do a lot of reading. What do I like? Lots of things. Mostly fiction – mostly mysteries -- but other stuff as well. It’s hard to make a desert Island list, but here are some recent favorites: Feed by MT Anderson, The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, Possession by A.S. Byatt, High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, Saturday by Ian McEwan, Old Filth by Jane Gardam, Airborn by Kenneth Oppel, Havana Bay by Martin Cruz Smith, Acid Row by Minette Walters, Fatherland by Robert Harris, Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt, The Way the Crow Flies by Anne-Marie MacDonald and Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson.
Just to name a handful.
I’ve also been reading all of Ian Rankin’s “John Rebus” mysteries set in that gloomy and wonderful city, Edinburgh. Even gloomier are Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko books set in Moscow, and just slightly less gloomy are Peter Robinson’s wonderful Inspector Banks mysteries set in Yorkshire. I love all that gloom and shadows lurching out of it.
If you tied me up and wouldn’t let me go until I named my all-time favourite book, I’d probably say The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne. My next choice might be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, or maybe Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen or The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Dracula? Maybe. Then again, I loved Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré (I’ve read pretty well everything LeCarre ever wrote). Then there’s The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, and How Tom Beat Captain Njork and His Hired Sportsmen by Russel Hoban, and Angel Square, by Brian Doyle, and Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, and Carol Shields’ The Republic of Love.
Did I mention Tales of a Gambling Grandma, by Dayal Kaur Khalsa?
You see how crazy it gets? When I was a kid I loved Enid Blyton’s “Adventure” series more than anything. I also roared with laughter at The Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks. Then there was Tom Swift Junior and the Hardy Boys.
When I was in my twenties I read Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Herman Hesse and Richard Brautigan. Everybody I knew was reading them. I devoured Graham Greene, after that. I loved C.S. Lewis’s science fiction trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hiddeous Strength. And, for a while, I was big on Charles Williams, who, along with Lewis and Tolien was part of a group at Oxford called The Inklings. Williams wrote religious thrillers. I was going through a religious phase back then.
I could go on and on, but I’ll stop. Oh, apart from mentioning Chris van Allsburg’s The Mysterious Harris Burdick, and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids and Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love, and all the Raymond Chandler mysteries set in the mean streets of LA…okay, okay, I’ll stop.
Thrillers, romances, picture books, poetry – Yikes! I totally forgot about poetry, which I read a lot of, especially Ron Koertge and Billy Collins. Anyway, it’s hard to find any kind of consistency in my reading patterns except maybe that I lean towards British authors.
But about that desert island… The thing is, you’d want something that was going to take a long time to read if you really were stuck on a desert island. So I’d choose the complete works of William Shakespeare. When kids ask me who my hero is, I say William Shakespeare. In fact Shakespeare is about as close as I come to having a religion, anymore; that’s called Bardolatry, by the way. I probably understand about sixty percent of what I read or hear when I see a play by Shakespeare, but just the hearing itself is so good for the ear. And sixty percent is up by about forty percent from what I understood when I studied him in high school. There’s just so much to learn, I’ll be reading him for the rest of my life. Desert island or not.
A Brief Introduction
I live near Perth Ontario, Canada. We moved to Eastern Ontario from Toronto in 1988; we being my wife, Amanda Lewis, and our three children: Alexander (Xan), Magdalene (Maddy), and Lewis. The kids have grown up and moved away to Toronto, London, England, and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Amanda’s still around, although she’s in Ottawa a lot, where she is Artistic Director at the Ottawa School of Speech and Drama.
We live on 76 acres of rough and tumble land. It’s a landscape that has figured prominently in my writing over the last twenty years. I designed the house we live in, finally putting to use three years of architectural training received at the University of Waterloo back in the late sixties and early seventies. That was before the school decided that maybe it would be better if I didn’t design anything that people were actually going to enter…
I left Waterloo and joined a rock band in Toronto. To find out more about my days with Boogie Dick, check out the autobiographical sketch for some of the painful details.
I decided to return to Waterloo to get a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts. I joined another band, there, Alabaster. We were primarily a cover band, doing songs by the Beatles, Cream, Neil Young, The Band, Credence Clearwater, Elton John, James Taylor, to name a few. We also did some original tunes, which got me writing, though it was still only a pastime.
I met Amanda the summer I graduated from Waterloo. It was 1974 and my art school mentor, Virgil Burnett, asked if I would look after his beautiful old, house in Stratford for the summer. There was a beautiful, young woman he had asked to look after his horse. I fell in love with her. (Not the horse, the girl). Amanda was working at her grandmother’s bookstore by day and at the Avon Theatre by night. At the end of the summer we couldn’t imagine being apart, so we moved to Toronto, where she was entering her second year at York University in the theatre program.
I found a job as a book designer with PMA Books. It was my first brush with publishing but on the other side of the table, you might say. Carol Martin and the folks at PMA Books were great. I liked living in a world of books and book talk. Canadian literature was on fire. It was an exciting time. It was also my first full-time job. And my last. I worked there a whole year and a half. Pretty good, eh?
Amanda and I took off for Europe in 1976 and when we returned I started up my own graphic design firm with Michael Solomon. In 1978, I decided to go back to school to do an MFA at York. The summer that I graduated from York I was so bored with school that I wrote my first novel, Odd’s End. It was just something to do – like going on a summer holiday when you don’t have any money. Odd’s End won the Seal First Novel Award. There was a $50,000 prize. I decided that this writing thing might be fun.
Honours and Awards
Tim's last three novels have all been short-listed for the Governor General's Award.
The Emperor of Any Place, in 2015
Blink and Caution, in 2011
The Uninvited, in 2009
Tim has been short-listed for the G.G. six times and won it twice.
Blink & Caution
Blink & Caution wins the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for 2011.
Blink & Caution has been designated a Junior Library Guild Selection for Spring 2011.
Blink and Caution was short listed for the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Award. It didn't win but huge congratulations to Kit Pearson for her wonderful novel, The Whole Truth," which did!
Winner in 1997 of the Vicky Metcalf Award for a body of work that is considered inspirational to Canadian Youth.
The Uninivited
Short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Children’s fiction
nominated as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association.
Arthur Ellis Awards - Finalist
ALA Best Books for Young Adults List
Texas Tayshas List
Ontario Library Association "Forest of Reading" Shortlist - White Pine (High School Level)
ALA Best Books for Young Adults - Nominee
Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year
Horn Book Summer Reading List
Rex Zero, King of Nothing
Included on the 2009 Bank Street College, Best Children’s Books of the Year list, 100th Anniversary Edition
Included on the USBBY Outstanding International Books List
CLA Book of the Year for Children Award (2007: Longlist)
IODE Violet Downey Book Award (2008: Shortlisted)
Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children's Book Award (2007: Shortlisted)
CCBC Best Books for Kids & Teens (2008: Selected)
Society of School Librarians International Book Award Honor Book
USBBY-CBC Outstanding International Book
Recommendations in:
Book Links
Booklist, Starred
Bulletin-Center Child Books
Horn Book, Starred Review
Kirkus Reviews
School Library Journal, Starred Review
Rex Zero and the End of the World
Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children's Book Award (2007: Shortlisted)
CLA Book of the Year for Children Award (2007: Honour Book)
CCBC Our Choice (2007: Starred Selection)
Boston Globe/Horn Book Award – Fiction (2007: Honor Book)
TD CCBC Canadian Children's Literature Award (2007: Finalist)
Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices (2008: Selected)
American Library Association Notable Children's Books
Boston Book Review - Winner
Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year
CCBC Choice (Univ. of WI)
USBBY-CBC Outstanding International Book
Recommendations in:
Booklist
Bulletin-Center Child Books
Horn Book, Starred Review
Kirkus Reviews
Publishers Weekly, Starred
School Library Journal
VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates)
A Thief in the House of Memory
CLA Young Adult Book Award (2005: Shortlisted)
American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults
Books for the Teen Age, New York Public Library
Kirkus Reviews Editor's Choice
Publishers Weekly Best Children's Books of the Year
Vermont Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award Master List
Recommendations in:
Booklist
Bulletin-Center Child Books
Horn Book
International Reading Association
Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
Publishers Weekly, Starred
School Library Journal, Starred Review
VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates)
The Boy in the Burning House
Winner of an Arthur Ellis Award of the Crime Writers of Canada
Winner of an Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America.
Short-listed for the Red Maple Awards, Ontario Library Association
Short-listed for The Ruth Schwartz Award of the Ontario Arts Council
Short-listed for the Mr. Christie Award
Winner of the literary prize "Insula Romana" as the best young adult book of the year in the Umbria region. (The book title in Italy is Il Ragazzo in fiamme)
Short-listed for the Guardian Book Prize in the UK
American Library Association Popular Paperbacks for Young Readers
Ned Mouse Breaks Away
Winner - Rocky Mountain Book Award
Starred Selection - CCBC Our Choice 2004
Silver Medalist - Mr. Christie's Book Award
Selected as a Canadian Toy Council Best Book
The Maestro
An International Board of Books for Youth (IBBY) Honor Book, 1998
Winner of the Governor General's Award, Children's Literature, 1995
Winner of the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book of the Year
Short-listed for The City of Toronto Book Award
Short-listed for the Ruth Schwartz Award of the Ontario Arts Council
Short-listed for the Mr. Christie Award
Included on The Hungry Mind Review Children's Books of Distinction
A New York Public Library Best Books for the Teenager
A Booklist Editor's Choice.
Short-listed for the Guardian Book Prize in the UK. (The book title in the UK is The Survival Game)
Mischief City
Included in the "White Raven" catalogue of the Internationale Jugend Bibliotek in Münich, Germany, 1986
Zoom at Sea
Short-listed for the Canada Council Award for text, 1983
Winner of the I.O.D.E., Toronto Chapter, Award for best children's book
Winner of the Ruth Schwartz Award of The Canadian Book Sellers Association
Stephen Fair
Winner of the Canadian Library Association, Children's Book of the Year
Short-listed for the Red Maple Award of the Ontario Library Association
Lord of the Fries
Short-listed for the Mr. Christie Award
A New York Public Library Best Books for the Teenager
The Book of Changes
Short-listed for the Mister Christie Award, 1994
Named an American Library Association Notable Book for Children
Short-listed for the Silver Birch Award of the Ontario Library Association
Some of the Kinder Planets
Winner of the Governor General's Award, Children's Fiction, 1993
Winner of the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award (first Canadian to win)
Named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year, Parenting Magazine (U.S.)
Named a School Library Journal (U.S.) Best Book of the Year.
Winner of the Canadian Library Association Children's Book of the Year
Short-listed for the Mister Christie Award
Winner of the Vicky Metcalf Award for short fiction. ("The Hope Bakery")
Rosie Backstage
The only Canadian title chosen in 1994 for the "White Raven" Catalogue of the prestigious Internationale Jugend Bibliotek in Münich, Germany
Fastyngange
Runner-up for the Author's Award presented by The Foundation For the Advancement of Canadian Letters, 1989
The Knot
Short-listed for the City of Toronto Book Award, 1984
Odd’s End
Winner of the Seal First Novel Award, 1980
Runner-up for the John Creasy Award, Crime Writers Association of
Great Britain
QUOTED: "The reader will be engrossed, like Bee, in unraveling the mystery and piecing together events."
The Ruinous Sweep
Christina L. Dobbs
The Horn Book Magazine. 94.5 (September-October 2018): p99.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Full Text:
The Ruinous Sweep
by Tim Wynne-Jones
High School Candlewick 388 pp. g 6/18 978-0-7636-9745-7 $17.99
With Dante's allegorical journey to hell echoing throughout, this dark adventure tale begins with a teen, unsure of who he is or what has happened, being pushed out of a vehicle. All Donovan knows is that he must get to his high school girlfriend Bee, though he can't remember her--or even the previous night--with any accuracy. In the first half of the book, the narrative alternates between Donovan's harrowing twenty-four 1 hours of trying to stay alive and Bee's attempts to try to unravel what had happened to Donovan, now unconscious in the hospital, and a suspect in his father's murder. Threads of magical realism weave into this first half as Donovan attempts to reconstruct events to understand from whom he is running and why; the second half shifts in tone and, seemingly, in genre, to mystery thriller. The two halves of the novel do not entirely seem to fit together, but the reader will be engrossed, like Bee, in unraveling the mystery and piecing together events as discovered by Donovan and Bee, who are both in increasing danger as they get closer to the truth.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dobbs, Christina L. "The Ruinous Sweep." The Horn Book Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2018, p. 99. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A552263175/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b9ebb962. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A552263175
QUOTED: "Fans of thrillers will find plenty of suspense in this story with vague echoes of Dante's Inferno."
THE RUINOUS SWEEP
Sharon Verbeten
BookPage. (July 2018): p26.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE RUINOUS SWEEP By Tim Wynne-Jones Candlewick $18.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780763697457 Audio, eBook available Ages 14 and up
MYSTERY
Tim Wynne-Jones' intense new book, The Ruinous Sweep, opens with a car crash, in which teenager Donovan Turner is tossed from a vehicle in the middle of nowhere. Then the narration fast-forwards to a hospital, where a near unconscious Donovan receives treatment following the hit-and-run and his girlfriend, Bee, holds watch and tries to decipher his urgent mumbles.
Shortly after Donovan's car accident, police inform Bee that her boyfriend is also suspected of murdering his alcoholic father, whose badly beaten body was found lying next to Donovan's baseball bat. The story's timeline then begins to alternate between Donovan's accident and the mystery of his father's murder, which Bee sets out to investigate. Wynne-Jones introduces a bevy of dark characters and chilling scenarios designed to lead readers to piece together the two puzzles, but while the eerie paths may thrill some, the winding narrative may prove confusing at points.
The Ruinous Sweep is a trip into an underworld filled with drugs, murder and dysfunctional families. Fans of thrillers will find plenty of suspense in this story with vague echoes of Dante's Inferno. The plot requires a fair amount of heavy lifting and focus, but fans of Wynne-Jones' previous books and his talent for fabulism may find it worthwhile.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Verbeten, Sharon. "THE RUINOUS SWEEP." BookPage, July 2018, p. 26. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544601902/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c9a0f7fd. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A544601902
WYNNE-JONES, Tim: The Ruinous Sweep
Lesley Little
Resource Links. 23.5 (June 2018): p21.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Resource Links
http://www.atcl.ca
Full Text:
WYNNE-JONES, Tim
The Ruinous Sweep
Candlewick Press, 2018. 400p. Gr. 7--& 12. 978-0-763697457. Hdbk. $18.99
[G]
This novel is about the double murder of a father and son and how it remains unresolved until the mystical dots are first understood and then properly connected.
The first part of the book is titled The Space Capsule and opens with a young man, Donovan, in the cab of a van wondering what it is he is supposed to be doing while he tries to recall why he is there in the first place. This is followed in chapter two by his girlfriend's observations of him in a hospital intensive care unit. The mysterious journey reminiscent of Dante's Inferno goes back and forth through the recollections and experiences of the two characters; Donovan, the murdered son, and Beatrice, his girlfriend. Donovan carries most of the narrative in the first half. It is a series of unreal events to which Donovan is privy but he has immense difficulty in understanding them.
The second part of the book is called the Bowhunter and it is in this half of the story that things start to come together. This is actually the better half of the book. It is more down-to-earth, better paced, and everything finally comes into focus; it all makes amazing sense.
Tim Wynne-Jones is a member of the Order of Canada, has won numerous awards for his varied and numerous works. He is also a songwriter.
Thematic Links: Father and Son; Personal Relationships; Psychic Experiences; Murder
Lesley Little
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Little, Lesley. "WYNNE-JONES, Tim: The Ruinous Sweep." Resource Links, June 2018, p. 21. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547267528/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9c246eb5. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547267528
QUOTED: "Young adults who enjoy crime dramas will be enticed to pick this book up."
Wynne-Jones, Tim. The Ruinous Sweep
Aimee Ambrose
Voice of Youth Advocates. 41.2 (June 2018): p67.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
Full Text:
Wynne-Jones, Tim. The Ruinous Sweep. Candlewick, June 2018. 400p. $18.99. 978-07636-9745-7.
3Q * 4P * S
Donovan Turner cannot remember anything from the past twenty-four hours. Since he found himself stranded in the middle of nowhere with only the vague sense that something terrible occurred, the entire night is a complete blur. As the sound of sirens surrounds him, Donovan takes off for the woods hoping to piece together the night's events before the police find him. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Bee, is attempting to fend off a stiff female detective, who seems to think Donovan is responsible for a recent murder. Knowing her boyfriend is incapable of such violence, Bee sets off on her own search for answers, often stopping at nothing to prove Donovan's innocence.
From its slow beginning to its dizzying plot line, The Ruinous Sweep is a challenging read. Donovans struggle to piece together his last twenty-four hours is as confusing for the reader as it is for him. Instead of allowing the reader to slowly uncover clues and piece together information, the author throws on twists, which adds to the confusion. Many times, it feels as if there are two very different stories occurring, each better off being told separately. Once Part Two begins, however, and Bee takes over as the lead, the story becomes focused. Young adults who enjoy crime dramas will be enticed to pick this book up.--Aimee Ambrose.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ambrose, Aimee. "Wynne-Jones, Tim. The Ruinous Sweep." Voice of Youth Advocates, June 2018, p. 67. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545022937/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c92a1e03. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A545022937
QUOTED: "Readers will love putting together the puzzle pieces to figure out what is really going on here."
The Ruinous Sweep
Jessica Anne Bratt
Booklist. 114.18 (May 15, 2018): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Ruinous Sweep.
By Tim Wynne-Jones.
June 2018.400p. Candlewick, $18.99 (9780763697457). Gr. 8-11.
Donovan is running for his life after causing a fatal accident. He keeps trying to contact his girlfriend, Beatrice, to tell her what happened, in hopes that she can help him get out of trouble. Meanwhile, Bee is doing just that, fighting to clear his name in the murder of his own father. In flashbacks--which depict a distorted sense of reality--readers slowly begin to discover who Donovan really is as a boyfriend, a son, and a person. Readers will learn of an earlier ultimatum given to Donovan by Bee, leading to his decision to break away from his father in a confrontation with disastrous results. Readers will love putting together the puzzle pieces to figure out what is really going on here on multiple levels. Some may find the ending bittersweet, but the heart of the latest from the acclaimed Wynne-Jones (The Emperor of Any Place, 2015) is refreshing. A literary thriller with riveting characters, infused with just a touch of magical realism. --Jessica Anne Bratt
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bratt, Jessica Anne. "The Ruinous Sweep." Booklist, 15 May 2018, p. 52. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541400928/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9496863d. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541400928
QUOTED: "Believably quirky characters and genuinely terrifying moments will keep readers enthralled until the bittersweet finale."
The Ruinous Sweep
Publishers Weekly. 265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p94.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Ruinous Sweep
Tim Wynne-Jones. Candlewick Press, $18.99
(400p) ISBN 978-0-7636-9745-7
In Wynne-Jones's tense, eerie thriller that lightly draws from Dante's Inferno, 17-year-old Donovan Turner lies unconscious in a hospital after a hit-and-run left him gravely injured. His girlfriend, Beatrice "Bee" Northway, is at his side. While Donovan relives the events leading up to the accident in his mind (or, possibly, an otherworldly in-between place), Bee makes careful notes in her journal describing each sound that Donovan utters, hoping to piece together what may have happened. Then Donovan's father is found beaten to death with Donovan's baseball bat. After Bee's boyfriend becomes a suspect in the murder, she puts herself in considerable danger to prove to the police that he's innocent. Wynne-Jones cleverly employs elements of his trademark magical realism, and readers will enjoy making the connections between Bee's discoveries and Donovan's subconscious version of events; both versions are chilling. The courageous, clever Bee is a revelation, and her clear-eyed approach to finding the truth and her enduring love for Donovan, along with believably quirky characters and genuinely terrifying moments, will keep readers enthralled until the bittersweet finale. Ages 14-up. Agent: Barry Goldblatt, Barry Goldblatt Literary. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Ruinous Sweep." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 94. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532799/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c7282d34. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532799
QUOTED: "Suspenseful and complex, this will mesmerize readers patient enough to stick with it."
Wynne-Jones, Tim: THE RUINOUS SWEEP
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wynne-Jones, Tim THE RUINOUS SWEEP Candlewick (Young Adult Fiction) $18.99 6, 26 ISBN: 978-0-7636-9745-7
A teen boy with anger issues, critically injured in a car accident, is suspected of murdering his alcoholic father and staunchly defended by his high school girlfriend, Bee.
The first part of Wynne-Jones' (Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes, 2016, etc.) novel has a hallucinatory quality. Occasional chapters describe Bee's vigil by Donovan's bedside in the ICU, while the bulk of the text describes Dono's travels through a nightmarish world fraught with violence and danger. A series of bizarre encounters and escapes keeps readers off-balance, unsure what details, if any, are real. In this section, similarities to Dante's Inferno may or may not resonate with teen readers. A sharp break in the narrative occurs after a dramatic event and shifts the focus to Bee and the tone from horror-inflected to whodunit. Bee's detecting efforts bear fruit, but her foolhardy risk-taking is clearly plot-driven and may frustrate some readers. Wynne-Jones' writing is smooth and compelling, and certain images will likely linger in readers' minds. However, most characters are adults, which may distance some teens, and the motivation for the murder is both decidedly adult and not entirely convincing. Some aspects of the first section never quite connect to the rest, while the enigmatic author's note raises further questions. No racial diversity is apparent; class differences are implied.
Suspenseful and complex, this will mesmerize readers patient enough to stick with it. (author's note) (Fiction. 14-18)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wynne-Jones, Tim: THE RUINOUS SWEEP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375091/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=42c05491. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375091
QUOTED: "This spirited story captures the enthusiasm of make-believe games, not to mention the appeal of brand-new sneakers."
Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes
Jeanne McDermott
Booklist. 112.18 (May 15, 2016): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes. By Tim Wynne-Jones. Illus. by Brian Won. June 2016. 32p. Candlewick, $ 16.99 (9780763671198). K-Gr. 2.
Secret Agent Man (S.A.M.) seems like an ordinary boy, but he leads a life of derring-do. Though he appears to be sitting in the grass while his sidekick, K (his mom), hangs laundry, he's really digging for the Lost City of Raisins. When S.A.M. goes with K to buy shoes, he's hip to Shoe Store Man's game and watches closely for anything fishy when he ties S.A.M. s laces: "One bow, two bows. Over, under, and pull them tight." As S.A.M. moves between reality and superspy fantasy, the colorful, blocky illustrations seamlessly transition from ordinary life depicted in sky blues and grass greens to the imaginative scenes in distinctly noirlike black-and-blue tones. The snappy language and playful atmosphere are very entertaining, especially when K plays along with S.A.M.'s game and when S.A.M.'s new tiger-striped shoes help him come to the rescue when K disappears after a boom of thunder (she's outside collecting the laundry before a rainstorm). This spirited story captures the enthusiasm of make-believe games, not to mention the appeal of brand-new sneakers.--Jeanne McDermott
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
McDermott, Jeanne. "Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes." Booklist, 15 May 2016, p. 60. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A453913721/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9cbdd615. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453913721
QUOTED: "Energetic compositions and appealing artwork bolster this spy-friendly text."
Wynne-Jones, Tim: SECRET AGENT MAN GOES SHOPPING FOR SHOES
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wynne-Jones, Tim SECRET AGENT MAN GOES SHOPPING FOR SHOES Candlewick (Children's Picture Books) $16.99 6, 14 ISBN: 978-0-7636-7119-8
A spy-obsessed boy must shop for shoes (tiger tennies!), and a newfound ability to tie them completes his mission.Secret Agent Man has a big imagination. In his mind's eye, raisins become jewels, fries are snakes, and everyone except K., his adult sidekick, is suspect. Together they canvas the sneaker store to find the right pair. The day is fraught with darkness and danger, but new tiger kicks help him roar to the rescue. Digital illustrations, done in a silkscreen aesthetic, bring the text to life. To convey the boy's thoughts, Won fills the spreads with atmospheric blues, creating an air of mystery and suspense. Their retro styling echoes pre-Cold War minimalist propaganda artwork--perfect for a spy. He cleverly juxtaposes this with S.A.M.'s reality, done in bright, white backgrounds and cheerful colors. Text and art find their comedic stride when S.A.M. looks for K. in the Holding Cell of Despair (the toilet) and the Rocket Silo (broom closet). However, some readers may lose heart when they see how easily S.A.M. learns to tie shoes--apparently without practice! S.A.M. has brown hair, dark eyes, and pink skin, while K., also pink-skinned, has lighter-brown hair and blue eyes.Energetic compositions and appealing artwork bolster this spy-friendly text. (Picture book. 4-7)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wynne-Jones, Tim: SECRET AGENT MAN GOES SHOPPING FOR SHOES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2016. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A449240854/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9b73573b. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449240854
QUOTED: "Wynne-Jones ... creates some lovely, offhanded rapport between mother and son."
Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes
Publishers Weekly. 263.11 (Mar. 14, 2016): p76.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes
Tim Wynne-Jones, illus. by Brian Won. Candlewick, $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-7636-7119-8
The title sounds promising--what kid wouldn't want to turn shoe shopping into something more daring? But most of Wynne-Jones's story happens after the hero, code name S.A.M., and his mother, code name K. ("Short for Kay"), buy matching tiger-striped sneakers. Their day together includes lunch out (S.A.M. orders "a double buffalo burger with a side of snakes and an electron float"), thwarting the attempted theft of "the Plans for World Domination" (by a baby in a stroller), and a rescue of the family laundry from the clothesline before a rainstorm. Wynne-Jones (the Zoom trilogy) creates some lovely, offhanded rapport between mother and son ("We are matching tigers," says S.A.M. "Roar," says K.), but the incidents pile up without really hanging together. The book ends up being a portfolio of themed drawings by Won (Hooray for Hat.'), who is in terrific form. His digital images, which combine the look of 1960s animation with a variety of compositional styles, handily capture both everyday sights (a shoe salesman carrying an improbable number of shoeboxes) and the drenched-in-shadows menace of imagined international intrigue. Ages 4-8. Illustrator's agent: Rubin Pfeffer, Rubin Pfeffer Content. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes." Publishers Weekly, 14 Mar. 2016, p. 76. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A447931959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a36a6f27. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A447931959
The Emperor of Any Place
Publishers Weekly. 262.49 (Dec. 2, 2015): p114+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Emperor of Any Place
Tim Wynne-Jones. Candlewick, $17.99 ISBN 978-0-7636-6973-7
Wynne-Jones (Blink & Caution) deftly blends realism and fantasy in this eerie tale featuring Evan, a high school student mourning his late father, and Griff, the crusty grandfather Evan meets for the first time. Evan always knew that his ex-Marine grandfather and draft-dodger father never saw eye to eye, but he wasn't aware of his grandfather's unearthly encounters during WWII until he discovers the mysterious diary of a Japanese soldier. When Griff shows up at Evan's door, Evan is immediately put off by his grandfather's controlling tendencies, but his curiosity is piqued. Could this be the same man mentioned in the diary, who visited an island filled with flesh-eating monsters and the ghosts of unborn children? Readers will be swept up quickly in the tense relationship between Evan and Griff, as well as the unlikely friendship between enemy soldiers fighting for survival in a surreal landscape. Without spelling out the metaphoric significance of the story within the story, Wynne-Jones provides enough hints for readers to make connections and examine the lines between war and peace, as well as hate and love. Ages 14--up.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Emperor of Any Place." Publishers Weekly, 2 Dec. 2015, p. 114+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A436234354/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dd22943a. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A436234354
QUOTED: "It could have been very heavy and sad but the moments of lightness provided by Osamu's writing and Evan's inner self-talk move the action along and will be appreciated by the intended reader. Osamu's survival and his tracking and finding of Derwood are very dramatic, pulling the action along so quickly that it will be difficult for readers to put down this excellent book. Highly recommended."
Wynne-Jones, Tim: The Emperor of Any Place
Joan Marshall
Resource Links. 21.2 (Dec. 2015): p34+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Resource Links
http://www.atcl.ca
Full Text:
[E]
WYNNE-JONES, Tim
The Emperor of Any Place
Candlewick Press/Penguin, 2015. 336p. Gr. 9-12. 978-0-7636-6973-7. Hdbk. $21.00.
16-year-old Evan's kind, gentle father dies suddenly, leaving him drowning in a pool of grief in spite of the support of his neighbours and friends in suburban Don Mills, Ontario, on a street Evan named Any Place when he and his father laughed at the pretensions of modern suburban life. In a book he finds on his father's desk he reads the fantastical story of Isamu Oshiro, a young Japanese soldier marooned on an island near Tinian where the Americans were based, towards the end of World War II. Initially alone, Isamu called himself the Emperor of Kokoro-Jima, the heart-shaped island. Isamu rescued downed American flyer Derwood Kraft and the two of them learned to co-operate and survive in spite of Derwood's amputated hand. Ghosts of the children these men would conceive and their descendants surrounded them and protected them from the zombie-like jikininki who wanted to suck their stories out of them, and from the fearsome immortal tengu, part hawk, part wildcat that attacked when the men least suspected it. Manifestations of posttraumatic stress disorder and the human longing for finding meaning in story, these monsters tortured the men. Even the friendly ghosts led them to question their sanity. Derwood was eventually rescued by Griff Griffin, an American marine who, suspecting Isamu's existence on the island, returned to tell him of the war's end. In a frightening climax, the tengu attacked and in spite of Griffs efforts to shoot it, took the life of the brave Japanese soldier. In horror and grief, Griff spends his adult life wondering if he has done the right thing or whether he did indeed cause Isamu's death.
Griff is Evan's grandfather, whose no-nonsense, stem demeanour has completely estranged him from his own son, Evan's father Clifford, who avoided the American draft and the Vietnam War by escaping to Canada. But he feels he has to come to see Evan to shepherd him through the legalities of Clifford's death. When Griff learns that Derwood's son Leo has written a book about Isamu, he tries to block its publication and distribution, and is unhappy that Evan has read the book. Evan and his 90-year-old grandfather are initially at loggerheads, fuelled by Evan's grief and rage, not to mention the differences in their age and personalities. But one night a vivid nightmare brings the truth to Evan, the truth he saw as a ghost child beside Griff when the tengu attacked Isamu. As he retells the story to Griff they gradually reconcile and plan to look for the daughter he fathered early in the war in Iceland, one of the ethereal ghosts that had protected him on Kokoro-Jima, the heart-shaped island where he found Derwood and Osamu so many years before.
Evan is a powerful character, both grief-stricken and terrified of his grandfather. However, his inner observations of the world around him are ironic and amusing, revealing him as an ordinary teenager. He is fascinated by his grandfather's mannerisms and personal style, as if he is observing an alien species. He can't quite believe Griff s sharply ironed pants, his clean white handkerchief or his polished tasselled shoes. Evan's love for his father leads him to believe his father's alienation from his grandfather was completely justified, so he looks for reasons to build up his own dislike of the old man. Evan barely controls his testy, knee jerk responses to his grandfather's black and white beliefs, but does run out of the house once for the day to try to escape Griff s intimidation and macho behaviour. Evan's grief is completely believable, his loss palpable and poignant. His inability to connect with a girl his best friend sets him up with reflects his focus on his father and on Osamu's tale.
Griff represents the one dimensional, judgemental man who has sacrificed love, lived with resignation and carried a grudge against his son for half his life. Reconciliation and friendly connection seem beyond him until he sees that Evan believes his story. He does reach out to Evan in the end, making him his executor and planning with him to research his first love from Iceland. Griffs hesitation in telling his story to Evan is entirely believable as he cannot admit that he could have been a murderer. This hesitation ratchets up the tension along with Griff s sharp insults and comments about his son's insubordination.
Isamu's adoration of his wife Hisako, to whom he addresses his story, is heart breaking as they were only married four months before Isamu volunteered for military duty. Isamu's inner strength, powerful understanding of the ghosts that surround him and practical skills at survival make him a fascinating character who reveals the Japanese beliefs about war. He is also quite amusing, inflating his own ego, tenderly recalling the past for his wife, and keeping a journal, all of which make his death so sad.
Derwood's fierce determination to live after having to amputate his hand, his gentle cooperation with Osamu and his engineering skills ensure his survival.
This novel is infused with the idea of ghosts. The zombie-like jikininki will both attract and repel readers, and the tengu will certainly horrify them, especially with its sudden attacks. The complex question of posttraumatic stress disorder, what causes it, and its cumulative disastrous results are wound up with the immortal tengu, the ghost that attacks and destroys. But it is the ghosts of children yet to be born, the idea of preincarnation, upon which the plot pivots, that will stay with the reader and provide many moments of thoughtful debate as it challenges western thoughts and beliefs.
The heart-shaped island of Kokoro-Jima blossoms into life as Isamu and Derwood roam over it searching for ways to survive and climbing a tall tree to observe the horizon and the American base at Tinian. The jungle that nearly buries the downed plane, the cave they shelter in and the wind swept beaches set the scene for confrontation, loneliness and despair. The dialogue is up-to-date, sharp and often amusing in the present, while awkward exchanges typify the past when Derwood and Osamu don't speak each other's language.
This is a multi-generational story that goes back and forth from Osamu's journal to the present day, a story that ties Evan's mourning in the present day to Isamu's mourning in 1945 and Griff's mourning throughout his post-war life. It could have been very heavy and sad but the moments of lightness provided by Osamu's writing and Evan's inner self-talk move the action along and will be appreciated by the intended reader. Osamu's survival and his tracking and finding of Derwood are very dramatic, pulling the action along so quickly that it will be difficult for readers to put down this excellent book.
Highly recommended.
Thematic Links: World War II; Pacific Islands; Japanese in World War II; Ghosts; Family Relationships; Secrets
Joan Marshall
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Marshall, Joan. "Wynne-Jones, Tim: The Emperor of Any Place." Resource Links, Dec. 2015, p. 34+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A440401581/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a7c488f4. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A440401581
The Emperor of Any Place
Sam Bloom
The Horn Book Magazine. 91.6 (November-December 2015): p94.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Full Text:
* The Emperor of Any Place
by Tim Wynne-Jones
High School Candlewick 328 pp.
10/15 978-0-7636-6973-7 $17.99
"So much of grief is unlearning," observes Wynne-Jones in this perceptive and multi-layered page-turner. When Evan's single father, Clifford, dies suddenly, the high-schooler must work through his own grief while dealing with Clifford's estranged father Griff, a military man who Clifford had claimed was a murderer. Griff's also a control freak and is somehow tied to the strange book that was sent to Clifford just before he died. As Evan reads the book--the translated journal of a WWII Japanese soldier stranded on a mystical island with an American Marine plane-crash survivor--he experiences a strange sense of deja-vu. Wynne-Jones skillfully weaves the World War II journal into Evan's own story, building suspense and keeping Griff's part in the proceedings just obscure enough to create a cracking mystery. The author's conversational tone provides occasional comic relief when things start to get too sinister, and the immediacy of his writing leads to some evocative descriptive passages (such as when Evan and his father listen to Miles Davis: "A night breeze stole into the room and was doing a slow dance under the jazz. Evan could feel it on the back of his neck, the sweat on him cooling. He shivered"). There's a whole lot going on here: Evan's and Griff's shared heartbreak, exhibited in very different ways, and their own increasingly complicated relationship; the stark contrast between the mainly nondescript "Any Place" of Evan's suburban Ontario and the horror of the desert island; and the unlikely friendship between enemy soldiers in the story-within-a-story. All these seemingly disparate parts come together in fascinating ways, resulting in an affecting and unforgettable read.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bloom, Sam. "The Emperor of Any Place." The Horn Book Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2015, p. 94. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A434223804/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f8d5fefd. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A434223804
QUOTED: "Literary master Tim Wynne-Jones has penned another outstanding book for adventurous readers, combining history and horror to grip the imagination."
The Emperor of Any Place
Diane Colson
BookPage. (Oct. 2015): p29.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE EMPEROR OF ANY PLACE
By Tim Wynne-Jones
Candlewick
$17.99, 336 pages
ISBN 9780763669737 Audio available
Ages 14 and up
FICTION
Evan is grief-stricken after the sudden death of his father, Clifford. His estranged grandfather, the legendary Marine lifer Griff, comes to help "get things in order," but all Evan knows about Griff is the mutual hate between him and Clifford, culminating in Clifford's move to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. But there may be a hidden motivation for Griff's sudden willingness to care for his grandson. Evan finds a book on Clifford's desk that chronicles bizarre, fantastical events from the end of World War II. Griff is determined to get his hands on the book, so Evan intends to keep it from him, suspecting that the book implicates his grandfather in some terrible deed.
The book reveals the story of a Japanese soldier who survives a battle against the United States and finds refuge on a deserted Pacific island called Kokoro-Jima, the Heart-Shaped Island. There, mystical ghost children follow him, and zombie-like beings feast on the memories of dead soldiers that wash ashore. This incredible story alternates with--and greatly overshadows--Evan's present-day interactions with his cold-hearted grandfather. Like Evan, the reader can scarcely wait for each installment of the tale of Kokoro-Jima.
Literary master Tim Wynne-Jones has penned another outstanding book for adventurous readers, combining history and horror to grip the imagination.--DIANE COLSON
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Colson, Diane. "The Emperor of Any Place." BookPage, Oct. 2015, p. 29. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A430495290/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7608b164. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A430495290
QUOTED: "a riveting, remarkable novel by a reliably great Canadian writer."
The Emperor of Any Place
Carolyn Phelan
Booklist. 112.2 (Sept. 15, 2015): p63+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Emperor of Any Place. By Tim Wynne-Jones. Oct. 2015.336p. Candlewick, $17.99 (9780763669737). Gr. 9-12.
Two weeks after finding his father dead with his head resting on a sand-colored book, Evan is still numbed by his loss when three things happen: He receives a puzzling phone call about the book. He begins the strange journey of reading it. And Griff, the grandfather he has never met, arrives unexpectedly early to help settle his father's affairs and take measure of his estranged son's son. Reading the mysterious book in secret, Evan finds the interwoven first-person accounts of two soldiers, one Japanese, the other American, stranded on a small Pacific island during WWII and encountering "monsters, ghostly children, eaters of the dead," as well as experiencing pain, privation, and loss. In this well-structured and beautifully written novel, the historical narrative alternates with chapters of Evan's present-day story, in which he unravels the mystery of Griffs involvement as a young marine with events on the island, and, simultaneously, takes his own measure of his grandfather. Wynne-Jones writes with a sure hand and a willingness to take readers into uncharted territory. The main characters in both time periods are complex and vividly portrayed, while the stories, both supernatural and realistic, quietly take note of nuances that standard narratives overlook. A riveting, remarkable novel by a reliably great Canadian writer.--Carolyn Phelan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Phelan, Carolyn. "The Emperor of Any Place." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2015, p. 63+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A430801179/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b9119e1c. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A430801179
QUOTED: "Wynne-Jones achieves an extraordinary feat: he illuminates the hidden depths of personalities and families through a mesmerizing blend of realism and magic."
Wynne-Jones, Tim: THE EMPEROR OF ANY PLACE
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wynne-Jones, Tim THE EMPEROR OF ANY PLACE Candlewick (Children's Fiction) $17.99 10, 13 ISBN: 978-0-7636-6973-7
After the shock of his father's sudden death and the arrival of a grandfather he was taught to hate but never met, Evan must unravel a family mystery. His father, Clifford, had been reading a peculiar, leather-bound memoir of a Japanese soldier who was marooned on an island during World War II. An accompanying letter suggests that it's somehow connected to Evan's grandfather Griff, a military man with "steel in [his] backbone." Evan knows that his father never got along with Griff, whose very presence irritates Evan as well, especially when he calls him "soldier." Not wanting to reveal anything to Griff, Evan starts to read Isamu Oshiro's memoir and finds himself mesmerized by the haunting, sad journal addressed to Isamu's fiancee. This book within a book, with its monsters, ghost children, and mysterious glimpses of the future, is as tightly written as Evan's modern-day story. Evan's resistance to his grandfather, colored by his father's poor relationship with him, slowly adjusts the deeper he gets into Isamu's memoir. Dual stories of strength and resilience illuminate the effects that war has on individuals and on father-son relationships, effects that stretch in unexpected ways across generations as Evan and Griff make their ways toward a truce. An accomplished wordsmith, Wynne-Jones achieves an extraordinary feat: he illuminates the hidden depths of personalities and families through a mesmerizing blend of realism and magic. (Fiction. 13-17)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wynne-Jones, Tim: THE EMPEROR OF ANY PLACE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2015. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A427027145/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2a29ac00. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A427027145
QUOTED: "Teen readers will devour this book. Tension, adventure, mystery, and fantasy combine to make this a page-turner."
Wynne-Jones, Tim. The Emperor of Any Place
Debbie Wenk and Sarah Phillips
Voice of Youth Advocates. 38.3 (Aug. 2015): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
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(a) 5Q * 5P * M * J * S
Wynne-Jones, Tim. The Emperor of Any Place. Candlewick, 2015. 336p. $17.99. 978-0-7636-6973-7.
A strange phone call prompts Evan to search his recently deceased fathers study for a book--the diary of Japanese solder, Oshiro, stranded on a Pacific island during WWII. The sixteen-year-old Evan begins to read the book after a letter found inside indicates a possibly sinister connection between the events in the diary and his estranged grandfather, Griff, a WWII Marine Corps sergeant major. When Griff shows up unexpectedly and starts asking cryptic questions, Evan becomes wary and even more determined to finish the book and find some answers.
Two stories emerge--Oshiro's struggle for survival and Evan's equally intense struggle to stand up to the stern grandfather he has never met and get answers. Oshiro's diary is written to his wife, detailing his injury in battle, his escape to the island, and eventually the American flyboy who becomes his prisoner, companion, and friend. It is a gripping account of survival, fear, and hope peopled with the ghosts of children yet to be, ghoulish spirits of the never-to-be-born, and a fierce mythical beast with multiple lives. Evan's thoughts and feelings are consumed by Oshiro's story and a picture of Griff's involvement begins to materialize. Evan's already raw emotions push him to confront Griff. This book brings to mind Marcus Sedgwick's Revolver (Macmillan, 2010)--a teenage boy only just coming to grips with the death of his father confronted by someone from that fathers past who brings questions and ultimately danger. Teen readers will devour this book. Tension, adventure, mystery, and fantasy combine to make this a page-turner.--Debbie Wenk.
The Emperor of Any Place is a hear-tracing tale of survival, friendship, family, and a touch of mystery that will draw readers in from any age group. The history of WWII combined with a blend of both Japanese and American cultures, fantastical creatures, and the modern day creates a unique tale that truly offers something for everyone. Written with descriptive language and compelling characters, readers will feel as though they are living the story right alongside Evan, Oshiro, and Derwood, and will not put the book down until the very end. 4Q, 4P.--Sarah Phillips, Teen Reviewer.
QUALITY
5Q Hard to imagine it being better written.
4Q Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses.
3Q Readable, without serious defects.
2Q Better editing or work by the author might have warranted a 3Q.
1Q Hard to understand how it got published, except in relation to its P rating (and not even then sometimes).
POPULARITY
5P Every YA (who reads) was dying to read it yesterday.
4P Broad general or genre YA appeal.
3P Will appeal with pushing.
2P For the YA reader with a special interest in the subject.
1P No YA will read unless forced to for assignments.
GRADE LEVEL INTEREST
M Middle School (defined as grades 6-8).
J Junior High (defined as grades 7-9).
S Senior High (defined as grades 10-12).
A/YA Adult-marketed book recommended for YAs.
NA New Adult (defined as college-age).
R Reluctant readers (defined as particularly suited for reluctant readers).
VOYA has added two new ratings to our book review codes in an effort to help our readers identify exactly the book they need more quickly. In response to reader requests and interest, we have added a New Adult (NA) code and a Reluctant Reader (R) code. The designation as NA recognizes that many new titles are available that feature twenty-something protagonists dealing with college-age/new adult issues. These titles still fit VOYA's young adult designation but deal with issues and characters beyond the interest and maturity of many high school seniors. The reluctant reader designation recognizes a title has specific qualities that make it of interest to those young adults who, for whatever reason, are reluctant readers. Often this involves a quick-moving plot and plenty of action coupled with short chapters and short overall length, but it may also involve larger fonts, inclusion of graphics that break up text, and other such conventions.
(a) Highlighted Reviews
(G) Graphic Novel Format
Wenk, Debbie^Phillips, Sarah
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wenk, Debbie, and Sarah Phillips. "Wynne-Jones, Tim. The Emperor of Any Place." Voice of Youth Advocates, Aug. 2015, p. 86. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A425811528/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a27ff8f3. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A425811528
QUOTED: "Wynne-Jones ... deftly blends realism and fantasy in this eerie tale."
The Emperor of Any Place
Publishers Weekly. 262.29 (July 20, 2015): p194.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Emperor of Any Place
Tim Wynne-Jones. Candlewick, $17.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-7636-6973-7
Wynne-Jones (Blink & Caution) deftly blends realism and fantasy in this eerie tale featuring Evan, a high school student mourning his late father, and Griff, the crusty grandfather Evan meets for the first time. Evan always knew that his ex-Marine grandfather and draft-dodger father never saw eye to eye, but he wasn't aware of his grandfather's unearthly encounters during WWII until he discovers the mysterious diary of a Japanese soldier. When Griff shows up at Evan's door, Evan is immediately put off by his grandfather's controlling tendencies, but his curiosity is piqued. Could this be the same man mentioned in the diary, who visited an island filled with flesh-eating monsters and the ghosts of unborn children? Readers will be swept up quickly in the tense relationship between Evan and Griff, as well as the unlikely friendship between enemy soldiers fighting for survival in a surreal landscape. Without spelling out the metaphoric significance of the story within the story, Wynne-Jones provides enough hints for readers to make connections and examine the lines between war and peace, as well as hate and love. Ages 14--up. Agent: Barry Goldblatt, Barry Goldblatt Literary. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Emperor of Any Place." Publishers Weekly, 20 July 2015, p. 194. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A422776881/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=20d5672b. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A422776881
QUOTED: "This murder mystery is highly recommended and would make for a great book-club read."
WYNNE-JONES, Tim. The Ruinous Sweep
Emily Moore
School Library Journal. 64.6 (June 2018): p96+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
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* WYNNE-JONES, Tim. The Ruinous Sweep. 400p. Candlewick. Jun. 2018. Tr $18.99. ISBN 9780763697457.
Gr 8 Up--Donovan "Turn" Turner is in a coma after being critically injured in a hit-and-run. Bee, Turn's girlfriend, is by his side and determined to figure out what happened. After the police interview Bee, she learns that they aren't just looking for the runaway driver, but that Turn's father is dead and they suspect his son. Turn is caught in a world between life and death, but is able to give Bee some clues as to what transpired. The problem is the clues make it sound like Turn is indeed his father's killer. Bee knows he could never murder and decides to not share all her information with the police. Instead she puts the pieces of the puzzle together on her own. Taking inspiration from Dante's Inferno, Wynne-Jones presents an ambitious novel that is grim and suspenseful to the end. There are quick pivots in time--from the recent past to Bee's present to Turn's present and back again--as well as switches in narration between the two. Turn's experience in purgatory (or maybe the environs of hell?) is harrowing and confusing, adding to this page-turner that explores loyalty, guilt, anger, and redemption. VERDICT This murder mystery is highly recommended and would make for a great book-club read.--Emily Moore, Camden County Library System, NJ
KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or in the same genre | Tr Hardcover trade binding | lib. ed. Publisher's library binding | Board Board book | pap. Paperback | e eBook original | BL Bilingual | POP Popular Picks
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Moore, Emily. "WYNNE-JONES, Tim. The Ruinous Sweep." School Library Journal, June 2018, p. 96+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540902984/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cd2ed1a2. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540902984
QUOTED: "Children will enjoy sharing Sam's clever, creative adventure."
"a terrific read-aloud with bold, dynamic art."
Wynne-Jones, Tim. Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes
Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst
School Library Journal. 62.6 (June 2016): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
WYNNE-JONES, Tim. Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes, illus. by Brian Won. 32p. Candlewick. Jun. 2016. Tr $16.99. ISBN 9780763671198.
PreS-Gr 2-Sam's day includes exploring his home, shopping for new shoes, eating lunch out, riding the bus home, and taking a nap. His alter ego, Secret Agent Man (S.A.M.), however, is digging for treasure, monitoring a suspicious salesman, and having a side of snakes with his burger. The text and pictures alternate between depicting a spy thriller and a child's actual existence. The digital illustrations have the look of block prints. Textures, shading, and contrasting colors are used to differentiate between the real and the imagined. When Sam is in S.A.M. mode, he wears black clothing and a gadget belt. Those pages look nocturnal, full of shadowy black, blue, and brown tones. Regular life looks like daytime, and Sam is dressed as a kid. Kay (K.) is Sam's mom/partner. When they both decide to get shoes with tiger stripes, K. shows a Secret Agent side as well. The realistic and the imaginary realms merge at climactic points, with the illustrations appearing either split screen-style or with a frightened Sam shown as a child against the dark S.A.M. background. VERDICT Children will enjoy sharing Sam's clever, creative adventure. A terrific read-aloud with bold, dynamic art.--Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst, St. Christopher's School, Richmond, VA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Whitehurst, Lucinda Snyder. "Wynne-Jones, Tim. Secret Agent Man Goes Shopping for Shoes." School Library Journal, June 2016, p. 86. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A453920147/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5b361885. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453920147
QUOTED: "Offering a unique take on the World War II period, this intergenerational tale is an excellent addition to most YA collections."
Wynne-Jones, Tim. The Emperor of Any Place
Susannah Goldstein
School Library Journal. 61.10 (Oct. 2015): p118.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* WYNNE-JONES, Tim. The Emperor of Any Place. 336p. ebook available. Candlewick. Oct. 2015. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9780763669737.
Gr 9 Up--An ambitious treatise on grief, war, memory, and the bonds between fathers and sons. Evan is 16 when his beloved father dies suddenly at home. Evan has no other family, so his estranged grandfather, Griff, whom he has never met, flies in to help him settle the affairs. The source of the family schism was the Vietnam War, when Evan's hippie father moved to Canada to dodge the draft, infuriating his father, a lifelong Marine. While going through his father's belongings, Evan happens upon a Japanese diary detailing a marooned soldier's account during World War II, a book that he knows he must keep from his grandfather at all costs. The narrative contained in this secret book unfolds throughout the course of the novel as readers meet Lance Corporal Isamu Oshiro of the Imperial Japanese Army through his own words and learn how his story ended up in the hands of Evan's father. This work is at its best when it is mired in death--seen in Oshiro's self-appointed job as island undertaker, as well as in GrifFs stoic refusal to discuss his son's death--and Wynne-Jones is spot-on in his writing on grief, especially from Evan's point of view. The book-within-a-book plot is less successful, as Oshiro's account is a bit lengthy, and the suspense of Griff's involvement ends quickly and conveniently, without much satisfaction for readers. However, the high points of this tale make it worth a first purchase. VERDICT Offering a unique take on the World War II period, this intergenerational tale is an excellent addition to most YA collections.--Susannah Goldstein, Convent of the Sacred Heart, New York City
KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or in the same genre | e eBook original Tr Hardcover trade binding | RTE Reinforced trade binding | lib. ed. Publisher's library binding Board Board book | pap. Paperback | BL Bilingual
Goldstein, Susannah
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Goldstein, Susannah. "Wynne-Jones, Tim. The Emperor of Any Place." School Library Journal, Oct. 2015, p. 118. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A431724955/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23cab5d2. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A431724955
QUOTED: "Alternately terrifying and inspiring, The Emperor of Any Place is a masterful entwining of what has been and what is to come."
The Emperor of Any Place
Karyn Saemann
Reviewer's Bookwatch. (Feb. 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
The Emperor of Any Place
Tim Wynne-Jones, author
Candlewick Press
99 Dover Street, Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
www.candlewick.com
9780763669737, $17.99, www.amazon.com
His father's sudden death forces a sixteen-year-old to confront his estranged grandfather and to reconcile an inexplicable past in The Emperor of Any Place, Tim Wynne-Jones' young adult novel about long-held secrets and the futility of war.
Evan's uneventful suburban teenage life, already shattered by his father's death, is further wracked by the emergence of a story from World War II that involves his grandfather, Griff.
Griff, a retired marine, has for nearly three-quarters of a century refused to disclose all he knows about the marooning of a US soldier and a Japanese soldier on a Pacific island during the war. Griff helped rescue the American soldier from the island, but the fate of his Japanese compatriot remains a mystery.
When Evan begins reading a book that had been in his father's possession, containing journal entries of both soldiers, their shocking, violent tale reignites troubling questions about his grandfather's past actions and forever alters Evan's view of destiny.
This is a story about bravery, monsters, unlikely protectors, unlikely friendships, hope, and an old man's determination to control how later generations view events he participated in long ago, that he's never fully come to grips with.
The journal entries painfully underscore both the brutality of war and the humanity that can illuminate its darkest moments.
Evan and Griff are a consummate match, countering each other in an increasingly intense but also darkly funny series of face-offs, as they spar over the truth and what to do with it. Ultimately, they find common ground in a hauntingly poignant metaphor.
The story's trajectory is a wild one, veering unexpectedly into deeply challenging places. Alternately terrifying and inspiring, The Emperor of Any Place is a masterful entwining of what has been and what is to come.
Karyn Saemann
Reviewer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Saemann, Karyn. "The Emperor of Any Place." Reviewer's Bookwatch, Feb. 2016. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A444913721/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=611c546b. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A444913721