NEW IMPRINT:ABOUT A decade ago, young Irish readers, writers and critics had plenty to complain about. Indigenous children's publishing was suffering a profound crisis. It seemed as if O'Brien Press was the only children's publisher of substance left.
Many believed that international success, when it came to Irish writers, did not always serve home needs. Eoin Colfer’s challenge to international big-hitters, for instance, was not with his brilliant books set in Wexford, but with the more cosmopolitan Artemis Fowl.
That was before the revolution: before new technology invigorated flailing imprints; before Penguin launched Puffin Ireland; before the deluge of self-publishing. With the shake-up has come healthy competition and a chance to redefine standards; and those standards are wholly dependent on the calibre and the vision of publishers. Enter a new imprint, Little Island, the offspring of the well-established New Island Books, and writer Siobhán Parkinson.
The publishers' fairy godmother bestowed a wish-list of blessings on Little Island with Parkinson's impeccable credentials. Not only is she perhaps the most intelligent and formally experimental writer of contemporary Irish children's fiction, but she is prolific. Her novels have garnered numerous awards and been widely translated, even into Chinese. My favourites include the 1996/7 Bisto winner, Sisters . . . No Way!and Four Kids, Three Cats, Two Cows, One Witch (Maybe)(1997, both O'Brien Press). Not everyone realises that Parkinson is a discerning critic and scholar, with a PhD on Dylan Thomas. She also brings to Little Island years of experience as editor of Inis, the magazine of Children's Books Ireland, and of the international journal Bookbird. Not only that, but she is a fine linguist. Cois Life published Dialann Sar-Rúnda Amy Ní Chonchúirin 2008, and Maitrióisceis expected next year. So lucky Little Island has in Parkinson an eye for editorial detail, an ear for a pitch-perfect tale and a lifetime of experience as a self-employed writer.
Parkinson's wisdom is evident in Little Island's first half-dozen offerings that comprise something old, something new and something borrowed. She revives two accomplished vintage novels, Mark O'Sullivan's young-adult White Lies(Wolfhound, 1997), and Maeve Friel's The Lantern Moon(Poolbeg, 1996), for the nine-plus age group. In Inisin 2004, critic Robert Dunbar included the latter (and, incidentally, Parkinson's own Call of the Whales) among his top 50 Irish novels. The Lantern Moon(€7.99) is set in 1811 and centres on the adventures of the Spears family, who are transported to Australia. There's Annie, a maid accused of theft, her sister, employed by the villainous Evans, and her brother. Deportation and the challenge of a new life provide the factual backdrop, and Friel has a writerly instinct for resonant images. The first drop of rain – the sign that the Australian bushfire will be quenched – falls on Annie just as her long-lost father looms into sight under the lantern moon.
In White Lies(€7.99), moody, hormonally-charged teens shape a tight plot. The novel has two narrators: Nance, adopted daughter of a small-town respected teacher, Tom, and her friend OD, who lives in miserable poverty. It transpires that Nance's natural father was also a teacher, a black African. A good man made bad by drugs, he died in a car crash after a showdown with Tom, her mother's new boyfriend. Nance eventually realises that her perspective on the world is not the only one, and that her individual battles relate to concepts such as fairness, honour and resilience.
Parent trouble, the staple of teen fiction, also provides some tension in the next atmospheric tale, The Cryptid Files: Loch Ness(€6.99). The eponymous monster, a cryptid or creature that inhabits the space between scientific reality and mythology, supplies the rest. Vanessa tiptoes suspiciously round her father's new girlfriend while the family researches the monster, with some unexpected results. The story ends with Vanessa preparing for a career of cryptid-busting that promises a host of sequels. Jean Flitcroft's first novel is utterly absorbing and suspense-laden.
Tom O'Neill's Old Friends, subtitled The Lost Tales of Fionn Mac Cumhaill(€9.99), takes his young teen readers time-travelling with protagonist Dark through tales that straddle the knowable and the imaginary. There is nothing implausible about the emotions that course through these latter-day folktales that bring LED lighting to fairy raths; no false notes dim their sense of loss and betrayal or, indeed, O'Neill's idiomatic style. This is a book straight from the oral tradition – it would sparkle if read aloud.
Little Island perspicaciously extends its debut selection by annexing two carefully chosen novels for older children that have proved successful among German speakers. Multi-tasking Parkinson reveals yet another talent: she translates them both fluently and wittily. The Great Rabbit Revenge Plan(€7.99), by award-winning Burkhard Spinnen, taps into contemporary novelistic concerns with troubled families while gently deprecating Germanic orderliness. Konrad gets entangled with Fritz, who wreaks revenge on her father's girlfriend – with a rabbit – and thereby learns that girls can be friends.
We end on a bittersweet note, with a book of traumas painful to articulate, so German, yet so universal. Renate Ahrens's Over the Wall(€6.99) tells of the aftermath of a brief love affair and a child conceived as the Berlin Wall fell, of adult lies and confused emotions, and fatherless Karo caught in their net. Ahrens brings home how world-shattering events impinge on small lives.
Mary Shine Thompson is Dean at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, a College of Dublin City University. Her most recent book is The Fire I' The Flint: Essays on the Creative Imagination(Four Courts Press, 2009)
