(no subject)

My friendly local farmer (my local farmer who is also my friend?) just gave me some beautiful biodynamic honey for Passover. My first Pesach present!

I just gave away all my stray flour and coconut and open jars and will be donating the last few frozen tubs of sambar to a friend shortly. I've kept just enough food aside for dinner tonight and cups of tea tonight and tomorrow.

From tomorrow lunchtime, my kitchen will be a thing of beauty. That is, until about two hour after lunch, when it will be a warzone for chicken soup and charoset. My question of the moment is whether to make kneidlach (matzah balls) or not. I am a bit short of big saucepans to cook in for Passover (I can't kasher the ones with plastic handles) so if I make them , it will be in a frying pan. This would be interesting, I guess, especially as I need the pan for boiling eggs and potatoes. It's all a matter of timing. I'll make my decision tomorrow.

I'm taking the afternoon off. I shall be sitting quietly, enjoying SF with a friend. Panic begins this evening, when I am wrestling my kitchen into submission. I'm also tidying my bedroom. Yes, I'm putting books away. And writing course submissions. Oh, and I'm laughing manically.

Edwina Harvey - The Whale's Tale

When I was in primary school, science fiction was one of my great joys. This was the sixties and the very early seventies. What was round was mostly adult SF (my parents said that if I was old enough to understand it, I was old enough to read it, so I worked on understanding everything from Microcosmic God to Flowers for Algernon, via Heinlein and Engdahl and Norton and goodness knows who else), but I had a special place in my heart for space adventures that included children.

Mostly the children were a bit older than I was. These were the books that let me write in my mind, because they left a spot open for children to do remarkable things. I had a very suburban childhood and I needed a spot kept open in my mind for remarkable things. I had particular attachment to certain whizbangery and if a book had those components (however illogical or foolish they were in some ways) I was happy.

The other day, Simon Petrie handed me a copy of Edwina Harvey's The Whale's Tale (Peggy Bright Books, 2009). It was mine subject to me reviewing it.

The moment I started reading it, I was faced with a quandary. The Whale's Tale is a book about space travel, with a child just at the age that was cool when I was heading rapidly towards high school. This child has all the idiocy and loneliness of a cool teen as perceived by a younger child. The novel has the requisite whizbangery (yes, it even has a jetpack!) and the right level of adventure for the person I was back then. It has superior species (mainly dolphins and whales), some echoes of David Brin* and Doc Smith, and just a touch of Noel Streatfield. In short, it takes me so very much back to one of the best elements of my childhood that I can't give a properly critical review. I can see its flaws, but I can't admit to them, because the book touched such a strong chord of memory.

I want to find a ten or eleven year old girl and I want to read it with her and find out if she shares the dreams of my childhood or if her dreams are different. I want to argue over the characterisation and discuss whether the jetpack is practical. I want to get paper and pencils and draw the ship and its watery core with her. In a way, that's my review: this is a book for sharing.


*OK, so David Brin wasn't writing when I was a child. He also has chatty dolphins and whales as great artists of song, though.