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How To Write Really Badly by Anne Fine (view source)
Revision as of 18:31, 18 April 2018
, 18:31, 18 April 2018no edit summary
{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=How To Write Really Badly
|author=Anne Fine
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=112
|publisher=Egmont Books Ltd
|date=August 1, 2002
|isbn=1405200618
|amazonukwebsite=http://www.annefine.co.uk|cover=1405200618|aznuk=<amazonuk>1405200618</amazonuk>|amazonusaznus=<amazonus>1405200618</amazonus>
}}
"'We have somebody new this term. Isn't that nice?' beamed Miss Tate."
Chester Howard doesn't think so. He's at his umpteenth new school and he doesn't think much of it at all. Everyone's so sickeningly nice! The teachers drip with saccharine welcomes, the children are so well-behaved it's frightening. Chester thinks Walbottle Manor (Mixed) is going to be just as much of a pain in the neck as all the other schools he's attended. And to make matters worse, Miss Tate seats him next to Joe Gardener, class dunce, class fidget, and generally irritating person. And to make matters worse still, there's a project to be done. Everyone must make a How To book. And everyone's choosing subjects of "bloodcurdling niceness". It's not Chester's bag, at all at all at all. And in any case, how will he ever be able to concentrate, sitting next to Joe? As far as Chester can see, it's going to be a long, long term.
I blow hot and cold on Anne Fine. She's highly thought of, having won just about all the major awards in the world of children's books. She's bagged the Carnegie Medal, the Smarties Award, the Whitbread Award, the list is endless. As the first Children's Laureate, she started up a super website - [http://www.myhomelibrary.org www.myhomelibrary.org] - but then shamefully neglected to update it for months on end. She makes a point of writing "issue-based" books about, for example, bullying, single parenthood and - as here, with How To Write Really Badly - dyslexia, but got all hot under the collar when people like Melvin Burgess wrote about teenage sex. Y'know, Anne - young teens don't have sex before they're ready because serious fiction about sex is written for them; they have sex before they're ready because of an overly-consumerist world bought into by their parents, because of peer pressure, but most of all because of hormones! Stop trying to censor serious writers, woman! She churns out books like there's no tomorrow and - unavoidably - they're not all great. There are, however, some absolute doozies amidst her catalogue and I think How To Write Really Badly is one of them.
It's a short book at just over a hundred pages of large type. And it's written in Fine's characteristically informal, colloquial style. Sentence structure is simple, vocabulary is challenging but always in context, imagery is kept to a minimum, and there is plenty of dialogue. It's full of funny one-liners and silly situations. I still laugh at some of them myself! As such, it's quite suitable for any child just able to read alone and equally attractive to an older child of seven or eight. It's also a breeze to read aloud. Happily, though, it's not a superficial story tacked on to a set of words deemed "appropriate" for a newly confident reader. It's a serious book with a proper plot and a think-about-it theme. How To Write Really Badly is about individuality, it's about searching for the talent lying in us all, it's about how we treat people who are "different". And it's also about the redeeming power of honest friendship. So it's about quite a lot really.
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