The Life and Loves of Cherry Bakewell by Rai Jayne Hearse

Okay, I’ll come clean. I have to like this one. Rai Jayne Hearse is a former student of mine from the University of Salford and I first met Cherry Bakewell in a dusty old room in our beautiful red brick Peel building.
 Rai Jayne worked on this novel on my Writing Novels for Young People course. When she tweeted that she had graduated, I replied that I knew- I’d been at the ceremony. She then replied that her novel was being published. I looked up the publisher - saw that it was kosher if a little unusual - and out of curiosity submitted something myself that has now also been published. Usually it’s the other way round: the lecturers introduce the students to publishers.
 I read a lot of young adult literature and indeed just before I read The Life and Loves of Cherry Bakewell I read a similar length novel by an established young adult writer who writes what I describe as chicklet-lit. I’d put Hearse’s book in the same category – except I’d say she does it better. The established writer irritated me a little. Hearse’s writing is fresher and pacier.
Her characters are believable and likeable – even the villains. Cherry changes satisfyingly by the end of the book. There is progression. Short diary entries maintain the pace. Hearse writes with a strong awareness of the young adult reader. She has precisely the right voice for the text.
It seems I am proved right. Every year at the beginning of my module I tell my students they are ideally placed to write for this reader. They have the writing skills, they are precisely the type of people young adults want to become and they are young enough to remember that time clearly. Here’s to many more.   
 
 

That Summer by Sarah Dessen

This isn’t quite what I call “Chicklet-lit”. I define Chicklet-lit as being Chick-lit for the next generation down – the generation that the book-publishing and book-selling industries might define as young adult. Chicklet-lit novels are always a fun, easy read yet are just one stroke more serious than what is written for the more mature Chick-lit reader. Personally, I’m not the greatest fan of them. I usually see them as competently written, following a formula that satisfies and just a little unadventurous. But I’ve read Sarah Dessen before and enjoyed her work. I was already familiar with her This Lullaby – which is in fact on my “further reading” list on one of the modules I teach at the University of Salford, UK. So, although the cover suggests Chicklet-lit That Summer is really something a little different.  

The novel totally absorbed me all the way through. Dessen certainly maintains the setting that so frequently houses Chickletlit – comfortable middle American life, girls interested in boys and young women who laugh and cry a lot and suffer all the normal adolescent anxieties. Yet she uses a more lyrical prose than one would normally find in a Chicklet-lit book. Just into the opening paragraph we read “It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it.”  And we can totally identify with main character Haven whom Dessen draws so well. She is rounded, complex and unusual.

My daughter remarked as we looked at the teen section in Waterstone’s “I wish they’d had books like this when I was a teenager.” She is now 30. And had there been books like That Summer available when she was a teenager, I would have gladly bought it for her.