Cassie Hart reviews two new middle grade novels both entrenched in a sense of place and dealing with difficult emotions. Rachael King’s The Grimmelings is beautiful and fantastical, and Leonie Agnew’s Take Me To Your Leader is funny and heartwarming.
The Grimmelings, by Rachael King (Allen & Unwin)
The Grimmelings is a book I would have devoured and made my entire personality as a young person. It’s the perfect blend of this world and the world that lies just beyond the reaches of our day-to-day lives. As a child (sometimes even as an adult), so much of the world can seem like that—just beyond our reach, slightly unknowable, with rules that we might not necessarily be able to comprehend, but know that we need to find a way to work within.
Which is exactly what Ella does in The Grimmelings. She might not understand everything, but she’s determined to find a way to save her family from a curse that has followed them across the years and all the way from Scotland.
It’s the perfect blend of this world and the world that lies just beyond the reaches of our day-to-day lives.
It’s all kicked off when she utters both a wish and a curse on the same day, resulting in the disappearance of a boy who has been mean to her, and the appearance of a boy with a Scottish accent who might just be the friend that she’s been yearning for.
A human friend, that is—because Ella’s true best friend is Magpie, her protective, wild-natured pony.
The cast of the book is mainly made up of Ella’s family: her mother, Morag, strong and firm, keeping their little family going after her husband disappeared six years prior; her grandmother, Grizzly, who had immigrated from Scotland and settled in the Canterbury Basin and who is now dying of cancer; Fiona, Ella’s little sister, who is described as pale (even her eyelashes are white) where Ella is dark. Fiona comes across as a strange, fey girl, who learned about making talismans and the likes from Grizzly, while Ella was taught an assortment of Scottish words, slipped into pockets, lunchboxes, and under her bedroom door.
These are all strong female characters—and strong in quite different ways from each other, demonstrating that all types of strength are important and valid, which I found really refreshing.
The other main figure of the book is the kelpie, of course, whose dark legacy seems to hover on the edges before dragging a blanket of darkness over the Basin as the story progresses. His human counterpart is a character that both intrigues and repels, adding to the multifaceted cast of the book.
…strong female characters—and strong in quite different ways from each other, demonstrating that all types of strength are important and valid
King manages to let the characters feel the full range of their emotions, while also creating space for readers to understand that those feelings don’t make a person good or bad. She shows us how things can change—our circumstances, our relationships, our place in the world. Through these characters, we can build on our own ability to see things from other people’s perspectives; Ella even manages to have some compassion for the kelpie that had tried to ruin her family, their business, and who had potentially killed both her father and a bunch of children as well, which is really something.
…those touches of Scottish vocabulary and te reo Māori help to ground this book in its place, in its people
The prose is absolutely beautiful, capturing the magic of the South Island, as well as tying it to its Scottish connection via the keld in the lake and some of the people who populate the book. I really enjoyed learning new words, and appreciated their placement at the beginning of the chapters so that they were fresh in my mind as I was reading.
While most of the novel is in English, those touches of Scottish vocabulary and te reo Māori help to ground this book in its place, in its people, and in the magic and isolation of the rural parts so abundant in both of these beautiful countries.
King has done a magnificent job of crafting an adventurous, action-packed novel that also has a whole lot of heart.
Take Me to Your Leader, by Leonie Agnew (Penguin Random House)
This is a book about community, about family, friends, and grief—all in an amusing and delightful tale about faking UFOs and trying to save a rural school.
Lucas is the hero of this story. He’s eleven years old, and his father died in a car accident, leaving him with his mother and older sister Ellie. He is incredibly safety-conscious, wears hi-vis gear at all times, always carries a backpack full of supplies, and reads daily updates on a website aimed at keeping kids safe. Oh, and he cannot ride in a vehicle without feeling like he needs to vomit.
This book is full of hijinks and laughs
They live in your average small rural town, and it’s filled with all of the quirky characters that you have come to love and expect in these kinds of stories. Having grown up rurally myself, it felt very real, and I particularly loved the old bus that the kids hung out in—my cousins and I used to sit in abandoned cars on our farm, so that felt like a very Kiwi thing.
When Lucas and his friends hear about how the government wants to close their school, he writes a letter to the Minister of Education, and reads it out to his class. Their teacher, the lovely Mr Ngata, who reminded me so much of my school teacher with the way he handled everything on his own, juggling the much younger kids through to the older, admin and teaching alike, approves a plan to protest this school closure in reasonable ways.
After Lucas puts glow-in-the-dark stickers on his kite and someone thinks it’s a UFO, his team come up with a slightly less typical plan: if they can successfully fake other UFO sightings more people will come to the town, which will stimulate their local economy and mean the school can stay open. It is so delightful to follow them as their plan goes into action, even if it doesn’t quite work out the way they think it might.
Lucas’s need to be safe is challenged time and time again, and he is pushed out of his comfort zone for the first time since his father died.
Grief, and the way characters deal with it, is handled in a really compassionate way
Herein lies the real beauty of this story. Lucas’s best friend, Alex, clearly knows that his mate is struggling, and also that he’s using safety as a coping mechanism. Rather than get angry at him, Alex retreats and does his own thing. Lucas has noticed but is too caught up in his anxiety to do much about it, until the catalyst of the proposed school closure launches Lucus from his frozen state and propels him into action and change. It forces him out of his head and anxiety, and reconnects him with the people who care about him.
Grief, and the way characters deal with it, is handled in a really compassionate way—not just Lucas’s, but his family’s, and all the other people impacted by the loss of his father, as well as the way their community is impacted by change. It shows how differently grief can show up and be processed, and how we can sometimes get a little lost and forget that connection is actually the best way to get through.
It’s a vision of how things could be, one that gives us hope and the delicious warm fuzzies
But if that all sounds a little too heavy, don’t worry. This book is full of hijinks and laughs, as our anxious hero embarks on a mission to fake UFO sightings around his town with the help of his pals.
This family, and the community that they are part of, make this book a wonderful read. It’s a vision of how things could be, one that gives us hope and the delicious warm fuzzies that we so often need—even if we don’t want to fake UFO sightings in order to get them.
Cassie Hart
Cassie Hart (Kāi Tahu) is an award-winning author of speculative fiction. She lives nestled between Taranaki Maunga and the ocean, where she nurtures children, cats, and story ideas.