JOHNNY SWANSON

Great News: Johnny Swanson, has been longlisted for major 2011 awards:

The CILIP Carnegie Medal
The UKLA Children’s Book Awards
The Redbridge Children’s Book Awards
The Sefton Super Reads

The winners won’t be announced until well into next year, but please keep your fingers crossed.

Johnny Swanson is in the shops now, and has been greeted by wonderful reviews.  You can read some of them in full lower down this page, but here are a couple of tasters. Philip Ardagh in The Guardian said:

Updale writes with such obvious relish that fun exudes from the ink on every page. This is real entertainment. Johnny Swanson is just the kind of book for which the term "joyous romp" was invented.

Amanda Craig in The Times said, ’Updale doesn’t put a foot wrong in this marvellous tale’.

Here’s a picture of the (rather unusual) cover. You may already have seen the front of it, but I thought you’d like a look at the whole thing, including the flaps that wrap round the book.

 

 

PICTURES FROM THE LAUNCH PARTY

We had a great time at the launch. 

Because the book is set in 1929, I dressed up in the style of the time. This is me, outside the Kew Bookshop before the party started:

And here I am with Jacqueline Wilson...

...and Francesca Simon

If you want to come and see me talking about Johnny Swanson, I’ll be at  the Edinburgh Book Festival on 15th August, and the Cheltenham Festival on 16th October.

 

JOHNNY SWANSON is very different from my Montmorency books.  It’s set in 1929, more than a decade after the end of World War I, when any glamour associated with the war had well and truly worn off.  The book features advertising, tuberculosis and murder.  The main character is a boy whose efforts to help his mother end up threatening her life - and he is the only person who can save her.  That sounds more grim than the book is.  There’s plenty of humour, too.  I hope you’ll get to love Johnny, Winnie, Hutch and Olwen as much as you love Montmorency and his friends.

REVIEWS

Here is the Text of the Guardian review from May 8 2010.  You can find the original at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/08/johnny-swanson-eleanor-updale-review

When researching her first foray into children’s fiction – the marvellous Montmorency novels – Eleanor Updale found herself deep beneath the streets of London in a public sewer. It’s unlikely that any such strenuous preparations were required for Johnny Swanson, save perhaps a trip to the former sanatorium of Craig-y-Nos Castle in Wales, which is today, rather conveniently, a hotel. This latest novel is, I would suggest, pitched at a slightly younger audience than Montmorency (though a thoroughly enjoyable read for this adult), and is in an undeniably lighter vein.

The story has three main strands: the schoolboy Johnny Swanson earning income from the personal ads; the spread of tuberculosis in the 1920s; and the up-to-no-good skulduggery – what other kind is there? – that somehow bridges these first two strands.

Johnny gets into the personal ads business when he sends off a two-shillings-and-sixpenny postal order to find out the SECRET OF INSTANT HEIGHT. (Their capitals.) If you’ve no idea what two shillings and sixpence is, or a postal order come to that, you’ll soon find out. Johnny doesn’t have that much money, so he "borrows" it in the not-actually-asking-but-having-every-intention-of-paying-it-back sense. When buying the postal order from the local post office, he creates a fictional Aunt Ada, pretending that she’s sick and will be spending the two-and-six to buy a train ticket to come and stay with him and his mother. The response (the secret of instant height) when it finally arrives, is not quite what Johnny expected. It is to stand on a box. He feels outraged and more than a little stupid.

Rather than seek revenge, he sees the potential in such a scheme, or rather scam. He soon starts coming up with advertisements of his own. To do this, his fictitious aunt has a new use: as the "adult" placing the ads for whom he is apparently running errands. When Johnny’s mother is taken away and charged with a serious crime, "Aunt Ada" takes on an even more significant role. She’s the nonexistent responsible adult supposedly looking after him, thus freeing him to do the best he can to prove his mother innocent.

At one time, a quarter of all UK deaths were attributed to tuberculosis and, right up until a cure was found in the 1940s, tens of thousands of people were affected every year, many of whom died. In 1929 – when this book is set – a supposed cure, known as Umckaloabo, was advertised in the press; an advertisement even less honest than Johnny’s "official portrait of the king for one shilling". (Anyone who sent off for that one received a postage stamp. Well, there really was a picture of the king’s head on it.)

When Johnny plays detective, don’t expect a story of intricate, multilayered plotting and subtle subterfuge. Johnny Swanson is very much of the plot-exposition-as-dialogue-overheard-by-an-eavesdropper-conveniently-under-the-table-at-the-time school of detective fiction. There’s no real need for the strenuous application of little grey cells here. Events move at a fair lick, and revelation follows revelation. Updale writes with such obvious relish that fun exudes from the ink on every page. This is real entertainment. Johnny Swanson is just the kind of book for which the term "joyous romp" was invented.

Amanda Craig’s review in The Times can be found at