Sita Brachmachari – Artichoke Hearts

l21/04/2015

All sorts of โ€˜autobiographical first novelโ€™ alarms went off when I looked at this, and then it turned out that the narrator lives in Hampstead (so even the school bully listens to Radio 4) and has a relentlessly chirpy terminally-ill gran and a crush on a boy who survived the Rwandan genocide. By a third of the way through the unlikely-coincidence-o-meter was in the red zone. It looked at first as if this story would be overburdened with Issues, of the kind you have to have if your teen-read is to win an award (see, for example, Sobibor on the shelf below it).

But somehow it all works. Thatโ€™s mainly down to the pacing of incidents. The four members of the writing group tell their stories and undercut Miraโ€™s present-tense diary. That diary has her doodles on the first page of each day โ€“ one day is all doodle and no text โ€“ and has just enough wonky grammar and resolute avoidance of โ€˜saidโ€™ (as Yr 7s are always told to do) to be plausible, however much the rest of the book makes her seem a lot older and more insightful than is natural for that age. Itโ€™s odd that a book printed in 2011 seems so out-of-time, but Mira is barely able to master a mobile, and never mentions any social media. I canโ€™t imagine any real twelve-year-old girls identifying with Mira too strenuously but the people in her world are all worth having her introduce us to them. I mentioned the similarity to the authorโ€™s circumstances and those of the Levenson family: looking back, I canโ€™t remember the mother getting more than two lines of dialogue. Instead we get a hands-on dad and two wise and funny older women, a couple of misguided female authority-figures the right age and some supernaturally smart dogs.

By Tat Wood