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A review by anunande
Half a Creature from the Sea: A Life in Stories by David Almond, Eleanor Taylor
Short stories will always be my first (writing) love and it's the form, especially micro and flash but also upto 3000 words, that I keep returning to when I want to go back to storytelling basics as it were. Since finishing my novelette, it's where I find myself again. Rediscovering my writing muscles in the form that made me first fall in love as a writer.
I've been wanting to read Half a Creature from the Sea: A Life in Stories since I first stepped foot into the Candlewick Press office a couple of years ago. I admit that it was the gorgeous cover that drew me in, but I stayed for the weird, wonderful stories and the very unusual memoir of a childhood spent in Felling-on-Tyne, deep in England's North East.
Once I got attuned to the author's writing style, I enjoyed his interpretations and representations of the quote in the following slide. The way his stories blend realism with the dreamed world until you're never quite sure what's what, how deeply rooted his stories in the countryside he grew up in, in the language and landscape and the people who shaped his formative years - and yet so far removed from it with the poltergist who simply wants to be heard and seen, to be at peace and loved, to the girl who wonders at the myths of her own origins, to the lad who believes his dead father's spirit has returned like he'd promised him he would, to the foreign boy from East Germany who's different but teaches the narrator an important life lesson, to the god who visits a garden on a snow day, to the now old man who remembers a childhood day that was the stuff of legends.
Each story had an autobiographical prelude of sorts where the author spoke about his inspirations and gave us tantalising glimpses into his childhood. I'm not usually a fan of author explanations but here I think it somehow works to create a rich magical experience, to show like many authors before him have that "ordinary places can be extraordinary".
I've been wanting to read Half a Creature from the Sea: A Life in Stories since I first stepped foot into the Candlewick Press office a couple of years ago. I admit that it was the gorgeous cover that drew me in, but I stayed for the weird, wonderful stories and the very unusual memoir of a childhood spent in Felling-on-Tyne, deep in England's North East.
Once I got attuned to the author's writing style, I enjoyed his interpretations and representations of the quote in the following slide. The way his stories blend realism with the dreamed world until you're never quite sure what's what, how deeply rooted his stories in the countryside he grew up in, in the language and landscape and the people who shaped his formative years - and yet so far removed from it with the poltergist who simply wants to be heard and seen, to be at peace and loved, to the girl who wonders at the myths of her own origins, to the lad who believes his dead father's spirit has returned like he'd promised him he would, to the foreign boy from East Germany who's different but teaches the narrator an important life lesson, to the god who visits a garden on a snow day, to the now old man who remembers a childhood day that was the stuff of legends.
Each story had an autobiographical prelude of sorts where the author spoke about his inspirations and gave us tantalising glimpses into his childhood. I'm not usually a fan of author explanations but here I think it somehow works to create a rich magical experience, to show like many authors before him have that "ordinary places can be extraordinary".