JANE'S COUNTRY YEAR, another Handheld Classics reissued delight

JANE'S COUNTRY YEAR
MALCOLM SAVILLE
Handheld Classics
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first edition since 1946, with full colour illustrations throughout.

'At last she reached the brow of the hill ... now the country opened out below her and she looked down into a wide and lovely valley ... Still patched with snow the little fields spread like a carpet below her and here and there a farmhouse with barns and golden ricks was clearly seen. Across the plain ran, straight as a ruler, a railway line and she saw a toy train puffing and crawling across the picture.'

Malcolm Saville's classic novel is about eleven-year old Jane's discovery of nature and country life during a year spent convalescing on her uncle's farm, after having been dangerously ill in post-war London. This deeply-felt novel was written while Saville was extending his range as a writer, alongside his very successful Lone Pine adventure series, and nature anthologies for children. Inspired by the experiences of Saville's own god-daughter, this marvellous novel is full of the wonder of discovery, as well the happiness of regaining health, making friends, and learning to love the natural world. The novel is also a record of rural England eighty years ago, written by one of the great twentieth century English nature writers.

The Introduction is written by Hazel Sheeky Bird of the University of Newcastle. The illustrations by Bernard Bowerman have been reproduced from the first edition.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A quiet, gentle read for your tween-years reader. Beautiful reprint edition of a very prolific author for children's post-WWII novel. It follows Jane, a young girl recuperating from a serious illness at her aunt and uncle's farm in rural England. The framing device is, I know you'll know from the off, an excuse to write an elegy for the rural life that generations of people around the world were abandoning in increasing numbers as the world adjusted to new realities.

The text is, of course, not telling you this directly. It's a very sweet, very detailed love-letter to a vanishing time as it faded away. The reason it is interesting to read now is the world is rediscovering a need, once amply fulfilled, to recognize and relate our lives to the rhythms of the natural world. We do our descendants a service by giving them books of this sort. The way that urban outsider Jane comes to understand and treasure this world and its beauties and cycles is edifying without feeling condescending.

A kid today will read this with a sense of shock, I think, that this was ever a way of life that millions followed. It is clearly written and, while there are people winking in it, they are doing so from adult to child, so it's revoltingly condescending but not unexpected. The kind of folk who lived this life at that distant time:

...would have done the w-verb without thinking a thing of it. *shudder* The good old days, they were rotten.

The Introduction by Hazel Sheeky Bird is a wondeful overview of Saville's extended career as a writer for tweens and teens. It makes the book suitable for adults nostalgic for an earlier way of life by contextualizing it in its social milieu. I guess most of the people I'd gift it to, those between 11 and 14, will skip past that essay. If you were old enough to remember the Coronation, or the Rosenberg case, this book with Introduction will very likely hit every last nostalgia bump on your noggin.

Gifted to yourself or a younger reader, one who is beginning to wonder about the natural world around them, this novel of self-discovery, and family love, and the cycle of the seasons embedding them all, will hit a high note for #Booksgiving.