Theresa Breslin's Divided City: Mixing the Colours

It's over ten years since Theresa Breslin's Divided City came out, and I can't believe I haven't read it before now. I borrowed it recently from the Mixing the Colours collection (part of a project in which women speak about intra-Christian sectarianism) at Glasgow Women's Library. I meant to review it for their website, but stupidly didn't check if it had been done already. It had, so I'm posting my review here instead.

Theresa Breslin’s Divided City explodes onto the page. A boy is walking down a street in a part of Glasgow he knows isn’t safe. Footsteps sound behind him – and then there's a stabbing. The boy, Graham, a Rangers supporting football fanatic, stops to help the young man who has been injured - Kyoul, an asylum seeker - and the story takes off from here.

Next we meet Joe. He and Graham have just been at the same football practice and they played really well together. The coach is hoping to set up a team drawn from all Glasgow schools, and these two seem a certainty. But Joe is a Celtic supporter – can he and Graham be friends? It’s not just a matter of football teams, it’s religion too – Joe is from a Catholic family; Graham is a Protestant whose Grandfather is hoping to persuade him to take part in the next Orange Walk.

Breslin draws the relationship between the two boys well, with its contrast of conflict and co-operation. Neither boy can be honest with his family about his new friend, and yet it is Joe whom Graham trusts to help him get a message to Kyoul’s girlfriend. After the exciting beginning I found this part of the plot unconvincing, but I can see that Kyoul was there to show that the boys are not intolerant or fearful of “the other” – apart from the blind spot that growing up with sectarianism has given them. I like that this is not completely resolved by the end of the book – it wouldn’t be in real life – but that we are left with a sense of hope that initiatives such as the all-Glasgow football team will start to build bridges.

Theresa, a former librarian, is a great supporter of libraries and is currently Vice-President of CILIPS (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). For more about her, there are many interviews and articles out there: the most recent one I've read is from the always entertaining Bookwitch. For more on Divided City, see its section on Theresa's webpage.

Other books for young people on the Mixing the Colours list include Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses series, Joan Lingard's Kevin and Sadie books, the Breadwinner trilogy by Deborah Ellis and Tribes by Cathy MacPhail.

New author links

A mixed bag of links which have dropped into my RSS/Twitter feeds recently:

Philip Ardagh's Grubtown site.

Lots on J M Barrie because of the 150th anniversary of his birth: the official site; Books from Scotland; and the NTS.

A Theresa Breslin podcast from Scottish Booktrust.

A Booktrust interview with Lucy Cousins to celebrate Maisy's 20th birthday.

A YouTube trailer for Michelle Harrison's 13 Treasures.

A Telegraph Book Club piece about Clive King's Stig of the Dump.

Two blog posts about Nicola Morgan, one from Scribble City Central and the other from Absolute Vanilla.

Finally, some film news. Films are definitely on the way about Judy Moody, Diary of a wimpy kid and, possibly, Mr Gum. I couldn't find any links about the latter apart from this tweet from its author on 20th May:
@AndyStantonTM EXCITING INDUSTRY GOSSIP: I am meeting with a film company today to discuss possible 'Mr Gum' movie.

Children's book miscellany

Stuff about specific authors:

David Almond has won the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen Award. Every other year IBBY presents this to a living author and illustrator whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children's literature.

Theresa Breslin's web page is currently advertising a drama competition based on her latest novel, Prisoner of the Inquisition, in which secondary schools can win £1000 worth of books in a competiton.

Morris Gleitzman tells the Perth Writers Festival (i.e. the Australian one) about his latest book, and how he became a writer, in an hour long podcast.

Meg Harper writes about school visits in Being Nice - if you are planning on organising an author visit, read this first and learn how not to do it!

Eric Hill celebrates Spot's 30th birthday in the Guardian with an audio slideshow showing how he draws 'my little puppy' and explaining how fell into writing the books almost by accident.

More general stuff:

Author Hotline is a school resource of exclusive author, illustrator and poet profiles giving a unique insight into the creative process and enabling young readers to connect with published professionals.

Barrington Stoke publishes fantastic books for dyslexic and struggling readers. We have a selection of their books in our catalogue and link to them from our Reluctant Readers page. For an opinion piece on them, see Bookwitch's blog.

Mrs P is an award-winning free interactive digital storybook destination - classic children’s stories brought to life by Kathy Kinney as Mrs. P.

Storytubes is a US site where kids enter a competiton to make short videos about their favourite books. Award winning entries are on the site - many of the titles will be known to Scottish children too and would make great introductions to the books, or they might give you ideas for your own videos.

Teen Titles

Read interviews with Annemarie Allan, Theresa Breslin and Gill Arbuthnott in Issue 46, in the Libray now, plus reviews of books for teenagers, all done by teenagers themselves. Links are to the books by these authors in our catalogue, some of which are shown below.