Warrior Boy Blog Tour: How Much Do You Care?

I was lucky enough to be invited to be part of the blog tour for Warrior Boy, an beautiful, emotional new Middle Grade (9+) from Virginia Clay about race, heritage and the horrors of elephant poaching. So today I'm delighted to share with you a lovely think piece written by the author herself. 

Everybody loves elephants, don’t they? Phenomenally intelligent, deeply loving, intuitive, emotional and violently threatened.

But what if you are an off-the-grid Kenyan subsistence farmer, with only two small fields of crops with which to feed your family, and these formidable beasts come silently in the night and destroy everything? They flatten your crops and thrust their marauding trunks into your water tank, draining it of all you collected last rainy season. You now have nothing to feed your family and no water for four whole months. Would you love elephants then?

Human beings are built to feel empathy but knowing too much can leave us confused as to how to respond. Every day the news brings atrocities into our living rooms on a scale as yet unprecedented in human history. Compassion fatigue is a phenomenon no longer reserved for those in caring professions.

In my children’s book, Warrior Boy, which is set in Kenya, my hero Ben comes face to face with the horrors of poaching. He suddenly understands his mother’s desire to protect elephants and vows to do what he can to help her.

But it may interest you to know, whilst I am aware that a child reading this story somewhere in the Shetland Islands will undoubtedly empathise with Ben’s response, I don’t think they have to start saving up their pocket money to do the same.

In Kenya, young people are changing the face of conservation through the movement #mabingwa (‘The Champions’). They are discovering the complexities of human and wildlife interaction, and making informed, caring decisions to preserve the future of both. They are no longer being told what to think by Westerners, but neither are they focusing their attention on poverty in Sri Lanka.

There may be no turning back from our global connectedness now, but as Rob Bell, the author of Love Wins puts it, “we can only care about a few things.” So, is it not wise to make your few things those which you know and understand? Of course, elephants are important, but so is the endangered house sparrow. And what about the old folk in your local community, crippled by loneliness? You may not feel like you have a sphere of influence, but you do – we all do. Choosing to eat less meat and not buy single-use plastic items are decisions that don’t feel particularly thrusting but have a powerful knock-on effect in time.

Richard Powers, the author of The Overstory, values the quiet power of ‘looking at the world differently’ as the first step on the road to a common consciousness. I like this too and it’s certainly the change that Ben experiences in Warrior Boy. I do hope that my book inspires young people to make changes for the better, but I would be overjoyed just to know it helped them look at the world a little differently too.

WARRIOR BOY by Virginia Clay out now in paperback (£6.99, Chicken House)

Connect with Virginia on twitter @VClayAuthor and find out more at 

www.chickenhousebooks.com

Thanks so much to Chicken House for inviting me onto their blog tour. For more information about the book, check out my review and for more stops on the tour, check out the image below! 

Tradition by Brendan Kiely

Synopsis (from Goodreads) 

Pages: 352

Publisher: Penguin

Released: 3rd of May 2018 

Powerful. Privileged. Popular.

The students at Fullbrook Academy are the elite of the elite, famous for their glamour and excess. Their traditions are sacred. But they can hide dark and dangerous secrets.

Jules is in her senior year with one goal: to get out and start her life at college.

Jamie is a sports star on a scholarship; Fullbrook is his chance to escape his past.

After a school party ends in disaster, the two of them discover a terrible truth. Can the two of them stand together against Fulbrook's most toxic traditions?

What I Have to Say 

This is an important book about privilege and tradition and how that can translate into rape culture at an elite boarding school. It's about standing up and changing things. 

Jules is a feminist. Right from the start of the book, she's standing up and trying to make the school a better place by handing out leaflets about women's health to the incoming freshmen students. Jamie is a little different. He's very much the big burly football player, coming into Fullbrook for a clean slate after bad things happened in his home town. It's hard at first to work out what his role in the story is, but I liked the way he changed over time and grew closer to Jules and the others. 

The way that the school handles things. The way that Jules is shut down and silent at every time that she tries to stand up for what's right, shows how important it is to stand up for what's right in every way you can. 

It's definitely a book that will stay with me for a long time, the iconic scenes that I'll remember long after I've forgotten many of the other books I've read this year. A must read for anyone who cares about feminist issues and activism. 

My thanks go to Netgalley and Penguin for providing me with this copy for review. 

The Pants Project by Cat Clarke

Synopsis (from Goodreads) 

Pages: 272

Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky  

Released: 7th of March 2017 

"My name is Liv (Not Olivia)... I'm not technically a girl.

I'm Transgender. Which is a bit like being a transformer. Only not quite as cool as cool because I probably won't get to save the world one day."

A Transformer is a robot in disguise. Liv is a boy in disguise. It's that simple. Liv knows he was always meant to be a boy, but with his new school's terrible dress code, he can't even wear pants. Only skirts.

Operation: Pants Project begins! The only way for Liv to get what he wants is to go after it himself. But to Liv, this isn't just a mission to change the policy- it's a mission to change his life. And that's a pretty big deal.

What I Have to Say 

This is a book that highlights how badly school dress code can be damaging to transgender teens. I grew up having skirts as the school uniform policy. Even while being cis, I hated it but even as I began to understand transgender and the issues surrounding it, it was never something that crossed my mind that would be a problem. This book opened my eyes to the small ways in which transgender kids can be hurt every day. 

I loved Liv as a character.  I love his love of comics and zombies and the way he builds up a good group of friends around him. Friends who don't care that acts differently to the girls in his class. The only problem is the bullies. And the skirt he has to wear every day. 

This is a story about activism and friendship. About finding who your friends really are. The only problem I had with it was the way they dealt with the bullying. It's the same way as bullying is dealt with in every other book. It's showing the textbook way of dealing with bullies and as most schoolchildren know, it just doesn't work. It felt a bit too moralistic of a story in that way. 

Really though, this is a story to inspire. It's a story of how you can change the world or at least your little bit of it. 

My thanks go to Sourcebooks and Netgalley for providing me with this copy for review.