Joy, that is the name of Jenny Valentine’s new children’s book. That title (in English A Girl Called Joy) does not immediately suggest a particularly original story. But the British writer, in her own words, does not rely on originality: “I am good at people, not plots,” she once told this newspaper.
She did herself a bit of a disservice with that comment. Correct Looking for Violet Park (2008) and Broken Soup (2009), the young adult novels with which Valentine put himself on the youth literary map, are ingeniously constructed exciting stories of which you can by no means guess the outcome. But about Joy, that she wrote for a younger target group, you cannot say that. Valentine tells the home and garden story about her ten-year-old protagonist who has traveled around the world all her life with her parents and older sister Claude and now suddenly has to take care of her very elderly, apparently philistine and rule-loving grandfather, very ordinary, straightforward. . From the moment Joy introduced herself, under the motto ‘nomen is omen‘, introduces as the sunniest human child alive and who can ‘discover a phenomenal silver lining in every cloud’, you know that what you read is what you get.
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Not that Valentine suddenly started writing very differently: her relaxed style remains light-hearted and lively. Moreover, she has a sharp observational skill and knows how to choose appealing images from what she observes. Striking, for example, is Joy’s description of her closed grandfather versus her open mother: “Grandpa is a bit vague and blurry, as if someone has drawn him with a soft pencil, while Mom is as clear as a black marker.”
Also well chosen is Joy’s image of the ‘dandelion fluff floating on the breeze from one place to another […] without worrying about where that will be,” illustrating how surprising her life was before she ended up in Grandpa’s uniform housing estate. The only thing she could count on in the past was that you couldn’t count on anything, she notes. ‘Now our “just” clashes with grandpa’s and we all do our best to make it work.’ But that proves difficult: ‘The new life feels like a full stop, while we were used to commas.’
Guus-Kuijerachtig
That conflict and how Joy deals with it is actually what the story is about. Valentine gives this shape cleverly: she convincingly takes you into Joy’s slightly rebellious world of thought in a Guus-Kuijer-like manner, while subtly sketching the family relationships. There is the impatience of Joy’s father with Claude who thinks it is nonsense that they have returned to England for an unknown grandfather who fell from a ladder. On the other hand, there is the struggle of Joy’s mother, who was on the other side of the world when her mother died and does not want to experience something like that again. Carefully navigating through all that adult stuff, Joy tries to get to know her grandfather and embrace her new school life. She succeeds wonderfully at the first, the second less so: ‘School is an education in social adjustment’, but she has the wrong fit: ‘I am the stepsister…, or the shoe’, she notes slightly ironically, referring to Grimm’s Cinderella .
It is not difficult to take Joy to your heart: she is lifelike and her optimism is heart-warming. At the same time, a little more tension would have been welcome. That is only now coming to an end, when the ancient oak in the schoolyard threatens to make way for a new school building. For Joy, the oak is proof of the magic behind the everyday that she believes in and with her friend Benny she tries to prevent it from being felled. Anyone who wants to know how that ends will have to wait for part two: apparently Valentine was not done with Joy yet. But that’s not a bad thing at all – bring on that book.