Counting Stars

November 17, 2003
"In this evocative collection of autobiographical vignettes," wrote PW
in a starred review, "readers can trace connecting threads between Almond's published works and his childhood experience as a sensitive, pensive English child preoccupied by the mysteries of religion, death and immortality." Ages 12-up.

March 1, 2002
Gr 5-9-Eighteen nostalgic vignettes form the patchwork of this memory quilt, Almond's wistful recollection of the people and places he knew during his childhood in a poor mining town in the north of England nearly 50 years ago. Like memory itself, the stories weave in and out of time and place, and while they appear disjointed at first, they quickly and subtly reveal patterns and themes that mold the boy into a man: the abiding love of parents and siblings, even beyond their deaths; first cigarette, first fight, first love; and the ubiquitous, disapproving eye of the Catholic Church and the teenage temptation to spit in it. Lilting dialect and homespun humor imbue Almond's narrative with a beauty and simplicity that transcend the poverty and squalor of the diverse settings, which range from graveyards to fun fairs, schoolrooms to empty lots. The chronological and cultural gap that separates Almond's youth from that of modern children is so palpable in these stories that many readers will feel overwhelmed and perhaps even discouraged. Tenacious ones, however, will be rewarded with a captivating portrait of Almond the child, whose life experiences helped produce Almond the writer and his eloquent body of literature.-William McLoughlin, Brookside School, Worthington, OH

Copyright 2002 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2002
Gr. 9-12. Like Almond's award-winning novels, these connected stories, based on personal experience, are about the miraculous in daily life, the unknown in the familiar. Almond writes with lyrical simplicity about growing up in a working-class family in a small mining town in the north of England. Catholic faith is central to childhood vision, and tentative questioning of Catholicism is as much a part of coming-of-age as is awakening sexuality. Almond comes close to the sentimental, especially in the idyllic picture of the loving family he's created, but he writes powerfully of ordinary life and of the dark outside: bullies on the street and in the house next door, cruelty in the name of faith, sorrow when the father and baby sister die. As with his other books, some of Almond's best writing combines the fragile and the grotesque, especially in the exquisite stories about the coming of the circus and the carnival. There's a strong sense of the adult looking back (many of the chapters were previously published in British literary magazines), so the audience here will be mainly readers who know Almond's work and are exploring their own stories of innocence and experience. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2002
In this evocative collection of autobiographical vignettes, Almond's writing exudes the same haunting mood that characterizes his novels (Skellig; Kit's Wilderness; Heaven Eyes). Here, readers can trace connecting threads between his published works and his childhood experiences as a sensitive, pensive English child preoccupied by the mysteries of religion, death and immortality. Rather than moving linearly, stories, set in the author's predominantly Catholic neighborhood, provide a spinning carousel of surreal images connecting different eras and piecing together fragments of memories. Town outcasts seem to change form as Almond reveals their poignant histories. Family members who die untimely deaths make surprising reappearances ("The week after our sister Barbara died she was seen walking hand in hand with Mam on this road toward the field... walked with a fluency which neither had in their lives, for Barbara had been an invalid child and Mam was already badly damaged by arthritis"). Mam re-emerges in one tale as a vibrant young dancer when her son gazes at an old photograph taken during her girlhood. In another, three deceased family members each define the word "death." At the heart of every selection, readers will feel the presence of the budding young writer gracefully, yet often sadly, riding waves of change while trying to make sense out of the world around him. The montage of scenes "merge memory and dream, the real and the imagined, truth and lies," and expresses pearls of wisdom that will remain fixed in readers' imaginations. Ages 10-up.

July 1, 2002
A collection of eighteen stories of Almond's childhood, real and imaginatively reinvented, suggests that the gritty fabulism of his fiction has roots in the rural Catholicism in which he was raised. The stories skip about chronologically, imitating the randomness of memory, but at the heart of each beats a persistent pulse. The strongest tales are those that convey the elusive succor of Catholic mysticism within the strict setting of a moral tale.

(Copyright 2002 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)