Drawing With Light by Julia Green (From Worcester News)

Drawing With Light by Julia Green

12:23pm Friday 26th February 2010 in

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KAT and Emily have grown up without their mother for almost as long as they can remember. And now Dad is with Cassy and they all muddle along together well enough – even though they are living in a cramped caravan while their new house is being renovated. Then Cassy and Dad tell them that Cassy is pregnant, and everything seems to shift. Emily feels a new urge to find her own mother. How could she have left them the way she did? Never writing to them? Not communicating with them? And as Emily begins her search, not knowing what she will find, she is at the same time embarking on a new relationship of her own, that of her romance with Seb …

This book is being reviewed by the Reading Group at the Chantry High School, Martley.

REVIEW

Book Review – Drawing With Light

Title: Drawing With Light
Author: Julia Green
Publisher: Bloomsbury, price £6.99 (paperback)
Reviewer: Jessica Nott (age 15)

“I’m on the edge of something extraordinary, and I can hardly wait for it all to unfold…”

This is the quote on the back of my copy of ‘Drawing With Light’ by Julia Green and I find it perfectly described how I felt before I opened the book. I had never read any of her previous books and ‘Drawing With Light’ does not fit into my normal reading genre. This meant I was pleasantly surprised when I first opened its covers and began to read.

The book is about the main character, Emily, trying to find out who she is through searching for her real mother, Francesca, who left when she was two years old as her life begins to get more complicated when she is sixteen at Sixth Form College. Her life starts to change when her older sister, Kat, goes to university in York and she has to live in an old caravan in the middle of a field with her dad and his partner Cassy as her dad restores an old, ruined house called Moat house. This is where she meets “a beautiful boy with fine features and expressive dark eyes” called Seb and as the story progresses so does their relationship. The story helps show the different challenges she encounters as she and Seb’s relationship blooms, she works toward her A-levels and she struggles with the feeling of being pushed from her dad’s and sister’s lives. The story takes place from September of one year to the summer of the next in three sections (notebooks), which I think helps to break-up the story into its different stages.

I like the way in which the book is written because it is half way between a diary entry style and the more conventional style of chapters, which helps the book to establish its own distinctiveness. I also like the way the writer makes the story relevant to almost any reader with the characters worries and problems on the sidelines surrounding the core story, such as exam and coursework stresses, parent-child relationships and work.

I think the story read very well because of its style, which I think would allow readers of different ages/ abilities to easily follow the story while keeping them entertained. The splitting of the story into the three ‘notebooks’ helps to clearly define the changes the story undergoes as it progresses and this helps the reading through the story.

Apart from the normal main characters of Emily, her family and Seb I liked the character Bob, a homeless man Emily knows and whose dog, Mattie, she ends up looking after when he goes to hospital. This is because it shows a good comparison between his life and Emily’s due to her complaining about her life in the caravan in the winter when he has no form of permanent shelter on the streets in all weathers all year.

I enjoyed the ending because it felt like it fitted well with the rest of the story and satisfied the expectations of the reader but still left them wanting more. I think that the way it is written means that the reader can almost imagine a kind of near happy ever after but in a real world sense, meaning it that that trouble is coming to a close making way for the rest of the characters’ lives.

I think I might read more stories by this author because this book had been written in an interesting style, which means I would enjoy reading other books in similar styles. I also think that the themes around which the author creates her story in this book are interesting to read about how the characters react and deal with them, such as in this book Emily’s relationship with Seb.

I think that this book is suitable for young adults because of some of the mild language in one scene and veiled mention of potential intimate scenes between the characters of Emily and Seb even though it does not happen in the story making it not fitting for younger readers. Some of the situations in the story may also not be understood fully by younger readers so they will not experience the story to its full potential.