Ground-breaking children’s author set for Glór

AUTHOR Marita Conlon McKenna is coming to Glór on Monday as part of Children’s Book Festival, which is running throughout the month.
Her first book Under the Hawthorn Tree, was published in 1990 and was a massive success. Dealing with children during the Great Famine, it’s darker than most children’s fiction and broke some new ground.
“The Famine is something I always had a passion about and I began to write the story for my daughter Mandy. I’d heard about three skeletons being found under a hawthorn tree and they were children and that haunted me. No one knew if they died of Famine fever or starvation, no one knew what happened or where they were from.
“I began to research the Famine and I wanted to write about it because there was no book for children at that time about the Famine. I wanted something my own children could read and I wanted the characters to be terribly strong and clever. All of the children’s books that Irish children were in, were always a bit stupid and they were running away with fairies and things.
“I wanted them [the characters] to be strong and brave and it was also about the relationship between the three of them, because they lose their parents in the Famine and they have to survive.”
The success of it was quite unexpected and she hadn’t even expected it to go to print. “When I finished it I didn’t think it would be published, I wanted it to be for my children, my grandchildren and my great grandchildren. I had no intention of publishing it but two or three people read it, they said it’s absolutely brilliant and you have to send it to a publisher. I didn’t know what to do because I was only starting off writing and I sent it to O’Brien Press. I remember they took ages to come back to me. They said they loved it but it was really a risk, because there was no children’s book like it at the time.
“They said ‘don’t expect it to do well, but we’ll do it and see what happens’. I remember it came out on May 23 and gradually, it began to build up. People were talking about it and children were reading it and then there was an explosion of children wanting to read it. The children made it their own, they loved it and they were well able for it. It’s selling all over the world now and read by children everywhere.”
Her most recent children’s book Love, Lucie is only on the shelves for the last few weeks. She says it’s suitable for children in the 11 to 13 age group and also has some appeal for adults. “Maybe for 10, 11, 12 and 13 but I think it’s a bit of a cross-over book because a few adults I know who read it really enjoyed it. There’s a lot about life in it and lessons for life.”
It’s about a little girl whose mother has just died. “It’s very different, it’s done in letter form and it’s about a girl of 11. It starts on the day of her mum’s funeral and she begins to write letters to her mum. The book goes through the year after her mum’s death and the different things that happen. The strangest thing is that as she begins to write the letters, she starts to see her mum’s ghost so there is a ghost element to it that I think the children really, really like. It looks at her dad, her older sister and younger brother and it was a really unusual book to write.”
Marita said it’s going down very well with the young readers. “It’s a very different book but kids seem to already be making it their own. It’s really strange, some people are comparing it to Under the Hawthorn Tree, which is totally different because that’s during the Famine and the kids were on their own but people say there’s the same kind of strong writing.”
Of course, loss is a huge theme in the book. “I used to have nightmares about losing my own mum when I was a kid and it’s funny to write your own nightmare and see how you would get through it. I lost two or three friends who died far too young and left children far too young and I suppose, in a way, I wrote this for them as well, because I wanted to explore loss, really.”