Despite the thing I am going to complain about later on, Hilary McKay is the contemporary children’s author I most wish had been writing when I was a little girl. When I’m sad, the books most likely to cheer me up are her Casson series (the first one is Saffy’s Angel and yes, you should read it immediately). Her latest, Love to Everyone, is an offshoot of her Binny series (which, yes, you should read immediately), the story of three children growing up in Edwardian England and then World War I.
(Love to Everyone is called The Skylarks’ War in England, which I think is a much better title. Nobody ever consults me about these things.)
Clarry is accustomed to feeling invisible. Her mother died when she was a baby (because of her? Clarry thinks probably), and her father doesn’t care about her, and her brother Peter does not admit to liking her. But in the summers, she goes to Cornwall to stay with her grandparents, and she and Peter have summers with their older, dashing cousin Rupert. Love to Everyone is the story of them all growing up, Peter and Clarry and Rupert and all the people they acquire (and lose) along the way.
Of the many good things about Hilary McKay, my favorite is her ability to shift seamlessly between humor and joy and sadness. Her jokes are so exactly what I want jokes to be — wry and absurd and understated — but she has managed to reach adulthood without forgetting (which many people do forget) how sad and scary it can be to be a kid. Clarry and Peter spend a lot of their childhood being badly discontented, but they are clever and persistent enough to see opportunities to change their circumstances. They are also surrounded — this is another thing Hilary McKay does wonderfully — by people who mean different things to them at different stages of their lives. Someone who is a tedious nuisance at one stage of your life may turn out to be absolutely vital and heroic at another.
(All this I loved.)
What I did not love — and this will be a spoiler, but one that I am glad I knew going into the book, ta to Ana for warning me — is that in this World War I story, Hilary McKay chose the only queer character to die at the front. It is much much too many years in the future for people to be unaware of the Bury Your Gays trope. In Love to Everyone, the queer character is only in the war in the first place because he has a crush (obliquely suggested) on dashing cousin Rupert. Whatever Hilary McKay may have meant by it, it’s exhausting to read yet another story in which the senselessness of war ™ is made evident by disposing of a queer character–the only queer character, incidentally, in the book.
So take that as a caveat. If that hadn’t happened, I would have had only good things to say about Love to Everyone. It’s got a terrifically vibrant and complicated cast of characters, all of whom feel like real people with rich backstories of their own (whether we get to hear those stories or not). You can feel the world around the edges of the book in a way that’s quite remarkable. I just wish that Hilary McKay had been a little more aware of our own world and the tropes we should have put behind us by now.
Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration.