Nicola Garrard's On the Edge is a gritty and powerful novel capturing the dark effects that tourism has on the local inhabitants of a Devonshire seaside town. Drawing on the author's own childhood, the novel portrays a community under pressure from gentrification, overtourism, and second-home ownership, which have pushed property prices beyond the reach of the local people, and undermined traditional industries leaving only precarious seasonal work in its wake.
At the heart of the novel is Rhys, a compelling teen protagonist, fiercely loyal to his family and desperate to protect them from Children's Services who he fears may split the family once again. His days are spent caring for his younger brothers - his father spends much of the week away as a long-distance lorry driver - and after being excluded from school he takes poorly paid work, his dreams of a surfing career shattered. This is a rare depiction of a working-class world that is often overlooked in YA fiction. Reviewed for LoveReading4Kids by Joy Court, this Book of the Month is "a searing portrayal of loss, grief, challenges to masculinity in the modern world and the strength of friendship and sibling bonds."
Nicola Garrard told us more about her hard hitting novel, about the young men who have inspired her writing, and her work with the charity Minority Matters. Nicola also shares her TBR pile - all top recommendations for teen readers.
Q. Rhys is essentially a young carer sacrificing his own goals to keep the family together. Is this an important issue for you to address?
A. As a teacher, I have taught scores of children with caring responsibilities for younger siblings, elderly or disabled relatives - and sometimes even their own parents, who may suffer from addiction or mental ill-health and need their child to take charge of shopping, paying bills, and even to contribute to household costs. Sometimes these children get into trouble at school for absenteeism or poor homework, but they have a maturity and sense of purpose beyond academic learning that is rarely acknowledged. I hope my novels celebrate these young carers.
Q. As a society do you think we ignore coastal poverty? Grockles are largely unaware of their impact. Did you want to raise awareness of this neglect?
A. I suppose all my books are about raising awareness of issues that limit the life chances of young people. Because of the stereotype of the coastal idyll, and the nostalgia among decision-makers for their own childhood holidays spent in beautiful areas, coastal deprivation is largely invisible in public opinion and government policy. I hope On the Edge contributes to a growing conversation about rural poverty and insecure housing, and the impact of inadequate healthcare, public transport and education on children’s lives. And the housing issue is not only about homeless families: increasingly, in Devon and Cornwall, children and their families leave their own homes to live in tents and caravans to make way for tourists. I also wanted to highlight how rural young people are affected by the trade in and misuse of illegal drugs. Tourism is fuelling an epidemic of child-trafficked party drugs. Summertime statistics for hospital admissions for overdose and drug-related injuries in Devon and Cornwall lay bare the link between tourism, teenage drug use, and the child criminal exploitation that is very much my professional focus as a teacher in London.
Q. Do you think Rhys was let down by those who should have had his back - at school and at home?
A. Rhys was certainly not properly known or valued by his school. In my experience as a teacher, this is common in secondary schools. There are so many ways that working-class boys like Rhys are let down by our education. Internal exclusion rooms across the country are disproportionately populated by working-class boys. I know a boy who took himself to school independently from Year 5 because his parents left the family home at 7.30 a.m. and returned eleven hours later. They are good parents; like Rhys’s dad in On the Edge, they were loving and supportive, but they had to work all hours to make ends meet. Throughout his time at a zero-tolerance academy, he was given ‘negative’ behaviour sanctions and detentions for not having, or occasionally forgetting, items like printed-out homework (not everyone has a printer, A4 paper and ink), astroturf boots (boys’ feet sometimes grow two sizes a year), or a clip-lid Tupperware box and apron for cooking. Really? He should’ve been given an award for remembering 98% of the time without the benefit of the helicopter parenting of his wealthier peers. He was intelligent, more than capable of taking A-levels and going to university, but of course he didn’t stay where he wasn’t known or valued.
Q. The descriptions of surfing feel very authentic- are you a surfer?
A. I am a surfer, but a very timid one! My brother, on the other hand, is a superbly talented surfer. When I started teaching in central London, he lived and worked on a campsite, cooked in a tourist pub, and carried hods full of stones for a dry-stone mason. Between jobs, he surfed every moment possible, to the extent that he’d turn up to the pub kitchen dripping in seawater! I used to wade through London’s Friday evening traffic to join him on the coast at weekends. He still encourages me to surf in bigger waves, but I get frightened if they’re higher than two feet. With the right conditions, though, I can happily spend hours in the water.
Q. Your highly praised debut novel 29 Locks told the story of a 15 year old growing up in poverty, and exposure to crime. What was the initial inspiration for your first book?
A. After one of my loveliest students in London, Mahad Ali, was tragically and senselessly murdered by a gang, and his case was not reported in the national media, I wanted to change the narrative about the young Londoners I’ve been privileged to teach since 2002. I wanted to show their talent for friendship, devotion to their families, eloquence, humour and resilience, but I also wanted to show how their lives are affected by poverty, racism, adultification, child criminal exploitation and a sometimes uncaring education system. I wanted readers to feel as angry as I was about knife crime and child exploitation, and to fall in love with the teenagers the media has programmed them to fear.
Q. Your stories seem to particularly focus on young males, living troubled lives and feeling on the edge of society. Why are you drawn to writing about these characters, and what do you hope your readers will take from your novels?
A. In nearly thirty years of teaching, the majority of my classes have been all-boy and in areas of high deprivation, so I am probably more in tune with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, although I would challenge the idea that they are on the ‘edge of society’ when a horrifying 31% of all children (4.5 million) now live in poverty.
I’m drawn to writing about teenage boys because I love their big, gallumphing, awkward, optimistic, comedic, striving, boisterous, puppy-like ways. I am frequently touched by their hidden sensitivities and the love with which they talk about their families and pets. I hope my readers will take from my novels that, yes, teenage boys have the capacity to harm each other and girls, and need guidance through the poisonous influences proliferating online, but their loyal, protective and gentle qualities must also be recognised and celebrated.
Q. Tell us a bit about your work with Minority Matters.
A. Minority Matters is a grassroots education charity in Finsbury Park, Islington, whose mission is to build community resilience to child criminal exploitation. I work on grant applications, project planning, outward-bound residential trips, and run an early intervention programme for school-excluded boys, with intensive tutoring in literacy, numeracy, social skills and confidence. We work with the whole family, running parent groups and criminal justice system advocacy, as well as campaign work. I also help to organise a yearly child criminal exploitation conference, where parents of groomed children meet senior members of the police, teachers, social services and local government to share their lived experience and propose solutions. Minority Matters is very close to my heart, as it supports the families of murdered young people - like Mahad - and strives to end the poverty, exploitation and inequality at the heart of violent crime in London.
Q. How do you prepare for writing a novel? What is your process?
A. I seem to start each novel in a different way; sometimes planning, and sometimes free-writing unconnected scenes to see what happens. Poetry has been my ‘way in’ to many of my characters, and both 29 Locks and On the Edge started as poems.
29 Locks began as a poem about my experiences taking London boys on residential holidays in Wales, and watching how they thrive in a new environment and use the freedom (and relative safety) of a new place to reflect on life in London.
On the Edge started as a novel in verse about growing up in Devon, and my memories of swimming, surfing and fishing - written sometimes from the perspective of fish or seagulls.
Nature, landscape, pets and animals are very important to the teenage characters in my novels, and, from conversations with students and my own children, I find that adults underestimate young people’s intense connection to and love of the natural world. However my novels begin, there are inevitably scores of redrafts as I treat every sentence with the same economy and intensity of attention as I would a poem.
Q. What is on your to-read pile? Any top recommendations?
My TBR pile always includes the entire UKLA Book Awards 11–14+ fiction longlist, announced each year in September, and the adult fiction shortlists for the Booker, Booker International and Women’s Prize.
This year, in Children’s and YA fiction, I particularly enjoyed Gavin Extence’s Finding Phoebe, Kate Di Goldi’s Eddy, Eddy and Kelly McCaughrain’s Little Bang. These are superb YA/crossover novels with literary merit.
Holly Bourne’s You Could Be So Pretty has stayed with me as a searing feminist portrayal of today’s entrenched and internalised abuse of teenage girls.
In terms of books that get reluctant teenage boys reading, I’ve road-tested three of Nathanael Lessore’s novels in my classroom (Steady for This, King of Nothing and What Happens Online) and they are hilarious page-turners.
In adult fiction, I often re-read and then listen to the same book in audiobook form by favourite authors such as Hilary Mantel, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Coe and Miriam Toews, filling my notebooks as I try to understand how they do it.
Q. What does LoveReading4Kids mean to you?
A. As a teacher, I know that, unlike large online booksellers, LoveReading4Kids gives back directly to schools. School libraries are in crisis, so every gifted book counts, especially in primary schools. An Act of Parliament ensures that all prisons have a library, but no such legislation exists to protect school libraries as a right. Currently, 14% of UK schools do not have a library. Thank you for what you do. We need you!
You might also be interested in our collections of books that feature Poverty and Homelessness, and Young Carers.
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