A wealth of recent books have challenged attitudes towards death in children's fiction. Photograph: Christopher Thomond
The Bower Bird, announced as the winner of the Costa children's book award last night, carries with it an exhortation from its author Ann Kelley to her readers to become organ donors. That's not the usual add-on for children's books - you're more likely to find them accompanied by glitter, lippy or chocolate - but maybe it will become so: right now, books about the possibilities of children dying seem to be all the rage.
Last spring at Bologna where, annually, the rights to forthcoming children's books are bought and sold, two of the biggest and most hotly fought over titles were narrated by children who spoke about what they felt about dying and, in particular, what they needed to do before they died.
It's a big turn around in terms of what is acceptable. Just a few short years ago, while teen sex had long been OK-ed and drug use was creeping in "for authenticity", death was cited as the last taboo. Now, death seems to positively stalk children's books, with characters confronting the grave with sometimes alarming abandon. Here, as in Kelley's previous title The Burying Beetle, her vivid, pertinent first person narration captures a bright-eyed urgency about life which those in possession of a full life expectancy cannot know. It's undeniably a good device for intensity and makes a moving and contrasting background to the usual teenage anxieties of falling in love, parental difficulties and the rest.
But in a market that is very crowded, it's hard not to think that it is our responses to the idea of dying rather than the inherent qualities of the stories themselves that make these books so captivating. Maybe it is because we rarely have much first-hand experience of child death - or any kind of death, really, come to that - that we are unbearably moved by the thought and expression of it; we are almost fearful that not liking it will reveal us to be unfeeling. And yet, however well-portrayed the death and the sense of death, these narratives tell only a small part of the whole. All too often, dying in fiction is imbued with a kind of heroism that affects those around it - whereas in reality this is rarely the case, as death causes a great deal of pain for those who are left behind. Maybe that's why, with a few notable exceptions, I've always regarded books about it with caution.
