Book Review by Paul Tobin

Many thanks to Paul Tobin, poet and author, who has written a review of Under The Foutain in his Blog "Magpie Bridge."



Monday, 31 October 2011

UNDER THE FOUNTAIN

I wanted to share with you an interesting book I happened to come across recently. It’s called Under the Fountain and it is written by Kathy Lovell and charmingly illustrated by Jane Meech. Essentially it is the story of two boys, Jake and George, who discover under the fountain in their local swimming pool a secret passage to the a sea cave where they meet two seals. Later in the story they are able to rescue the seals and save their lives. There is also a second plot that describes Jake’s treatment for leukaemia.
Why did it capture my imagination? Well for two reasons, basically it is a page turner; once I started I wanted to know what happens to the characters. Secondly, in a past life I was a social worker, and books like this are immeasurably useful for helping children make sense of their illness and the treatment process. When I was working for Social Services it was almost impossible to find books that related to the situations people found themselves in, and a book like this is very welcome.
I must just say a word about the illustrations, I think that Jane Meech has captured both the children and the seals. The artwork is excellent, as I hope you can see from the examples on this post.









Posted by Paul Tobin at Monday, October 31, 2011 elated to the situations people found themselves in, and a book like this is very welcome.

How the story began

Twelve years ago my daughter was diagnosed with Leukaemia, she was eight years old. After trying to explain to her about the disease, and how it was treated, the first thing that she said was “I want to meet someone with the same thing as me.” At that particular time there wasn’t another child in Bristol Children’s Hospital with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. The next thing that she wanted was to read a story about a child that had leukaemia. There was very little around apart from the colouring book about the Hickman line, “The Wiggly” book. The book was informative and child friendly but not really about “someone.”

We spent the long summer inside the four walls of a hospital ward acting out many fantasy stories. Most of the time we used favourite soft animals, Barbie dolls and numerous plastic figures, with some attempt on my part to sew clothes for the dolls and animals.

Time went on and horses became much more a focus of our lives, so although I wanted to write a story for children with leukaemia, it went onto a back burner while I thought of different kinds of stories for a daughter who was fit and healthy and trying to adjust to being back to the world of school.

Little ideas for a story continued to flit around in my head until the son of a friend was diagnosed with ALL just over a year ago. There was a terrible irony in this, as the friend had been very supportive in the fundraising we had done for CLIC when my daughter was going through treatment. The impetus was there to write something, something that was more than just an explanation of what it’s like to have leukaemia, but something that would also give a sick child the chance to read a story with a positive self image for themselves as the hero of a story. And so, I began to write…