Keith considers recent books which throw light on children, parenting and human behaviour – and they are not text books.

One of he tasks that falls to me each year at Mill Grove is the writing of our annual newsletter we call Links.  It’s designed to communicate news between members of the Mill Grove family dispersed around the world.  The two biggest sections are therefore called, unsurprisingly, “Family News” and “Diary”.  Writing it takes about a week of pretty concentrated effort, sifting through diaries, notes, letters, photos, greetings, newspaper cuttings and so on.  It’s a very rewarding endeavour, not least because when it reaches people a very common comment is that they “stopped everything they were doing and read it from cover to cover”.

It so happens that I have just finished the copy and selection of photos for this year’s Links.  And this means that my head is full of the events, routines, visitors, achievements, births, marriages and deaths of last year.  And this in turn led me to think of some of the books that I had read (from cover to cover, of course!) in 2006 that I would commend to readers of Children Webmag. 

As a university lecturer I rarely recommend books to students, knowing that in general they prefer lecture notes, websites and articles.  But my sense is that you might be interested to know the sort of books that resonate with, and perhaps even indirectly, inform what we do in our residential community.

My guess is that you would tend to think of books about child care theory and practice, and there were several of these in 2006, but it is two novels that I want to add to my list of recommendations in this column (that includes The Kite Runner and Out of the Woods: Tales of Resilient Teens (Adolescent Lives)).  The two books I have chosen at the end of the year are My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult (London: Hodder 2004), and We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver (New York: Counterpoint, 2003).  Neither is a light read in the sense that they bring the sort of light relief you might get from reading Bill Bryson or Terry Pratchett, but they are both gripping stories by first rate writers.  Their focus is on relationships within families.