Wee Free Men
Tery Pratchett
318 pages
published in 2003
Wee Free Men is the second Discworld novel aimed at children, following in the footsteps of 2001's The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. There are two kinds of children's books I've found: books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar which offer simple reading for children still learning to do so and books like these Pratchett novels or Harry Potter which are intended for children who can read well enough already. Quite often, as is the case here, it's difficult to see in which these differ from "proper" adult books. To me, it often seems as if the main difference is a greater care to avoid unnecessary complexity and confusion when writing for children. Which is what Terry Pratchett more or less confirmed when he popped up in a recent discussion in rec.arts.sf.written on just this subject:
The difference in writing for children (or Young Adults as the trade likes to call them) lies in:
Less reliance on a large shared cultural background (I'm 44 years older than them, maybe. I know more stuff.)
More care with vocabulary and sentence construction -- which is not the same as using simpler words, although if you're going to come up with 'sussuruss' you'd better have the meaning to hand.
Attention to background details -- sometimes kids require fewer.
And X. I don't know what X is, but I know I'm doing it when I'm writing for younger readers.
In other words, you don't have to dumb down your story to write a children's novel. And indeed, Wee Free Men is anything but dumbed down. It could've been published as a regular Discworld book. Where it differs from most Discworld books is that the plot is fairly straight forward and the focus stays for the largest part with the heroine of the book.
Said heroine being Tiffany Aching, nine years old who wants to be a witch when she grows up, but at the moment has her hands full with her baby brother Wentworth, who could be left in the middle of a clean floor, freshly washed and dried and be sticky in less then five minutes. Apart from baby sitting her brother, Tiffany is also an expert cheesemaker and dairy maid. Which isn't much help, now the Queen of Fairy is invading the Chalk, where Tiffany lives. What's worse, the Queen took Wentworth and the only person who could get him back, the local witch, Tiffany's grandmother, died a while before.
The Chalk is an area of sheep farmers and the only "magic book" her grandmother had left was a book about the diseases of sheep. Fortunately, Tiffany gets help from an unexpected quarter: the Nac Mac Feegle. These are a race of blue picties, a few inches high but with a maniacal glee and agression more suited to a mountain troll (but if said troll would meet the Nac Mac Feegle, he'd take the long way around... They're outcasts from Faery, NOT because they were always drunk and disorderly...
That's the plot more or less, fairly straightforward: Wentworth has to be rescued from Faery and the invasion has to be stopped. The story is more interesting and is, unsurprisingly in a young adult book, about growing up and taking responsibility, about dealing with the loss of somebody near to you. It works well, Tiffany is a fully rounded person, slightly too mature for her age fromt he start, but then she wants to be a witch, so no wonder. I liked the relationship between her and her granny, completely treated in flash backs and the recurring theme of "it's still magic, even when you know how it's done". Which is of course another part of growing up; learning how to do things you thought happened spontaneously.
Very much recommened, for anyone.