Handle with Care: an interview with Louisa Reid

Handle with Care, Louise Reid’s latest YA novel, introduces us to best friends Ashley and Ruby. In the dramatic opening scenes, Ruby – whose sections are written in verse – goes into labour during a history class with a baby she didn’t know she was having. The book examines issues of mental health, friendship, family and responsibility, while deeply engaging the reader with the situations of the girls and the people around them. It’s both brilliantly plotted – I was desperate to see how events would unfold – and profoundly moving.

When Louisa and I spoke and I confessed to sobbing as I read, she told me that writing it was an emotional experience, too: “It took me a while to finish this book. I started writing it a while ago, then I stopped because I could see where the story wanted to go. I wasn’t sure if it was a direction I would be allowed to go in, or if my readership would find it too much. But in the end, that was what the story demanded. Things don’t always turn out the way they should in real life, and I feel like my readers know that. We need to acknowledge that mistakes are made, and that there are victims and there are consequences. It would have been going against my every instinct to tie the story up in a neat happy ending, although there is hope there, too.”

I asked whether Louisa felt there was a pressure on writers of YA and children’s fiction to shy away from darker themes. She cites The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks as an inspiration. “It has stayed with me throughout my writing career as something I wish I had written. It is so bleak, and so good. I was shaken to the core – I couldn’t believe he ended it the way he did. I also think we like a weepy – sometimes you have to let your reader have a good cry.”

 Both teenagers undergo seismic changes through the book. For Louisa, it’s important to depict young people whose perspective is shifting from accepting the worldview of parents and other authority figures to developing their own moral compass. Ash has always idolised her kind and capable mother, but during the novel she begins to question some of her actions and motivations. “The moment when you realise your parents are real people who don’t have the answers to everything can be a foundation shaking experience.”

Louisa drew on her experience of both raising and teaching teenage girls, but says that part of the authenticity of the characters’ voices comes from drawing on her own memories of adolescence. “So much happens within a short period of time, and it’s so fundamental that it does still feel vivid to me. The mistakes you made, the good times, the bad times, the friendships, the heartaches, the fears. When I was a teenager, the idea of getting pregnant was the ultimate spectre. Nowadays, I hope there's less of a stigma around teen pregnancy, but I think it's still very, very hard for young women who have to face not only the facts of a baby when they're still babies themselves, but also the way in which the world reacts and responds.”

Digital gossip and the distorting lens of social media torment both Ruby and Ash and – as someone who grew up in a pre-digital age – I found these elements both utterly believable and deeply distressing. “It's an online life, now. The way things can spread and proliferate can be really frightening, and I think most young people live with a fear of someone saying something about them online, or some picture being shared and the consequences of that. Part of the reason Ruby's so lonely in the book is because she feels attacked in this online world as well as in person, so she shrinks in on herself and feels cut off from all those social connections you really need as a young person. That loneliness is a driving factor in her feeling depressed and fearful and isolated.”

In the digital age, gossip and drama – which we all remember being central to our teenage lives – is turbocharged. “You can't control where that picture goes, where that video goes, how that lie develops and spreads. People are poisoned against a vulnerable individual who needs love, kindness, patience, but instead gets sneers and mockery. The boys at school making crude comments… it's completely inappropriate, but this behaviour is normal.” The book also makes sharp and wise observations on the chasm between the glossy cuteness of parenting a newborn as viewed on Instagram and the exhausting reality.

 I wondered whether the hard-hitting nature of some of themes Louisa depicts had led to any resistance from gatekeepers, but she has found teachers and school librarians hugely supportive. “They are more than willing to get books that tackle quite complex and perhaps heart-wrenching stories into the hands of readers who will respond to them. There's a place for everything in a school library: the lighthearted comic stuff, the graphic novel, the classics. There’s always that magic of: right book, right time, right reader. Sometimes you need a book that allows you to experience the problems of somebody else to help you work through your own. It's about building empathy amongst your readership for people who are suffering or feel on the outskirts.”

The idea of empathy is threaded into the structure of Handle with Care, as the voices of the two girls – and the different perspectives they have on the unfolding action – carry the narrative. Louisa says, “We need to allow ourselves to see things from multiple perspectives if we're ever going to work together, to be kinder to each other.”

“I’d love readers of this book to take away something of the importance of friendship, which all teenagers know already, but about being prepared to ask hard questions and listen to answers, even if they're unpalatable. Ash experiences how hard it is sometimes to keep going with somebody when they're pushing you away, but a message from the book is that although they may be telling you they don’t want to talk, perhaps they just can't express how hard life has become for them. In Ruby, that shows up in rage a lot of the time, and Ash doesn't fully understand that under the fury is this huge pain.”

The book also explores the idea of affluent neglect. Ruby wants for nothing in material terms, but her high-flying mother is emotionally distant, wanting to sweep her pregnancy under the carpet. “There’s a message for the adults reading too, actually, that with teenagers, they're not ready to deal with grown up stuff on their own. They need support, even when they're slamming the door on you. And it's so difficult to deal with emotional crises in young people. I mean, parents aren’t trained for that, are they? There's no manual.”

I asked Louisa about the decision to write the sections narrated by Ruby in verse. “The form is brilliant for getting to the heart of that subjective emotional experience. Initially, all the narrative was in prose but an early reader – and then my agent – both suggested I try this. Ruby’s sections are painful, and it gives them a real immediacy. It worked for her.”

Handle with Care is that very special thing: a propulsive page-turner that packs a real emotional punch, and a book that will open up hard and desperately necessary conversations. Ruby and Ash, and their powerful story, will stay with readers long after they turn the last page.

Handle With Care by Louisa Reid is out now.

This interview was commissioned for Books for Keeps Magazine.

It's the feels you're looking for: an interview with Matt Goodfellow

Matt Goodfellow’s powerful yet accessible novel in verse The Final Year, illustrated by Joe Todd-Stanton, won the 2024 CLPE Children's Poetry Award, and the hearts of readers of all ages. Nate is facing down the dreaded Year 6 – SATS, friendship struggles, anger and all – when his little brother falls ill and his world, already chaotic, spins off its axis. He finds lights to guide him, though, including friendships old and new, a perceptive new teacher and reading and writing.

Nate felt so real to me, and we can see from the book’s success just how real he felt to young readers, too. I asked Matt how difficult it was to achieve such an authentic child’s voice.

“Everything I write is inspired by a combination of three things: my life, lives that I've seen, and things that I make up. I taught as a Year 6 teacher in East Manchester, where the book is set, and Nate is a combination of lots of different young people I taught, kids that I've met doing events around the country, and stuff from my life.”

Matt’s editor, Charlotte, also comes from a teaching background, and their hard work getting the accent and dialect right and creating a setting that felt true to life has paid off.

“As a teacher, I didn't see lives like Nate's represented in literature. And we’re saying: this is a story to be told, and these lives are important. Your cultural heritage matters. Your accent matters. We’re trying to get teachers and young people to understand that an expression of self in the voice that you've grown up with is really important. It’s about identity.”

The dire warnings about “knuckling down” and “stepping up” issued to students in The Final Year struck a powerful chord both for my daughter – who has just navigated that year of SATS and stress – and I. Nate benefits from the wisdom and sensitivity of new teacher Mr Joshua, who became a mouthpiece for some of Matt’s feelings about the educational system and poetry in schools.

“There’s an undeniable pressure to do things in a certain way, and it does push creativity out, and it does stop things like poetry creeping in. Schools bump out young people disenfranchised by poetry because of the way teachers are forced to teach it. My son's nineteen, and his dad's a poet, and he still left high school thinking poetry was nothing to do with him. But the first thing he does when he leaves school is put his headphones in and listen to rap and rhyme.

No writers write the way that teachers are made to teach writing in school. So poetry can become this fluid space where things can be done differently – but because a lot of the teachers won’t have had training in teaching poetry, it can become self perpetuating that everybody's frightened of it.”

Nate uses both the public library and the school library as places of refuge, seeking out new reading experiences. But Matt says that wasn’t inspired by his own experience – “I rebelled against reading, mostly because I was an idiot” – but rather his years seeing the book corners and school libraries that dictate what young readers have access to.

“Although there’s a movement within publishing to reflect everybody, there’s still not a lot of lives like Nate’s being seen, so I think it's important that people can go and find those stories.”

I’m so grateful to Matt for putting David Almond on my radar. His children’s classic Skellig threads through the book: comforting and inspiring Nate and giving him a new sense of the possibilities of storytelling. “David writes with a beautiful sense of place about the northeast and there's real life in it, but there's also a magic that he does so uniquely. When I became a teacher, I’d wanted to be a rock star. I didn't have kids yet. I knew nothing about kids’ literature. And in my second year of teaching, I had a year 5 class, and I read Skellig and I thought, this is one of the best books I've ever read. I just didn't know that kids’ writing could be that textured.”

The idea of writing something with the same power for children had taken root, but songwriting was in the rearview mirror, and Matt saw his future in education. Then, author Tom Palmer came into the school, and – as Matt organised more school visits, focussing on poets he admired like Wes McGee, Brian Moses and Jan Dean – another path appeared for him.

David Almond loved The Final Year. And when Matt talked to him about it after publication, he realised that after a gruelling year, much of Mr Joshua’s encouragement to Nate was a way in which Matt was talking to himself. “And David said, “You only find out what they're about after you've written them.” Genius.”

I wondered whether Matt had had a similarly inspiring teacher, but he says, “I went through primary school easily but moving on to high school, when my behaviour changed a bit, nobody really took the time to say, let's unpick this. I started writing songs when I was about thirteen, and the idea that you could write and talk about yourself came from there, not from any teachers.”

He adds, “And I was nowhere near as good a teacher as Mr Joshua is. I wanted him to be at the start of his career because he's not tired. I needed him to really want to be in the classroom, to really care about the kids. He spots that Nate has something to say, and I did try to do that when I was a teacher because there's noisy kids, there's quiet kids and there's kids in between. And quite often, kids can fall through the gaps, and teachers are so busy. It does feel like he's there speaking to the readers who don't have that teacher.

And maybe Mr Joshua is the teacher that I needed when I was a kid, and that's why I wrote him like that.”

The Final Year has been justly praised for Matt’s authentic, sympathetic handling of fear and grief, as Nate’s little brother falls ill. He draws the realities of the way in which children are kept at a remove from crises, the need to blow off steam and the way kids offer each other support in pages so deft and true, I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader reading through tears.

“There’s always been sadness in my life and I knew I wasn’ t the only one. The music I listen to and the stuff that interests me is generally about articulations of sadness, which some people think is weird. But the stuff that happens in the book, happens. And quite often, we don't talk about it. I've had a lot of emails from parents and kids thanking me for writing about it. Young people live lives in which people die and sad things happen, and if we pretend that they're not because it's difficult for us to talk about, it’s very unhelpful.

Some teachers said they wouldn’t read The Final Year to their class because it's too close to the bone. It’s not my job to tell any teacher what to do in their classroom, but those are the young people that I wrote the story for, to let them know that they're not alone. But in general, the reaction to this book has been so brilliant, from kids and teachers. There’s been a lot of response from adults because, hopefully, it's written on a number of different levels. I work really hard to make space for any adult to read the book because it's about life. It’s about grief, and it ultimately, it is about hope.”

I was thrilled to hear that Nate will return in a sequel, The First Year, to be published by Otter-Barry Books in April 2025. Matt says, “I’m never interested in writing the same book twice, so it's a very different sort of set of issues.” Readers will be able to follow Nate’s transition to secondary school and the new challenges he’ll face.

In the wise words of Mr Joshua as he ignites Nate’s passion for writing: “It’s the feels you’re looking for.” Reader, you’ll find them within the pages of The Final Year.

This interview originally appeared in Books for Keeps.