Chambers, Aidan 1934–

(Malcolm Blacklin)

Personal

Born December 27, 1934, in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, England; son of George Kenneth Blacklin (a funeral director) and Margaret (Hancock) Chambers; married Nancy Harris Lockwood (a former editor of Children's Book News), March 30, 1968. Education: Attended Borough Road College, London, 1955–57.

Addresses

Home and office—Lockwood, Station Rd., South Wood-chester, Stroud, Gloucestershire GL5 5EQ, England. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

English and drama teacher at various schools in England, 1957–68; full-time writer and editor, 1968–. Macmillan, London, England, general editor, "Topliners," "Club 75," "M Books," and "Rockets" series, 1967–85; Signal: Approaches to Children's Books, South Woodchester, Gloucestershire, England, publisher, beginning 1969; Thimble Press, proprietor and publisher of Signal magazine, with wife, Nancy Chambers, beginning 1969; Turton & Chambers, co-founder and editorial publisher, beginning 1989. Further Professional Studies Department, University of Bristol, tutor, 1970–82; Westminster College, Oxford, visiting lecturer, 1982–92; May Hill Arbuthnot lecturer, University of Kansas at Little Rock, 1986. Writer and presenter of radio programs, including (with Nancy Chambers) Book-box, Radio Bristol, 1973–75; Children and Books, BBC Radio, 1976; Ghosts, Thames-TV, 1980; and Long, Short, and Tall Stories, BBC-TV, beginning 1980. Has produced children's plays for stage. Military service: Royal Navy, 1953–55.

Member

Society of Authors.

Awards, Honors

Children's Literature Association Award, 1978, for article "The Reader in the Book"; Best Books designation, School Library Journal, 1979, for Breaktime; Eleanor Farjeon Award (with Nancy Chambers), 1982; Best Books for Young Adults, American Library Association, 1983, for Dance on My Grave; Silver Pencil Award (Netherlands), 1983, 1985, 1986; Carnegie Medal, 1999, and Michael J. Printz Award, 2003, both for Postcards from No Man's Land; Hans Christian Andersen Award, 2002; Astrid Lindgren Award nomination, 2006.

Writings

FOR CHILDREN; FICTION

Cycle Smash, Heinemann (London, England), 1967.

Marle, Heinemann (London, England), 1968.

Don't Forget Charlie and the Vase, illustrated by Clyde Pearson, Macmillan (London, England), 1971.

Mac and Lugs, illustrated by Barbara Swiderska, Macmillan (London, England), 1971.

Ghosts Two (short stories), Macmillan (London, England), 1972.

Snake River, illustrated by Peter Morgan, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975, Macmillan (London, England), 1977.

Fox Tricks (short stories), illustrated by Robin and Jocelyn Wild, Heinemann (London, England), 1980.

Seal Secret (novel), Bodley Head (London, England), 1980, Harper (New York, NY), 1981.

The Present Takers (novel), Bodley Head (London, England), 1983, Harper (New York, NY), 1984.

Also author of Ghost Carnival, 1977. Contributor to Winter Tales for Children 4, Macmillan.

YOUNG-ADULT NOVELS

Breaktime, Bodley Head (London, England), 1978, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.

Dance on My Grave, Bodley Head (London, England), 1982, Harper (New York, NY), 1983.

Now I Know, Bodley Head (London, England), 1987, published as NIK: Now I Know, Harper (New York, NY), 1987.

The Toll Bridge, Bodley Head (London, England), 1992, Harper (New York, NY), 1995.

Postcards from No Man's Land, Bodley Head (London, England), 1999, Dutton (New York, NY), 2002.

This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, Bodley Head (London, England), 2005.

PLAYS

Everyman's Everybody, produced in London, England, 1965.

Johnny Salter (produced in Stroud, Gloucestershire, England, 1965), Heinemann (London, England), 1966.

The Car (produced in Stroud, 1966), Heinemann (London, England), 1967.

The Chicken Run (produced in Stroud, 1967), Heinemann (London, England), 1968.

The Dream Cage: A Comic Drama in Nine Dreams (produced in Stroud, 1981), Heinemann (London, England), 1982.

Only Once: A Play for Young Actors (produced in Stroud), Line by Line (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England), 1998.

EDITOR

(With wife, Nancy Chambers) Ghosts, Macmillan (London, England), 1969.

I Want to Get Out: Stories and Poems by Young Writers, Macmillan (London, England), 1971.

(With Nancy Chambers) Hi-Ran-Ho: A Picture Book of Verse, illustrated by Barbara Swiderska, Longman (London, England), 1971.

(With Nancy Chambers) World Minus Zero: A SF Anthology, Macmillan (London, England), 1971.

(With Nancy Chambers) In Time to Come: A SF Anthology, Macmillan (London, England), 1973.

The Tenth [Eleventh] Ghost Book, Barrie & Jenkins (London, England), 2 volumes, 1975–76, published in one volume as The Bumper Book of Ghost Stories, Pan (London, England), 1976.

Fighters in the Sky, Macmillan (London, England), 1976.

Funny Folk: A Body of Comic Tales, illustrated by Trevor Stubley, Heinemann (London, England), 1976.

Men at War, Macmillan (London, England), 1977.

Escapers, Macmillan (London, England), 1978.

War at Sea, Macmillan (London, England), 1978.

(Under pseudonym Malcolm Blacklin) Ghosts Four, Macmillan (London, England), 1978.

Animal Fair, illustrated by Anthony Colbert, Heinemann (London, England), 1979.

Aidan Chambers' Book of Ghosts and Hauntings, illustrated by Antony Maitland, Viking (London, England), 1980.

Ghosts That Haunt You, illustrated by Gareth Floyd, Viking (London, England), 1980.

Loving You, Loving Me, Viking (London, England), 1980.

Ghost after Ghost, illustrated by Bert Kitchen, Viking (London, England), 1982.

Plays for Young People to Read and Perform, Thimble Press (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England), 1982.

(With Jill Bennett) Poetry for Children: A Signal Bookguide, Thimble Press (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England), 1984.

Out of Time: Stories of the Future, Bodley Head (London, England), 1984, Harper (New York, NY), 1985.

Shades of Dark: Ghost Stories, P. Hardy, 1984, Harper (New York, NY), 1986.

A Sporting Chance: Stories of Winning and Losing, Bodley Head (London, England), 1985.

(And contributor) A Haunt of Ghosts, Harper (New York, NY), 1987, published as A Quiver of Ghosts, Bodley Head (London, England), 1987.

Love All, Bodley Head (London, England), 1988.

On the Edge, Macmillan, 1990.

Favourite Ghost Stories, illustrated by Tim Stevens, Kingfisher (New York, NY), 2002, published as Haunted Stories, Kingfisher (London, England), 2005.

FOR ADULTS

The Reluctant Reader, Pergamon Press, 1969.

Introducing Books to Children, Heinemann (London, England), 1973, revised edition, Horn Book (Boston, MA), 1983.

Axes for Frozen Seas (lecture), Woodfield & Stanley, 1981.

Booktalk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children, Harper (New York, NY), 1985.

The Reading Environment: How Adults Help Children Enjoy Books, Thimble Press (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England), 1990, Stenhouse, 1996.

Tell Me: Children, Reading, and Talk, Thimble Press (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England), 1993, Stenhouse, 1996.

Contributor to periodicals, including Books and Bookmen, Books for Your Children, Children's Book News, Teachers' World, and Times Educational Supplement. Author of columns "Young Reading," Times Educational Supplement, 1970–72, and "Letter from England," Horn Book, 1972–84.

OTHER

Haunted Houses, illustrated by John Cameron Jarvies, Pan (London, England), 1971.

More Haunted Houses, illustrated by Chris Bradbury, Pan (London, England), 1973.

Book of Ghosts and Hauntings, Viking (London, England), 1973.

Great British Ghosts, illustrated by Barry Wilkinson, Pan (London, England), 1974.

Great Ghosts of the World, illustrated by Peter Edwards, Pan (London, England), 1974.

Book of Flyers and Flying, illustrated by Trevor Stubley, Viking (London, England), 1976.

Ghost Carnival: Stories of Ghosts in Their Haunts, illustrated by Peter Wingham, Heinemann (London, England), 1977.

Book of Cops and Robbers, illustrated by Allan Manham, Viking (London, England), 1977.

Adaptations

The Toll Bridge was adapted for the stage and produced in Antwerp, Belgium, 1998.

Work in Progress

A new young-adult novel.

Sidelights

An accomplished dramatist and critic and the author and editor of both fiction and nonfiction, Aidan Chambers is widely known as an outspoken advocate of children's literature. Many of Chambers's writings highlight a recurring theme: that children should be encouraged to read at an early age and allowed to develop their skills and reading preferences at an independent pace. "I can remember the day—evening rather—when I first learned to read," Chambers wrote in an essay for Sixth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators. "That evening in winter I sat staring at a page of print, and suddenly I started to hear the words in my head, making sense. And the sense they were making was a story, with people talking in it, about an adventure on an island. Hearing those printed words suddenly making sense in my head is one of the most vivid and valued moments in my life." Chambers firmly believes that children respond best to subjects that are of interest to them. To this end, he has compiled anthologies about a variety of subjects, including ghosts, crime, and aviation. Chambers's fiction, primarily directed to young adults in novels such as Breaktime, Dance on My Grave, and Postcards from No Man's Land, is noted for its honest depiction of adolescent emotions and its sympathetic treatment of nontraditional young-adult themes such as homosexuality. "Whether editing anthologies or writing or reviewing children's books, Aidan Chambers takes his work seriously," asserted Christine Heppermann in Children's Books and Their Creators. "He believes children, like adults, deserve good books written just for them."

Born in 1934 in Chester-le-Street, a small coal-mining town in the northeast part of England, Chambers came from a working-class family: his father was a skilled woodcraftsman and his mother cared for their home. His childhood home was dominated by a large, black, castiron fireplace where all the food was cooked and the water heated; only a few books could be found, including a dictionary, a volume of Aesop's Fables, and a do-it-yourself medical book. Chambers did not read for pleasure, nor did he excel in primary school. "Throughout my ninth year I was beaten twice every Friday for not being able to do well enough in mental arithmetic tests," he recalled in the Sixth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators. "School in Chester-le-Street was not a place you learned anything except how to avoid bullies."

Because he lived close to coal mines, Chambers got a firsthand look at the harsh realities of mining life. He described for Something about the Author Autobiogra-phy Series (SAAS) both the fascination and terror he associated with the pitmen: "Out of view at the head of the valley to my left was a coke factory, a huge, concrete affair from which oozed red-hot cinders in great vertical slabs like pus from a wound…. As I lay in the dark trying to get to sleep,… I could see through my back bedroom window the bobbing flashlights of pitmen as they walked to or from the mine along a path that skirted the top of the wood. I imagined they were night spirits invading my territory, and I was glad to be safe at home."

Going to the movies was a way to escape the realities of his nondescript life, and Chambers was particularly impressed by the cinematic moment Judy Garland as Dorothy opened the black-and-white cottage door onto the dazzling colors of Oz in The Wizard of Oz. "I loved the snug hiddenness of the dark cinema, the smell, the smoke-filled beam of light shining onto the screen … the utterly absorbed attention of an audience captured by a film," Chambers recalled in his autobiographical essay for SAAS. "I'm sure the way I write stories, per-haps even the way I read them, owes more to those hundreds of hours spent watching movies than to anything else."

After World War II, Chambers's father took a job in the industrial town of Darlington. While Chambers was not happy about leaving his hometown, the move brought about one happy change: Darlington's school system was a good one, with attentive teachers and a challenging curriculum. Chambers was especially impressed by Jim Osborn, the head of the English department. With some prodding, Osborn convinced Chambers to join the debate and drama clubs, and the boy discovered that he loved public speaking and theatre. It was also about this time that he realized that he wanted to become a fiction writer. He recalled for SAAS: "This impulse planted itself when I was fifteen, the night I finished D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers…. Paul Morel's life seemed so like my own—the first time I experienced such a recognition—that I wished I could have written it."

Chambers did not have a lot of time to devote to his writing for the next few years. After graduating from school, he served two years of compulsory service in the armed forces. Upon his release from the service, Chambers entered college, where he produced some plays and also wrote several of his own. He then got a job teaching English at a boys' school. "I arrived in Southend with just enough money to see me through to my first pay cheque, a suitcase of spare clothing, board and lodging arranged in a house near the school, and an exhilarating sense of an end and a beginning: an end to a constricted adolescence, to being a son supported by parents,… a student required to pass exams, and the beginning of an independent life," Chambers noted in his autobiographical essay.

Chambers enjoyed both his teaching position and living in Southend. He made a great many friends and rekindled his interest in religion, attending Anglo-Catholic services on a regular basis. Over time, he was drawn to the idea of joining a monastery. After looking into various religious orders, Chambers joined two brothers who were organizing a new type of order set up specifically to work with young people in the community. This led Chambers to a position at a local secondary school where the students were far from great readers. Responsible for their literary and drama instruction, Chambers spent several years in search of novels and plays appropriate for these students before finally deciding to write some of his own. The novels and plays were so successful that they were soon published.

Chambers lived as a monk for the next seven years. Although he enjoyed many aspects of the monastic life, he still felt unfulfilled. Both his writing and work outside the monastery often brought him into conflict with the other brothers of his order. After a great deal of thought, Chambers eventually decided to devote himself full time to teaching and to writing fiction. He served as the general editor for a young-adult series at Macmillan, and also continued to write plays, novels, and reviews. After marrying Nancy Lockwood in 1968, Chambers quit teaching to focus entirely on his writing. In 1969, he and his wife founded Thimble Press in order to publish Signal magazine, a periodical devoted to increasing the critical appreciation of children's literature.

As Signal's circulation increased, Chambers's fiction writing took on a new voice. He told SAAS: "It happened like this. Having settled in,… my plan was to write another book of the kind I'd written before. But when I sat down to start, I realized that the prospect so bored me that I couldn't face it…. For days I sat and worried…. Finally, desperation took charge…. I grabbed a new notebook, a brand new pencil (I usually typed everything I wrote), sat myself in an easy chair (I usually sat at a desk), and told myself to write the first thing that came into my head and to go on until I told myself to stop."

The result was the novel Breaktime. Told in a mixture of narrative modes, through narration, letters, stream-of-consciousness, and a diary, Breaktime follows seventeen-year-old Ditto on an eye-opening school holiday. While working on the novel, Chambers was concerned that both the story's strong sexual emphasis and free-form narrative structure would hurt its chances for publication. Despite the author's initial misgivings, Breaktime was published and met with a generally favorable critical response. "With humor and wit, with ingenuity and candor, the author has offered one piece of one kind of truth in a spirit of technical and emotional investigation," remarked Margery Fisher in Growing Point. Richard Yates, writing in the New York Times, found Ditto to be "an appealing young man," so appealing, in fact, that the nature of his quest for adventure is one that "any number of readers can take to heart." A reviewer for Horn Book was equally laudatory, noting that Chambers "was interested in casting a teenage novel in a twentieth-century literary mode, and he has succeeded remarkably well…. In more ways than one … this book is strong meat—for its intellectualism as well as for its realism."

Chambers has followed his first success with several more well-received novels for young adults. Similar to Breaktime in style, Dance on My Grave opens with a newspaper story describing the arrest of Hal Robinson for dancing on the fresh grave of his lover, Barry. Hal's account of the events leading up to this crime is revealed through notes taken during sessions with his social worker, as well as through letters, footnotes, and lists. After flipping over a boat on the Thames River in London, Hal is rescued by the older Barry, and the pair are brought together as friends and eventually as lovers. Consumed by his first, passionate love, Hal is both angry and jealous when he discovers that Barry has casually been with a girl. A fight ensues and Barry leaves on his motorbike; he is killed in an accident a short time later. A fast and hard-living young man, Barry had made Hal promise to dance on his grave after his death, and Hal does so, revealing to the world his long-hidden sexual orientation.

"Dance on My Grave is inventive, witty, [and] stimulating," maintained Neil Philip in the Times Educational Supplement, adding that Barry and Hal's relationship "is related with a cool matter-of-fact humour which is most refreshing." Mary K. Chelton similarly asserted in the Voice of Youth Advocates: "To have male feelings so well depicted is a rare treat, and to have the protagonist be a young gay male who survives a lost love with insight and joy, is rarer still…. Everything about this book is superb." Margery Fisher, writing in Growing Point, claimed that Dance on My Grave "makes its point through raucous good humor and implied feeling, through the sharp observation of a boy and his blundering apprehensions of the way others observe him. If teenage novels are to justify their existence, it will be by this kind of honest, particularized, personal writing."

Using framing devices similar to those employed in his previous young-adult novels, Chambers began Now I Know with three separate narratives, taking place at three different times. As the three strands intertwine, they form the story of Nik, a seventeen-year-old agnostic who is persuaded by a history teacher to do the background research for a youth group that is creating an amateur film about the second coming of Christ. During the course of this work, Nik meets and falls in love with Julie, a Christian feminist who eventually loses her sight when she is injured by a terrorist bomb. After witnessing this attack, Nik decides to conclude his research through an experiment in the local junkyard; he engineers a "practice version" of the crucifixion.

"With its time shifts, word play, and discussions on such vexing theological problems as free will, suffering and affliction, doubt and belief, the novel is compelling but demanding. Yet it offers enormous rewards to thinking, mature young adults," asserted Horn Book reviewer Ethel L. Heins. Patty Campbell concluded in her Wilson Library Bulletin review of the U.S. version of the book, NIK: Now I Know, "Chambers in this many-layered novel has given us a work of stunning impact, a book in the tradition of C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald that lights the search but begs no easy answers."

Chambers's theme of self-discovery through conflict is continued in The Toll Bridge. Borrowing from the Greek myth about Janus, the two-faced keeper of the gate to Hades, the novel introduces Piers, who symbolically has two faces as well. To escape the pressures of his parents, girlfriend, and school, Piers takes a job as the gatekeeper of a private toll bridge, living in isolation in the gate house. The one friend Piers does make is Tess, the estate manager's daughter, and the triangle is complete when a handsome, mysterious young man named Adam shows up one night. Unable to rid himself of his guest, Piers (renamed Jan when the three friends give each other new names) finds himself oddly drawn to Adam, as does Tess, though they know nothing of his past.

The Toll Bridge "is a rites of passage novel about identity and growth through friendship but it's also much more than that," maintained Melanie Guile in Magpies. "Moreover," continued Guile, the novel's "multifaceted form, together with its patterns of imagery (bridge, water, fire), enact crucial concerns in the novel: the fragmentation of personality that is an inevitable part of adolescence, and the struggle towards integration." As a Publishers Weekly reviewer asserted: "Provocative in the best sense, this novel suggests even more than its intricate plot spells out, leaving readers with much for pleasurable contemplation."

Winner of Britain's prestigious Carnegie Medal as well as the Michael J. Printz Award, Postcards from No Man's Land also features Chambers's intricate, multi-layered plotting techniques. In the novel, seventeen-year-old Jacob Todd travels to Amsterdam to represent his grandmother at a ceremony commemorating a World War II battle in which his grandfather had fought and died in 1944. While there, Jacob visits the home of the Dutch family that sheltered his grandfather before his death. Jacob's adventures are interspersed with the story of his Dutch grandmother, Geertrui van Riet, and her relationship with Jacob's grandfather during the war. Tony Bradman, writing in the London Daily Telegraph, called Postcards from No Man's Land "a terrific novel, chock-full of well-rounded characters and good writing." Dubbing the novel "provocative," Magpies reviewer Anne Briggs asserted that "Jacob's tentative but enthusiastic exploration of the world … hit[s] just the right note for thoughtful adolescents teetering on the edge of adulthood." In School Library Journal, Starr E. Smith wrote that the "real-world decisions" facing Chambers's characters "link … teens across time and generations, and lead … to a conclusion as convincing as it is absorbing and thoughtprovoking."

Called "the most daring of Chambers's experiments so far" by School Librarian contributor Peter Hollindale, This Is It: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn takes the form of a diary written by a pregnant teen. A poet, Cordelia is nineteen and looking forward to the birth of a daughter; in her diary she collects impressions of her teenage years with the intention of giving the "pillow book" to her daughter on the girl's sixteenth birthday. Cordelia records not only her day-to-day actions, but also her fleeting impressions, feelings, and introspections, as well as intimate descriptions of first love and sexual awakening. This Is It, described as "immense in size, ambition, scope and reach" by Hollindale, is also "a huge and wonderful act of imaginative empathy, for which all sixteen-year-olds who might be Cordelia's daughters, or sons, have cause to be grateful, as does the art form of young adult fiction."

In his SAAS essay, Chambers explained that his novels are actually a sequential body of work. "This is how I think of it: I'm writing a portrait of a boy whose character is slowly emerging—is being created—as the books appear. Breaktime is largely to do with physical sensation—the life of the senses. Dance on My Grave is largely to do with the emotions—kinds of love, and our personal obsessions. Know I Know is largely about what people often call spiritual experience and about thought, and how they clash and blend and compliment each other." According to the author, the novels are primarily concerned with how language defines individuals, language being the "god who makes us."

Chambers takes a long time to write his fiction, sometimes taking years to fine-tune a novel or short story. Part of that time, he noted in an interview posted on his home page, is "brooding time," "the time before I start writing the book … in which the story and the characters gradually inhabit me and begin to live inside me…. The characters reveal themselves most intimately while I'm actually writing the book. They often reveal surprising aspects of themselves I didn't know about before. And sometimes this changes the way I thought the story would go. But they never 'run away' with me. Or at least, not unless they take me with them. Because by the time I start to write the book they inhabit me so intimately that I am them and they are me."

Despite his reputation for creativity, Chambers views writing as a craft that demands great attention to detail, and he continually struggles to find the right words and voice for his characters. "I have always found it a struggle to author books that matter to me," he wrote in his essay for SAAS. Chambers added: "I know that my life is privileged and rewarding beyond measure, and I'm thankful for that, but I do not think of myself as successful and won't until I have written a book that satisfies me by matching in its objectified, printed form the rich density of the imagined original. In this respect, nothing has changed since I was fifteen. I am also just as unsure of myself and as sure of failure, as unhappy with crowds of people; still prefer being at home to being anywhere else; still find in reading both the best of pleasures and the best means of keeping some kind of grip on life."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Children's Books and Their Creators, edited by Anita Silvey, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1995, pp. 127-128.

Something about the Author Autobiography Series, Volume 12, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991, pp. 37-55.

Twentieth-Century Young-Adult Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1994, pp. 111-113.

PERIODICALS

ALAN Review, fall, 1997, S. David Gill, "Aidan Chambers: Monk, Writer, Critic," pp. 11-12.

American Book Review, November-December, 1997, pp. 1, 5.

Booklist, May 15, 2002, Hazel Rochman, review of Postcards from No Man's Land, p. 1604; March 15, 2003, Hazel Rochman, interview with Chambers, p. 1321.

Books for Keeps, November, 1992, p. 27.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, September, 1995, p. 9.

Daily Telegraph (London, England), February 13, 1999, Tony Bradman, "Stories of War, and the Pity of War."

Growing Point, July, 1982, Margery Fisher, review of Dance on My Grave, p. 3928.

Horn Book, November, 1978, Margery Fisher, review of Breaktime, pp. 3418-3419; June, 1979, review of Breaktime, p. 307; January-February, 1989, Ethel L. Heins, review of NIK: Now I Know, pp. 76-77; July-August, 2002, Gregory Maguire, review of Postcards from No Man's Land, p. 454.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2002, review of Postcards from No Man's Land, p. 564.

Kliatt, May, 2002, Paula Rohrlick, review of Postcards from No Man's Land, p. 6.

Magpies, May, 1993, Melanie Guile, review of The Toll Bridge, p. 33; May, 1999, Anne Briggs, review of Postcards from No Man's Land, pp. 37-38.

New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1979, Richard Yates, "You Can and Can't Go Home Again," p. 30.

Publishers Weekly, June 19, 1995, review of The Toll Bridge, p. 62; April 29, 2002, review of Postcards from No Man's Land, p. 72.

School Library Journal, July, 1995, p. 92; July, 2002, Starr E. Smith, review of Postcards from No Man's Land, p. 114.

Times Educational Supplement, September 10, 1982, Neil Philip, "Adolescent Friction," p. 33.

Voice of Youth Advocates, October, 1983, Mary K. Chel-ton, review of Dance on My Grave, p. 198.

Wilson Library Bulletin, May, 1988, pp. 78-79.

ONLINE

Aidan Chambers Home Page, http://www.aidanchambers.co.uk (June 14, 2006).