Giant by Judith McQuoid
A charming blog today from Judith McQuoid, author of Giant, a book that celebrates friendship!
Books Build Bridges
by Judith McQuoid
When I was 7, my dad read The Chronicles of Narnia to me. With a full cast of voices, it was quite the performance! We had recently moved from Ireland to Texas and all of us were feeling culture-shocked, quite out of place. Looking back, I wonder if those stories reminded Dad of our green homeland.
CS Lewis, the creator of Narnia, was a Belfast boy like my dad. So decades later, when I was looking into my dad’s family history, I decided to delve into Lewis’ life in Ireland too. One day, I realised that my grandfather had been born and raised in the same part of Belfast at about the same time as Lewis. And my imagination ran riot! What if the two boys knew each other from the sweet shop on a Saturday morning? Or caught the same tram home every Thursday evening?
And so I began writing my middle grade novel, Giant, which imagines a friendship between Jacks, the young CS Lewis, and Davy, who’s based on my grandfather. Davy is from a poor, working-class family and he soon becomes enchanted with his new friend’s books and adventures. Both boys are feeling out of place in their own lives. Davy is destined for a manual job in the shipyard but wants to draw pictures for a living. And Jacks is sent away to a boarding school where he becomes terribly homesick.
Feeling lost and out of place is a common and difficult phenomenon for a lot of people and for many different reasons. I struggled to fit in at school when we emigrated from Ireland to the USA and felt disconnected from the new people in my life. But then I discovered the school library. Not only did I find wonderful stories to lose myself in that gave me hope and new perspectives, I also found an enthusiastic librarian and a whole gang of other bookworms. Books built a bridge for me to a new life in a new place.
Recently, I had the privilege of being invited to the re-opening of another school library. The shelves were brimming with beautiful new books, wide open portals to other worlds and other lives. I met dedicated teachers who showed me round the new space with pride shining in their faces. But most importantly, I met a gang of bookworms – members of the Book Club, the Editor’s Club, the Journalism Club, the Anime Club. They chatted to me with passion and excitement about their new library and the treasures it holds.
CS Lewis had a gang of bookworms too, called the Inklings. They knew that stories are transforming. They fire our imagination and inspire creativity. They help us to imagine, think, explore, experience, and feel what others feel. They can also comfort us and bring us hope when we are sad or lonely or missing home. And they can build bridges between us and other people. Books are magic.
