Play by Luke Palmer

Happy New Year and welcome to our first blog of 2024, aptly written by Luke Palmer about New Years resolutions.  We have also included the Reading group discussion notes as produced by publisher, Firefly Press.

I’ve never held much truck with new year’s resolutions. They seem too complete, too final, a big list of monolithic I wills that casts judgement over the next twelve months, waiting for us to trip up. They don’t seem to have any regard for nuance, or for the future’s unknowns. In short, and kind of ironically, they don’t seem well suited to change.

That’s not to say I think change – by which I mean personal change, self-reflection and improvement – are bad ideas. Two decades as a secondary school teacher has pretty much made them my daily life and my first book, Grow, about a young man who is groomed into far-right extremism, had them hard-wired in. Last year’s successor, Play, didn’t stray too far from that territory either. One of Play’s four central characters on their journeys towards manhood chooses a path that leads to a county lines drug smuggling operation, but all four young men are pushing at and testing the boundaries of their various masculinities, often crossing them in an attempt to discover where they are and to define the limits of their own selves. In the hope that my teenage readers (and my students!) can better make the ‘right’ choices in their complex lives, I am most interested in characters who make the wrong ones.

I don’t think that many young people feel they’re allowed to be wrong at the moment. Or allowed to make choices that may later turn out to be less than perfect, even though they seemed pretty good at the time. Choices have a habit of doing that. A combination of factors – expectations from home, increasing exam pressure from schools, and the ubiquitous judgement-factory of social media to name just a few – all mean that a lot of young people feel trapped, unable to do anything that might lead to being wrong; to failure which, nowadays, so often seems terminal.

But it’s not terminal, is it? We all fail. And there are countless TED talks and podcasts and self-help books that pick up on that fact and encourage us to get better at it. ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’, said the inimitable Samuel Beckett. Because failure is our most informative state. If you never get anything wrong, can you ever say you’ve really learnt anything? It’s our failures that teach us how to get things right. Next time. Because there is always a next time.

Reading is, first and foremost, escapism. It is not real life. But, in that regard, one of the many wisdoms reading can impart is this awareness that failure is not permanent. It is recoverable, redeemable. To my mind, young adult fiction is the tipping point at which the distinction of characters as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ falls away. They are (and aren’t we all?) amalgamations of many shades of good and bad, of rightness and wrongness, an ever-shifting balance of forces in flux. These characters fail, and push the reader into a more critical position regarding that failure – not a judgemental one, hopefully, but a position of empathy. Once you’ve shut the cover, you can bring all that failure-by-proxy back to the real world and, with it, the understanding of how to fail better.

Perhaps that’s why young people’s reading for pleasure remains one of the more reliable indicators of their future success. It lays the foundations for resilience by showing there is always a chance for redemption.

Returning, then, to those new year’s resolutions, maybe it’s the seemingly arbitrary deadline of the 1st of January that gets my hackles up. Because the need to change and adapt and get better is an ongoing and continual process, isn’t it? It’s too important to only be done once a year. So perhaps there is one that I’ll allow: read more.