The Hereford Times

Stirring mix of love and loss

1:43pm Thursday 17th January 2008

IT is notoriously difficult to follow a successful debut, especially one that was awarded a prestigious literary prize but, with Broken Soup, Jenny Valentine has written a second novel which not only fulfils the expectations created by the first, but has already been shortlisted for the Waterstone's Children's Book award.

Broken Soup, which takes its title from a drawing by Jenny's oldest daughter, Molly, called Heartbreaking Soup, once again deals with a teenager's experience of loss but, this time, the narrator is a 16-year-old girl.

"I found it more difficult to write as a girl," says Jenny, whose narrator in Finding Violet Park was Lucas, a teenage boy. "I am just not a girly girl."

Though the theme appears, at first sight, to be similar to that of Finding Violet Park, it gets a very different treatment.

And, says Jenny, most novels involve loss and finding in some form. In Broken Soup, she has been drawn again to focus on loss experienced by children and their "ability to cope with quite devastating loss or abandonment of one kind or another".

Sixteen-year-old Rowan's brother has died and her mother is finding it hard to cope, leaving Rowan to care for six-year-old Stroma and trying to stay beneath the radar, desperate to keep her broken family a secret, even from her father.

Everything changes when a boy, "a good angel", says Jenny, hands Rowan a negative he says she dropped. It isn't hers, but he's insistent and before long, she finds that though she hadn't dropped it, the picture does in a sense belong to her.

Another element the new novel shares with the first is that the denouement was as unknown to the author as it will be to the reader. What appears to be meticulous plotting is once again, admits Jenny, "accidentally clever", proving once more the truth of Stephen King's assertion that "if you (the author) know what's going to happen, so will the reader".

"My sister said I should have given more clues," says Jenny. "I couldn't, though, because I didn't know myself what was going to happen. But I'm pleased I didn't know, because I wouldn't have been able to resist giving clues."

As a result, the end of Broken Soup provides something that's all too rare - a genuine and moving surprise.