The Scarecrows
Front cover of first U.S. edition
(Greenwillow, 1981) |
|
| Author | Robert Westall |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's supernatural fiction, psychological novel, ghost story |
| Publisher | Chatto & Windus |
|
Publication date
|
1981 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) |
| Pages | 159 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 8046301 |
| LC Class | PZ7.W51953 Sc 1981 |
The Scarecrows is a young-adult novel by Robert Westall, published by Chatto & Windus in 1981. It is a psychological novel with a supernatural twist, featuring a thirteen-year-old boy's reaction to his mother's courtship and remarriage six years after his father's death. It deals with themes of rage, isolation and fear. Beside the inner themes, it "tells of a boy and his family brought to the brink of destruction by sinister external forces" and it may be called a ghost story. Its U.S. Library of Congress Subject Headings are remarriage, stepfathers, and horror stories.
Westall and The Scarecrows won the annual Carnegie Medal for British children's books. Thus he became the second writer with two such honours, having won the 1975 Medal for The Machine Gunners.
William Morrow and Company published the U.S. edition under its Greenwillow Books imprint within the calendar year.
The story is a third-person limited narrative, with the point of view entirely that of Simon Wood—his thoughts, feelings and memories, the things he sees and experiences, conversations he has, conversations he overhears. The novel opens at Simon's boarding school in the south of England, where the poisonous atmosphere of bullying and denigration has nurtured Simon's "devils", as he describes his blind rages. He first sees Joe Moreton there, when the man has given Simon's mother a lift to an event at the school. Simon loathes him at first sight and regards him as a "yob", unimpressed by his fame as an artist.
At an art gallery Simon overhears a conversation making clear that Joe and his mother are dating, which enrages the boy. When his mother tells him she intends to marry Joe, he vainly begs her not to and then refuses to attend the wedding. But he must finally join his mother, his sister, and Joe at their new home in Cheshire. There both his mother's happiness and his sister's adoration of Joe incense him, for he regards them as betraying his father's memory. A neighbouring unused water mill, separated from the house by a turnip field, provides a refuge for him, but it harbours a sinister secret. During the war, the miller was murdered by his wife and her lover.
...
Wikipedia