Hi I'm Holly Smale and I am the author of the Geek Girl series and my brand new series
The Valentine's and the first book in the series is called Happy Girl Lucky
and it is the story of Hope, who is the youngest Valentine sister. She's very excited
because she's 15 at the moment, when she's 16 she becomes famous like her
parents and her siblings and her grandparents and her great-grandparents.
So she is is preparing for that moment but things aren't going quite to plan.
I'm here in Waterstones Piccadilly today and I wanted to share three books that
are really important to me, that I loved when I was younger and that were really
instrumental in inspiring this book series, so come with me and I'll show you
them. So the first book I'm going to look at was one of my favourites as a kid and
definitely the first inspiration for the Valentine series: Ballet Shoes by Noel
Streatfeild. My mum got me this when I was really quite small because I was
really, really into ballet. I did ballet every week and I wanted to be a
ballerina for a very small amount of time. I actually wanted to be a ballerina
part-time scientist, so basically science during the day, ballet at night; that was
the plan. And so my mum went and got me this as something to kind of like deepen
my love for it. And it became a complete obsession and the three sister
dynamic was something that really, really excited me: Pauline, Petrova and Posie as
three orphans who are found by Uncle Gum and brought back, given the surname
Fossil because he collected fossils and then it's about their kind of attempt to
hit the ballet world essentially. And I think it was something that not only
felt incredibly glamorous to me when I was young but also felt really relatable,
because I had a little sister as well. And I think that that kind of impulse to work
out which sister I was, was really, really strong. To the point
where each sister got a necklace in the book, a different one for each of their
kind of personality types. And I was so obsessed with having my own necklace and
being one of the sisters that I made my mum go out and buy me a 'jewel necklace' and she
came back with a garnet rosary which wasn't exactly what I was asking for. But
I was obsessed with working out which sister I was and I think I wanted to be
Petrova who's the kind of car-obsessed tomboy,
but secretly knew that I was probably Pauline. Which was a bit depressing.
This really inspired me as a child and when I came to write
the Valentines this three sister dynamic was something that I really,
really wanted to explore further. The second book I'm going to show you is
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and this was probably as special to me as it
is to so many millions and millions of girls and women and men all over the
world. And I became obsessed with it and
I was thinking about why it became so important to me and yes it does have
that kind of the background of something that's quite serious going on, the Civil
War's bubbling all along in the background. But those four girls have
such a grounded and real relationship in life that even though it was set so
many years before I was born, it still felt very real and relatable to
me as a 10 or 11 year old girl. And again I was trying to work out while
reading it which of the sisters I was. And again I think it was a massive
disappointment to me because I think that I wanted to be Jo,
I wanted to be the writer, I wanted to be the adventurer who cut off her hair and
sold it and ultimately didn't pick Laurie. But unfortunately, I think deep
down, I knew that I was an Amy and that's a sad life disappointment to me.
But in terms of inspiring my book, this was pretty fundamental as well. I really
wanted to capture that kind of, you know, the exotic-ness of a family that you
you don't know, that you haven't met, but that feels so real and so completely
relatable. And I mean so many decades later I can still remember the lines
that Amy gets in trouble for at school and the soiled glove that Megan
and Joe share at the ball and the little tiny moments are still really vivid to
me. So when I was writing the Valentines I really wanted to give that sense that
they were real people having real moments that you could really
connect to, no matter how old you are or when you were living. So this was
fundamental and so sad that I'm still an Amy. So for the third book I'm going
to look at we've actually come downstairs into
the classics section and the poetry section and where we will be looking at
actually one of the first stories I ever loved.
Way before I found Ballet Shoes, way before I read Little Women, I was read
Tennyson by my mom when I was about 2 or 3 years old. She was an English teacher who
had no concept of age-appropriate reading and so she read me a lot of her
classics. She read me Goblin Market and Hiawatha, so I was
getting a lot of kind of poetry. And the one that I really attached to
quite strongly was Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Lady of Shalott which I think
really ignited a love of language first of all. The sounds of the poem were
so incredibly absorbing to me when I was really small and the rhyme and the rhythm.
But the story itself was so romantic and so fairytale-like and so
dramatic that as a small kid I was completely lit up by it and I used to
ask for it every night. And it also used to really frustrate me because as a
feminist and as someone who has instinctively been feminist my entire
life, even as a really small kid, I was frustrated by the ending of Lady of Shallot
because you know, obviously, *spoilers* she dies for love essentially. And then
Lancelot basically goes 'Cool, she was hot.' So I remember feeling really
angry about it as a small kid, like, how is that fair? And when I came to
write The Valentines, very soon within writing Hope's story, I realised that I was
essentially writing an update. I was writing about a young girl who was
essentially trapped in a very luxurious situation in a big house but unable to
leave and unable to live her life. Much as the Lady of Shallot is trapped in her tower
and is only able to watch the world through a mirror. And then I realised it
was kind of a love story and that Hope would then meet a knight or a prince and
escape to try and be with him. So I realised that I was essentially doing a
contemporary version of the Lady of Shallot which kind of
gave another layer to the book and really kind of for me brought it alive.
And I managed to weave the poem through the book, there's even a point where Hope
is in class studying it and she's not academic and she is really frustrated
that she's being forced to write this 'old dude poem' which I enjoyed
really, you know, kind of making into comedy. But for me it was really, really
important and being able to bring something that was so special to me as a
kid and so inspirational into my books has really meant a huge amount to
me as a writer and hopefully that'll come out in the reading of it. So, yes,
Tennyson: an unexpected but beloved book from my young childhood.