Flash

by Joyce Stranger

Genres: Animals, Adventure

Audio Cassette

Published February 1, 1999

About the author

Psuedonym of Joyce Muriel Wilson (1921–2007). Lived in Anglesey, Wales.
Trained as a biologist, specialising in animal behaviour, and tried her hand at dog training too. Not surprisingly, animal themes, especially relationships between human and animal feature in all of her books. She thought that the human-animal/human-nature relationship was extremely important and that a co-existence between the two could improve quality of life. She said "for many people an animal can provide a harmony lacking in day-to-day relationships with people."
Her books are not very anthropomorphic, deliberately so. She thought that many animal books, especially childrens were inaccurate or sentimental or humanised the animal and wanted her stories instead to "show how animals live in a world that is real to them"
They are definitely not sentimental either, many are quite downbeat. Disasters often strike her fictional worlds and her characters are often unhappy, guilt-stricken or remorseful. However they usually end on a more upbeat and optimistic note.
Ms. Stranger was one of the few authors to write horse stories aimed at adults. Most of her pony books are either adult or teenage stories.

Reviews

[Daisy May Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been longing to reread some Joyce Stranger for a long time. I wasn't sure which title I wanted to start with, or indeed what many were about, but I wanted her back in my life. And when it came down to it, I couldn't quite remember why. I could remember the sensation of them; the way I devoured them, in that slightly giddy drunken haze you do when you're a kid and you find somebody new to read and realise how prolific they have been, years before you were born, how much you have left to read of their work. How it might never end.

I remember one of her books, vaguely, about being something to do with shire horses and another about foot and mouth disease (a mystery to childhood me), and then there was this. Flash. A book about a dog, a book that is bluntly adult in fashion and yet somehow rendered for children. I was intrigued by it and so I got it, and I read it, and I remembered just how grimly honest Joyce Stranger can be. This is not the happiest of stories; things do not go well.

And yet Flash is beautifully, brilliantly written. It wears its age heavily at points, and its agenda also, but Stranger is such a good, vivid, wild writer. She's not what I would call a modern writer, perhaps even back in the 70s, there's something else here and I wonder if it's almost naive. I mean naive very particularly here; innocent, natural, unaffected, because I think that's what this story is. Stranger commits a thousand literary sins; she's fond of an omniscience which allows her to see inside the head of every character, sometimes to weary effect, and she's fond of a diverting segue that sort of (sorry Joyce) isn't.

But Flash works. I can see why it got published, why it sold, why Stranger became who she was. There's something of Enid Blyton's determined power about it that carries it through the dull parts, and Stranger works, so hard, to get her point across. Occasionally it falters, occasionally it get super dull, but it works. Grimly, bluntly, naively, this works. It's not pretty nor is it perfect nor is it kittens and roses and rainbows, but it works.

[Lilith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Autrice di libri per ragazzi ed adulti che vedono come protagonista l'amore per gli animali. In "Flash" la storia è imperniata intorno l'ansia quotidiana nella lotta per la vita di un ragazzino che ha conosciuto troppo presto il dolore e che cerca di aiutare un cucciolo che parallelamente sta seguendo la sua sorte. Narrazione semplice per una storia semplice, senza picchi di emozione ma comunque sufficientemente interessante. 6.5

[Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for the first time when I was 10 years old, and I wanted to read it again before I chucked it as I am going through a process of de-cluttering the house. To be honest, while I was reading it, it didn't come back to me at all, making me wonder if I ever did read it all the way through - I don't think it is that child friendly in many ways. Still, who am I kidding, I can't remember what I did yesterday, let alone a book I read almost four decades ago...

It was okay (better than the Rex, by the same author), but was still a bit grim and depressing, especially for the child / young adult audience it is aimed at.

[Mike Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a book I'd read and loved as a kid so when I saw it for a quid I thought it was worth picking up and re-reading.

It's clearly not the tour de force I thought it was when I was nine or ten - but I was going through a pretty big "I want a dog" phase and this novel fanned the flames of that at the time. These days, the idea of following my 'best friend' around with a bag to pick up his poo honestly doesn't appeal. (Not least because I never did get a dog and my best friend is a man in his late thirties.)

Anyway, the book pairs up a young orphan boy with a runt from a litter who the vet advises will never survive. The plucky young lad decides to hand rear the pup, then disaster strikes... then disaster strikes again... then disaster strikes again... and again.

Throughout the book you are left wondering if the child and his dog will be allowed to stay and work together, or if the string of disasters will end in, for want of a better word, disaster. It's reasonably well written, tries to represent the harshness of life on a Scottish farm and doesn't patronise the reader. If you want to read a book about a boy with a pet dog then this is a decent enough effort.

[Bionic Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent story about a border collie.