Guard Your Heart

"This is a really important novel and a really good book. It was the 2021 Great Reads Award winner in the senior category. The two principal characters are Aidan and Iona, who were both born on the day of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. They’ve lived their whole lives in peace time, outside of what was called the Troubles, and they represent the young people of Northern Ireland. Aidan is deeply entrenched in Republican culture, family history and heritage. Iona is from a Protestant family. Her father is a retired police officer and her brother is a young police officer. So you can see the culture clash right away. The novel has echoes of The Twelfth Day of July , a 1970 book for children in their early teens – a series actually – by Joan Lingard. Guard Your Heart is the modern version for young adults. The novel opens when Aidan who has finished his final exams, goes to a party, then finds himself visiting his mother’s grave before moving on to the Peace Bridge, a very iconic structure in Derry. There, he’s savagely attacked by a group of youngsters from the Protestant side of the city. The attack is interrupted by a girl who tells them that she’s filming the whole thing. Aidan and Iona are drawn together as a result of this episode and from that the story unfolds. The setting is very important here, because everything in the physical environment shouts political identity and heritage, and there is the interplay of that with the social and cultural environment. The Peace Bridge is symbolic of healing and reconciliation in the post Troubles era, but in the novel it’s a symbol of separation and division. At one point the story moves to Belfast, to City Hall and Queen’s University. While in Belfast, Aidan privately recalls that this is also the location of the former Crumlin Road Gaol, where Aidan’s father had done time as a political prisoner. It’s a memory he is not yet ready to share with Iona. I’m interested in how Divin’s setting is integral to her narrative. The symbolism of setting is sometimes actually the cause of the tension and the conflict. It is a local story rooted in Northern Ireland, but I think that it’s a novel for an international audience. With themes of prejudice and radicalisation it speaks to our time, wherever there is conflict and polarisation. Aidan and Iona live in peace time, but their whole world is overshadowed by the past. There are still tensions and there is still intolerance, bigotry and racism. This novel is about how teenagers can escape from that sort of inherited identity conflict. Iona is open to understanding the other. For Aidan it’s tied up with his feelings for her. He struggles not only with cultural and political baggage, he also has the personal family baggage, the shadow of the abusive father. He is afraid that he is going to be like his father. Another thing I like about this novel is the exploration of where one is with one’s faith. Iona thinks that if we believe in God and forgiveness and reconciliation, where are we then with the bigoted prejudiced attitudes? She is trying to find herself in this, and so is Aidan in his own religious beliefs. I think that this novel has some really important messages for all of us, and one of them is the idea that we need to be open to the other. Aidan has been brought up in a society which is very narrow, his heritage seems to be very inward looking. She’s open but it’s scary to step outside your comfort zone, it’s not an easy process when the “we” becomes possible. Another message that comes through very well in the novel is that if we’re going to heal, if we’re going to move forward, then there needs to be a focus on our common humanity, our shared experiences, even if it is shared experience of pain. Aidan has grown up with the Republican perspective on history, the Bogside murals, the 1916 Easter Rising, the rebellion in Dublin, de Valera, that’s the prism that he would have viewed all that history through. But when he looks at the exhibits in City Hall they focus very much on the shared experience of Protestant and Catholic boys going off to war in World War One, of the Belfast people as workers, the International Brigades where Irish people went to fight in the Spanish civil war. That’s a perspective he had never thought of. He thinks about people born into famine, into “No Irish Need Apply” times in England, he thinks of being born into a Protestant or a Catholic family. I’ve often thought about what side I would have taken in the civil war in this country if I had lived in those times. I’m lucky in the time I was born in. The reflection Aidan has in looking at those displays resonates with me. And the idea of the shared experience, the idea that we need to focus on the common ground, not on our differences and division. Yes, and the past is still in the present. It’s present in the lives of Aidan and his brother, and it’s present in Iona’s family, her brother in the police force, her father’s medications for pain and depression and stress. Aidan is proud that his father was involved at the time with the IRA, because there was so much injustice, so much brutality and prejudice. He’s proud that his father stood up and fought, but at the same time he can see what’s bad about it. He can see what’s holding him back and what he needs to do to make his own future. You can’t wipe out the past. I don’t agree with cancel culture. I think we should know what our past is. But we need to see it in perspective, in context. We need to understand it so as to learn from it and do better. I think that that’s really important. Divin focuses a lot on the healing process. It’s a slow process and you have to be patient with it, but it has its dividends. I think she’s captured that message very well. The young people are our future. I come back to the idea that this novel isn’t just for teens, this is for adults. It behoves us as adults to encourage and support young people on their journey through this process of moving forward, to respect their efforts and help to build a society that is more tolerant and less divided, more understanding no matter what the background is. I’m delighted that Guard Your Heart won the Great Reads Award because I think it really is for our time and should be widely read. These novels feature very impressive female characters. Also, several of them deal with race. The race issue comes up in fiction for teens a lot, because young adult fiction is current and doesn’t brush the reality of daily life under the carpet. In A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder , at one point Pip wants Ravi to break into a suspect’s home and he quickly points out that he would be in bad trouble if he – a brown boy – breaks into a white family home. Pip realises that she’s forgotten a promise she’s made to herself to always be aware of the lived experience that people have around race. Her stepfather is Black, and throughout her life she’s been aware of the difficulties he has had, the suspicious looks and the thoughts he sees on people’s faces when they see him with a white boy – his stepson – and the difficulties he has at work where he’s a partner in the business but is very often taken as security staff. It’s there also in Wing Jones , in an incident when they go to the hospital to see Marcus. They present themselves at the reception desk, and the the person behind the desk says “family only”. She has made an assumption, an unintentionally upsetting comment, because the mixed race family is totally outside of her experience. In Finding Dinah , Dinah’s father Tego is from Benin. At one point Dinah goes swimming, and she feels that she would just love to swim away to meet the women of her father’s generation, how she would learn from them and be healed and protected and comforted by them. Pip, whom she meets, is Sri Lankan, he’s Tamil. She gets annoyed because he calls her African. She says “Africa is a whole continent”. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. I found it really difficult to pick just five books from Ireland’s Great Reads Award and I would like to mention a few more great titles for teens, very briefly. In 2016, we had on the shortlist in the senior category Weightless by the Irish author Sarah Bannan. It is a searing account of bullying in an American high school. The narrative voice is the first person plural, which is unusual. The novel is based around the real life story of Phoebe Prince. Another title I would like to mention is Dear Martin by Nic Stone, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Great Reads Award in the senior category. It is the story of a well educated, intelligent Black American teenager who tries to tease out the current racial issues and concerns through the lens of the writing of Martin Luther King . The author’s treatment gives a historical perspective on racism in the US setting, a wider social context. Most Likely by Sarah Watson was on the 2020 Great Reads Award shortlist in the senior category. This story follows four very strong female teenage characters in their final year in high school in Cleveland, we read about their characters and personalities with interest. One of them eventually becomes the first woman president of the United States but her identity isn’t revealed until the very last moment of the story. It’s a coming of age story and a political novel. Finally, on the 2020 shortlist we had Nóinín , an Irish language novel by Máire Zepf. It is written in free verse with a very fast paced narrative about the dark side of social media. In the name of the main character, Nóinín (meaning daisy) is a symbol of innocence and beauty and fragility. She becomes dragged into the dangers lurking behind her online interaction. It’s beautifully written and it was our most read title in 2020."