YA Book Club November: The Blue Book of Nebo by by Manon Steffan Ros

This month, I have chosen to look at the award-winning The Blue Book Of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ros. This year, this fantastic and slim YA novel won the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing, and became the first translated novel to do so in the awards history!

The Blue Book of Nebo follows fourteen year old Dylan, his mam, Rowenna, and younger sister Mona as the last survivors in a small town in Wales, Nebo, after ‘The End’. Written in alternating diary entries between Dylan and Rowenna, this book is a deeply personal and intimate look at the inner thoughts and emotions of a family’s attempt to survive after the nuclear apocalypse.

My first impressions of this book where that I loved the two clear different narrators. Dylan is a logical, intelligent, and caring teenager. His mother appears distant at times, but through her chapters, you learn how passionate, emotional, and driven she is. My heart ached for how hard she worked to keep Dylan safe! Between the two narrators, the themes of family, resilience, survival, and highlighting the things we take for granted really shone.

Originally written in Welsh, the book won Welsh Book of the Year Award in 2019. Manon Steffan Ros is a prolific Welsh writer, having written twenty children's books and three novels for adults, all in Welsh! This surprised me, as I, perhaps ignorantly, had not heard of her before this book was shortlisted for the Yoto Carnegie. It makes me want to read more of Manon Steffan Ros works...

In this novel, the Welsh language is spoken about a lot, often referred to as a dying language, or at least one that Rowena feels unable to or alienated to use. This is not just the work of fiction – in June 2023, around only 29.2% of the Welsh population aged 3+ were able to speak the language. Rowenna talks of the bitter-sweet feeling of always being the “stupid, invisible bottom-set girl, the one who gradually dropped her Welsh because all the cool things, the American bands and the English soaps, were in another language.” Rowenna’s frustration is extremely sympathetic and relatable, the thought of giving something up that is so important to you because you are not ‘good enough’ or it is ‘not cool’ really touched me. She even says, “If The End hadn’t happened, I’d feel that these books weren’t for me, that I wasn’t good enough for my own mother tongue.”

Despite her own inner conflict regarding Welsh, Rowenna encourages her son to learn the language. Immediately after the disaster, many people begin looting and stealing around the town. Rowenna steals some books from the library (not encouraged in real life!) and takes many Welsh language texts. Rowenna tells a neighbour, David, that she is unsure why she did this, to which he says: “I suppose instinct makes you save that which you’re most in danger of losing.” The concept of losing a language feels quite distant to us, living in a world of constant communication – where 39% of countries have English as one of their official languages and almost 20% of people across the entire world speak it. It seems impossible that one day, somebody might pick up a classic text in English – Pride and Prejudice, A Christmas Carol, or something by Shakespeare! - and there be nobody to read it. I wonder if this was what Rowenna feared? They had no idea how many people across Wales, or even the world, had survived The End. Her child could have been the last known speaker of Welsh. Can you imagine being the sole surviving English speaker? Would you use or think about language differently?

The Blue Book of Nebo This means the book falls into the category of a Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia. ‘Dystopia’, as a word, breaks down into ‘dys’ meaning bad and ‘utopia’ meaning a world where everything is perfect. A dystopia, therefore, is essentially a hypothetical future where everything is bad - the world may exist in dangerous political, societal, technological, religious, and/or environmental disaster. Some other examples of this are The Hunger Games, 1984, Divergent, Maze Runner, and, amusingly, Wall-E!

In the case of The Blue Book Of Nebo, which is set in 2018 and at the time of initial publication would have been a very near future, this kind of dystopia can be referred to as ‘speculative fiction’. This means that the dystopian elements, while imagined and fantasy, are very… possible. Many writers may use this to comment on our current society. This made me wonder what Manon Steffan Ros was trying to say about our society… What would we change? What would we reboot? Or, is it like Dylan says: “Sometimes… I don’t want to change a single thing, I don’t want this to end. I fit here, now.” Would we be better in a slower, more down-to-earth life? Would we survive without phones, electricity, the internet, and having everything available to you, all of the time?

I also wanted to mention the brilliant title of this book - The Blue Book of Nebo. When Dylan and his mother find a notebook, they decide to name it this. Dylan writes:

‘Like The Black Book of Carmarthen, or The Red Book of Hergest. That’s how they did it in the olden days.’ I’d read about them in a book about Welsh history. ‘Important books that said something about our history. And now is a part of history, isn’t it?’

This made me read the book through a different lens. What if I was reading this after society recovered? Would I view this text as special? Would it represent the times?

Dylan is a huge reader, and often understands what he’s going through by relating to different novels and quotes. Books are special to him. But this made me think, when later in the novel Rowenna encourages Dylan to think critically about the emotional and philosophical weight he puts on certain books. She says, “Maybe you should treat every book equally and decides which ones you think are sacred.”

In a world a post-Covid world, with what seems to be constant political and humanitarian worries, I approached this book with a tenderness and critical eye. Could this be our world? Could our path be changed? Are books sacred? If The End did come, how far would I go to protect my language, my family, and survive? This book is touching, relevant, moving, and heartbreakingly good. Without a doubt, this is a worthy winner of the Yoto Carnegie prize and is one of my favourite reads of this year!

Questions for readers:

1) What was your overall impression of the novel? Did you enjoy it?

2 ) This book is narrated by both Dylan and Rowenna. Did you prefer reading one perspective over the other?

3) Did you feel any sense of ‘dramatic irony’ (we know something the character doesn’t) while reading this book? For example, do you wish you could have told Dylan about something Rowenna wrote?

4) Have you ever read or seen any dystopian fiction before? How did it compare?

5) [*Spoiler*] What did you think of the ending? Is help coming? Do you think the characters want to go back to normal life?

6) What would you try to save if The End happened?

Extract:

In your exams, you are often given a blind close reading activity. If you want to practice this, each month, I will provide an extract and a choice of two questions to answer. Good luck!

There’s a hell of a view from the lean-to. Down toward Caernarfon, where you can see the castle towers jutting out like gnarling teeth, and then the sea and Anglesey beyond it. I can’t ever remember going to Anglesey, but Mam says I went loads of times when I was a little boy. There were nice places to go for walks, Mam says, with nice beaches all around, because Anglesey is an island. I was thinking about that yesterday when I was sitting on the roof of the lean-to, looking out. Seeing the sea and the island, which looks too big to be an island from here. There are trees and fields and places I don’t know between here and the sea. Yesterday was a cold day—cold enough to make my mouth steam, like snow in a saucepan. I sat there thinking about all those people in the olden days, poor things, going to beaches in their cars and sitting there all day with nothing to do. Standing with their feet in the water, then splashing about a bit and then having a picnic. I try not to think about those people too much.

Then I heard Mam coming out with Mona strapped to her breast, and I climbed down the ladder. There was too much to do to waste time thinking about Anglesey and the olden days.

***

Our house is in a dead place. What I mean is, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and no one ever comes here. Well, almost no one. In the olden days, an elderly couple lived in the house called Sunningdale, which is about seventy-eight steps from our house. They went away soon after The End, same as everyone else. “What’s Sunningdale?” I asked Mam one day after I’d been looking though their windows.

“A bloody stupid name,” she barked back. “Keep away from that house, Dylan. It isn’t ours.”

I think I can remember Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe, but I can’t be sure. He was tall with white hair and glasses that always seemed to be reflecting some light, so you could never quite see his eyes. She was small and thin and stared at you as she spoke. Sunningdale is exactly the same as it was when they left it, except that I’ve used their garden for planting and I’ve cut down a few of their trees for firewood. I want to go inside the house, but Mam says no. For some reason, she’s a bit funny about Sunningdale and Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe.

The truth is, they’ve probably gone forever. They were old, old enough to have stopped working. They did pointless things, like playing golf and growing tiny trees called bonsai in their kitchen window. They probably went away to find their families and decided to stick with them. Somewhere in England, probably.

1) What does this extract reveal about the world Dylan lives in and his attitude to it?

2) Describe the ways the language used in this extracts relates to the Dystopian genre?