To those who'll own tomorrow

lsquoStandish Treadwell Canrsquot read canrsquot write Standish Treadwell isnrsquot brightrsquo With these lines Sally Gardnerrsquos book Maggot Moon sets the tone of what yoursquod imagine to be a tale of teenage angst You cannot be more mistaken The reader will find rebellion fear and bravery between the very first lines but for reasonsu00a0more sinister Maggot Moon is the story of Treadwell who is often humiliated at school because he is dyslexic his love for words and forceful imagination notwithstanding ldquoI collect words mdash they are sweets in the mouth of soundrdquo It is 1956 and he lives with his stoic grandfather in a dystopian England which is ruled by the tyrannical Motherland Treadwellrsquos world is a slightly better place because of his friend Hector Lush and his family though they hold a terrible secret While the Motherland prepares to be the first country to land on the moon Treadwell and Lush have grand plans to someday move to a new planet Juniper the land of CrocaCola and ice creamcoloured Cadillacs That is until Hector mysteriously disappears Maggot Moon pulls no punches thatrsquos just not Gardnerrsquos style What she does though is weave terrible details into daily lives What you see is what Treadwell sees mdash a teacher beating a child dead in his school playground ldquoas a matter of discipline thatrsquos allrdquo This too she does with rather ominous but minimalist prose as if challenging the reader to imagine the worst without the guidance of words much like Treadwell has done all his life That however does not stop Maggot Moon from being a powerful tale of courage friendship and a million lsquowhysrsquo It has a singular voice and turn of phrase which do not let the reader rest until she picks up that pencil and underlines lines just for the joy of reading them again that night You are not leaving this land of ice creamcoloured Cadillacs anytime soonu00a0Croca Cola in hand Excerpts from an interview withu00a0Sally Gardner What was childhood like growing up with dyslexia and struggling with words amid children who did not I didnrsquot learn much at school at all By the time I was seven years old it became clear that I was having trouble with words and it wasnrsquot cute anymore Four years later my parents took me to this doctor who diagnosed me with lsquoword blindnessrsquo and claimed she could lsquocurersquo me in six weeks I was terrified of her and could not wrap my head around lsquothe coat is in the moatrsquo sort of word exercises Needless to add I wasnrsquot cured at the end of it all And there were so many others like her who were unbelievably ignorant and thought they could wipe dyslexia out or that vitamins would do the trick By then my parents were panicking and I was seen as someone who would never be lsquonormalrsquo They began to believe that I would remain dependent on them all my life I was shifted to a school for maladjusted children The place was extreme mdash thatrsquos the only way I can describe it Those schools donrsquot even exist today If someone lost their temper wersquod be smacked all of us That sounds grim What kept you going then Well I knew I wasnrsquot stupid I now understand that dyslexia can be a source of strength but I definitely didnrsquot feel that way in school It paralysed me I think what kept me going was my imagination We were not allowed to watch television back then so I made up my own stories I was hungry for them I could go on and on when I began making one up in my head I remember the first story I made up was about a tree I saw outside the window How did you discover words and writing Oh I was desperate to read My father was a churchgoer and I loved the Bible though not so much for the language as for the music I was terribly clever had a huge vocabulary and a fantastic memory I could never do English grammar but I did memorise it along with spellings I still have the trappings of bad spelling but it never got in the way of what I really wanted to do with words Today I am passionately involved with advocacy of dyslexiarelated issues and education and the one thing I tell parents and children is this mdash dyslexia is not a disease It is just a different way of looking at things around you I hate the word itself mdash dyslexia because it has such a negative meaning of being a disability What we need instead are different teaching models which parents and tutors could use In Maggot Moon Standish is dyslexic He is a lot like you too mdash he collects words andu00a0has a powerful imaginationu00a0Was that intentionalu00a0and autobiographical After I decided to write Maggot Moon I knew I wanted it to be about a boy who sees the world the way I did I wanted to show what it is to think visually and to think in imagesu00a0not words However the book isnrsquot autobiographical at all I havenrsquot had the extreme experiences Standish has in the book I have tried to touch upon the muchunderrated qualities of bravery and courage which donrsquot seem to be talked about as much We are stuck in this mememe culture and I wanted to write something which illustrated that real bravery is about extending your strength to others What made you write Maggot Moon in the first place Did the story happen because you wanted to write about Standish No it did not begin with Standish For my previous book The Double Shadow I deeply researched into the Second World War and became rather obsessed with whatifs mdash what if John F Kennedy or Mahatma Gandhi hadnrsquot been shot What if Winston Churchill had been killed by that taxi on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1931 What if America hadnrsquot been to the moon Maggot Moon comes from the possibility that any of these possibilities would have made the world a different place Tell us about the ebook edition of Maggot Moon which has been designed for people with dyslexia No one in the lsquonormalrsquo world has really asked what it is like to be dyslexic I wanted readers to experience what it is like when you have words jumping in and out of a cage There is no one to correct it no teacher is going to be able to make it go away and it will be with you till the day you die I wanted to show this in a positive way Maggot Moon is unapologetically stark and shows Standishrsquos dystopian world for what it is mdash violent and unjust How did you tackle this noholdsbarred approach Violence is big in little peoplersquos life today Amid this what Maggot Moon does is ask a few questions It tells you not to believe everything yoursquore told but to question it I hope it introduces a reader to the idea that there are no finite answers and the lsquowhyrsquo is the most important question to ask Yet when I wrote it I never thought it would find a publisher Who would publish a book in which a child is killed by his own teacher in the school playground The violence in the book is the way Standish sees his world therersquos no way of knowing it through any other description It took me a very long time to write that Violence like love must be written like poetry to make it work You have to be honest as a storyteller not sycophantic Maggot Moon Sally Gardner Rs 399 Published by Penguin Books