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Well, because the Children's Literature Group is doing a Carnegie Medal Winners theme (and because the list of the award recipients is naturally absolutely extensive and exhaustive) I am of course also feeling rather rushed regarding my available reading time at present (and likely for the foreseeable future). And when I am feeling said type of perusal stress, in particular for any given novel I am starting, like in this case Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child (which was awarded the Carnegie Medal for 2009 and which I found a digital copy of on Open Library), the book in question totally needs to right away, it needs to immediately textually grip and delightfully enchant me, it basically requires a beginning, a textual start that is readable, relatable and is also not potentially bewildering or baffling in any way. As sorry, I simply do not want to deal with the latter (with a perchance confusing story beginning) whilst under (even if indeed totally self imposed) reading stress (and just to be clear, just to be totally and utterly truthful here, even when perusing only for pleasure and with all the time in the world available for and to me, a bad, a subpar, an unclear story starting point, yes, this more often than not really makes me profoundly annoyed, frustrated and often majorly wanting to stop reading).

And sadly, frustratingly, Siobhan Dowd's opening pages for Bog Child, in my humble opinion, they are annoyingly presumptive and textually assume and also expect A PRETTY HUGE AMOUNT of prior knowledge and education (both recent and historical) regarding the so-called Troubles, regarding the IRA and sectarian violence from readers, to the extent that I really do personally feel as though Dowd just throws her potential readers into the deep end so to speak and then expects them to swim (and indeed, that the author, that Siobhan Dowd also uses a lot of political and cultural acronyms with which especially many North American readers would not be familiar is equally and problematically frustrating). But even though I originally was going to continue on with Bog Child and to simply grin and put up with what I most definitely consider a much too little information and backstory start, well, because I honestly have never at all enjoyed stories for children or young adults where there is either not a sufficient amount of backstory provided at the beginning or where the author assumes too much (and that for me, Bog Child most certainly does this, and even with me knowing a bit about the IRA and the issues plaguing Northern Ireland), yes, the beginning of Siobhan Dowd's text kind of makes me feel both annoyingly lost and really massively frustrated, so that I have finally decided to not continue on with Bog Child for the time being, to only grant two stars for what I have read thus far (but to also consider upping my rating if I ever decide to try Bog Child again and end up enjoying Sioban's Dowd's story as a whole more than I have the beginning).