This paper situates Margaret Engels’ collection of poems that form a novel, The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom (2008), in both the historical context it depicts (The various wars against Spain 1850-1899) and the emerging field of human-plant studies (HPS). Noting that Cuba’s indigenous population was destroyed by genocide and imported illnesses, the paper suggests that the island itself, as portrayed in Engels’ poetry, has colluded in human politics and played an active role in determining who can lay claim to Cuban nativity. Human-plant studies provide a rationale for suggesting that, in Engels’ The Surrender Tree, the flora of the island determines the progress of the Wars of Independence. This argument is extended to crystals, which also ‘grow’ but which are not deemed to be ‘living’, to suggest that, in The Surrender Tree, it is not the people who choose their nation and fight for its independence or to maintain Cuba’s connection to an empire of nations, but rather that the island itself chooses its people.

This article looks at the endpaper maps that often accompany children's novels. Taking its cue from Victor Watson's suggestion that maps ‘are both a signal and an invitation to a special kind of reading game,’ it argues the case that, rather than being considered paratextual, or only ancillary to the narratives they accompany, or (far worse) ideologically confining, as some have suggested, such maps are irreducible to simply the ideology of the individuals who ‘author’ them. Following Michel de Certeau's consideration of the difference between maps and tours, the article then discusses how these maps might unfold spatial potential, repeatedly remaking territory, thereby opening up the notion of spatiality for the reader.

PDF plusFantasy other worlds are often seen as alternative, wholly ‘other’ locations that operate as critiques of the ‘real’ world, or provide spaces where child protagonists can take advantage of the otherness they encounter in their own process of growth. Rather than consider fantasy fiction's presentations of ‘other’ worlds in this way, this article proposes reading them as potential thirdspaces of performance and activity that are neutral rather than confrontational such that, in fantasy other world fiction for children and young adults, the putative ‘other’ world may not, in fact, be ‘other’ at all.