Author reveals what an ‘off-grid’ life would be like

Young Fearnhill library enthusiasts joined other students from North Herts at an author talk at St Francis school, Letchworth.

The author in question was Katya Balen who read an extract from her book October, October and students were asked to consider what ‘off-grid’ means – the character October in the book lives off-grid until her 11th birthday when her Dad has an accident and her life changes dramatically as she is moved to the city.

Katya uses a lot of sensory language in the book as October interacts with the environments that she lives in.

Students were given a sherbet lemon and were encouraged to think about describing it using their senses as they held and then ate it. Students then wrote a paragraph describing the sweet from October’s point of view remembering that she had always lived self-sufficiently so they needed to describe it using thing she would know, she would perhaps never have tasted a lemon before.

Some observations from our students:

“Sherbet lemons taste crunchy and hard like uncooked carrots and the flavouring is sour – the opposite of mango.”

“It tastes sour and sweet like a green apple, hard like a rock. I hear it sliding across my teeth. It smells sweet. It gets sticky between my fingers like a dead caterpillar. It is sweet like tree sap.”

“A sherbet lemon tastes quite sour. It has a rough feeling. It sounds like something hard banging on a wall and smells sweet like a strawberry.”