Choices for English
ETANSW
Conference
Friday
20th November 2015 F4.1
Presented
by Helen Sykes and Deb McPherson.
Although
Deb was unable to present on the day, she contributed greatly to the
preparation for this session and she wrote detailed notes on many of the titles
we selected. Below you will find annotations on the titles that I presented,
plus many more that I couldn't manage to cover. The titles are presented in
alphabetical order, but we've given you first here an overview. If you are
looking for something specific, such as fiction for class set use, poetry or
non-fiction, you can find the titles in the overview and then go to the
alphabetical list.
Our use
of a 'class set' category begs the question, of course. Obviously most texts
can be used for whole-class sharing, and there will be all kinds of reasons for
choosing a particular title: it's set in your local area; it explores a
particular concept that is the centre of a unit of work you want to teach; it
just seems to resonate with this particular class at this particular time.
Traditionally, however, English teachers have searched for that magic 'class
set' title that will work with most classes. I complain constantly that I can't
find enough of them - but I never could. They are not necessarily the books
that win the awards, because there are practical concerns: they can't be too
long, too difficult, too idiosyncratic. Very popular books may not be a good
choice: half your class might have read them already. There is no magic
formula, but they need to be very well-written and they usually engage the
emotions strongly - we want to laugh or cry (and sometimes both at the same
time). They mostly have protagonists that we empathise with, and they mostly
deal with life's big issues. Some will be ongoing classics; others have great
relevance just for the moment, but may not stand the test of time. We've
included a short list of some recent possibilities here, but please don't
ignore the other fiction titles we've recommended for wide reading. One of them
might be the perfect 'class set' for you. You can skim the 'recommendation' at
the end of the annotations to find what you need.
After the
alphabetical list of annotations, we have a separate section on recommended
series fiction. Young adult series fiction has been particularly good in recent
years - plenty of variety to appeal to different kinds of readers and some very
good quality writing. A wide reading unit based on contemporary series fiction
would be a good way of engaging your students with reading and of encouraging
them to read more.
We also
have a final, short section where we've listed six novels published in recent
years that are really good class-set value - titles that you might have missed.
It's a diverse list, published between 2010 and 2014. Not all are immortal
classics, but all are very useful bookroom acquisitions. We've reproduced the
notes we wrote for them for previous conferences. -HS
Overview
Class set novels Years 7-8
A group of
novels about 'the Wall'
The
Crossing by Catherine
Norton. Omnibus.
The
Cat at the Wall by Deborah Ellis. Allen & Unwin.
The
Wall: A Modern Fable by
William Sutcliffe. Bloomsbury.
The River and the Book
by Alison Croggon. Walker Books.
A
Single Stone by Meg
McKinlay. Walker Books.
Nona
and Me by Clare Atkins.
Black Inc.
The
Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie by
Kirsty Murray. Allen & Unwin.
Goodbye
Stranger by Rebecca
Stead. Text Publishing.
The
Sound of Whales by Kerr
Thomson. Chicken House.
Two
Wolves by Tristan
Bancks. Random House Australia.
Class set novels Years 9-10
Freedom
Ride by Sue Lawson.
black dog books.
The Truth about Peacock Blue by
Rosanne Hawke. Allen & Unwin.
Prince of Afghanistan by Louis Nowra.
Allen & Unwin.
I'll
Give You the Sun by
Jandy Nelson. Walker Books.
Inbetween
Days by Vikki Wakefield.
Text Publishing.
Buffalo Soldier by Tanya Landman. Walker Books.
Great YA literature - but possibly not
class set
The
Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness. Walker Books.
The Cracks in the Kingdom by Jaclyn Moriarty. Pan Macmillan.
A Prince without a Kingdom by Timothée de Fombelle. Walker Books.
Graphic novels/picture books/illustrated
books
Flight
by Nadia Wheatley and
Armin Greder. A Helen Chamberlin Book.
Mysterious
Traveller by Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham, illustrated by P. J. Lynch.
Walker Books.
Baba Yaga's Assistant by Marika
McCoola, illustrated by Emily Carroll. Candlewick Press.
The Cat with the Coloured Tail by Gillian Mears, illustrated by Dinalie
Dabarera. Walker Books.
Kidglovz by Julie Hunt, illustrated by Dale
Newman. Allen & Unwin.
The Singing Bones by Shaun
Tan. Allen & Unwin.
Eat
the Sky, Drink the Ocean edited
by Kirsty Murray, Payal Dhar and Anita Roy. Allen & Unwin.
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains: The
Graphic Novel by Neil Gaiman. Headline Publishing, 2014.
The Marvels by Brian
Selznick. Scholastic.
Non-fiction
Atmospheric:
The Burning Story of Climate Change by
Carole Wilkinson. Walker Books.
Steve
Jobs: Insanely Great by
Jessie Harland. Random House.
Island Home by Tim Winton.
Penguin.
Drama
Behind
the Beautiful Forevers by
David Hare. Faber & Faber.
Seventeen
by Matthew Whittet.
Currency Press.
Poetry
The
ABC Book of Australian Poetry: A Treasury of Poems for Young People compiled by Libby Hathorn, illustrated by
Cassandra Allen. ABC Books.
A
Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz. Mariner Books.
Poems
That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them by Anthony and Ben Holden. Simon &
Schuster.
Poetry
by Heart: Poems for Learning and Reciting edited by Julie Blake, Mike Dixon, Andrew Motion and Jean
Sprackland. Viking.
Film
3
Idiots directed
by Rajkumar Hirani.
X+Y (also known as A Brilliant Young Mind) directed by Morgan Matthew.
Fiction
for wide reading, Years 7-8
The
Astrologer's Daughter by
Rebecca Lim. Text Publishing.
Finding
Audrey by
Sophie Kinsella. Doubleday.
The
Forgotten Pearl by
Belinda Murrell. Random House.
I
Am Juliet by Jackie
French. Angus & Robertson.
Newt's
Emerald by Garth Nix.
Allen & Unwin.
The
Ratcatcher's Daughter by
Pamela Rushby. Angus & Robertson.
Fiction
for wide reading, Years 9-10
Laurinda by Alice Pung. Black Inc.
Tigerfish by David Metzenthen. Penguin Books.
Series
fiction
The
Colours of Madeleine
series by Jaclyn Moriarty. Pan Macmillan.
Every Breath/Every
Word/ Every Move by Ellie Marney.
Allen & Unwin.
Man Made Boy/This
Broken Wondrous World by Jon Skovron. Allen & Unwin.
Vango series by Timothée de Fombelle. Walker Books
The Tribe series by Ambelin Kwaymullina. Walker
Books.
The Last Girl/The
Last Shot/The Last Place by
Michael Adams. Allen & Unwin.
City of Orphans series by Catherine Jinks. Allen &
Unwin.
The Ship Kings series by Andrew McGahan. Allen &
Unwin.
Great
choices you might have missed
Butter by Erin Lange. Faber and Faber.
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey. Allen & Unwin.
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. Walker Books.
Trash by
Andy Mulligan. Definitions.
The Watch That Ends the Night: Voices
from the Titanic by
Allan Wolf. Candlewick Press.
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. Allen & Unwin.
Alphabetical list of
annotated titles
3
Idiots
directed by Rajkumar Hirani. 2009. Rated
M.
In Hindi and English. When Hindi is used,
there are English sub-titles.
Screening time: just under 3 hours.
This is by no means a recent film, as you
can see from its release date, but I only discovered it earlier this year when
I was searching desperately for Asian films suitable for use with junior
secondary students. This was a recommendation from Karen Stapleton from AIS,
and I am grateful to her for the discovery. If you're not already familiar with
it, it's really worth exploring.
This is a glorious way to introduce Stage
5 students to the joys of Bollywood. 3
Idiots is a laugh-out-loud comedy with some gut-wrenchingly sad moments and
an underlying tenderness. It explores perceptively some very important values,
especially in relation to education. While very clearly made for traditional
Bollywood audiences, it provides a fascinating insight for Western viewers into
the world of aspirational middle-class Indians.
The film is rated M because there are a
few confronting scenes - particularly a suicide - and the humour is often quite
vulgar. Your students will love the vulgarity. If they haven't seen Bollywood
films before, they may be rather surprised by the inclusion of song-and-dance
sequences, but these are just so much fun that your main problem could be
keeping them in their seats. I wanted to get up and dance myself, and the songs
stayed with me for hours afterwards.
Best friends Farhan and Raju graduated
ten years previously from one of India's most prestigious engineering colleges.
They join fellow-student Chatur who is anxious to keep a commitment he made on
graduation to catch up with Rancho, the extraordinary non-conformist who topped
their graduating class but then disappeared. The film is part road trip, with
some stunning cinematography of aerial shots following the car through
magnificent landscapes as they set out on their search.
The story flashes back from the search
for Rancho to their college years. Farhan, Raju and Rancho were close friends -
the three idiots, although Rancho was always the leader of the group, flouting
authority and challenging them all to question the status quo. Chatur was a
sycophantic teacher's pet, determined to achieve his idea of success: lots of
money, a fancy house and car, and a trophy wife. We have already seen that ten
years on, Chatur has - in his own terms - succeeded. He is confident that he
will find that the supposedly brilliant Rancho is a failure.
Much of the film focuses on college life
and Rancho's refusal to conform to its demands. The Dean, known to all students
as ViruS, is arch-conservative: he prides himself on the exclusivity of the
college and its supposed rigour, which consists mostly of mindless
rote-learning. As Rancho points out at one stage to the enraged Dean:
You have the best
college in the country, yet none of your students has ever invented anything of
note.
There is a very funny scene where ViruS
asks students to define a machine. Rancho does so beautifully, in very clear
and simple language, and is rubbished by the teacher. Chatur knows what's
wanted and he mouthes the following gibberish, to great praise:
Sir, machines are any combination of
bodies so connected that their relative motions are constrained and by which
means, force and motion may be transmitted and modified as a screw and its nut,
or a lever arranged to turn about a fulcrum or a pulley about its pivot, etc.,
especially, a construction, more or less complex consisting of a combination of
moving parts, or simple mechanical elements, as wheels, levers, cams etc.
ViruS tells Rancho that if he wants simple
language he should join an Arts and Commerce college, not a superior
engineering establishment. Rancho is thrown out of class but returns a moment
later because he has forgotten something. What has he forgotten? With wonderful
fluency he explains:
Instruments that
record, analyse, summarise, organise, debate and explain information; that are
illustrated, non-illustrated, hardbound, paperback, jacketed, non-jacketed;
with foreword, introduction, table of contents, index; that are indented for
the enlightenment, understanding, enrichment, enhancement and education of the
human brain through sensory route of vision - sometimes touch.
He
has, of course, forgotten his books.
The
values of the education establishment are heavily satirised, particularly in a
wonderfully funny (if rather rude) scene where star student Chatur delivers a
prestigious speech. He has corruptly had the librarian write it for him and, as
Rancho guesses, he then learns it by rote, not understanding very well the
traditional Hindi in which it is written. Rancho has inserted some very rude
words into the speech the librarian wrote. The student body rock with laughter;
the school administration and the government representative are horrified;
Chatur is at first oblivious - and then humiliated.
The
satire is at times harsh. The suicide sequence involves a student who has been
mercilessly bullied by ViruS. A later very dark moment has a desperate Raju
jumping from a third-floor window and almost killing himself. But this darkness
is balanced by a joyous optimism, summed up by Rancho's assurance:
Whatever the
problem in life is ... just say to yourself 'Aal Izz Well'. This won't solve
your problems but it will give the courage to face it.
There
are a couple of false moments in the film, particularly the improbable scene
when Rancho's inventive genius saves the day and delivers a baby, but my
interest never waned, despite the great length of the film. I also guessed the
ending some time before the surprise reveal, but that didn't matter either.
This is basically a wonderful celebration of life and of values like Rancho's
pronouncements: 'Chase excellence and success will follow' and 'Life is not
about getting marks, grades but chasing your dreams'.
Students
who are familiar with Bollywood films will notice that, while this is
celebrating Bollywood conventions, it is also parodying them. The
song-and-dance sequence in the college bathroom is a great example. Even what
appears at first to be a more traditional love sequence, like the wonderfully addictive
'Zoobi doobi' song, is very inventive in its use of the camera. This is
anything but stereotypical.
Oh,
and I forgot to say, it's also a rather sweet love story.
Recommendation: This is obviously a suitable text for
Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia.
I was
delighted with this film and would love to share it with kids. It probably
needs to be Stage 5, because of the M rating, although most Year 7 kids would
love the toilet humour. Like all Bollywood films it seems ridiculously long but
there is so much variety of tone and the pace is so fast that I didn't really
notice. Of course you can't afford to show all three hours in class time, but it
seems to be freely available online, although it has disappeared recently (for
Australian viewers) from YouTube. I'm
too old-fashioned to download films and I rarely watch them online, so I
confess that I don't understand the legality of this. But the fact that it is available online
means that you can ask students to watch much of it for homework, allowing you
to focus in class on key scenes. Make sure to send a note home to reassure
parents that movie-watching is indeed homework; in some schools you may want to
explain that it is rated M. Make sure too in class to ask students to explore
some of the imaginative ways in which 3
Idiots has been filmed. -HS
The
ABC Book of Australian Poetry: A Treasury of Poems for Young People
compiled by Libby Hathorn, illustrated by
Cassandra Allen. ABC Books, 2012 (2010). ISBN 9780733320194. 192 pp. Hardcover.
Despite its rather young cover this is a
fine anthology for the secondary poetry book box. Poet Libby Hathorn says she
was concerned about some classic works slipping away from our consciousness and
took the opportunity in this anthology to ‘invigorate classic works and
highlight contemporary Australian voices’. The use of the metaphor of a river
to connect each section works very well as we start at the beginning and move
through the mountains, forests and plains to then head for the city on the
coast and the sea.
The anthology is a beautifully produced
hardback. There are clever, colourful illustrations by Cassandra Allen and
paper that is beautiful to the touch. C. J. Dennis and Steven Herrick are
represented, as are Gilmore, Lawson, Paterson, Murray and Archie Roach. John
Tranter and Peter Skrzynecki (although there is a slip up in the spelling of
his name as Skryznecki) are there, as well as poems by Peter McFarlane and
Randolph Stow.
Recommendation: This anthology should touch some hearts
in classrooms from Years 7 - 10 and at $25.25 it is a good investment for the
box book. -DM
The
Astrologer's Daughter
by Rebecca Lim. Text Publishing, 2014.
ISBN 9781922182005. 321 pp.
This is thrilling and unusual crime
fiction, a genre that is very much under-represented in young adult literature.
Set in Melbourne's China Town, it is about the search for a missing person -
the protagonist's mother, Joanne. Because Joanne is an astrologer, the key to
her disappearance probably lies with one of her clients. Avicenna has her mother's
powers but has always refused to use her talent to read the stars. Now she must
examine her mother's journals to find the clues that elude the police. Her
quest leads her into a dangerous and seedy world where the greatest threats
come from highly respected establishment figures who are not what they seem.
Avicenna's attempt to piece together the clues is complicated by her increasing
recognition that her mother had consistently lied to her about her past.
While it is Avicenna who pieces together
the clues, the police are represented positively. They are sceptical at first
about Joanne and Avicenna's astrological powers but they are also dogged in
their determination to find out what has happened to Joanne. The wonderfully
cynical Detective Wurbik becomes a father-figure to Avicenna, despite the fact
that like most typical teenager daughters she frequently rejects his advice.
After arranging an interview with Avicenna by one of her mother's former
clients, a very wealthy businessman named Kircher who believes his family
intend to kill him, Wurbik thanks Avicenna for her time and explains: 'Well, he
wouldn't take no for an answer. Who'd
want to be rich, eh? Whole different set of problems.' Avicenna reads the
charts and predicts that Kircher will die shortly, at the hands of someone
close to him. A little later Avicenna suffers a panic attack when she sees a
television news item reporting on Kircher's violent death in an explosion on
his yacht.
As well as being crime fiction, The Astrologer's Daughter is also a
classic love story, with an unlikely romantic hero. As in all good romances
Avicenna and Simon detest each other to begin with, and there are major
misunderstandings to be overcome; Avicenna is as unjustly prejudiced against
Simon as Jane Austen's Lizzie was against Mr Darcy. But life is more
complicated these days. The Mr Wickham character, to whom Avicenna is attracted
against her will, is the repulsive Hugh - very, very rich, very, very handsome
and powerful because of his family connections with the Melbourne
establishment. When Wurbik warns Hugo not to give Avicenna any trouble, Hugh -
confirming how repulsive he is - says, 'almost like he's thinking out loud,
"I could have that man seriously
inconvenienced."' (It's very satisfying to see at the end Detective Wurbik
in control of the fate of those establishment figures, including Hugo's
relatives, whose evil has been unmasked.) I must say that I find Avicenna's
reluctant attraction to Hugo unconvincing: the Avicenna we get to know is just
too bright and sensible to fall for Hugh's superficial charms.
The unlikely Mr Darcy character, Simon,
is a striking contrast to Hugh: from a seriously dysfunctional family, Simon is
sleeping rough in a battered old car that 'looks like a low-rent drug dealer's
ride on its second go round the odometer' and that 'smells like stale hash
browns'. Simon becomes, however, both a great help in Avicenna's search for her
mother and also a witness in his own life to the violence and deprivation that
lie beneath the veneer of our civilisation. As readers we are satisfied when
the right man eventually gets the girl.
Early in the novel we learn that Avicenna
had been severely burned as a child in a household fire - a fire in which her
father died rescuing her:
[The police] recoil
when I answer the door, and my hand rises to my ear. But, of course, it's too
late. The young woman's eyes narrow thoughtfully on the melted, stumpy thing
that is all that remains of my left ear, then on the waxy-looking pattern burnt
into my left cheek that pulls my eye down a little at the outer corner.
Avicenna is, not surprisingly, acutely
sensitive about her appearance. The importance of body image and of its
relationship to self-esteem is one of the issues that the novel explores
perceptively.
One of the strengths of The Astrologer's Daughter is the
first-person narration; the persona revealed by the colloquial language
reflects at first Avicenna's toughness, but we soon see too her vulnerability:
I swing my pack
onto my shoulder, already backing away from the two of them, seated in awful
tableau. The roaring in my ears seems to grow louder. Jesus, I don't even know
where I am. I'm so far out of my narrow comfort zone, it's like I'm in a
parallel universe ...
And I nod once,
sharply, before fleeing the room, and the howling old woman in her bright,
jewel-box house, who will never find peace. It's like looking into my own
future.
This novel received several awards: it
was on the CBCA Older Readers' Notables list, 2015; it was shortlisted for the
Aurealis Awards, Best Young Adult Novel, 2014; it was longlisted for the Gold
Inky award, 2015; and it was shortlisted for the Davitt Awards,
Best Young Adult Novel, 2015.
Recommendation: Good crime fiction for teenagers is
hard to find. Crime fiction with both an intriguing plot and interesting,
credible characters is even rarer. This is an appealing read for Years 8-10. -HS
Atmospheric:
The Burning Story of Climate Change
by Carole Wilkinson. Walker Books, 2015.
ISBN 9781925126372. 253 pp.
Carol
Wilkinson is better known for writing fiction and for her wonderful Dragonkeeper series, but here she draws
on another area of her life as a climate action group member and a campaigner
for sustainable living and a safe climate.
Her
introduction is clear and acknowledges the global debate. Anecdotes from young
people preface the thirteen straightforward chapters setting out the science of
climate change. These short reminiscences really are engaging ‘tasters’,
capturing as they do such varied personal, political, cultural and historical
perspectives. We hear from people from the past and the present, from
individuals in places such as England, Persia, China and Denmark. Vincent Dwyer
is fifteen when he gets caught up in a climate change rally in Melbourne on his
way to play a game of chess. Billy Low, aged ten, is a coal ‘putter’ (or puller
of the coal tub and collector of coal) from Newcastle England in 1843 and
Torben Tranberg is an eleven-year-old Dane watching his family’s wind turbine
make their electricity.
Wilkinson
is an appealing writer and her well set out chapters are interspersed with
clear headings and useful graphs, tables, images and inserts. The reader is
introduced to human activities over time that have influenced climate change,
to the history of fossil fuel and scientific research, the study of ice cores,
the ozone hole, the growing international response and the opposition to taking
action on climate change. Her final chapters contain good advice on what
individuals can do to live sustainable lives and outlines actions available to
us all. A glossary, timeline, list of websites, list of sources and index
further support the reader to take their explorations further.
In the
last chapter, in a fitting finale, we return to Vincent Dwyer, now a sixteen-year-old
and a much more informed individual who is committed to reducing the carbon
footprint of his family. We seem to have come full circle on our exploration on
climate change and Wilkinson ends with a challenge to the young people who will
inherit our planet:
You have a job to
do. Yes, you. You are the most important person in the campaign to fix our
climate. You can make a difference. (p. 230)
Recommendation: This
is a welcome addition to our choices for non-fiction for sharing with students
in Years 7 and 8. It of course also fills the gap for a text that meets the
cross-curriculum requirement, Sustainability. -DM
Baba Yaga's Assistant
by Marika
McCoola, illustrated by Emily Carroll. Candlewick Press, 2015. ISBN
9780763669614. 127 pp.
This graphic
novel from the States uses the witch of Russian folklore to tell a story of a
teenage girl who, unlike others, refuses to run away terrified and seeks,
instead, adventure, thanks to a beloved grandmother who taught her the value of
stories. Masha, unhappy about her father's intention of remarrying, answers an
advertisement for an assistant to Baba Yaga. Memories of her loving
grandmother's advice and her own good sense stand her in good stead as she
faces a series of tests, to be ultimately rewarded by a Baba Yaga who is much
less terrifying than expected.
The story
of Masha's encounter with Baba Yaga - and, most importantly, of how she saves
the children Baba Yaga has imprisoned and intends to eat - is interspersed with
flashbacks that tells Masha's family story. Most significant is the death of
her beloved grandmother, an event that has left her unable to trust life.
Ultimately, this work is a celebration of courage and self-knowledge.
The
brightly coloured graphic frames are slightly cartoonish, an appropriate style
for a story that looks at mythical beings through the lens of modern teenage
life.
Recommendation: This is
aimed at the young adult market. Many students will find it absorbing. It's a
useful addition to a unit of work on traditional stories, anywhere from Years
7-10. -HS
Behind
the Beautiful Forevers
by David Hare. Faber & Faber, 2014.
ISBN 9780571312412. 129 pp.
This playscript is based on journalist
Katherine Boo's compulsively readable non-fiction text, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death and hope in a Mumbai slum (Scribe Publications, 2012. ISBN
9781921844638. 288 pp.). Boo is an American journalist and the book is based on
years of first-hand research in the Annawadi slum that is adjacent to the Sahar
International airport in Mumbai. The slum is hidden from the airport by a wall
of advertising for expensive Italian floor titles that promise to remain
'beautiful forever'. The juxtaposition between the extravagant lifestyle
promised by the advertising and the fragile shacks of the slum, with their dirt
floors, in many ways sums up the Mumbai Boo is reporting on.
Boo chose to present her research by
telling the story of three families who live in the slum. The first is the
family of Abdul, who is possibly sixteen, possibly nineteen, and the family
breadwinner; Abdul has become a skilled recycler, scavenging through 'the
things that richer people threw away'. The second is the family of the
ambitious and ruthless Asha, who aspires to be the next slumlord; her daughter,
Manju, is the only college-going girl in Annawadi but regrettably (from Asha's
viewpoint) does not share her mother's pursuit of material gain at all costs.
The third is that of Fatima, universally known as One Leg, who is desperately
jealous of Abdul's family's relative prosperity. In a self-destructive rage,
Fatima burns herself grievously in a fire and blames Abdul. Much of the
narrative of the book centres on this incident and its consequences.
David Hare follows Boo's book closely,
focusing too on the story of the three families and giving them a vivid presence
on stage. Both Boo and Hare supplement the main characters with a large
supporting cast, especially of road boys, scavengers that Abdul knows, and
corrupt officials. In the world that Boo and Hare present, corruption is
endemic at every level, especially amongst the police, lawyers and court
workers, from the highest to the lowest. Innocence is useless in the justice
system; money and influence are everything. The conditions in gaol are even
worse than those of slum existence.
It is not surprising that Hare was
attracted to Boo's text: he has written for years about globalisation,
inequality and injustice. But even such a skilled dramatist must have been
daunted by the task of adapting Boo's huge canvas for the stage. Hare has risen
magnificently to the challenge. While the cast is huge and at first confusing,
Hare gives us a clear narrative that allows us to share in the fragility of
this makeshift world. He seems too to have picked up on Boo's comment about goodness.
One of the highlights of the play is the moment when Abdul reacts with rage to
yet another corrupt government official demanding a bribe:
Look at us. You're like dogs. Licking at us, taking what's
left of our blood. You've already taken our lives. All right, so we let you do
it. But there's a limit. And my mother's reached it. Do you understand? She's
paid the police, the people in the prison, in the courts, the neighbours,
anyone who held out their hand. And tell you what? This is a great day. Because
this is the day we stop. We stop.
There is violence in the play: the scene,
for example, in which street boy Kalu is tortured and killed by two dealers is
distressing. There is bad language, especially - and amusingly - from the mouth
of Abdul's mother Zehrunisa, who is constantly being berated by her children
for her swearing. There is the uncomfortable exposure that for many life is
cheap; like the people in the hotels near the slum who complain that 'every
night the ash from our cow-dung fires drifts across and lands on the swimming
pools', we would really prefer not to know. But Hare has also given us humanity
at its best, especially in the young people, Abdul and Manju.
Recommendation: This is obviously a suitable text for
Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia. It is a sophisticated text that you
probably won't use with students younger than Year 10. Even then, you will use
it with top stream classes. It would also be a great text for Year 11. If you
can find a suitable class, it is wonderfully rewarding: an unforgettable
insight into the lives of the poor in contemporary India. The issues that are
raised, both in the book and in the play, are hugely relevant.
You could use the playscript on its own
with a class, or alongside Boo's book. The play had a triumphant season in
London in 2015. The National Theatre
Live program filmed one of the performances. While I don't believe the film is
available on DVD, several independent cinemas - like the Dendy and Palace
chains - screen the National Theatre Live performances from time to time. -HS
A
Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry
edited by Czeslaw Milosz. Mariner Books,
1998. ISBN 9780156005746. 344 pp.
How to resist a title like this?
Thankfully no resistance is required as the Nobel Prize Winner for Literature
presents a magnificent collection of poems. I fell in love with Milosz’s
rationale for this anthology. It was to select poems, whether contemporary or a
thousand years old, that were ‘short, clear, readable and … realist, that is
loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible.’
The poems are gathered under intriguing headings: 'Epiphany', 'Nature', 'The
Secret of a Thing', 'Travel', 'Places', 'The Moment', 'People Among People', 'Women’s
Skin', 'Situations,' 'Non Attachment' and 'History'. They all benefit from
their erudite introductions. Some
poems are contexualised while others stand alone. It was wonderful to re-read
Herbert’s 'Elegy of Fortinbras' and
to discover so many new and piercing poems from poets and places never
encountered before. The calm delight of Robert Morgan’s 'Honey', the guilt of
Roethke’s moss gatherer, the wisdom of Mary Oliver’s 'Wild Geese' and Ch’In
Kuan’s river journey 'Along the Grand Canal' are representative of a once in a
lifetime collection.
Recommendation: This is truly an anthology of gems that
sparkle in the mind long after the book has been closed. Don’t just buy it for
your students; get one for yourself. -DM
Buffalo Soldier
by Tanya
Landman. Walker Books, 2014. ISBN 9781406314595. 368 pp.
This brutal and powerful novel asks the
question: what does it mean to be free? Charley, a young Afro-American, is the
narrator of the story set during the period of the United States’ Civil War and
the Indian wars. Her daily life as a house slave is all too vividly captured,
from the abuse and bigotry of her owners to the cruelty of the overseer’s son.
When the Yankees burn down her plantation, it frees her and others but leaves
them to find their own way to food and shelter. After following the army as
cooks for a while Charley, Cookie, and Amos (her closest friends) return to the
ruined plantation. When they enter the nearby town, they invite suspicion and
hatred from disgruntled whites. When the lynch mob comes calling Cookie and
Amos hide Charley, but in a terrible and violent act Cookie is raped and both
she and her husband are killed. Charley is left to wander on in despair. She
disguises herself as a boy and finally signs up for the US Army as part of the
Afro-American Buffalo soldiers' unit, a group that was sent to the west to
fight the Indians and help the settlers.
As readers we travel over a lot of
territory in this story and it’s not just geography. Prejudices, attitudes and
philosophies are all explored. Charley may have a rifle and a job but she is
not free from the bigotry of her times and neither is her unit. Mocked as
inferiors by their contemptuous fellow soldiers, the poorly provisioned Company
W always work hard to demonstrate their capability as soldiers. Charley
initially sees the Indians they same way other soldiers see W Company, but over
time her sympathies change. She begins to see what the Indians are fighting for,
as she witnesses the genocide being practised by the US Army. When Jim, an
Indian-Mexican scout, enters her life, she is more than ready to leave her army
life and follow him.
There is no escaping the violence and savagery
exposed in this novel. As an account of a desperate life in terrible times it
is riveting. While some plot twists are contrived, the overall impression is a
powerful one. Charley is often close to despair but her determination and
resilience are formidable. Buffalo
Soldier won the CILIP Carnegie Medal for fiction in 2015.
Recommendation: Year 9 or 10 could find much to explore
in this novel. While some of the horrors it exposes are shocking and
confronting, such details represent the reality of the times, and it is a novel
that you are compelled to keep on reading. -DM
The Cat at the Wall
by Deborah
Ellis. Allen & Unwin, 2015. ISBN 9781760112448. 142 pp.
Deborah Ellis has set out in this book to
do what she has done so many times before: to bring to life for a young
audience the conditions faced by children living in less privileged countries.
Often, as in this case, she writes about children living in conflict zones. She
has a talent for creating credible and sympathetic characters with whom young
readers can empathise, and she also has a gift for informing readers about the
real dangers and difficulties of a situation without traumatising them.
In The
Cat at the Wall, Ellis focuses on conditions on Israel's West Bank - behind
the Wall. The plot is based on 'Straw Widow operations' in which Israeli
soldiers commandeer a Palestinian family home so that they can spy on the neighbours.
In this case the soldiers are Simcha - a brash prejudiced ignoramus 'fresh off
the boat from America' - and the older, more experienced and less judgmental
Aaron. But the house is not empty as they first thought: a terrified little boy
is hiding there. Much later, we discover that the boy is alone because his
parents have been killed by other Israeli soldiers in a misunderstanding at a
checkpoint.
Ellis needs a narrative point of view -
an independent observer. She needs someone who will describe what would seem
odd to a Western reader: the smallness of the house, with its minimum of
furniture; a kitchen consisting of a kerosene stove, a small sink and a shelf
with a few plates; a pantry consisting of nothing more than a jar of chickpeas,
a few small jars of spices, and a couple of old sprouting onions. Western
observers would notice that there were no children's toys - none of the
ubiquitous plastic of their own homes: just an elaborate home-made cardboard
town. But there is, of course, no way that a Western child could conceivably be
placed in the setting to provide the necessary narrative viewpoint. So Ellis
gives us a stray cat as narrator - but a stray cat that is the reincarnation of
a spoilt North American thirteen-year-old girl. The cat tells us what is
happening in the little house; in between times, the cat reminisces about her
life and death as a girl.
I'm all for suspension of disbelief as a
reader, but there were times while reading The
Cat at the Wall where Ellis was asking too much of me. Children might be
more forgiving - and this novel is for child readers, rather than for young
adults. The main story itself is great. Ellis is particularly good at capturing
the tension - the tension between the two Israeli soldiers; the anxiety when
they find their radio dead and their spare batteries missing; the suspense when
the boy's teacher and class knock on the door, calling for him; the
increasingly dangerous escalation of the situation as local boys start stoning
the house. Personally, I resented leaving this story to learn about the
not-very-nice Clare's problems with her mean teacher, and I didn't much care
that Clare achieves at the end a kind of redemption.
Despite my reservations, this novel has a
lot to recommend it. It highlights in particular the problem with 'the Wall':
the people on either side do not know or understand each other, so tragic misunderstandings
are inevitable. The scene in Chapter 18 when the boy's father is shot at the
checkpoint is distressing; the Israeli soldiers - frightened boys - shout
commands in Hebrew; the man shouts back explanations in Arabic. They have no
way of communicating with words and fear leads to misinterpretation of actions:
Omar's father backed out of the taxi. In his hands was
something long and black.
'He's got a rifle!'
I heard one shot. And then another.
And then there was silence. A terrible, terrible black
silence.
The 'something long and black' is a
violin case (the cat had noted, disapprovingly, the violin lying on a window
sill 'gathering dust without a case') - the only thing the man had to hold his
identity papers and his wife's medical information when he left home so
hurriedly with his wife in labour. He had explained that to the soldiers, but
they were unable to understand. Similarly, a fatal incident - possibly
involving even more deaths - seems likely at the climactic ending of the novel.
As the cat sees it, there is 'a colossal mess' of misunderstanding and fear as
Palestinians demonstrate and a heavily-armed Israeli helicopter hovers overhead:
The Israeli army moved forward. The rioters moved forward.
'Back off!' warned the army over the loudspeaker.
'You back off!' the crowd yelled back.
A weird silence fell on the area like a fog. I saw soldiers
aim their rifles. I saw teenaged boys pick up rocks.
It looked like all hell was going to break out right over
us.
I never disclose endings, and I won't do
so now. There is a resolution, but it's not very satisfactory. The Wall remains
and hell will break out again.
Recommendation: The
Cat at the Wall is a fairly easy read for Stage 3 and 4. Offer it to Year 7
students alongside Sutcliffe's The Wall
and Norton's Crossing (both reviewed
here). All three books are about physical walls separating people, but - more
importantly - all three explore the idea that physically separating people
leads to dangerous misunderstandings. Norton's Crossing is also fairly accessible, while Sutcliffe's novel is more
demanding. Encourage students to read more than one of the books so that they
can compare the very different ways the authors deal with the concept.
In some schools discussion of the
Israeli-Palestinian situation can lead to problems. In such a case, make up a
wide reading box of stories about children living in difficult situations
around the world. Include The Cat at the
Wall, Crossing and The Wall. Other possible titles by
Deborah Ellis include Parvana, Parvana’s Journey, Shauzia and
Parvana's Promise, all set in Afghanistan; The Best Day of My Life, about a homeless Indian girl suffering
from leprosy; The Heaven Shop, about
children who have been orphaned by AIDS in Africa; Diego, Run! and Diego’s Pride, about a boy whose parents have been wrongly
imprisoned in Bolivia for drug smuggling; and No Safe Place, the story of three adolescent asylum seekers from
very different backgrounds who are at the mercy of people smugglers as they try
to cross the English Channel. Sally Grindley has written a number of books about
children in non-Western countries, including Bitter Chocolate, about the conditions of child cocoa
workers in Africa, Torn Pages, about AIDS orphans in Africa, and Spilled
Water, about child
factory workers in China. Other titles that give Australian readers
insight into the lives of children in other countries include Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan, about the plight of young widows in India, Trash by Andy Mulligan, about the lives of children
scavenging in the rubbish tips of Manila, Eoin Colfer’s Benny and Omar, set in Tunisia, and The Wild by Matt
Whyman, the grim story of two brothers growing up in the poisoned wilderness of
Kazakhstan. Allen & Unwin's 'Through My Eyes' series is also very
worthwhile: Rosanne Hawke's Shahana,
set in Kashmir; J. L. Powers' Amina
(Somalia); John Heffernan's Naveed
(Afghanistan); Sophie Masson's Emilio
(Mexico); Robert Hillman's Malini
(Sri lanka) and Prue Mason's Zafir
(Syria). -HS
The Cat with the Coloured Tail
by Gillian
Mears, illustrated by Dinalie Dabarera. Walker Books, 2015. ISBN 9781922077400.
74 pp. Hardcover.
While this is aimed at the mid- to upper-
primary school age group, like many good stories it has a fairly universal
appeal. For kids it has lots of fun ingredients: an icecream truck that
produces delicious icecreams, a magic cat that senses unhappiness, and Mr
Hooper, the icecream vendor who so wants the world to be a happier place. The
fable-like story is interspersed with the cat's songs about the heart of the
world, songs that to human ears sound like purring. The story has the structure
of a quest: Mr Hooper and the cat with the coloured tail bring help and
happiness to a series of individuals but, at the end - and with great
difficulty and personal danger - they rescue the 'heart of the world', which
has become black, damaged, sad and bitter-smelling.
Fables always, of course, have a moral.
This one is a celebration of the healing power of friendship, love and
kindness.
This is an illustrated story and the
illustrations complement the text beautifully. Dabarera's sketches are mostly
black and white with blobs of colour, but the magic icecreams are fully
coloured and background colours are used behind the print to reflect the
changing mood of the story. There is a delightful sketch of the lonely, sad old
lady who discovers a new spring in her step when she tastes her magic pink
icecream: the icecream, the only colour on the page, looks almost like a rose
in bloom. The joy in the sketch reflects the joy in the words:
Under her tongue, it was delicious and cool. Each sweet lick
that the old lady took put more and more life into her walk, until she was
skipping home, even as she licked.
To eat a moon-cream was like licking love and happiness both
at once. After a moon-cream, life would always be luckier.
Recommendation: Include this in a unit of work on
traditional stories. Ask students to compare it to traditional fables and have
them consider the extent to which it follows the quest narrative. -HS
The Cracks in the Kingdom
by Jaclyn
Moriarty. Pan Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 9781742612874. 526 pp.
This is Book 2 of The Colours of Madeleine, a sequel to A Corner of White. A third book to complete the trilogy is still to
come.
This is totally and wonderfully original.
It is challenging, thought-provoking, constantly surprising, frequently very
funny. It's a huge read and it makes lots of demands on its readers, but like
many difficult books it offers great rewards.
Moriarty's originality and inventiveness
were evident in her first book - Feeling
Sorry for Celia - and its sequels, but The
Colours of Madeleine is on another level. The language is so perfect that
it is almost a distraction; open the book at almost any page to discover a
delight:
The mood, which had been flying, abruptly took a seat and
put its feet up.
Over the next couple of weeks, Elliot got himself so tangled
in busy he couldn't see his way around the knots.
There was a long pause, minutes passed, then there was a
thud, the air itself seemed to tumble and Princess Ko tumbled with it.
She was gone.
In her place was a kind of empty space of panic: a smearing
of glassy streaks and smudges in the air, as if unseen figures were frantically
splashing dirty water at windowpanes.
Moriarty's imagination is outrageously
inventive. This is the story of two worlds. One of them is our world, although
not one that our students will be very familiar with: the university town of
Cambridge, England. In Book 1 we come to know fourteen-year-old Madeleine Tully
who is being home-schooled with a couple of friends. They are bright,
inquisitive, interesting young people. Madeleine is, however, troubled. She and
her mother are desperately poor, and her mother is ill. In the other world, the
fantasy world of the Kingdom of Cello, we meet Elliot Baranski. Elliot seems
quite like teenage boys in our world, and the people in his world behave much
like humans here, but his world itself is bizarre. Seasons can change at any
moment - it is quite normal to have three different seasons in a day. 'Colours'
are 'living organisms: a kind of rogue subclass of the colours that we see when
we look at a red apple or a blue sky', and some of them are deadly, attacking
without notice. Elliot is troubled too: his father has inexplicably disappeared.
Madeleine in Cambridge (our world) finds
a note sticking out of a parking meter; she writes a reply. Elliot (in the
Kingdom of Cello) finds her reply poking out of an old broken television that
has been used as part of an art installation in his school playground. They
begin to correspond. Elliot knows a little of the World, as World Studies is a
compulsory subject at school, although Madeleine has never heard of the Kingdom
of Cello. According to Elliot, there was a time when the two worlds were in
contact, but all contact has been forbidden for the past three hundred years.
There are still some cracks between the worlds (Madeleine's parking meter and
Elliot's old television represent one of the cracks), but anyone in Elliot's
world must report a crack immediately to the authorities so that it can be
closed up. Elliot, however, has no intention of reporting what he has
discovered.
One of the joys of Moriarty's fantasy is
how random it is. I've read so many fantasies set in other worlds that have
been elaborately created by the author so each strange creature or phenomenon
can be explained in detail. Moriarty doesn't bog us down in tedious explication.
The Kingdom of Cello just is. She describes it and its people with such vividness
that we never doubt for a moment its existence. We never doubt that Madeleine
and Elliot have found a crack, and we delight in discovering their growing
friendship.
While Book 1 concentrates on the
characters of Madeleine and Elliot, Book 2 is concerned with the terrible
plight of the royal family of the Kingdom, all of whom have been kidnapped by
traitors. Only the young Princess Ko is left, and she has to hide from her
people the fact that the rest of her family is missing. The very feisty
princess is just one of a number of fascinating new characters introduced in
Book 2, as Madeleine and Elliot try to work out what has happened to the royal
family and then how to rescue them.
The plot is terrific. There is plenty of
suspense and action and lots of surprises. But it is the rich, complex
characterisation that impresses me most. This is high-quality fiction.
The
Cracks in the Kingdom
won the Ethel Turner Prize for young people's literature at the NSW Premier's
Literary Award in 2015 and was listed as a CBCA Older Readers' Notable book in
the same year.
Recommendation: This is long and challenging, and many
of your students will find it daunting. It reminds me a little, in its
intelligence and effortless artistry, of Philip Pullman's Northern Lights' trilogy. For some of your students, reading this
(and its prequel) will be a life-changing experience. Like me, they will
anxiously await Book 3. -HS
The Crossing
by Catherine Norton. Omnibus, 2014. ISBN
9781742990286. 181 pp.
This well-written and accessible novel is
narrated in the first person and in the present tense by Cara, who has grown up
in the shadow of the Wall. All that she can see from the windows of the apartment
where she has grown up is the blankness and greyness of the Wall.
Norton paints a compelling picture of an
authoritarian regime where the overblown rhetoric about Equality tries to
disguise the reality of a failed state. Food shortages are acute, and the
variety of food available very limited. Long queues for bread and milk begin
before dawn. Energy supplies are erratic. State censorship is strict: home
internet connections are forbidden and there are many empty shelves in the
library, where books have been removed. Despite the rhetoric about Equality, it
is obvious that party officials live very different lives from those of the
masses.
Cara's situation is especially bleak
because both her parents work for the Department of National Security. They are
entitled to little privileges - Cara and her sister, Lilith, have separate
rooms, unlike most siblings - but they can also be called away on duty for days
at a time. This time they will be gone for a month; twelve-year-old Cara and
nine-year-old Lilith will be on their own, with only an emergency phone number
to someone they don't know as backup. The Co-op is short of food as usual: the
best that their parents have been able to do in the way of supplies for a month
is eggs - all 92 of them.
The present-tense narrative is
interspersed with past-tense flashbacks as Cara reminisces about the events of
the previous year. Cara had become friends with Leon and his older sister Ava,
who live on the top floor of the apartment building with a view over the Wall.
Cara had never questioned her life; she had always been a compliant and
obedient child, eager to please; but her acquaintance with Leon's family
disturbs her. Unlike her own parents, who are cold and distant, Leon's parents
are warm and welcoming. Their balcony has a flourishing vegetable garden and
Leon's father, Marco, cooks nutritious and appetising meals. Marco even bakes a
birthday cake for Ava; Cara did not even know that people celebrated birthdays.
Cara's sister Lilith is academically
precocious and was away the previous summer at a special children's camp. Cara
spent a wonderful summer with Leon and Ava. Part of their time was spent in the
wilderness along the canal, a dangerous, forbidden area. Ava had made for
herself a bow and arrow and the children hunted rabbits in the bushes along the
canal - a valuable contribution to Marco's cooking. But Cara had been
successfully indoctrinated by the regime and she began to suspect Ava of
committing Suspicious Acts. Her report to her parents led to the children's
mother, Gretel, being arrested and taken away for re-education. A year later,
Cara feels deeply guilty for her betrayal - and increasingly sceptical of
everything she has been brought up to believe. Her re-connection with Leon's
family transforms her life.
Norton's Wall is obviously very like the
Berlin Wall, and the regime has lots in common with that of East Germany, but
the novel is not set in Berlin. The setting is more contemporary: the internet
exists, even if citizens of the regime have limited access to it. Norton's Wall
is symbolic of all attempts to divide people. It is also symbolic of all
authoritarian attempts to control people. As Ava says to Cora: 'Don't ever let
them wall up your mind.' Cora finally recognises that that is what almost happened
to her.
This won the Patricia Wrightson Prize for
children's literature at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2015.
Recommendation: Norton's characters are engaging and
the plot is tense. This is an accessible text that will broaden the horizons of
Stage 5 readers. It will work well as a class set. It could be used too
alongside two other books about walls - Sutcliffe's The Wall and Ellis's The Cat
at the Wall (both reviewed here).
Eat
the Sky, Drink the Ocean
edited by Kirsty Murray, Payal Dhar and
Anita Roy. Allen & Unwin, 2015. ISBN 9781743319789. 227 pp.
In late 2012,
in both Australia and India, women were attacked in a series of violent crimes.
This anthology is in part a response to that violence and also an opportunity
to use speculative fiction to explore feminism and gender issues. The editors
have drawn together a stellar cast of authors and illustrators from India and
Australia who have collaborated via skype and email on six graphic novels, ten
short stories and a play script. The editors chose the title because it
suggested ‘impossibilities, dreams, ambitions and a connection to something
larger than humanity alone’. This anthology represents fiction of a high
calibre and with an inclination to explore the collaborative and collective action
of women and girls rather than the more conventional actions of a single
protagonist.
Some of the
stories are grim but most hold out hope in diverse futures that are often
dystopian and degraded. Coming of age and rites of passage are central. I loved
Margot Lanagan’s ‘Cat Calls’ and Justine Larbalestier’s futuristic retelling of
Little Red Riding Hood in ‘Little Red Suit’. The wolves in both stories are all
too human. In ‘Cat Calls’ a young woman is harassed daily on the street as she
passes a group of men at the tea shop. In implementing a clever strategy to
rebuff the men she finds that collective action leaves her, and her companions,
more powerful and better able to deal with such crudities in the future.
The future in
‘Little Red Suit’ is bleak too as Poppy seeks to leave the crowded, underground
city of Sydney to visit her grandmother on a close island. Her mother and
others are reluctant to let her go but Poppy leaves and crosses the desolation
of the outside. She becomes aware of a human wolf, a hacker who invades the
integrity of her suit and taunts her. Poppy makes the terrible discovery of the
death of her grandmother but, when attacked by the hacker, she fights back
against him and prevails.
The graphic ‘Swallow
the Moon’ by Kate Constable and Priya Kuriyan which opens the collection has a
different perspective on the detritus from the past, as a group of young women
go through their own rite of passage as they travel down to the sea. In Anarkali, another graphic story, a spirited woman fights back against
the Emperor’s entombing of her for loving the Prince.
The anthology
canvasses many issues including body image, gender equality, the
environment and social justice. The
anthology also provides an insight into the creative and collaborative process
that formed the stories. A sixteen-page section allows the writers and
illustrators to narrate their individual journeys and there is detailed
biographical information about each contributor.
Recommendation: This anthology is already being
used in classrooms in NSW and should delight and inspire students in many other
Year 8 and 9 classrooms. It also meets requirements for cross-curriculum
content such as Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia and Sustainability. -DM
Finding
Audrey
by Sophie Kinsella. Doubleday, 2015. ISBN
9780857535490. 280 pp.
This British novel is first-person
narration in the voice of a teenage girl who has had some kind of breakdown as
a result of bullying at school. The exact nature of the bullying is never
specified; all we know is that it involved three girls, who were eventually
expelled - despite the head teacher's initial reluctance to believe Audrey's
version of the events. For many months Audrey has been having counselling and
taking medication, while being home-schooled. She is agrophobic but also
intensely uncomfortable about making eye contact with anyone, except her little
brother. She finds conversation with Linus, who comes to play computer games
with her older brother Frank, almost impossible. Linus recognises her distress
and begins to communicate with her by writing notes. The contact leads to a
growing friendship and the beginning of Audrey's recovery.
While Audrey is mentally disturbed, her
mother is crazy - what Audrey herself describes 'Not normal Mum-insane. Serious
insane.' Mum is addicted to the Daily
Mail and its lifestyle advice. In the opening chapter Mum throws son
Frank's computer from the upper-storey window because she has been unable to
break his addiction to computer games - and the Daily Mail has told her that computer games are bad for kids. Mum's
dependence on the Daily Mail provides
quite a lot of the novel's humour, as does Audrey's videotaping - on her
counsellor's advice - of unguarded moments in her family's daily life.
While Finding
Audrey deals with mental illness and bullying, it is not another
teenage-angst just-reading-it-makes-me-want-to-slit-my-wrists title. Kinsella's
touch is light: the emphasis is on recovery, not the trauma itself. We do
discover, through Audrey's experience, the terror of a panic attack, but we
also share with her the triumph of her gradual overcoming of her fear, as she
and Linus set themselves amusing challenges where they take it in turns to
confront a complete stranger with a bizarre request.
Recommendation: Girls in the Year 5 - 8 age group will
enjoy this. It could be considered as a class set for a girls-only class in
Year 7, but it may be a bit young - and, perhaps, a little lightweight. You
could make up a diverse and interesting wide reading selection of books about
bullying with Pat Schmatz's Bluefish,
Tony Palmer's Break of Day, Erin
Lange's Butter, Simon Rich's Elliot Allagash and Gordon Reece's Mice. -HS
Flight
by Nadia Wheatley and Armin Greder. Windy
Hollow Books, 2015. ISBN 9781922081483. Hardcover.
The cover is dark - a black sky above a
vast expanse of grey-brown desert. To one side are the tiny figures: a woman on
a donkey, a baby in her arms, and a man leading the donkey. At the right-hand
top of the page, in white capitals against the black is the title: 'Flight'.
Anyone with a Bible background can't help but think of the flight out of Egypt,
when Joseph and Mary sought refuge for the baby Jesus when Herod gave orders to
kill all Jewish newborns. The genius of Wheatley and Greder is that this is
both the story of that flight and of all the other flights since, including the
ones that are happening right now. Joseph was advised in a dream by an angel;
this family has 'been tipped off that the authorities are after their blood' so:
'Tonight is the night. The family has to flee.'
'The air is bitterly cold, and the wind
shrieks across the sands, as if to warn of the long, hard journey ahead.' The
words appear on the right-hand page, again against a totally black sky, beneath
which is the huge expanse of desert and just the silhouettes of the tiny
figures on the far left. I googled images for 'flight from Egypt' and the tiny
figures here and on the following page are similar to many of the traditional
representations of Jesus, Mary and Joseph fleeing Herod. But this is the
contemporary story as well. A double-page spread reproduces the cover image,
but this time we can see why the two adult figures are staring, alarmed, at the
horizon: 'The night's bombardment has started' and the black is broken with the
reds and oranges of fiery explosions. The figures are shown for the first time
in the foreground, a little larger, huddled together fearfully, the mother
wrapping both arms around the baby protectively, as 'the rumbling is coming
closer, closer ...' The next very dark double page has indistinct black forms
in the shape of tanks.
That this is a story about contemporary
refugees in the Middle East is confirmed with the image of the man kneeling on
a prayer mat, his shoes placed a little behind and aside, but the Christian
reference is constantly present too. As the little family continues through
jackal country, where the howling makes the woman's 'blood run cold', Greder's faintly
sketched bare trees look like crucifixes. This is not just the biblical story
of the flight out of Egypt, nor is it just the contemporary story of Muslim
refugees being forced to flee countries like Syria. It is both; we are
confronted by the fact of our common humanity.
The refugee camp evokes every image we've
ever seen of such places on our television screens. Wheatley's text emphasises
the endless, dreary waiting. On the final page, the baby has grown into a
little boy. With the optimism of childhood, he reassures his mother that they
will find a new home. Mother and child look out at us from the page, but can we
meet their gaze, knowing as we do how few new homes are available and how great
the numbers are who need them?
Recommendation: This is a very powerful picture book
for young adults from two of our national treasures. It must be used in our
classrooms and is suitable for use anywhere, from Year 7 to 11. It has the
advantage of not being about 'boat people', so that we can avoid confronting
the terrible stereotypes ('queue jumpers', 'economic migrants') that so many Australians,
sadly, believe. We can have a discussion about the human problem without
needing to engage with the political issues. And we can explore with our
students the artistic skill of these two creators and their ability to create,
with words and pictures, such an unforgettable story. -HS
The
Forgotten Pearl
by Belinda Murrell. Random House
Australia, 2012. ISBN 9781742753690. 289 pp.
This is a very readable historical novel
set in World War II. It begins in 2012 with Chloe telling her grandmother that
she has a school assignment to interview someone about their experiences during
the war. Grandmother Poppy has never before spoken about her experiences as a
teenager in World War II, but she decides that it is time to put her past on
the record. The narrative about Chloe frames the main story. Murrell uses
Poppy's story to provide a comprehensive picture of Australian civilian life in
World War II.
Poppy's narrative begins in Darwin in
October 1941, two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. She not
only witnesses the first air raid on Darwin, in which more than 200 people are
killed, but she is actively involved at the hospital, helping her parents who
are treating the injured. Evacuated from Darwin, Poppy is on a Sydney ferry the
night the Japanese submarines attack Sydney Harbour. The fate of her brother
Edward, captured in Singapore, is unknown. Her older sisters join the war
effort, discovering new lives that they could never have imagined pre-war.
Murrell's research is comprehensive and
the picture she paints includes the impact of the war on the Murata family,
Japanese pearl fishers who arrived in 1880 but who are interned as enemy aliens
after the attack on Darwin. There is the story too of Daisy, the household help
in Darwin, who was once a 'drover's boy', and of Jack and his family on a huge
Northern Territory cattle farm. It's a satisfying insight into a former
Australia.
Recommendation: This is a rewarding read for girls in
Years 7 and 8. Include it in a selection of Australian historical fiction for
Stage 4. Other titles could include Pamela Rushby's The Ratcatcher's Daughter (reviewed here), Robert Newton's Black Dog Gang, Jackie French's The Night They Stormed Eureka, Kerry
Greenwood's Journey to Eureka, Zana
Fraillon's No Stars to Wish On, Felicity
Pulman's A Ring through Time, Robert
Newton's Runner, Jackie French's The Road to Gundagai, Kirsty Murray's The Year It All Ended and Kate
Constable's Crow Country. -HS
The
Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie
by Kirsty Murray. Allen & Unwin, 2013.
ISBN 9781743317020. 216 pp.
Christmas
is cancelled and Lucy McKenzie has been sent to stay with her Aunt Big while
her mother flies to Paris to help her sister Claire who has had a serious
accident. Aunt Big, an artist, lives at an old house called Avendale, deep in
an isolated valley near Broken River. It’s a mysterious place of qualities. In
the dining room Lucy finds four giant murals, one for each of the seasons, and
the size and intensity of the paintings is unsettling. One night Lucy hears a shout
and stumbling into the dining room she sees the spring wall glowing, as if it
was a sunny day with the yellow flowers moving, and hears a small figure
calling her name and waving at her. Lucy
walks through the walls into the past. She meets April and her brother Tom in
an Avendale from the 1930s. The paintings become a magic portal for Lucy to
explore the past and her role in helping to save Avendale becomes clearer and
her friendship with April, Tom and Jimmy Tiger develops. She becomes closer to Aunt
Big as well, as their somewhat cranky relationship warms, especially in their
flight from a modern day bushfire.
Recommendation: This delightful
time travel novel should have strong appeal for Year 7. The lightness and
elegance of the writing and the clever plotting make this a very enjoyable book
to read. The characterisation rings very true and the novel provides a gentle
focus on the power and magic of art to inspire and transport us to other places
and times. The subtle enchantment of this novel really stands out. -DM
Freedom
Ride
by Sue Lawson. black dog books, 2015.
ISBN 9781925126365. 367 pp.
As the blurb on the back cover reveals,
this novel is 'based on true events' - the 1965 Freedom Ride when a bus load of
university students visited country towns in New South Wales to draw attention
to the prejudice and discrimination against Aborigines in those towns. Even
though people and places have been fictionalised, the novel does an excellent
job of telling the story of that important event - an event that young
Australians should know about. While kids might regard 1965 as ancient history,
it is worth pointing out to them that many of their grandparents were
relatively young at the time and that the deplorable conditions so well
depicted here are actually quite recent.
Lawson says that her fictional town of
Walgaree has been 'cobbled together from many towns throughout not only New
South Wales but the entire country'. It is hot, dry, dusty and spiritually
bleak. Aborigines live in settlements on the outskirts, ranging from the
Anglican and government mission to 'the Tip'. Handwritten signs saying 'No
Abos!!!' can be found in the front window of shops and pubs. Aboriginal men who
served in World War II are excluded from the RSL. Aboriginal women wait submissively
in shops, to be served only after all white customers - including children -
are satisfied. Aboriginal children are forbidden to swim in the local pool when
white children are there.
While the novel narrates the events of
the Freedom Ride and exposes conditions in country towns of the time, its
centre is the personal story of a young boy and his seriously dysfunctional
family. This is the story that engages readers. Robbie lives a joyless
existence with Nan and Dad, both of whom are brutally racist and emotionally
stunted. From the beginning, he is an outsider, an easy victim of the town
bullies. Robbie's limited world broadens when he is offered a holiday job by
Barry Gregory, who has returned to the town from overseas to take over the
caravan park on the death of his father. Barry and his mother, Mrs Gregory, are
warm and life-affirming and Robbie blossoms emotionally in their company.
Robbie is amazed when Barry tells him that in London he saw: 'Black people
eating, drinking, shopping, even living with white people'. Robbie is even more
amazed when Barry hires an Aboriginal boy, Micky, to help with the work in the
caravan park - and even invites him into the house to share a meal! 'The only
Aborigines I'd heard who went inside a white person's home worked for them,
doing cleaning and washing. And I was just about certain they didn't eat with
their bosses.'
Robbie's personal journey hinges on his
relationship with Micky. He is furious with himself for not defending Micky:
I shouldn't have called Micky a boong.
Spineless.
Useless.
Pathetic.
Again.
He is ashamed that he failed to warn
Micky that some white boys intended to beat him up, and he is miserable that he
pretends to his father that he and Micky never work together at the caravan
park. But there is nothing like getting to know someone to dissipate prejudice.
By the time Robbie hears about the Freedom Ride on the television, he reacts to
Dad's racist comments by thinking of Micky:
... there was nothing useless or dirty or stupid about him.
He was funny and worked hard. He was smart too. Actually, he was just, well,
normal. And that man on the television, Charles Perkins, spoke better than half
of Walgaree.
It is of course the arrival of the
Freedom Bus in Walgaree that brings issues to a head, especially when Barry and
his mother offer the students accommodation at the caravan park. Lawson
reproduces incidents that actually occurred, such as the one where the
president of the RSL is desperate to keep an Aboriginal returned soldier out of
the RSL Club, as happened in Walgett, and the one concerning the demonstration
outside the swimming pool, as happened in Moree. For Robbie, his discovery of
the unfairness of racial discrimination is complicated by his recognition of his
father's appalling hypocrisy. He finally finds the courage he thought he didn't
have.
The other discovery that Robbie makes is
purely personal. His father and grandmother have been lying to him for years.
For the reader, the revelation is shocking but it makes sense of the suffocating
family tension that Lawson evokes so well. As Robbie struggles to come to terms
with his trauma, it is his new 'family' - Barry, Mrs Gregory and Micky - who
provide him with support.
While I think this novel has a great deal
to offer young readers, I don't think it is Lawson's best work. It is trying
perhaps a little too hard to make sure that readers get the point. I think
Jackie French is sometimes guilty of the same thing, but it's perhaps
forgivable in a novel that you are going to use for class discussion, one that
is exploring issues to which many students will bring their own prejudices and
stereotypes. One consequence of this concern to make the issues clear to
students is a tendency towards caricature: the contrast, for example, between
the terrible Nan and the lovely Mrs Gregory is just too stark. On the other
hand, the Aboriginal boy Micky comes over just as Robbie describes him - funny,
smart and decent.
Recommendation: This is obviously a suitable text for
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders' Histories and Cultures.
This would work well as a Stage 4 class
novel. Certainly, it gives an excellent picture of the Freedom Ride and of
racial discrimination in Australia at the time, but that is not the reason to
use it in the English classroom. We are English teachers after all, not social
science teachers. What Freedom Ride
does well is use first-person narration to follow a young boy's personal
journey of discovery on several levels, including his journey from ignorance to
understanding about racial discrimination and his recognition of the need to
stand up for what he believes. -HS
This
powerful and impressive novel focuses on the prejudice against Aboriginal
people in the 60s, when Charlie Perkins organised the first freedom rides in
rural Australia.
It is
1965 and sixteen-year-old Robbie is growing up in Wagaree, a country town in
NSW where he lives with his distant dad and cranky Nan. When he gets a holiday
job with Barry Gregory and Barry’s mother at the local caravan park, the
contrast between their warmth and welcome and the coldness of his home
environment is stark.
Barry
is a man who has returned to Wagaree after many overseas experiences and he is
appalled by the discrimination against Aboriginal people. As Robbie gets to
know Barry and his mother and works alongside Mikey Menzies, a local Aboriginal
teenager, he too becomes troubled by the way the Aboriginal people are treated
in the town. His attitudes begin to shift. He sees them served last in shops or
not at all, and knows that the town always blames them for any trouble. Some of
the local boys he knows are involved in vandalizing the Aboriginal mission and
in beating up Mikey. Robbie is increasingly isolated from them. When the
freedom riders come to town he has the opportunity to stand up for what he
really thinks.
Lawson
writes well and really captures small town life. Robbie’s appalling Nan is a
wonderful piece of characterisation, but it is Robbie who stands out. His
struggle with prejudice and his growing courage and independence are powerfully
portrayed and there is a wonderful twist in his personal life as well. The
racially abusive terms used at the time are reproduced here and have a visceral
impact as ignorance and xenophobia are fully exposed in the confrontation
between the townsfolk, the freedom riders and the Aboriginal people at the
swimming pool.
In a guest post on Kids
Book Review Sue Lawson explained why she wrote her novel and what she hoped
to achieve. She said:
We need to know about our past and remember it, so we can
ensure that [such] treatment and behaviour never occurs again. And we must
remember the courage and passion of not only those students on the Freedom
Ride, but others who have taken a stand when staying quieter would have been
easier.
And if we know our past, we have a better understanding of
the present - the importance of Reconciliation, the Stolen Generation and land
rights. For me, Freedom
Ride is about fostering empathy and
starting a conversation.
http://www.kids-bookreview.com/2015/07/guest-post-sue-lawson-on-writing.html
Recommendation: This novel
would be an excellent choice to explore a range of issues associated with
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders' History and Culture with Year 9 or 10
students. -DM
Goodbye
Stranger
by Rebecca Stead. Text Publishing, 2015.
ISBN 9781783443192. 304 pp.
Rebecca
Stead has a fine publishing record with When
You Reach Me and First Light both
notable for their intriguing content and remarkable plot twists. In Goodbye Stranger Stead ventures into the
vexed area of photo texting, and, in this case, the matter of increasingly
revealing photo texting between school students.
Bridge
(never call her Bridget), Tabitha and Emily are best friends; they made a pact
never to fight and have kept to it. Emily is the school star and getting lots
of attention from Patrick. Bridge had a bad accident a few years ago. She has
taken to wearing cat ears, is shy and more prosaic and starts to enjoy time
talking with Sherm. Tabitha is a powerhouse out to save the world. They go to
school and talk and learn and make mistakes and get on with growing up. But
when Patrick sends Em a photo of his knee and asks for a selfie back the reader
can see there may be trouble ahead. There is a twist as well with an
unidentified person voicing in the second person some of the chapters. It
doesn’t appear to be any of the main characters so who is it and why is she
skipping school? How the three friends work out their problems and how the
unidentified voice is brought into the picture are deftly handled.
Recommendation: This novel covers
issues many Year 7 and 8 students will find pertinent in their lives.
Friendship and love are mixed up with growing sexuality, the use of technology
and making sense of relationships. It’s a potent mix and well controlled by
this composed and compassionate writer. -DM
I
Am Juliet
by Jackie French. Angus & Robertson,
2014. ISBN 9780732297985. 207 pp.
French has told Shakespeare's story of
Romeo and Juliet from Juliet's point of view. Most of the novel is first-person
narration in Juliet's voice. Juliet's voice as written by French is appealing:
she is a strong and perceptive character, frustrated by the limitations placed
upon her by her gender and her social status. Like Shakespeare's Juliet,
French's Juliet is mature beyond her years and has huge courage, well aware of
the dangers of taking the Friar's poison; but French is able through the
first-person narration to provide insights into Juliet's motivation that the
play-format cannot offer. French's Juliet is inspired not just by her love for
Romeo but by a conviction that their marriage will unite the warring families
and heal Verona.
The first-person narration works well,
but the novel is given greater depth because Juliet's narrative is framed - in
the first and last chapters of the novel - by that of Rob Goughe, 'youngest
apprentice actor of lord Hundson's men', who has been cast as Juliet in Master
Shakespeare's new play. Rob is astounded that the playwright has given so many
speeches to a mere girl: 'So many words! And yet, what words.' Initially
sceptical about how the audience will respond, he is captivated as he first
reads and then performs Master Shakespeare's script. (Actors - even lead actors
- weren't given the whole script in Shakespeare's day, only those scenes in
which they participated. But that's a minor quibble and, in the context,
totally excusable as poetic licence.) The framing narrative is an obvious
invitation for students to explore the nature of Shakespeare's theatre. French
has provided some useful notes at the end of the novel to help in such an
exploration.
French draws on those marvellous words in
Juliet's narrative, at times like the first meeting with Romeo, in the balcony
scene and at dawn after their wedding night. She also gives perceptive insight
into the life of an Elizabethan thirteen-year-old girl from a wealthy family.
Juliet knows that she will always be her father's daughter and her husband's
wife: there will be no opportunity ever to be herself. There are several scenes
where we see her serving women laboriously dressing her, as if she is a doll.
We see her play her role at her father's banquet: 'My face and heart ached from
smiling.' Her only purpose in life is to make a good marriage that will enhance
her family's wealth and status. Shakespeare captures unforgettably Juliet's joy
in falling in love, but French shows that it is also a liberation: for the
first time, she can be herself. She is the one who proposes - so different to
her life until then of submission and obedience.
French has fleshed out the characters of
Tybalt and Paris. Tybalt, a swaggering, lecherous bully, had always assumed he
would become Juliet's husband and her father's heir. There is a sickening
moment when, after the announcement of her betrothal to Paris, she finds the
pet lovebird Tybalt had given her dead at the bottom of its cage, its neck
snapped. Paris is dealt with rather more kindly, showing true compassion to
Juliet, although he mistakenly believes her grief is for Tybalt, not for Romeo.
There is some interesting background, too, for the Friar - one of the few
friars who had stayed, after the King had ordered the monasteries disbanded,
'bound to the new church now', but aware that their existence is fragile: 'The
friar's eyes were uneasy. He would break God's law if he married me to Paris.
If he did not, he faced death or exile.'
Despite the nominal location of Verona,
French - like Shakespeare - sets Juliet's story firmly in Elizabethan London in
the 1590s. As always, French's research has been meticulous, and she vividly
evokes the setting. Juliet is carried to the Friar in her sedan chair. Modesty
requires that she keep the curtains closed, but she can smell London - 'the
sawdust and vomit stink of the tavern, the stench of chamber-pots, the blood
smell of the butchers' row', and she can hear the shouts of the street-sellers.
When she arrives at the church she is accosted by beggars of all kinds. Later,
in a scene that has no parallel in the original, Juliet tries to run away to
find Romeo in Mantua: she is robbed and assaulted; even the woman who saves her
from rape strips her of her clothes.
Please note that, although there is
nothing in French's text that could be described as sexually explicit, French -
like Shakespeare - does not shy away from Juliet's sensuousness and her joy in
lovemaking. While I regard that as one of the great strengths of the novel,
there may be some in your community who find it offensive.
This was listed as a CBCA Older Readers'
Notables book in 2015.
Recommendation: This is an enjoyable novel for girls in
Stages 3 and 4. It's a great addition to a Stage 4 unit of work introducing
Shakespeare, especially as the framing narrative leads straight into a study of
the theatrical conventions of the time. Use as well French's excellent Macbeth and Son, which asks the
troubling question: does it matter if
Shakespeare was telling deliberate lies, out of self-interest?
In her notes at the end, French talks
about students' reluctance to read Shakespeare because of 'all those words', and
how their attitude changes when they see a good film version. It would be
wonderful while introducing students to Shakespeare at Stage 4 to show them
Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, but as it
is rated M that won't be possible in most schools. However, you may get
permission to show carefully selected excerpts - and enterprising students who
enjoy them may well source a copy of the film for home viewing. -HS
I'll
Give You the Sun
by Jandy Nelson. Walker Books, 2015. ISBN
9781406326499. 429 pp.
This is a powerful young adult novel that
is so superbly written that the writing almost gets in the way of the story.
You want to stop and re-read - and perhaps write down that perfect paragraph or
exactly-right image. Half the story is told by Noah, who is a highly original
and creative artist: he sees the world in sharply realised images, like this:
I can't lie awake in bed for another minute, so I put on
some clothes and climb onto the roof to see if the new kid's on his. He's not,
which isn't totally surprising since it's not even six in the morning and
barely light yet, but I kept thinking while I was tossing around in bed like a caught
fish, that he was awake too, that he was up on his roof shooting electric bolts
out of his fingers through the ceiling and into me and that's why I couldn't
sleep. But I was wrong. It's just me up here with the fading fathead moon and
every screaming seagull from far and wide visiting Lost Cove for a dawn
concert. I've never been outside this early, didn't realize it was so loud. And
so dreary, I think, taking in all the gray huddled-up old men disguised as
trees.
Noah is gay and he's just fallen totally
in love at first sight with the boy who has just moved in next-door. But his
town is seriously homophobic and his father is constantly berating him for his
lack of assertive masculinity, so coming out is not an option. When Noah and
Brian take a selfie of their heads together on the pillow the reader knows that
disaster is not far away.
Noah's love for boy-next-door Brian is
just one of the difficult relationships that Nelson explores. The most
important is Noah's relationship with his twin sister, Jude. For thirteen years
they have been inseparable. They can communicate without speaking. But there is
an uncomfortable shift in the first chapter, when it becomes clear that their
mother - a noted art critic - has recognised that Noah's artistic talent is
special. One of the games Noah and Jude play is this:
If we were drowning, who would Dad save
first? (Jude.) For thirteen years, Mom's stumped us. We had absolutely no idea
who she'd dredge out of the water first.
Until now.
And without sharing a glance, we both
know it.
Perhaps their relationship could have
survived this, if it hadn't been followed by a shocking, totally random tragedy,
for which they both feel responsible. As we read, we don't know for some time
what that tragedy has been. We just know that, between the opening chapter -
'This is how it all begins' - in Noah's voice and the next section - 'The
History of Luck', narrated by Jude, there has been a three-year gap and
everything has changed.
This is a young adult book, not a
children's book. The language may confront some readers. The frankness of the
sex scenes may concern others - although I found Jude's awkward coupling with
the older Zephyr much more difficult to read than the love scenes between Noah
and Brian. This is a young adult book too because it deals with big, difficult
issues, and it knows that ethical questions are complex. It is also a serious
book about art and the power of creativity. The novel explores the importance
of art in the lives of Noah, Jude, and their mother. All three connect in
different ways with the mysterious world-famous sculptor Guillermo Garcia.
Big issues, big emotions, characters that
you care deeply about ... This is an important young adult novel.
Recommendation: This won't work as a class set
everywhere. In some schools the language will be unacceptable. With some
classes it will be too long and complex. But if it is right for the class you
are teaching, you will find plenty to talk about - including the clever use of
the alternate narrators and the skilful plotting that keeps the reader turning
the pages avidly. Try it from Year 9 - 11. -HS
Inbetween
Days
by Vikki Wakefield. Text Publishing,
2015. ISBN 9781922182364. 352 pp.
Stuck in between is a hard place to be
and seventeen year Jacklin is well and truly stuck. It’s 1994 and she’s stuck
in the small town of Mobius, the gateway to a popular suicide forest. She’s
stuck by sex with Luke who doesn’t love her while she loves him. She’s stuck
living with her older sister Trudy and estranged from her parents, working at
the roadhouse at a job she could lose and feeling out of control. She counts to
stay in control. When Jeremiah, the boy next-door, returns to help his mum,
Jack is given another choice to consider.
As Wakefield says this is a ‘story about
love, choices, change and moving on’ and you couldn’t have a better novelist to
help explore them. Everyone makes mistakes in this novel and Jack most of all,
as she navigates that perilous time between adolescence and adulthood. The
small town where everyone knows your business and no-one new stays is perfectly
captured, (‘people drove in by accident and left on purpose’) and yet, as the experiences
of Pope, the solitary camper in the Nula State Forest, point out, many
townspeople have a heart and they do care.
Families are not easy and neither is
communication in Jack’s family. Her
parents rarely speak to each other and even less to their two girls. Christmas
is a disaster and yet you get the feeling something is going to be salvaged
here. Wakefield also charts the course of the relationship between Jack and
Jeremiah with delicacy and wryness. There’s growing up to do for both of them
and, because Wakefield's characters are nuanced and real, the reader has hope
that change is possible.
Recommendation: This rites of passage novel is a
perfect fit for Year 10 or 11 students. Be aware of expletives and restrained
sex scenes but enjoy the humour, the realism, the dog, the friends, the old
drive-in, the whale, the awkwardness and the anger as well as the vicarious
experience of capturing what’s running around in Jack’s head. I loved this book
and relished reading it. It’s a fine addition to the best of Australian young
adult fiction. -DM
Island Home
by Tim
Winton. Penguin, 2015. ISBN 9781926428761. 256 pp.
I have three editions of Tim Winton’s
first non-fiction memoir, Land’s Edge,
subtitled ‘a coastal memoir’. Three copies because each one was so different,
with contrasting covers and illustrations, and because I loved the book.
I only have one copy of Island Home. But I was hooked early by
its Gerson /Getty image which looks like a realistic Fred Williams on the dust
jacket cover and the beautifully designed John Canty endpapers picturing a surf
(seen from above) rolling in on a nearly deserted beach. But there are a few
people in this landscape and that’s part of the point of the text.
The memoir begins with two epigraphs.
Judith Wright’s iconic line from her poem ‘The Surfer,’ is first: ‘Turn home,
the sun goes down; swimmer turn home’. This is followed by Neil Murray’s line
‘My island home is waiting for me’ from his song ‘My island home’. Incidentally,
that home is Elcho Island off the coast of Arnhem Land in the Northern
Territory. These two lines are the perfect introduction to this text. Winton
has been a passionate surfer all his life and a keen observer of the Australian
landscape around him. More lately he has been a strong advocate for paying
attention to our surroundings and taking notice. By the end of the memoir, he
concludes: 'This earth is our home, our only home. And if home and family aren’t
sacred what else can be?' (p233).
In so many Tim Winton novels and short
stories the landscape has been positioned as another character, the natural and
urban world intruding on and shaping the story and the lives within it. In this
memoir Tim Winton explores his relationship with the Australian landscape. The
structure is interesting. He divides the text into short observations and memories
of specific landscapes; for example, County Offaly 1988, Freemantle 1999 and
Northam 1995. These are interspersed with longer, more reflective chapters such
as ‘The island seen and felt’, ‘Settlers at the edge', ‘Barefoot and unhurried’
and the wonderfully evocative ‘The corner of the eye’. Just the titles alone
would be great starters for creative writing exercises for students. Winton want us to re-observe what’s around
us, to value and protect what we can. Understanding and appreciating the
Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the land is critically important in his
eyes:
People were chanting and dancing and
painting here tens and tens of thousands of years before the advent of the
toga. This is true antiquity. Few landscapes have been so deeply known. And
fewer still have been so lightly inhabited. (p. 15)
There is a strong argument running
through the book that equates the landscape with part of our family. First
sounded in ‘The island seen and felt’:
The country leans in on you. It weighs
down hard. Like family. To my way of thinking it is family. (p. 23)
It re-emerges in other chapters,
particularly in the last one, ‘Paying respect’, and in the poem found there by
Kakadu elder, Big Bill Neidjie, the father of Kakadu National Park, from Story about Feeling a part of which
appears below.
… that tree, grass…that all like our father
Dirt, earth, I sleep with this earth.
Grass… just like your brother.
In my blood in my arm this grass.
This dirt for us because we’ll be dead,
We’ll be going this earth. This the story now.
Recommendation:
Island Home is a
wonderful memoir and a powerful text to engage students in Stages 5 or 6. An
exploration of both Land’s Edge, the
1993 memoir, and Island Home and a
discussion about the merits and differences between the two texts and what they
represent in the life of one of Australian’s best writers could be profitable
in the classroom. A Winton novel or short story could be added to the mix to
examine Winton's statement in Island Home
that “I persisted with place as a starting point for my stories.’ (p. 137) -DM
Kidglovz
by Julie Hunt, illustrated by Dale
Newman. Allen & Unwin, 2015. ISBN 9781742378527. 271 pp.
This is an intriguing graphic novel about
a child prodigy known as Kidglovz whose passion and talent for music become a
curse; he is imprisoned by a harsh guardian named Dr Spin who is interested
only in the child's capacity to make money. Dr Spin advertises himself as a
musical impresario, although there is a rumour that he was once a snake-oil
salesman. Dr Spin even starves the child, so that he will remain small: child
prodigies need to be children, the smaller and cuter the better. Kidglovz's
music teacher, Lovegrove, loves him and wants him to live a normal life but she
is Dr Spin's sister and powerless against him. Life changes when a child thief,
Shoestring, breaks into Kidglovz's room. A plot to rescue Kidglovz is hatched
but things go badly wrong and both Kidglovz and Shoestring face strange and terrifying
ordeals.
The setting is never specified but it is
European and probably nineteenth century. The black and white drawings are
harshly realistic but there is a framework of mystery and magic. The
introductory page sets the scene:
There is a town in the mountains not far from here where
people lock their pianos on the night of the full moon. It makes no difference
- the keys move up and down and the air is filled with wild music.
This is followed by eight pages of
wordless images telling a story about a young woman who is robbed of something
precious by a travelling salesman. The story does not make much sense at this
stage; it is only much later that we realise that it is a flashback, providing
vital information about Kidglovz's origins. These eight pages precede the title
page, which is followed by the first of five parts telling the story in
graphic-novel format.
Like most graphic novels, the illustrator
uses a variety of frames. No two pages are alike, and much of the detail is
very satisfying: an unframed image reaches up the page to accommodate a boy
climbing a ladder; a series of six frames of different sizes shows the two boys
following a dog, Hugo, through a scary underground tunnel, with the first frame
almost filled with the dog's head as he sniffs out a trail; a double-spread has
four rounded frames (and no text) summing up peasant life in the mountains
during winter, like glimpses through a window. The written text is at all times
minimal; it is the pictures that mostly tell the story.
Recommendation: This is well worth studying as a class
text, probably in Years 8 or 9. It will be hugely popular with students who are
already fans of the graphic-novel format, but the narrative is so compelling
and the characters so interesting that most will be won over. Make up a wide reading selection of graphic
novels, including Brian Selznick's The
Invention of Hugo Cabret, which has some similarities to Kidglovz. Encourage students to read
more than one and to compare the different storytelling techniques, including
the different use of images. -HS
Laurinda
by Alice Pung. Black Inc, 2014. ISBN
9781863956925. 336 pp.
This novel has strong autobiographical
elements. Like Pung, the protagonist, Lucy, is Asian Australian, raised in a
bleak outer suburb of Melbourne. Like Pung, she moves out of the world of her
family and friends to attend a posh private ladies' college (on an 'Equal
Access Scholarship') where she feels alienated, powerless and angry. She falls
under the influence of the power group at school - the 'Cabinet' - bitchy rich
girls who are ruthless to anyone vulnerable, including their teachers. Her
introduction to the world of the wealthy girls at Laurinda makes Lucy angry,
too, with her background, intensely embarrassed by her parents' poverty and
their ethnicity. This is a coming-of-age story where the protagonist's search
for identity involves both ethnicity and class.
The story is told in a series of letters
to Linh, who appears to be a friend from her previous school. This narrative
device is clever, allowing Lucy's point of view to dominate. Linh seems to be
rather different from Lucy: much more assertive, confidently part of her
lower-class suburb. It is a shock to discover that 'Linh' is Lucy's middle
name: that she is writing the letters to her other self.
One of the strengths of the book is its
depiction of the long, hard struggle of newly arrived migrants to carve out a
life for their children in the new country. Lucy's mother is an outworker,
slaving for hours in her garage sewing clothes. Her father works long hours for
little pay in the local carpet factory. Lucy herself has to take on most of the
domestic chores, including caring for her little brother, as both her parents
are always working. There are lots of little details of family life, such as
the habit of eating dinner sitting on the floor with old newspapers as a
tablecloth. Such family habits become an embarrassment to Lucy as she realises
how they would be perceived by her fellow students at Laurinda.
Much of the book is about the day-to-day
life of school. While the depiction of Lucy's family life is realistic, school
life has almost a cartoonish quality, as have the scenes involving the wealthy
mothers who regard Lucy as 'your little Pygmalion project'. Lucy's bitterness
distorts the picture:
There was something creepy about the femininity at Laurinda,
something so cloistered and yet brimming with stifled sex that it reminded me
of the Victorian whalebone corsets we once saw at the Werribee Park Mansion,
which kept everything cramped tight, until the stitches unravelled and out
poured mounds of naked pink and white. It was the femininity of tiny éclairs
and teacups, crocheted collars and little pearl earrings, the
young-girl-to-old-woman transition that skipped sexuality altogether ...
This was how 'niceness' was policed - not through directives
about virtue, but through conformity in dress and manners. The result was that
anyone who was slightly different, who had a heartbeat that didn't race at the
latest Laura Ashley creation but at George-with-the-one-eyebrow in the Auburn
Academy soccer team, anyone who liked her colours bold and not pastel, who
loved her jokes explicit and not coy - any of those types were automatically
cast as sluts, and so became pariahs.
Pung has a strong satirical eye, and
satire exaggerates and distorts. The backcover blurb describes the book as
'funny, feisty and moving', and there is certainly plenty of humour. However,
the humour is often bitter, even black. The writing is vivid and precise, but
it is at its liveliest when it is skewering someone. John Marsden has described
the writing as 'sharp as a serpent's fangs', not a bad description of the author's
satire:
Stanley is a place where many people work in banking and
advertising - that is, their mums clean banks and their brothers put Safeway
ads into mailboxes. It's a place where people have four cars in their driveways
- but only one that is working. It's a place where the bogan and the bogasian
sometimes coexist peacefully, but more often don't.
That's funny, but it's also bitter. I
sometimes found the humour uncomfortable and the anger off-putting.
This was a CBCA Older Readers' Notables
list 2015.
Recommendation: This novel resonates with many teenage
girls who identify with Lucy's search for self, especially girls who have grown
up in ethnic communities. Lots of readers compare it to Looking for Alibrandi, although most acknowledge that it does not
have the warmth of Marchetta's novel. It is, like Looking for Alibrandi, an interesting historical document. Wealthy
girls' schools in our capital cities are very different today. -HS
The
Marvels
by Brian Selznick. Scholastic, 2015. ISBN
9781407159454. 640 pp.
Spanning over 200 years and moving
between graphic and text representation, this marvellous novel (how could I
resist?) asks questions about the nature of stories and invites the
reader/viewer to try and work out the connections between the graphic and text
sections of the book.
At over 650 pages this novel seems a big
ask for Year 7 or 8 students but, like The
Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck,
over half the book is narrative illustration.
The first section starts in 1766 and
tells the story of the Marvel brothers. They are putting on a performance on
the ship Kraken when a terrible storm shipwrecks them. The younger boy, Billy,
survives but Marcus, the older brother, dies. Billy and his dog, Tar, are
rescued, and Billy goes on to work at and write for the Royal Theatre. His
adopted son begins four generations of actors at the Royal Theatre until
Leontes, an artist rather than an actor, runs away. But flames at the Royal
draw him back to try and rescue his deranged grandfather and the first part of
the novel ends in flames with a blank page to follow.
The prose section of the novel opens in
1990 with Joseph Jervis lost in London. He’s run away from school and is
looking for his uncle Albert Nightingale, who lives in number 18 Folgate Street.
He is helped to find the house by Frankie, a young person looking for a dog.
Joseph receives an unfriendly welcome from his uncle but Joseph becomes sick
and gets to stay in an amazing house, full of wonders and old fireplaces and
tales and history. He begins to piece together the story of the house and of
his uncle, which seems related to the Marvel family and the Royal Theatre. He
and Frankie become a team to puzzle out the answers. But surprises await them and
the resolution of the two is tested. There are dark moments in the story, AIDS
rears its horrible head and there is loss and sorrow as well as joy, but the
overwhelming feeling is one of wonder and a desire to explore and understand.
The production of this book is wonderful,
with Selnick’s beautifully detailed drawing, often in extreme close-up. The
magical blue cover is detailed in gold, echoed in the gilt edges of the pages.
There are many connections, both pictorial and prose, between the two sections
and the short final graphic section which takes us to 2007.
Selnick says much of the inspiration for
this novel came from Dennis Severs’ House at 18 Folgate Street, a famous brick
and motor ‘time machine’ which is one of London’s most popular tourist
attractions. Dennis’s obituary can be read at the end of the novel. Dennis
created the Jervises, a fictional family to inhabit his house, and Selnick used
aspects of Dennis’s life, and that of his partner David Milne, to inhabit his
novel.
Recommendation:
The Marvels is a rare
book and a challenging one but there will be students in every school who will
fall in love with it. At $34.99 it is not cheap but it is a wonderful read and
should be in classrooms and libraries everywhere. Students in Years 7 and 8
will be especially drawn to it. -DM
Mysterious
Traveller
by Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham,
illustrated by P. J. Lynch. Walker Books, 2014 (2013). ISBN 9781406354528. 48
pp.
This beautiful story has the aura of a
traditional legend. It is an illustrated short story in picture-book format. It
begins with a thrilling pursuit through the desert:
There were five riders but six camels, travelling fast. Desperately
fast. They were being chased, hunted. But because of the fading light, and the
dust thrown up by the camels' feet they could not tell how close their pursuers
were.
But an even deadlier threat awaits the
riders: a huge, overwhelming desert storm. Only the riderless camel, Jin-Jin,
survives - and the woven basket it had been carrying. The old man Issa, famous
as the region's most skilful guide, finds Jin-Jin protecting the basket, in
which there is a baby girl. Issa names the child Mariama and brings her up as
his grandchild. She accompanies him everywhere and, when he loses his sight,
she becomes his eyes, enabling him to continue to guide people through the
desert.
In traditional stories lost babies always
have a fascinating past, and Peet and Graham do not disappoint. Few traditional
stories, however, are told quite a lyrically as this:
She learned that for a guide everything had a meaning. The
shape of a thorn tree, the way sand swirled from the crest of a dune, the
length and colour of a shadow, the call of a bird, the height of a cloud.
The prose brings to life this strange
desert world and the simple lives of Issa and Mariama. The relationship between
them is a delight. For me it recalled vividly Silas Marner and his Eppie: a
very, very different world, of course, but a story with many similarities. It's
a celebration of love, wisdom and goodness.
Lynch's illustrations are perfect. There
are many full-page paintings, boarded by Arabic tiles. The colours are mostly
muted, Mariama's blue cloak contrasting with the desert colours of the
landscape. Towards the end, there is a glorious double-page spread in vivid blues
and browns, depicting the landscape of mountains and valleys - 'so beautiful,
so magical' - that Mariama sees from the top of the cliff when she and Issa are
searching for lost travellers: a landscape of 'peaks that were flat-topped and
grooved like huge and ancient teeth. Others were bent and twisted like goats'
horns, while others were slender and pointed like minarets.'
This is a delightful work in its own
right, but it's also a boon at the present time to have such a wonderfully
positive story from the Middle East.
Recommendation: Use this in a unit of work on
traditional stories, at any level. Consider using it as a class-set text in
Years 7 or 8. It has the depth and quality to allow whole class exploration. -HS
Newt's
Emerald
by Garth Nix. Allen & Unwin, 2015.
ISBN 9781760112653. 232 pp.
This is utterly silly and deliciously
enjoyable. It is very, very different from the Garth Nix we are familiar with,
except for the skill of the writing. In an afterword Nix explains that this is
based on a very early, rejected work, in which the Regency romance story was
embedded clumsily within a contemporary thriller structure. Thankfully, Nix
never threw away the original and he has transformed it here into a wonderful
romp. The front-cover blurb alerts us to the fact that it is 'A Regency romance
with a magical twist', but that's too simplistic. It's a clever over-the-top
riff on Georgette Heyer. The pomposity of the opening paragraph is superb:
Of all the birthdays she'd had, Truthful decided her present
one was the best and most exciting. It seemed very fine to be eighteen years
old and to finally be on the brink of being launched into fashionable society
in London. Not that she was dissatisfied with Newington Hall and its beautiful
gardens and lawns that sloped down to the widely envied cliff walk bordering
the vast perspective of the English Channel. Nor was she in any way exasperated
by living with her sole surviving parent, Admiral the Viscount Newington, even
though she might well have been, since he had come late to fatherhood, was past
sixty, and was inclined to be curmudgeonly when he suffered from the gout.
I love the inversion of the opening
sentence and the use of the passive in the second. I love the old-fashioned
structure of the 'not ... nor' structure of the third and fourth sentences, to
say nothing of the complexity of clauses in that final sentence, or the
magnificent use of the adjective 'curmudgeonly'. I knew immediately to expect
what Graham Greene would have called an 'entertainment'.
In the first chapter Lady Truthful's
precious heirloom emerald, which may be capable of powerful magic, is stolen.
In her quest to recover the emerald, Lady Truthful is not only launched into
London society but is forced to disguise herself from time to time as her male
French cousin, so that she can venture into places no young lady could ever go.
Disguised, she has a confrontation in the street with a young man - 'his
features, if not set in anger, could be described as handsome. He had a
particularly fine shock of jet-black hair' - and every romance reader knows
that she has met the man of her dreams. Of course, this is page 54 and there are
almost 200 to go, so there are many obstacles to overcome: he hates women,
having been betrayed by one; they are both nearly killed several times by the
evil sorceress, Lady Amelia Plathenden, who has stolen the emerald; he may
already have a fiancee, and - most concerning of all - he may be fairly poor
and of ordinary (non-aristocratic) stock.
This is a rollicking adventure story,
with some highly entertaining sequences, such as the episode where the pair are
kidnapped by pirates in Lady Plathenden's service and the handsome if angry
hero is lashed to the bowsprit, slowly drowning, while Lady Truthful saves the
day - and his life - by using the sheets and blankets from the pirate captain's
cabin to construct a sea anchor. The finale of the Masquerade Ball in the
Brighton Assembly Rooms is splendid, with even the prince regent's life
threatened by the tsunami that the sorceress has called up with the powers of
Lady Truthful's emerald. As we always knew it would, finally love conquers all.
Recommendation: Some of Garth Nix's fans will be
disappointed, and even bewildered, but this is a great opportunity to introduce
him to readers who might have been daunted by the Old Kingdom quartet or the Keys
to the Kingdom series. Such new readers may not be ready to tackle his
other works immediately after reading this, but they may explore Georgette
Heyer - and, later, when they are ready to explore the works that have made
Nix's reputation, they might hopefully also venture into Jane Austen and even
Patrick O'Brien, as Nix recommends in an after-note.
Feel-good books for young adults are
rare. Genuinely funny books are even rarer. Boys, sadly - unless they can be
tempted to try it because they are Garth Nix fans - will be reluctant, but
girls in Years 6-8 will enjoy this thoroughly.
Wide
reading suggestions:
Make up a book box of feel-good romance for your Stage 4 girls. Include such diverse
titles as Kate Constable's New Guinea
Moon, Shirley Marr's Preloved,
Karen Wood's Rain Dance and Under the Flame Tree, Lili Wilkinson's The Zigzag Effect and A Pocketful of Eyes, and Kristen
Chandler's Girls Don't Fly. Forego
the temptation to set an assignment on their reading; just let them enjoy. Newt's Emerald is, also, of course, an
alternative history. Make up a collection of alternative histories, such as Richard
Harland's Song of the Slums, James
Roy's Ichabod, Eoin Colfer's Airman and Kenneth Oppel's Airborn, Skybreaker and Starclimber; include
as well some of the very popular steampunk titles, such as Richard Harland's Worldshaker and Liberator, and Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series. -HS
Nona and Me
by Clare Atkins.
Black Inc, 2014. ISBN 9781863956895. 288 pp.
There are many readable novels about
fifteen-year-old girls coping with problems with friends, family and first boyfriends.
Most, like this one, are first-person narratives. But this is far superior to
most of them. Atkins has succeeded not only in giving us an insightful view
into Rosie's life, but also in providing an informative, comprehensive and
memorable picture of life for a whole community - both Indigenous and
non-Indigenous - in contemporary Arnhem Land.
Rosie is the granddaughter of
missionaries who (atypically) not only made an effort to learn the Yolŋu
language but encouraged the people they worked with to preserve their language
and culture. Rosie's missionary grandmother was adopted into a Yolŋu family and
her dad grew up as brother and best friend to a Yolŋu boy. Rosie herself, until
age nine, was inseparable from her adopted Yolŋu sister, Nona. They were both
devastated when Nona moved away from Yirrkala to live on Elcho Island with her
immediate family but, inevitably at that age, soon lost touch. By the time they
see each other again, Rosie is in Year 10 and desperate to retain her status as
best friend to the bitchy and superficial Selena. To acknowledge her close
relationship to Nona - bare-footed and possibly illiterate - seems impossible.
The novel opens in 2007, with Rosie in
Year 10 and Nona tentatively returning to school. The narrative of Rosie's year
- her desperation to please Selena, her crush on Selena's good-looking brother
Nick, her tense relationship with her mother - is interspersed with flashbacks:
warm scenes of Rosie and Nona as children together, from 1995 to 2001. Most of
the flashback scenes are set in the Yolŋu community, experiences shared with
the wider extended family - sitting around a campfire, finding honeycomb in the
bush, wriggling their feet to find mud mussels in the sand, hunting wallaby in
Mum's old troopie. They are joyous times, in stark contrast to Rosie's
uncomfortable relationship with Selena and Nick and their often blatant racism.
Atkins sets the story against some major
landmarks in Australian history, such as Cathy Freeman's Olympic victory in
Sydney, John Howard's Intervention and Kevin Rudd's Apology. The privileged
lifestyle of the non-Indigenous community at Nhulunbuy, where Selena and Nick's
father earns big money at the bauxite mine, contrasts starkly with the rundown,
overcrowded houses at Yirrkala, where Rosie and her mother live in a
predominantly Yolŋu community. The impact of the Intervention has an immediate
impact on the community, with many Indigenous workers losing their jobs. The
psychological impact is even more severe. There is a spate of deaths among the
young Indigenous men - road accidents and suicides. Nona, deeply hurt by
Rosie's rejection, leaves school and, at fifteen, marries the young man to whom
she has been promised since childhood.
Presenting the narrative through Rosie's
eyes works very well. She knows the Yolŋu people well, but she is also apart
from them. Her parents might be ageing hippies but they have implanted some
solid middle-class values. Rosie aspires to finish school and go away to art
school. She is horrified that Nona has become pregnant at fifteen. She sees the
destructive drinking and petrol-sniffing in the community, but she also
experiences the sense of belonging and the respect for tradition. Rosie's Dad
explains it to her:
Everyone shares everything here. It's gurrutu - you know, kinship. The best and worst thing about Yolŋu life. You
can always ask for things, but you're always being asked for them too. It drove
your Mum crazy when we first moved to Yirrkala.
To some extent, this novel is a polemic.
I don't use that word pejoratively. Atkins has a point to make: that the Yolŋu
lifestyle is different from that of middle-class white Australians, but - as
her Dad also says: 'Everyone's different - the Tongans, Africans, Iraquis ...'
She wants too to make it clear that the imposition of a middle-class white
Australian lifestyle is not an option.
Nona
and Me was a CBCA Older
Readers' Honour Book in 2015.
Recommendation: This moving and perceptive novel is
ultimately very positive. It makes a very important contribution to the
literature we have available to give non-Indigenous young adult readers a
realistic and sympathetic understanding of Indigenous lives. This would make a
worthwhile class set text for Years 7 - 9, especially for girls. It is of
course a suitable text for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders' Histories
and Cultures. -HS
Poems
That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them
by Anthony and Ben Holden. Simon &
Schuster, 2015. ISBN 9781471134906. 336 pp.
Men from twenty nationalities ranging in
age from their early twenties to their late eighties talk about the poems that
moved them and shook and haunt them to this day. What a wonderful idea for an
anthology and what great appeal it should have for boys in our classrooms. Here are men from a range of backgrounds and
occupations, some suffering the loss of a child, others transformed by the
power of nature or a sense of mortality. There are writers and comedians,
architects and actors, other poets and scientists, all explaining why the poems
they choose moved them so. You will find Alexi Sayle choosing Edwin Muir’s ‘The
Horses’, Ken Loach selecting John Clare’s ‘I am’, Julian Fellowes on the
comfort of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’ and Christopher Hitchens on ‘Dulce
et Decorum Est’. Each poem is prefaced
by the reasons it was selected and followed by a brief biography of the man
concerned.
Recommendation: This is a great addition to your poetry
book box. -DM
Poetry
by Heart: Poems for Learning and Reciting
edited by Julie Blake, Mike Dixon, Andrew
Motion and Jean Sprackland. Viking, 2014. ISBN 9780241185544. 576 pp. Hardcover.
This selection of over 200 familiar and
unfamiliar poems from Beowulf to Wendy Cope and Carol Ann Duffy is based on the
UK secondary school recitation competition with an emphasis, naturally enough,
on poems that delight the ear as well as the eye. A full-page note on each poem
can be found at the back of the book and more than 100 poems have a QR code
next to them. If you have this code app on your mobile phone or tablet you can
scan the code and find yourself listening to the poem.
The poems are organised chronologically; the
editors say this is to allow students to see poems as conversations across time
and to engage with the influences, connections and arguments spanning a
thousand years.
Recommendation: This is a great collection to browse
through. While it is expensive at $35, a few copies in a book box would have
many students engaged by the printed words and the opportunity to use their
smart phones to hear them instantly. -DM
Prince of
Afghanistan
by Louis Nowra. Allen & Unwin, 2015. ISBN 9781743314821. 173 pp.
It’s wonderful
to see another young adult novel by Louis Nowra. Into that Forest was one of my favourite books in 2013 and Prince of Afghanistan is a terrific
read, especially for those less engaged boys in Years 8 and 9.
Nineteen-year-old
Mark and Prince are alone in Afghanistan after a combined Australian/American
mission goes badly wrong. The three kidnapped doctors are safely helicoptered
away but Mark sees his friend Casey killed as the second helicopter sent to
pick up the remaining soldiers explodes under Taliban fire. Casey’s dog Prince
is alive but wounded and Mark decides to find a way back to base through enemy
territory for both of them.
Prince is a
Doberman pinscher who has been trained to detect buried mines and he and his
handler Casey had a close relationship. The explosion deafens both Mark and
Prince and Mark must use touch to try and bind Prince to him. Their journey
back under cover of darkness will take days and, as they are both wounded and
have few rations, it will be difficult and dangerous as well.
Nowra is a
wonderful writer and the tension and drama of Mark and Prince’s story never
slackens. Mark’s memories provide flashbacks to his growing up and teenage
years. The death of his mother, his own
adolescent drug addition to marijuana and the retreat of his father are
succinctly conveyed. Nowra captures the tough life, despair and daily rituals
of people in a war-torn country and his ability to create such a convincing
setting adds verisimilitude to the tale. This is traditional storytelling at
its best as Nowra charts the growing bond between the wounded man and his dog.
Evocative full-page photographs of Afghanistan introduce most chapters and
there is one of Prince that is very appealing.
Recommendation: From its opening line, ‘I am falling
from the sky’, to its powerful ending, this is a text Year 9 students will be
happy to explore in most classrooms. It could also be used towards the end of Year
8 and would meet the cross-curriculum priority of Asia and engagement with
Asia. -DM
A Prince without a Kingdom
by Timothée de
Fombelle, translated by Timothée de Fombelle. Walker Books, 2015. ISBN
9781406360028. 448 pp.
This impressive, intelligent work is the
second and final book of the Vango
series. I have not read Book 1 - but I will! I had read de Fombelle's previous
books, Toby Alone and Toby and the Secrets of the Tree,
wonderful fantasies about the struggle for survival in the world of a great oak
tree. This is very different, although both series display the author's talent
for creating breathtakingly scary situations in which his characters struggle to
survive.
The series tells the story of the
protagonist's quest for identity: in 1918, at age three, he was washed up on a
Sicilian beach with Mademoiselle, his nanny. All he knows for sure about his
past is that he has many dangerous enemies. His only friend, other than
Mademoiselle, is a mysterious priest, Zefiro, living in a hidden monastery.
When, at fourteen, Vango announces that he wants to join Zefiro's order, the
priest sends him out to experience the world before making a commitment. He is
pursued across a divided and conflict-ridden Europe by his enemies and also,
after a false accusation, by the French police.
It is the huge scope of de Fombelle's
canvas that is so impressive. Book 2 opens in New York in 1936, with an
immediate flashback to Vango's time aboard the Graf Zeppelin in 1929 and his
meeting with the delightful and unusual Ethel. His time on board the Zeppelin
ended abruptly, with a violent attempt on his life. Now again, in 1936, unknown
enemies are trying to kill him:
Vango didn't understand what was going on. From the age of
fourteen, there had always been dangers and dramas trailing in his wake. The
world exploded when he passed by. Ashes were all he left behind.
The reader doesn't understand what's
going on, either. We are taken on an intoxicating ride that includes Sicilian
mafia, European gunrunners, Nazi thugs, the French Resistance of World War II,
Russian gangsters, an execution in Sing-Sing prison, an aristocratic Scottish
estate on the banks of Loch Ness and the complex internal politics of the
French police. There is an astonishing connection with Stalin and his family.
There is an even more astonishing connection with the Romanovs. The first half
of the twentieth century and its most significant events are the setting,
against which we become acquainted with a large, diverse and sharply realised
cast. The plot moves swiftly through time and place, revealing unlikely links
between characters and their fates. The tension is intense, as Vango survives the
most dangerous of attacks. It's an amazing achievement on de Fombelle's part to
bring all this together in a story that never loses its main focus: the puzzle
of Vango's identity.
Recommendation: This is a beautifully written book that
would be a delight to explore with a class, but the reality is that it is too
long and too complex to work as a class set with most classes. It is also very
different from what most of our students are reading. While thrillers and
action novels are popular, they are not usually about political history. The
characters, too, are very different from the adolescent protagonists of most
young adult fiction. You may need to coax your better readers to try this, but
it's worth doing so. This is superior writing from a master storyteller. -HS
The Protected
by Claire Zorn. UQP, 2014. ISBN 9780702250194. 254 pp.
Hannah's
life has been torn apart by the death, almost a year earlier, of her older
sister, Katie. Her mum has virtually stopped living, spending most of her days
sleeping; Hannah refers to 'Mum's walking-dead status'. Her father is suffering
from both the physical injuries he received and his guilt that he was driving
the car in which Katie died. Hannah, who received relatively minor injuries in
the crash, cannot remember what happened. As a witness, she is under great
pressure to remember and knows that she will soon be questioned in court.
While Hannah
herself is totally isolated and barely functioning, in some ways she is better
off than before: she had 'spent most of my high school career feeling like a
freak' and 'my social life is booming now that I don't get pelted with bits of
food during recess'. The merciless bullying she had experienced for four years
stopped when she returned to school after Katie's death. As she remembers that
time, we get to know Katie too. From Hannah's perspective, Katie is totally
confident and successful - 'She could wear a garbage bag and it would look like
a well-executed fashion statement', a constant reminder of Hannah's own
failure. Katie not only failed to help or defend her younger sister, she
frequently sided with the bullies and contributed significantly to Hannah's
misery. Katie comes across at first as a total bitch, but Zorn's characterisation
is subtler than that. It's school counsellor Anne who suspects that Katie was
more vulnerable than she seemed. She had warned Hannah that she would be on her
own at high school: 'I have worked hard to establish myself and I don't need
you coming and screwing it all up.' A moving subplot about Katie's secret
relationship with an older boy, Jensen, underlines her vulnerability.
Hannah has
been resistant to counselling. School counsellor Anne, desperately trying to
kick her smoking habit, is different. And so is rebellious and popular new boy
Josh, who first speaks to Hannah when she has accidentally left her book, Jane Eyre, behind: 'Isn't that the one
where the chick gets it on with her boss?' Both Anne and Josh are genuinely
funny, empathetic human beings. The presence of humour is a huge relief in a
novel like this that is about human trauma. Zorn offers the reader hope - hope
of personal recovery, of new friendship and of family healing.
Like Zorn's
previous book, The Sky So Heavy, this
is set in the Blue Mountains area of New South Wales. The novel will have
special resonance for students who are familiar with that region. Right at the
beginning, the scene is evoked:
A fire is burning somewhere, across a gully, gums and leaf
mould are smouldering, the eucalypt oil is hissing, tree-flesh twisting. The
smoke drifts in a thick, putrid mass, up from the gully, over the ridge. It
clings to the air, that acrid scent.
Zorn's first
novel, The Sky So Heavy, was
shortlisted for several awards. This, her second book, was named the 2015 CBCA
Book of the Year for Older Readers and
won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Young Adult. It was also
shortlisted for the 2015 Gold Inky Award.
Recommendation: This is a beautifully written novel
that deals sensitively with difficult issues. It will be much loved by girls in
Years 7 - 9. -HS
The
Ratcatcher's Daughter
by Pamela Rushby. Angus & Robertson,
2014. ISBN 9780732297138. 227 pp.
Although she loves school, thirteen-year-old
Issy has no choice but to leave and begin contributing to the family finances,
just as her sister Kate who would have loved to be a nurse has had to take a
job as a housemaid at the same age. Their father's work as a labourer on the
docks is uncertain, although he makes a little extra money catching rats. The
year is 1900 and, suddenly, there's lots of extra work, as the authorities
offer twopence a rat to ratcatchers, aware that the bubonic plague has reached
Sydney and will, inevitably, also come to Brisbane.
Rushby has vividly recreated the times,
including lots of small details that contemporary readers will find intriguing.
Before beginning work, for example, Issy washes her only dress (in the copper,
of course) - a dress that is too short for her and that has been let down as
far as possible. 'Even let down it was barely decent: my stockings showed halfway
up my knees.' Gran's solution is that Issy should bend her knees a little, so
that the dress looks a bit longer. (And, no, Issy doesn't have a wardrobe full
of jeans and tops that she can wear instead of the one dress.) Teenager Albert,
next door, where there are lots of kids, has to sleep under the house, in a
space where there is an earth floor, next to where his father stores the chook
food. Even relatively wealthy families have their toilets 'way down the
backyard, with a rampant honeysuckle vine climbing all over it.' Toilets are
emptied once a week by 'the dunny man', and girls like Issy and Kate empty and
clean for their employers the family china chamber pots each morning.
Not surprisingly the chook food next to
Albert's sleeping area attracts rats and Albert is one of the first victims of
the plague. Albert's family, Issy and Kate's family, and the neighbours on the
other side are all forcibly evacuated to a quarantine facility that isn't ready
to receive them. There are humiliating supervised antiseptic baths and hasty
burials - no funeral ceremonies - for the plague victims. There is government
incompetence and public panic, and no long-term plans by the authorities for
those who have been quarantined.
When the family is finally released from
quarantine, they find that 'cleansing gangs' have been through the house and
every bit of fabric - clothing, linen, mattresses - has been burnt. There is of
course no compensation. They are dependent on the charity of neighbours who are
themselves bitterly poor. Issy goes back to her work as a housemaid for a
family that is in the undertaking business. Kate works for a couple of doctors.
The girls become aware that not everything is as it seems. The authorities knew
that the plague was coming but failed to take preventative action. Poor people
who die of the plague are buried immediately without ceremony; exceptions can
be made for the rich. The poor who display symptoms or who are exposed to the
disease are quarantined in miserable conditions. Doctors looking after the
wealthy find ways of concealing the nature of the disease, so that the patients
can remain comfortably in their homes. Issy and Kate finally realise that what
they are seeing is corruption and that their employers 'could be in this up to
their necks'. The young doctor whom Kate so admires falls victim himself to the
plague; Issy's timely warning about the way the infection spreads probably
saves the lives of her undertaker employers.
When her father becomes very ill -
fortunately, the often deadly influenza and not the Black Plague - Issy, who
detests rats, is forced to take over his ratcatching business. There are some
wonderfully grisly scenes:
I heard the clerk shout, 'Rats! Look at all the rats!' I
heard the dogs yap, the rats squeal, the horrible soft squelches and thuds as
their bodies hit the ground. I didn't look. I couldn't. Not until the growls
and yelps and squeals and thuds had stopped did I open my eyes.
The floor of the warehouse was littered with bodies. The
dogs were prowling, sniffing, scratching around the walls. The clerk was rather
green.
This was listed on the CBCA Notables list
for both Older Readers and Younger Readers in 2015.
Recommendation: The
Ratcatcher's Daughter is a glimpse of a period of Australian history that
will intrigue readers. Girls in Stages 3 and 4 will empathise with Issy, the
narrator, and her sister. Make up a box of Australian historical fiction.
Include in the selection Robert Newton's Black
Dog Gang, which is also about the Black Plague at this period but is set in
the Rocks in Sydney. The narrator is a boy who teams up with his mates to raise
rats when they realise how much bounty the government is prepared to pay. A
diverse selection of Australian historical titles for this age group could include
Jackie French's The Night They Stormed
Eureka and Kerry Greenwood's Journey
to Eureka (both, of course, telling the Eureka story); Zana Fraillon's No Stars to Wish On, about conditions in
orphanages early last century; Felicity
Pulman's A Ring through Time, a
timeslip novel that looks at life on Norfolk island when it was a convict
prison; Robert Newton's Runner and Jackie French's The Road to Gundagai, both set during
the Depression; Kirsty Murray's The Year
It All Ended, looking at the immediate aftermath of World War I and the
devastation of influenza; Kate Constable's Crow
Country, which also uses the timeslip format to explore injustice to
Indigenous Australians in the 1930s; and Belinda Murrell's The Forgotten Pearl, which paints a comprehensive picture of
civilian life during World War II. -HS
The
Rest of Us Just Live Here
by Patrick Ness. Walker Books, 2015. ISBN
9781406331165. 343 pp. Hardcover.
Patrick
Ness remains my favourite author for adolescents and his new book offers new
opportunities in the Year 9 or 10 classroom. This is a more playful novel than
those that have come before, and Ness is having some fun at the expense of
those adolescent titles that focus on zombies, vampires, gods and warriors and
‘the chosen one’.
The
beginning chapter summaries (reminiscent of the heading in period texts like The Coral Island) forecast the
supernatural tale of Immortals and indie kids who battle them. Such battles
have been going on for years and provide the backdrop to the much more
fascinating and realistic lives of the ordinary American teenagers who are just
getting on with life. Mikey is the seventeen-year-old narrator and his sisters
(Mel and young Meredith) and friend Henna are important players in the novel.
Mikey is in love with Henna but can’t tell her. He is worried about all the
usual adolescent anxieties and a bit more. His father drinks, his mother
organises, his sister was anorexic and he just wants to graduate and go to
college. His mate Jared rather bridges the gap between the ordinary and the
extraordinary, being revealed as a quarter god and gifted with the ability to
heal people. Jared is such an engaging character and his position between Mikey
and the new boy on the block, Nathan, is beautifully judged.
Ness
has lost none of his ability to capture intensity and action and the
description of Mikey’s car crash with a zombie deer is equally as riveting as
the drowning scene in More Than This.
As the supernatural battles play out at the margins, the business of loving and
learning and growing up is centre stage for this intriguing group of teenagers
who find out so much about themselves and the nature and meaning of their own
relationships.
Recommendation: The Rest of Us Just Live Here is
smart and clever and sometimes profound and deeply interested in what
adolescents are thinking and feeling. It should give students the opportunity
to discover that their own lives are much more absorbing than a fantasy cycle. -DM
Recommendation: This would make a satisfying class set
for Years 9 - 11, especially alongside a wide reading unit on series fiction.
There is a problem, however, with writers as talented as Ness: we don't really
want to end up with a program in which there is a Ness title on the class set
list every year. My first choice would have to be A Monster Calls, but I would also be tempted by the first book in
the Chaos Walking trilogy and the
absolutely mesmerising More Than This.
So I've crossed The Rest of Us Just Live
Here off my list of potential class set titles purely because it's less
wonderful than some of his other writing. -HS
The
River and the Book
by Alison Croggon. Walker Books, 2015.
ISBN 9781925081725. 136 pp.
Alison
Croggon is a noted Australian poet and author and this slender and moving novel
will only enhance her reputation.
Simbala,
a young woman, is the narrator. She is one of the Keepers of the Book, a
treasure of the village in which she lives. The other treasure is the river on
which the village sits. The river provides life and food to the village people.
The mystical Book, protected by generations of keepers, provides answers to people’s questions, although ‘there was no guarantee that anyone would
understand it’. But war and cotton upstream are draining and poisoning the
river and gradually the village sees their way of life changing irrevocably.
When Jane Watson, a white woman, ‘who looked
clean and sharp like a steel blade’, comes to the village she says she is
working to stop the exploitation of the river people and Sim befriends her
against her grandmother’s advice. Jane lives with the people, gathers
information and when she leaves she steals the Book, a theft that was a ‘wound
that went too deep for pain’.
Sim
leaves the village to see if she can find Jane and reclaim the book. Her
journey is difficult and she ends up living in the city far from her village
but with friends who love her and respect her.
With the help of the poet Ling Ti she does find Jane and confronts her. A
two-faced woman is revealed: a fighter for justice for the river people but
also a cultural vandal who robbed the village of what it valued most.
Recommendation: The power of
this simple tale is considerable, the language is deft and lyrical and the
message is profound. I found it a dazzling narrative that was accessible and
memorable and it could be a great text to explore with Year 7 or 8, especially
in the context of sustainability. -DM
I think The River and the Book could also be worth considering for Year 9
or 10. Yes, it's a simple read, but - as Deb says - the message is profound,
perfectly appropriate for older students to explore. It has almost the quality
of a fable. -HS
Seventeen
by Matthew Whittet. Currency Press, 2015.
ISBN 9781925005462. 54 pp.
The last day of school has arrived and
Tom, Mike, Edwina, Sue and Ronny are ecstatic. Their school shirts (all except
for Ronny’s) are covered in texta colour names and they are counting down the
seconds. They erupt in excitement when school is over. The swearing starts on
the first page. They make plans (all except for Ronny) to meet in the park that
night for celebrations.
The night involves a lot of drinking and
coarse language. There are revelations about relationships and challenges for
all the characters from the vulnerable Ronny to the tightly wound up Edwina.
Cocksure Mike with his truth or dare game leads them into difficult territory. No-one
leaves the park quite the same, but the human qualities of trust and love are
there at the finale.
The Belvoir production was notable for
the fact that theatre elders played these seventeen-year-olds. Peter Carroll,
Maggie Dence, John Gaden, Genevieve Lemon, Barry Otto a and Anna Volska (any
one of whom could light up a stage on their own) joined forces to deliver
characters that were passionate and full
of the strains of youth. Genevieve Lemon actually played a fourteen-year-old,
Tom’s sister Lizzy who watches over him even when he is drunk and disorderly.
During rehearsal the director invited
real seventeen-year-olds into the theatre to improvise the content of the play
and was delighted with their energy and insight. She is clear that adolescents
could play the roles but makes the point that it is that mix of knowing and
innocence that the older actors bring that enhances the performance.
Recommendation:
Seventeen would be a
wonderful drama to examine towards the end of Year 10 or in Year 11. All those
anxieties and fears and hopes and sillinesses of youth, as director Anne-Louise
Sarks says in her valuable Director’s note, are there to explore. Issues of
identity and belonging jostle with humour and boundless energy. In the script
for the Belvoir production there is a Q & A section with fascinating
answers from seventeen-year-olds from a variety of schools to the following
questions:
·
What
matters to you most right now is …
·
What
or who do you want to be when you are older?
·
Can
you imagine life at 70? What might it be like?
·
The
advice I would give to my older self would be …
·
What
do you daydream about?
·
What
does love mean to you?
·
Regrets
- do you have any? If you are happy to, can you share what these are?
·
The
message I would send to the rest of the world right now is …..
Such questions would make a great start
to a unit on transitions that focused on this text. -DM
The Singing Bones
by Shaun
Tan. Allen & Unwin, 2015. ISBN 9781760111038. 185 pp. Hardcover.
Shaun Tan's picture books have become an
essential part of our classrooms: The
Rabbits, The Lost Thing, The Arrival, The Rules of Summer and other texts by Tan are widely taught.
However, if you were hoping that Tan's latest book would be a further addition
to your bookroom or booklist, you will be disappointed. Tan constantly
surprises, constantly reinvents himself. The
Singing Bones is very different from what we have seen before. It has been
described as an art book for adults, one that will become a collector's item.
It's handsome and heavy enough to be a coffee table tome but, unlike most
examples of the genre, it demands to be picked up. Each time you browse, you will
find something new to delight, startle and unsettle you.
The frontispiece explains that The Singing Bones has been 'inspired by
Grimms' fairy tales'. The genesis of the book was a request from Tan's German
publisher for him to illustrate Grimms
Märchen, a collection of Grimms' fairy tales that had been retold by
novelist Phillip Pullman. Tan decided to represent the tales by a series of
small sculptures (from 6cm to 40cm high), primarily made out of papier-mâché
and clay. The three-dimensional figures were then photographed. For Pullman's
book, Tan created fifty sculptures but, after that project was completed, he
continued to explore the world of the Grimm brothers. He has brought together
the original fifty sculptures with another twenty-five to create The Singing Bones. However, this is not
a fairy tale anthology like Pullman's 512-page work; rather, it is an art book
inspired by those tales. Each double page displays the title of an original
Grimm fairy tale, a key extract from the story (each only about 6 to 12 lines
long) and a full-page coloured photograph of Tan's sculpture. Many of the
sculptures are vividly coloured, like the glowing orange-red of the golden
bird; most are so tactile that you want to reach out and touch them, like the
dozens of nails that make up the spikes on the head of Hans the hedgehog; all
have that surreal quality that is so characteristic of Tan's work. There is
something ancient and primitive about them, reflecting raw, primal emotions.
Human figures are instantly recognisable but slightly caricatured; animal
figures are uncomfortably human. Like the stories themselves, the illustrations
are dark and disturbing: seven identical, shapeless hanged men swinging from
the gallows for 'The Boy Who Left Home to Find out about Fear'; a grotesquely
grinning witch looming from behind a lolly-studded house in 'Hansel and
Gretel'; a manic dancing Rumpelstiltskin. Pullman, in his foreword to The Singing Bones, writes of 'the power
and the strangeness, the sheer uncanny presence of the little sculptures Shaun
Tan has created.'
You can't browse through these glimpses
into the world of the Grimm brothers without wanting to re-read the original
stories. Tan has provided an appendix that gives a brief summary of each of the
seventy-five fairy stories, to provide context to his pictures, but most
readers, like Tan himself, will want to explore further. A good place to start
is Jack Zipes' introduction to The
Singing Bones: 'How the Brothers Grimm made their way into the world'. Tan
recommends that the next step should be a reading of Zipes' translation of all
279 stories in The Complete Fairy Tales
(Vintage Classics, ISBN 9780099511441).
Recommendation: Most English programs contain units of
work on fairy stories or, more broadly, traditional storytelling. The Singing Bones is a great resource
for such a unit of work. You can use it at any level, from Year 7 to 11.
However, the value of a book does not lie only in its usefulness in the
classroom. For some students, this exciting work could be life-changing,
broadening their aesthetic horizons. Make sure that your library has several
copies and that they are prominently displayed - and find lots of opportunities
to recommend it. -HS
A
Single Stone
by Meg McKinlay. Walker Books, 2015. ISBN
9781925081701. 271 pp.
In this memorable and compelling novel
Australian author McKinlay has created a totally convincing unique world and,
in Jena, a courageous and inspiring heroine. The novel opens with a claustrophobic
account of Jena leading six other girls through narrow crevices and tiny
tunnels deep into the mountain to harvest precious flakes of mica, on which
their community depends for both lighting and heating. It is dangerous work,
work that Jena loves - to be part of what is known as 'the line'. We learn that
many generations before it had been easier to harvest the mica, but it is now
scarce and almost inaccessible. There are hints in the first chapter that the
community has adapted to change over time: 'These days, the girls who made up
the line were leaner; years of painstaking management had seen to that. And
they were more careful, too, being sure to show respect to the mountain.'
As the narrative continues, we learn
about Jena's world. There is only the valley; once it had been part of a larger
world with people coming and going freely, but then an earthquake blocked off
the pass and those villagers not killed by falling rocks were trapped. The land
is unproductive and the winters are bitter - often, fatally so. Over the
generations a mythology has developed to explain the disaster: it was the action
of men, in mining the mountain, that caused Rockfall. The Gash is there as a
constant reminder of men's failure to respect the mountain, as is the blocked
Pass. The villagers must never again disrespect the mountain by blasting or
using pickaxes; in fact, men - who were the perpetrators of the disaster - must
never again be allowed inside the mountain. Only women can harvest the mica -
and, as it becomes increasingly inaccessible, only the smallest and thinnest of
prepubescent girls.
As the mythology developed, the community
came under the control of a matriarchy - the Mothers, former members of the
line, who train the young girls of the community to harvest the life-saving
mica. To have daughters who can become part of the line is essential. Families with
daughters who are part of the line receive larger quotas of mica and food and a
better chance of surviving the harsh winters.
Gradually, we learn of the cruelty of the
training of the girls: starvation from babyhood, the tight wrapping of limbs to
inhibit growth, even the breaking of bones. Jena has always taken these for
granted, but her accidental discovery of another method the Mothers use to
produce tiny females shocks her to the point of rebellion.
The story is mostly limited third-person
narrative, from Jena's point of view, but at the end of the first chapter,
there is a second intriguing viewpoint, that of another girl called Lia. Lia
seems to be in the same landscape as Jena but she clearly does not belong to
Jena's strange community. We learn that her people came to the area some time
after the rockfall, driven from their island home by a wild sea that had
swamped their land. Tantalising glimpses of Lia are interspersed through the
narrative about Jena: perhaps most tellingly, the contrast in Chapter 6 between
the hungry premature baby that Jena's community deliberately deprives of food
and Lia contentedly accepting a second large helping of stew - 'Ripe tomatoes
have coloured it a deep red and Father has added juicy chunks of orange and
yellow peppers'. The sensuousness of the bright colours of Lia's meal contrasts
starkly with the grey bleakness of Jena's world. Gradually the connections between
Jena and Lia - and their very different worlds - become stronger, leading to a
satisfying conclusion.
This is a very readable adventure with an
empathetic main character. It is also a thoughtful exploration of gender and
body issues and of the nature of oppression. The world McKinlay has created
does not exist anywhere in time or space, but it reflects perceptively our
world, including our capacity to make sense of our experiences by mythologising
them and our willingness to trust accepted hierarchies simply because they have
always been there.
Recommendation: This is a great Stage 4 class novel.
You may have some difficulty persuading boys to read a story where the
protagonists are female, but it is probably worth the effort to try. McKinlay's
narrative technique deserves close attention: suspense is beautifully created
by the use of the second narrative viewpoint, but also by the gradual
revelation - in short flashback scenes, distinguished by italic font - of
Jena's past. The novel obviously begs to be used as a springboard for a study
of body image, a topic that is increasingly important for boys as well as
girls.
McKinlay reveals on her website that she
did not know, when she wrote the novel, that mica is mined in India by child
labour. Mica is a real metal, although McKinlay gave it in the novel properties
it does not have in the real world. The coincidence about oppressed children is
another possible avenue for exploration.
Anorexia is of course one of the worst
consequences of poor body image. Introduce students to Lesley Fairfield's
amazing graphic novel Tyranny: I Keep You
Thin; suggest they use it as a model for their own writing about an issue
that concerns them. Of the many young adult novels that explore the issue of
body image, some of the best include Butter
by Erin Lange, The Big Fat Manifesto
by Susan Vaught, Scott Westerfeld's four-book series Uglies, James Moloney's A
Bridge to Wiseman's Cove, Brigid Lowry's With Lots of Love from Georgia and Dorian Cirrone's Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You. -HS
The
Sound of Whales
by Kerr Thomson. Chicken House Ltd, 2015.
ISBN 9781910002278. 320 pp.
There
are two dead bodies on a beach – one is that of a pilot whale and the other is
a man with a knife slash across his stomach. Their stories become entwined with
those of the Dunbar brothers – fourteen-year-old Fraser, who helps marine
biologist Ben McCraig with his work, and reclusive Dunny, the elective mute who
seems to have a strange connection with the whales in the area. New arrivals in
Nin, Americans Sarah Risso and her daughter Haley, also become involved in the
local troubles and a tempestuous relationship begins between Fraser and Haley.
This
novel has a magical setting on the wild Scottish island of Nin and it’s not
easy to pick the villains as the brothers try to work out what has brought
death to their shores and how the whales are involved.
The Sound of Whales won the Times
Children’s Fiction Prize in 2014.
Recommendation: This would be a
good text for Year 7 or 8 to consider in a wide reading unit with an
environmental focus. It would go well with Blueback,
The River and the Book and the climate change book, Atmospheric (both reviewed
here). -DM
Steve
Jobs: Insanely Great
by Jessie Harland. Random House
Australia, 2015. ISBN 9780857988560. 216 pp. Hardcover.
If you
are looking for a biography about an individual who changed the way we live,
you can’t really go past this graphic hardcover by Jessie Hartland on Steve
Jobs. In accessible words and pictures Hartland charts Jobs life from college
drop-out to techno geek and ultimately iconoclast who placed an unforgettable
stamp on our social media and the technology we use everyday. Jobs is portrayed
as the perfectionist he was, as socially maladroit and nearly impossible to
work with and as a genius, so there is much for students to discuss about this
undoubtedly controversial figure.
Recommendation: Why the
publishers placed a photograph of Ashton Kutcher on the cover (I know he played
Jobs in the film) instead of Steve himself puzzles me, but perhaps they believe
they will sell more copies with the movie star rather than the business man. It
does seem at odds with the non-fiction status of the text but again could
provide an interesting discussion in the Year 9 classroom. The title could be
debated as well. -DM
Tigerfish
by David Metzenthen. Penguin Books, 2014.
ISBN 9780143568421. 248 pp.
The real protagonist of this novel is
Templeton, a fictional bleak working-class suburb on the fringes of Melbourne,
where in summer 'the Western Highway shimmers like stainless steel' and in
winter 'the wind blows through the place like a vampire spirit on the hunt for
body heat'. There is a sense of menace hanging over the place, exemplified in
the narrator's comparison with the dangerous tigerfish that he has seen on a
favourite television documentary. Like the predatory tigerfish 'hiding just out
of sight in the dirty river, waiting to tear into people as they wash their
clothes or bathe their babies', there are vague, unsettling threats: memories
of the dead girl found many years ago out in the waste ground at the back of
the houses, under the long grey powerlines; three greyhounds with their throats
cut; more recently, a huge lurking figure - 'an odd dude' - who prowls the
wasteland.
The only life to be found in Templeton is
at the huge, air-conditioned shopping mall - Sky Point Mall, known to the
locals as Knifepoint Mall. It is there that Ryan meets Ariel, a luminous figure
who doesn't seem to belong. She's working in the surf shop, even though she's
never seen the sea. Ariel is a good example of Ryan's insight that 'it strikes
me life isn't that cruisy for anyone.' Fate has been cruel to her, her
captivating stepsister Kaydie, who has
stopped talking, and her bewildered stepmother. Fate has been cruel too
to the dangerous school bully Elmore and his suicidal sister Eden. And even in
Ryan's own family, happier and more functional than most, older brother Slate is
drifting through life, working a mind-numbing day shift at the local pipe
factory while being beaten up as a security guard at night.
There is a plot of sorts - the mystery
about the prowler is solved and Ariel's life gets back on track - but this is
largely a series of scenes: Ryan and his mate Evan taking Ariel and Kaydie to
see the sea; Evan and Elmore fighting at school; Ryan and Ariel travelling back
to the farm where Ariel lost everything. It is narrated in Ryan's voice -
surprisingly tender and optimistic from someone raised in such a bleak
environment. Tigerfish is ultimately
life-affirming: there are no miraculous easy answers, no sudden rescues from
reality, but there is hope and there is potential. The final sentence, as Ryan
realises that Ariel has been able to return to school as she had so much wanted
is: 'And just like that, the new year begins.'
This was listed as a CBCA Older Readers'
Notable book in 2015.
Recommendation: Recommend this to boys in Years 8 and
9. They may find it a little slow, but they will recognise the authenticity of
Ryan's voice and the basic decency of his character. For boys from backgrounds
not unlike Templeton, this will be a revelation; for those whose lives are more
fortunate, perhaps it will widen their horizons a little. -HS
The Truth about Peacock Blue
by
Rosanne Hawke. Allen & Unwin, 2015. ISBN 9781743319949. 253 pp.
The
Truth about Peacock Blue
is an engaging and moving novel for young adults that will appeal strongly to
girls. Hawke has used first-person narration to allow readers to share the
experiences of Pakistani teenager, Aster. While many of the details of Aster's
life in her family home and little rural village are very different from the
lives of Hawke's readers, most young people will empathise with Aster and
discover how much they have in common with her. Readers share first her shock
and grief when her much-loved only sibling, Ijaz, dies in his sleep at age
fifteen, and then her apprehension and difficulties as she faces the
unfamiliarity of a large government high school, very different from the little
village school where she has had her primary education.
Aster is Christian in a country where
Christians are a three per cent minority. The government school is of course
Muslim, but Aster's father is assured by the principal that her constitutional
right to freedom of religion will be respected. However, most of the girls are
hostile to her and the teacher of Islamic studies and Arabic, Mrs Abdul,
believing she has a mission to convert Aster, begins to regularly harass and
abuse her. Readers share Aster's shock and horror when she is accused by Mrs
Abdul of committing blasphemy in her examination; Aster never knows what error
she is supposed to have committed that is seen to be blasphemous - perhaps a
spelling mistake - and Mrs Abdul claims to be so appalled by the obscenity that
she felt forced to burn immediately the offending exam paper, so there is no
evidence. The lack of evidence, however, is inconsequential in a society where
just the charge of blasphemy taints lives forever. Aster is dragged away in a
police van surrounded by angry men calling for her death into a nightmarish
world of a prison system that is brutal and inflexible and of a justice system
that moves painfully slowly and that is evidently corrupt.
Hawke uses Aster's story to explore not
only the injustices of the Pakistani blasphemy laws but to canvass a wide range
of human rights issues, from freedom of religion to Australia's treatment of
asylum seekers. She particularly looks at issues involving girls and women: the
extraordinary injustice that women who are raped must find four independent
male witnesses to prove they were forced or else be accused of adultery;
limited opportunities for girls' education; the powerlessness of women in
prison. Hawke uses a blog, set up by Aster's Australian cousin, Maryam, to
expose readers to diverse opinions about such issues, some of them quite
extreme. Maryam, in her blog posts, argues for justice, for freedom of speech,
for freedom of religion and for religious tolerance; the messages posted on her
blog from teenagers from all around the world debate her arguments.
The story follows Aster through three
years of imprisonment to a court judgment that sentences her to death and then
an endless wait for an appeal. Recommendation:
Hawke writes from a Christian perspective and her protagonist finds peace and
strength in her Christian religion, but this is not a Christian polemic. Hawke
argues strongly for freedom of religion and religious tolerance. The book will
be very welcome in Christian schools but its use may be more difficult in some
areas where the subject of blasphemy arouses strong views. While the purpose of
the novel is unquestionably to promote tolerance, discussion of it may lead to
intolerance if not handled very carefully. That said, it is a book that needs
to be widely read. Use it as a class set with girls in Years 8 or 9 if you can;
otherwise recommend it strongly. -HS
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains: The
Graphic Novel
by Neil
Gaiman. Headline Publishing, 2014. Headline Publishing Group, 2014. ISBN
9781472221070. 80 pp. Hardcover.
Neil Gaiman
never disappoints and this fascinating picture book/graphic novel is by a
master storyteller. The subtitle is ‘A Tale of Travel and Darkness with
Pictures of All Kinds’ and Gaiman said that the Isle and Syke and the legends
and history of the Inner and Outer Hebrides inspired the text.
A wee man has
been searching for ten years for news about his daughter, Flora, a red-haired
girl he believed to have run away while looking after his cattle. The trail is
cold but he seeks Calum MacInnes as a guide to the cave on the Misty Isle where
much gold is meant to rest. Calum is a wolfish man with a long face and he
agrees to guide the unnamed dwarf. He has been chosen for a reason. They travel
through the mountains where ‘the summer winds have winter on their breath,
where they howl and whip and slash the air like knives’, and a fortune teller
reads them riddles about their past and the future. The two men reach the isle
and camp at the Man and Dog Rock where MacInnes, mistrusting the dwarf, holds a
dirk to his neck. The dwarf defends himself and persuades MacInnes to remove
the dagger. As they travel towards the cave, a tale unwinds about a young woman
whose cattle Calum stole and whom he tied by her long red hair to a thorn bush.
The reason the dwarf approached the man becomes clearer, as his real purpose in
travelling to the isle is revealed. What passes in the cave and afterwards I
leave to your own discovery, but the haunting words and images will lead you to
a compelling conclusion.
Recommendation: This dark tale of revenge and
regret is wonderful and the setting is vividly realised by both prose and
picture. The gripping first-person narration adds brilliantly to the force of
the novel. This would be an excellent text to use as part of a wide reading in
fantasy/horror genre unit with a Year 9 class or with a collection of graphic
novels. -DM
Two
Wolves
by Tristan Bancks. Random House
Australia. ISBN 9780857982032. 288 pp.
The title comes from a Cherokee Indian
story quoted on the frontispiece. Each of us is torn between two wolves -
different sides of our character. The quotation signals that this novel is more
than an exciting adventure. It is also, for the protagonist - thirteen-year-old
Australian boy, Ben - a moral and ethical journey.
Bancks sets the scene beautifully. Ben is
making another clay animation movie - his seventh. All of them star a super
detective who just happens to be also named Ben. He and his little sister Olive
are home alone, in a home that we understand is anything but wealthy. When two
police cars pull up outside and the police ask for his parents, Ben knows
enough to guess that they are there on serious business. Minutes after the
police have left, his father's 1967 Valiant - 'the Green Machine' - comes to a
screeching halt and his parents rush Ben and Olive to the car. They are going,
they say, on a surprise holiday. They have never been on holiday before. There
are other oddities: Mum says that they will buy clothes, as they don't have a
change of clothes with them - 'That's what you do on holidays.' Both Mum and
Dad turn off their phones; Ben and Olive have never seen Mum turn off her phone
before. At Uncle Chris's place, they swap cars, trading an old station wagon
for Dad's beloved Valiant. In a rundown motel Mum cuts first Ben's long curly
hair with nail scissors, then Dad's and her own - 'a holiday haircut'. It's
pretty clear to both Ben and the reader that something suspicious is going on.
Ben wants to be a detective when he grows
up, and he has endless curiosity. He has seen Uncle Chris give Dad a grey nylon
sports bag with black handles. He catches Dad hiding the bag in the roof cavity
of Grandad's old deserted cabin, where they are to spend their 'holiday'. He
can't resist climbing on an old table and looking to see what's in the bag. It
is cash - a huge amount of cash - and Mum's explanation is anything but
convincing: 'He was sick of being treated like a child. He was going
undercover. He would find the truth.'
This is a fast-moving thriller with
interesting characters. Ben's curiosity gets him into serious trouble but he
does win the battle between the two wolves of his nature.
This was named an Honour book in the CBCA
children's book awards for 2015.
Recommendation: Thirteen-year-old Ben is someone that
your Stage 4 students can relate to. They will enjoy the humour, Ben's
relationship with his feisty little sister, and his moral dilemma. The book
will appeal especially to boys - and boys' books suitable for whole class study
are fairly hard to find. -HS
The Wall: A Modern Fable
by William
Sutcliffe. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014 (2013). ISBN 9781408838433. 304 pp.
We presented this title in 2014 but we
have reproduced our notes here because it goes so well with two more recent
titles: The Crossing by Catherine
Norton and The Cat at the Wall by
Deborah Ellis. Ellis specifies that the wall she is writing about is the
barrier on the Israeli West Bank. Norton and Sutcliffe are not so specific;
both are interested in the broader question of the consequences of forcibly
separating human beings.
Notice that, like John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and
Morris Gleitzman's Once, Sutcliffe
has called his novel a 'fable'. That signals immediately that it is a made-up
story - made up to teach us a lesson. While the setting of the story is very
like the Israeli West Bank and the people who live behind the wall are very
like the people we know as Palestinians, Sutcliffe is careful never to suggest
that the story is set in a real place.
Joshua is a troubled boy who lives with
his mother and stepfather in a divided city, where a wall and soldiers separate
two communities, and the rubble-strewn residue of their broken world gives
hints of the old life before the wall was built. Joshua discovers a manhole,
which leads to a tunnel, which leads in pitch darkness under the wall and
across to the other side. Forbidden territory, dangerous territory, violent
territory, which a boy like him - visibly different - shouldn't stray into. An
act of kindness from a girl saves his life but leads to a brutal act of cruelty
and a terrible debt he's determined to repay. And no one, no one must find out
that he's been there - or the consequences will be unbearable.
Our first view of Joshua reveals the
arrogance of the bright adolescent, contemptuous of the security guard who 'is
probably a bit stupid'. 'David is my best friend in Amarias, even though he's
extremely annoying. Amarias is a strange place. If I were living somewhere
normal, I don't think David would be my friend at all.' When he discovers the
manhole he is torn between excitement - 'the best adventure playground, the
best climbing frame, the best secret hideout I've ever seen' - and 'a feeling I
can't quite understand ... something to do with the obvious suddenness with
which this place was transferred from a home into a heap of junk'.
Joshua hates his step-father Liev ('my
anti-father'), who is a religious fundamentalist with very narrow ideas. He
hates living in Amarias: 'All the houses in Amarias are the same. You see new
ones going up all the time: first the concrete, sprouting metal bars like a
dodgy haircut, then the red roof and the windows, and finally the cladding of
stone slapped on like a paint job. This one's different. There's no concrete.
Just proper lumps of solid stone.'
On one level this is a boy's adventure
story: 'Maybe I ought to work out the risks, remind myself of everything I've
been warned about, take stock of what I have to lose ... but that's not the
kind of person I am, and it's not who I want to be, either. Mysteries are for
solving, walls are for climbing, secret hideouts are for exploring. That's just
how things are.'
Joshua's meeting with Leila and her father
is transformative. In an attempt to make some restoration for the harm he has
caused them, Joshua begins to tend their olive grove, owned by their family for
generations but now inaccessible to them, except on the rare occasions when
they can get a permit to cross the wall. The arrogant teenager becomes a
compassionate human being as he tries to nurture the dying olive trees.
Recommendation: This is a beautifully written
novel. It is a book for children - a boy's adventure into a dangerous new
world. But it is a book for intelligent children, like Joshua himself -
children who can learn that they share a common humanity with people who at
first appear to be different. It is unquestionably a pro-Palestinian book, in
the sense that it portrays these people who happen to be in circumstances
rather like those of the Palestinians as decent human beings, oppressed by
their more powerful neighbours. For that reason, it may be a difficult choice
for class use in some communities. But its 'lesson' about tolerance and common
humanity is very important. If you can, share it with bright kids in Years 7
and 8.
Consider using The Wall alongside The Crossing and The Cat at
the Wall (both also reviewed in these notes). In my opinion, The Wall is by far the best of the three
novels, but The Crossing is a fine
novel and more accessible. I personally found The Cat at the Wall a little disappointing - not Ellis at her best
- but it will appeal to students who will find The Wall difficult. You could offer all three titles to students
and let each of them choose which to read. Hopefully, some will read all three.
-HS
X+Y
(also known as A Brilliant Young Mind) directed by Morgan Matthew, 2014. Rated M.
Nathan (played by Asa Butterfield) is a
teenager who loves Maths but is socially challenged and on the autism spectrum.
He had a close bond with his father and was in the car when his dad was killed
in an accident. He struggles to connect with anyone, including his mother,
Julie (played by Sally Hawkins). When Nathan is given a new, rather
unconventional maths mentor, his love of mathematics is given a powerful
impetus.
He is soon selected as a representative
in the United Kingdom squad for the International Maths Olympiad. He travels to
Taipei and finds mixing with other gifted students who don’t bully or harass
him a revelation. There is another surprise too; he finds he has a strong
connection to his female exchange partner, Zhang Mei.
Nathan’s rational mind has to grapple
with love as well as numbers and his mother’s explanation of love is rather
neatly constructed for a mind such as his:
When somebody says they love you it means they see something
in you they think is worth something ... It adds value to you.
Recommendation: This is a tender and perceptive film
with fine performances and a number of issues for classroom discussion.
Difference and diversity, the gift and burden of talent, the nature of
communication and relationships are all on offer in an engaging, sometimes
funny and charming film. Year 10 students may identify with Nathan’s
difficulties and come to a better understanding of the differences that are in
all of us, as well as the common humanity that connects us. -DM
Series fiction
In recent years series fiction has been
hugely popular with teenagers. Series like Twilight
(and its imitators) and The Hunger Games
have not only had huge sales but have also attracted large audiences for the
film versions. In The Rest of Us Just
Live Here (reviewed here) Patrick Ness mocks the obsession of series
fiction with supernatural beings who just happen to find themselves in an
American high school setting. We began with vampires but we've had werewolves,
zombies, sirens, faeries and, most recently, lots of angels. Angels are an
especially inspired choice as they have to remove their shirts to release their
wings, thus exposing their oh-so-impressive abs.
This flood of popular but formulaic
writing has disguised the fact that some of the best quality writing for young
adults in recent years has been series fiction. Worse, books from series are
often overlooked by literary prize judges, who seem to prefer stand-alone
titles, so that some of this quality fiction does not get the publicity it
deserves. (The NSW Premier's Literary Award has refused to go along with this
trend, awarding Books 1 and 2 of The
Colours of Madeleine the top young adult prize in 2013 and 2015.)
We've listed below just eight recent
series - six of them Australian - which would make an excellent basis for a
wide reading unit for Years 8 or 9. Have multiple copies of the first book in
each of the series you choose and make sure that your library has copies of the
sequel. You could supplement the titles
we've suggested with older series - The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for those who've missed it; Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings; Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy; Act of Faith and The Sultan's Eyes by Kelly Gardiner; Brian Caswell's Deucalion trilogy; Philip Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy; Reboot and Rebel by Amy Tintera; Isobelle Carmody's The Obernewtyn Chronicles.
The
Colours of Madeleine
series by Jaclyn Moriarty. Pan Macmillan.
Book 1: A Corner of White. 2014. ISBN 9781742612607. 432 pp.
Book 2: The Cracks in the Kingdom. 2014. ISBN 9781742612874. 526 pp.
Book 3: A Tangle of Gold will be published early in 2016.
Moriarty has produced a fantasy series of
unusual quality. Her books are startlingly original and beautifully written. The
idea of alternate worlds and the possibility of communication with them is not
new, but no fantasy writer has created a fantasy world as magical, strange and
intriguing as the Kingdom of Cello. Moriarty's strength, however, is that she
sets her story also in our world - or, at least, the world of Cambridge,
England, and she creates that world just as vividly as the fantasy one. The
Kingdom of Cello is aware of the existence of our world but all contact has
been forbidden for three hundred years. Cracks open up occasionally between the
two worlds, but any resident of Cello knows that a crack must be reported
immediately to the authorities so that it can be closed up.
Elliot, living in Bonfire, the Farms, the
Kingdom of Cello, does not report the crack that he finds. Instead he begins a
correspondence with Madeleine, living in Cambridge, England. Madeleine has
found a note sticking out of a parking meter in Cambridge. She answers the
note, pushing her reply into the parking meter. Elliot, in Bonfire, finds her
reply, poking out of an old television in his school playground. The utter
randomness of this 'crack' that allows communication between their worlds is
typical of Moriarty's fantasy. It is quirky and highly entertaining.
These are big, complex books. There are
plot strands that seem to be going nowhere but are expertly brought together.
There are lots of surprises and a great deal of suspense. There is a huge cast
of characters in both worlds, all so sharply realised that the reader has no
trouble keeping track of them. And there are Madeleine and Elliot themselves,
two of the most appealing characters I have met in young adult literature.
These are challenging reads but
enormously satisfying. They appeal strongly to both heart and head. Recommend
them to good readers of any age. -HS
Every Breath/Every
Word/ Every Move by Ellie Marney.
Allen & Unwin.
Book 1: Every Breath. 2013. ISBN 9781743316429. 335 pp.
Book 2: Every Word. 2014. ISBN 9781743316511. 334 pp.
Book 3:
Every Move. 2015. ISBN 9781743318539. 338 pp.
These are exciting murder thrillers from
a new Australian writer for young adults. At the centre of the books is the
uneasy relationship between the protagonists: sixteen-year-old country girl
Rachel, still mourning the loss of the family farm, and the
boy-almost-next-door, Mycroft. Mycroft, originally from the UK, lives a bleak
life with an unsympathetic aunt. At seventeen he seems to be a misfit and a
loner, but he has a passion for and deep knowledge of forensic science. In Book
1 Mycroft's forensic knowledge eventually solves the murder of a homeless man;
in the process both Rachel and Mycroft are almost killed when the murderer,
desperate to avoid detection, succeeds in trapping them in the lion's cage at
Melbourne Zoo.
Book 2 takes Mycroft to London to use his
forensic skill to solve a murder. Rachel, concerned for him, follows, and finds
herself in deadly trouble. In Book 3 they return to Melbourne, but so does the
criminal mastermind who tried to kill them in England. The final tense drama is
played out in country Victoria, near the farm at Five Mile where Rachel grew
up.
Throughout the series there is the
tension of the relationship. Rachel is very insistent that they are just
friends, but the sexual tension between them is obvious early on. Mycroft is
not, however, your typical teenage boyfriend. Being a nerdy genius and a
domestic slob is one thing, but being deeply troubled by the deaths of his
parents seven years earlier - deaths he is increasingly sure were not
accidental - is another. Mycroft is erratic and troubled, obsessed by his past.
These compulsive reads are much enjoyed
by readers in Years 8 and 9. -HS
Man Made Boy/This
Broken Wondrous World by Jon Skovron. Allen & Unwin.
Book 1: Man Made Boy.
2013. ISBN 9781743315132. 368 pp.
Book 2: This Broken
Wondrous World. 2015. ISBN 9781743315972. 365 pp.
In this two-book
series American writer Jon Skovron combines a variety of genres. They are
firstly breathtaking and highly inventive thrillers, with plenty of fast-moving
action. They are coming-of-age stories, following the fate of a
seventeen-year-old as he ventures out into the world for the first time. There
is a charming offbeat romance. There are sci-fi elements, as the protagonist is
a talented computer hacker and a pioneer of virtual reality. There is constant
humour, some of it rather black. And there is an amazing use of intertextuality
as we meet an array of creatures from literature and mythology: the Siren from The Odyssey, the Minotaur, Madame
Medusa, Lord Ruthven from The Vampyre,
Charon the Ferrymaster, H. G. Wells' Doctor Moreau, as well as assorted satyrs,
harpies, ogres, trolls, faeries and werewolves. Then, of course, there are
Boy's parents - Frankenstein's Monster and The Bride - and his girlfriend:
Sophie Jekyll and Claire Hyde.
Boy is both monster and
normal teenager. He passionately hates Frankenstein for having created the Monster
and the Bride, but he does not realise that in experimenting with virtual
reality he is replicating Frankenstein's experiment -
bringing a new creation to life that will not only be beyond his control but
that can adapt endlessly. In Book 1 Boy's creation is enormously destructive;
in Book 2 it becomes a force for good.
These
are original and intelligent books that will win a devoted readership.
Introduce them to students in Years 8 and 9, especially boys. -HS
Vango series by Timothée de Fombelle. Walker Books.
Book 1: Vango. ISBN 9781406354010. 432 pp. Hardback.
Book 2: A Prince without a Kingdom. ISBN 9781406360028. 448 pp.
This two-book
series, translated from French, is an impressive and demanding read. The books
are thrillers, set against the major events of the first half of the twentieth
century: the fall of the Russian Tsars, the Russian Revolution, the Sicilian
mafia, gunrunning in Europe in the years between the wars, the rise of Nazism,
the Occupation of France and the French Resistance. The action moves across
Europe, into the Scottish highlands, and to the United States. It's a huge
canvas. Against this backdrop Vango, who was washed up on the Sicilian coast at
age three, tries to discover his identity - and why so many people want to kill
him.
This is very different from what most of
our students are reading, but it has a great deal to offer to those who will
take a risk with it. Recommend it strongly to those in Years 8 - 10 who are
interested in world history. -HS
The Tribe series by Ambelin Kwaymullina. Walker
Books.
Book 1: The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. ISBN 9781921720086. 400 pp.
Book 2: The Disappearance of Ember Crow. ISBN 9781921720093. 400 pp.
Book 3: The Foretelling of Georgie Spider. ISBN 9781921720109. 441 pp.
The publisher describes this exciting
three-book series as eco-dystopian. Set many
centuries into the future, after humanity was almost wiped out in an
environmental catastrophe, these books describe an authoritarian society where
those that do not conform are eliminated. In this case, the misfits are
teenagers who begin to develop diverse and fantastic 'abilities'. Each of the
three books focuses on one of the teenagers: Ashala, Ember and Georgie, as they
struggle against destruction.
The author comes from the Palyku people
of the Pilbara region. What sets The
Tribe aside from the many other recent young adult post-apocalyptic novels
is the author's decision to draw on her heritage. An adaptation of the
Dreamtime legend of the rainbow serpent is an important part of the narrative
of Book 1. Ashala seeks advice from her ancestral spirit, the giant Serpent.
The Aboriginal understanding of country underpins the whole series.
This series has been very successful with
readers in Years 8 and 9. -HS
The Last Girl/The
Last Shot/The Last Place by
Michael Adams. Allen & Unwin.
Book 1: The Last Girl. ISBN 978174331638, 400 pp.
Book 2: The Last Shot. ISBN 9781743316733. 416 pp.
Book 3: The Last Place. ISBN 9781743316740. 407 pp.
This post-apocalyptic fiction for young
adult readers is sensationalist, violent and compulsively readable. The world
ends in a moment: when The Snap occurs, almost everyone is suddenly telepathic,
able to hear the thoughts of those around them. The result is devastating,
leading to brutal conflict. Only a handful of people like sixteen-year-old
female protagonist Danby are immune. She is plunged into a terrifying world.
Initially, there is the threat from those who have become insane but, later,
there is the much more chilling menace of a huge army of clones, all sharing
the consciousness and working in the interests of the dictatorial Jack. In the
battle to survive, one of the most interesting features is the difficulty of
knowing whom to trust. There are two young men in Danby's new life - Nathan and
Jack. They have very different visions for the future. Both claim to care for
Danby.
This is mostly set in Sydney and the Blue
Mountains behind the city; in the third book the setting shifts further up the
New South Wales coast. Local readers enjoy the familiarity: there is a special
frisson in reading, for example, the scene of a bloody siege in the quiet and
picturesque town of Leura, or of watching Danby and Nathan try to bring back to
life the catatonic figures littering the streets of Parramatta.
Full of explosions and dead or catatonic
bodies, these read like a blockbuster movie. They are popular with readers in
the Year 9 and 10 age group. -HS
City of Orphans series by Catherine Jinks. Allen &
Unwin.
Book
1: A Very Unusual Pursuit. 2013. ISBN 9871743313060. 360 pp.
Book
2: A Very Peculiar Plague. 2013. ISBN 9871743313053. 376 pp.
Book
3: A Very Singular Guild. 2014. ISBN 9871743313091. 360 pp.
This fast-paced three-book series by one
of Australia's most talented writers is both historical fiction and original
fantasy. It is set in Victorian England and is very Dickensian, full of
underfed and poorly housed street children who have lived precarious lives. The
series is also seriously scary: there are dangerous child-eating monsters in
London's dark places, and only the singing of a child can lure them out to be
killed. Monsters in this world take many forms: there are human beings preying
on orphaned children too, and they are even more difficult to defeat. The
darkness of the world is countered by the courage and decency of the child
characters themselves. Jinks's use of contemporary Victorian slang, including
criminal cant, provides a sense of authenticity and will appeal to readers who
love words for their own sake. She has provided a glossary of slang terms at
the end of the book, although the meaning of most expressions is evident from
the context.
This is compelling reading for good to
average readers in Years 7 and 8. -HS
The Ship Kings series by Andrew McGahan. Allen &
Unwin.
Book 1: The Coming of the Whirlpool
Book 2: The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice
Book 3: The War of the Four Isles
Book 4 (the final book) is due for
publication in September 2016.
This is great writing for young adults
from an Australian author who has won major awards for his adult writing. This
is an epic adventure series with an impressive young hero, Dow Amber. Fantasy
elements blend seamlessly with classic seafaring tales. There are mighty sea
battles, feats of great courage, love and betrayal, politics and intrigue.
There is plenty of action adventure, wonderful characterisation and a superb
sense of place: some of the landscapes McGahan creates, such as the huge ice
world of book 2, are unforgettable.
This series will challenge and excite
your good readers in Years 7 and 8. The books are long, complex and
compulsively engrossing. We tend to associate action adventure with boy
readers, and there is no doubt that boys who are fluent readers love this
series, but girls too have become addicted. This is intelligent writing for intelligent
readers. -HS
Great choices you might
have missed
This is a very short list of titles (only
six of them) from recent years that we regard as very good value for the
classroom. Each of them has earned their place on the list for different reasons.
The Australian novel Jasper Jones, as
Deb predicted so accurately in 2010, has become a 'must buy'; not only is it
used alongside To Kill a Mockingbird
in Year 10, it has replaced it in many cases. It is also being widely used for
whole class study in Year 11. It is frowned upon, however, in some schools -
the language, while often very funny, can be a little confronting in those
schools where this is still an issue. Note, by the way, that Kate Mulvany has
adapted Jasper Jones for the stage
and that it will be performed in January 2016 at Belvoir Theatre.
A
Monster Calls we also
predicted would be a classic; our affection for this title increases over time.
It was in hardcover when we first reviewed it, but we've updated the
information to a paperback edition. The paperback we've chosen has the
wonderfully haunting illustrations of the original, and we think these enhance
the text beautifully, but there is another unillustrated paperback edition if
you prefer (ISBN 9781406361803).
The Watch That Ends the Night is a
superb example of the power of the verse-novel format in the hands of a skilled
poet. Your students will forgive the fact that it's in verse to begin with
because they're interested in The Titanic.
Many of them will come away from their study of this book with a real
understanding of poetry. The review for this title was written by Ernie Tucker,
who presented with us in 2012 when the AATE conference was held in Sydney.
Although
there have been many excellent books about life in Asia published in recent
years, Trash is still our favourite:
a perfect class-set text with a thrilling plot, engaging characters, diverse
narrative voices and a terrific ending.
Butter and We Were Liars may not be of the same literary quality as some of
the others on this shortlist, but both are very contemporary and guaranteed to
engage those students in Year 9 who really don't want to read much at all.
Butter
by Erin Lange.
Faber and Faber, 2013 (2012). ISBN 9780571294404. 345 pp.
Some of the best class set novels over the
years have been books about bullying. Nothing quite get kids so fired up as
injustice. Every kid knows what it feels like to be bullied, and quite a few
know what it's like to bully others. This novel asks them to think about
another situation: what's your position if you don't actually participate in
the bullying, but you are aware of it and just look on?
What makes that question especially
relevant is that this is a very contemporary novel. It is set in the world that
adolescents actually inhabit these days but that few writers of adolescent
novels have yet fully caught up with: a world lived online. This is the world
of non-stop text messaging and of Facebook. We've had a few books about
cyberbullying, and there has been considerable discussion about the effects of
anonymity on behaviour. But this goes a lot further. This is a world in which a
lonely outcast can have an online romance with a girl from the popular set and
where the school freak can be transformed overnight into a media star on the
web. It's a world where spectacle dominates to the extent that normal moral
conventions and human empathy are lost in the excitement of the moment. It's a
world in which ordinary, good kids can condone evil.
Butter is narrated in the first person by a
very intelligent, self-deprecating voice. Butter is his nickname, one that was
conferred on him by the bullies in a very cruel moment that is one of the
memorable scenes of the novel. It's not until the last line of the novel that
we discover his real name. In his teens, Butter is excessively obese - about
420 pounds or 190 kilos or more than 28 stone. His doting mother fluctuates
between plying him with food as a token of her love - 'pecan waffles, Canadian
bacon, and poached eggs' for breakfast - to trying to persuade him to try one
of the latest diets. His father seems defeated, probably not even aware that it
is a very long time since he has spoken directly to his son. Butter's
conviction that he is an embarrassment to his father is just one of the bitter
facts of his life. At school he is a freak and a loner. His only consolations
are his music - he is a talented saxophonist - and his online, anonymous
relationship with Anna. Anna and Butter have never spoken; she is falling in
love online with the charming and witty, 'JP', the pseudonym Butter has
adopted. He has built up a profile for his online identity: a popular and
sporty boy from the private school across town.
We learn a lot about Butter from his
relationships with some of the adults in his life, particularly Doctor Bean,
the doctor who manages his diabetes, and the Professor, the music teacher at
his college. As readers, we like and care for Butter, sympathise with his
hopeless infatuation with Anna, appreciate his humour and intelligence. His
fellow students see only his size.
In a moment of despair Butter sets up a
website and declares that, on New Year's Eve, he will eat himself to death on
webcam. That declaration transforms his life. Students are divided about
whether he is serious or not but all of them are fascinated. Butter, from being
a complete loner, is adopted by the in-crowd and is caught up in a social
whirl. There is huge interest in what Butter will eat at his final meal. As a
diabetic, Butter realises that he actually can kill himself by eating the wrong
things; a severe allergy to strawberries is an added bonus.
The tension in the story depends of
course on whether or not Butter will go through with his threat - and whether
any of the students who have followed him on his website will try to prevent
the suicide.
Recommendation: This is a high-interest, well-written
novel that keeps readers turning the pages. Like a lot of the best books, it's
both very funny at times and heart-wrenchingly sad. It's a great class set
novel for Years 8-9, raising a wealth of ethical questions about bullying and
about social values. While it will be a success with any class, try it with one
of those lower-stream classes where most kids don't really want to read: this
will get them in. - HS
Jasper Jones
by Craig Silvey.
Allen & Unwin 2010 (2009). ISBN 9781742372624. 394 pp.
What
a glorious book this is – savage and thoughtful, funny and profound, it
explores the lives and secrets of many people in the small mining town of
Corrigan. I was riveted from Charlie and Jasper’s opening trek to the secret
glade, where Laura Wishart is hanging, through to Jeffrey Lu’s triumphant
cricket debut and the revelations about Laura’s death.
Jasper
Jones is set in a small Australian town in the 60s. The Vietnam War is on, the
draft is happening; racism and fear of the unknown permeate the town. Three
‘veg’ and meat are on the table, except at Charlie’s best friend Jeffrey’s
place, where his mother cooks delicious Vietnamese food. Jeffery Lu is a
remarkable creation – optimistic, ebullient and undefeated, even by the
ignorant and bovine racism he encounters.
As
an Indigenous boy, Jasper knows only too well that the police will regard him
as the obvious suspect in Laura's death, and both Charlie and Jasper have
little confidence in how the justice system would treat him.
Recommendation: Jasper
Jones is one of the
‘must buy’ books for any English Department. It would make a great companion
text to study in Year 10 with To Kill a
Mockingbird. -DM
A Monster Calls
by Patrick Ness.
Walker Books, 2012 (2011). ISBN 9781406339345. 240 pp.
This is a very special – a book that will
haunt you. Thirteen-year-old Conor is suffering a recurrent and terrifying
nightmare, triggered by the fact – that he is attempting to deny – that his
mother is dying. So when, just after midnight, Conor hears his name being
called and finds that the yew tree from the graveyard on the hill has
transformed into a huge and threatening monster at his bedroom window, Conor
isn’t even frightened: this real-life monster is much easier to deal with than
his nightmare. The monster is and does everything monsters are meant to do,
roaring and threatening to eat Conor alive with its ‘raggedy teeth’, shattering
glass and wood and brick, but Conor can cope with it. The dialogue between
Conor and the monster is a joy. Over a series of nights, the monster tells
Conor stories – stories that finally enable him to accept that his mother will
die.
Ness’s beautifully written text is
complemented by the evocative and scary black and white drawings. The story is
totally absorbing and achingly sad, while at the same time providing that glow
of satisfaction that a reader experiences when a story is perfectly told.
The origin of this book is equally sad.
It was begun by Irish writer Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer in her early
forties. The publisher asked Patrick Ness, author of the brilliant Chaos Walking trilogy, if he could
finish it. Ness makes it clear that he did not attempt to write the book that
Dowd might have written; instead he used the ideas she had been developing to
inspire his own story, which he dedicates to Siobhan.
Recommendation: I would love to read this aloud, over
several lessons, to a class. Years 7 and 8 are the intended audience, although
I think most classes would be mesmerised. It’s a great horror story. Kids love
horror stories but really good horror is hard to find. But it’s also a powerful
exploration of the pain of dealing with the death of a loved one. Make sure to
leave time for some attention to the detail of Ness’s writing and his genius
for finding the right word. The morning after that first encounter with the
monster, Conor is getting his own breakfast, relieved that he doesn’t have to
eat his mother’s health-food-shop cereal and bread: ‘It tasted as unhappy as it
looked.’ This will become a classic. -HS
Trash
by Andy Mulligan. Definitions, 2014 (2010). ISBN 9781909531130. 224 pp.
This impressive
novel is a perfect class set text for Years 7-9. Set in the Philippines, it is
narrated by multiple voices, including those of three young boys who make a
meagre living scavenging on a huge tip in Manila. The tip is their home as well
as their workplace. One day one of the boys discovers a bag, containing an
identity card, a key and some money. The money is very welcome, but it soon
becomes clear that the bag is much more valuable than it appears, when hordes
of police descend on the tip offering large rewards for its recovery. The bag
holds a deadly secret and the boys’ decision to solve the mystery propels them
into a very dangerous situation.
This is a
breathtaking thriller with wonderfully appealing characters. The surprising
ending is astonishingly right.
This will give
students insight into the lives of the very poor in third-world countries and
the impossibility of social justice in corrupt regimes. It will also give them
an appreciation of the possibilities of multiple narration.
Recommendation: I would use this with a Year 8 class,
but it will work with bright Year 7s and it would be a satisfying text for
those Year 9 students who might not cope with something longer and more
difficult. It is a fairly easy read. It begs to be accompanied by some research
into the lives of children growing up in intense poverty. It also lends itself
to an investigation of the consequences of stereotyping people: these kids have
been labelled ‘trash’. This is an outstanding novel, ideal for use with the
Australian curriculum. -HS
The Watch That Ends the Night: Voices
from the Titanic
by Allan Wolf.
Candlewick Press, 2013 (2011). ISBN 9780763663315. 480 pp.
From the immense data collected by
historians and ‘Titaniacs’ (those hobbyists obsessed with the story), Wolf has
written a fascinating and gripping verse ‘faction’ that focuses on twenty-two
selected passengers but extends to the iceberg itself and even a ship’s rat,
having begun with the sombre account from John Snow, the undertaker, at sea for
five days after the sinking to collect the numerous bodies. The verse varies
from the more formal rhyme and rhythm of the ice to the lively dialogue of the
passengers resurrected in the present tense. And these are cleverly selected
from the 2 207 passengers and crew aboard. Although John Jacob Astor the
millionaire, Margaret Brown (later dubbed the unsinkable Molly Brown), the
captain E. J. Smith, the lookout Frederick Fleet and Harold Bride, the radio
operator, might be obvious choices, Wolf constructs the personal fabric that
clothes the well-known events of the disaster, using the evidence found on the
bodies to draw out the ironies and mysteries to fictionalise the known facts.
The other voices are from the gambler, the baker, the second violinist, Jamila
the young refugee, Lolo the tailor’s son, Frankie the dragon hunter and, most
intriguing of all, Thomas Hart, the stoker, a fictionalised character that
turned out to be a fiction based on a fiction that the newspapers of the time
had reported as fact. The sources used are explained in the easy-to-read notes
that support the large bibliography of books and websites that many readers
will want to consult in this year of the centenary of the disaster. [This
review was written in 2012.]
The voices ring true and the poems,
mostly in single or double pages, stretching to four pages at most for the more
dialogic ones, are easy to read and give the personal accounts of the voyage
from Southampton to Cherbourg to Queenstown to The Grand Banks and then the
fatal meeting with the iceberg - which was tiny as icebergs go, barely reaching
the height of the Titanic’s forward well deck. The two hours of the sinking and
the stories of that night for both victims and survivors, being told through
the voices, convey the humanity of the events without sensationalism or
melodrama.
The beauty of the book’s design and the
quality of the production is a further bonus.
Recommendation: I expect that a new generation of
‘Titaniacs’ will be produced in schools that buy this book, as it will be an
easy read for years nine upwards. (Younger readers might need a warning about
the undertaker’s final and frank description of bodily decomposition - ‘embrace
this fact and learn to love it’ - on pages 404-5.) -ET
We Were Liars
by E. Lockhart.
Allen & Unwin, 2014. ISBN 9781760111069. 225 pp.
This is very
contemporary, very compelling and rather uncomfortable reading. The setting is
a private island just off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, summer playground of
America's wealthy aristocracy. The Sinclair family who have owned the island
for generations are the epitome of the beautiful people: 'The Sinclairs are
athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide,
our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive.'
And under no
circumstances must anything threaten that beautiful image.
The family have
built four substantial homes on the island - one for parents, Harris and
Tipper, and one for each of their married (and divorced) daughters and their
offspring. All family members spend every summer on the island. There are
increasing tensions among the daughters, as it seems that their trust funds may
be inadequate to maintain them in the manner to which they have become
accustomed, but life on the island is paradise for the children: a group of
littlies and the four older children - Cadence, Johnny, Mirren and the
outsider, Gat. To the family, the four older children are known as the Liars.
Gat, the
outsider, first came to the island when the Liars were all eight. He is the
nephew of Ed, boyfriend of the divorced Carrie, and of Indian heritage - a
striking contrast to 'our white, white family'. Of course they are all too
well-bred to be racist, but Gat's otherness becomes a threat the summer they
all turn fifteen, when it is obvious that Cadence - the eldest of the
generation and presumably the heir - is falling in love with Gat. It is Gat who
tells Cadence that to her grandfather, the patriarch, he is Heathcliff:
'There's nothing that Heathcliff can ever do to make these Earnshaws think he's
good enough.'
Cadence is the
narrator. Her narration opens a little before the year in which she will turn
seventeen, and we learn everything in flashback. However, it is confusing
flashback, as Cadence has had a terrible accident that has left her with
selective amnesia. She has no memory of the accident and only flashes of memory
of that fifteenth summer.
The novel is
very tautly written. The reader is as eager as Cadence is to find out what it
is she cannot remember. The truth, when it hits us, is deeply, distressingly
shocking. This is a novel whose ending must never be revealed to anyone who has
not yet read it.
As well as a
structure that so cleverly conceals the truth - despite the fact that all the
clues are there, if we hadn't been too blind to see them, there is much to
admire about the writing. The first-person narration in Cadence's voice gives
us an incisive look at the life of privilege and the thin veil of normality
that must always be kept in place. Cadence describes emotional situations in
extreme terms. She watches her father get into the Mercedes and drive away, out
of her life and her mother's life, and she explains the pain like this:
Then he pulled out a handgun and
shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole
opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed.
Blood gushed automatically from my open wound,
then
from my eyes,
my
ears,
my
mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure.
The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house,
the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch. My heart spasmed among the
peonies like a trout.
Mummy snapped. She said to get
hold of myself.
Be normal, now, she said. Right
now, she said.
Because you are. Because you can
be.
Don't cause a scene, she told me.
Breathe and sit up.
It's a
technique that Lockhart uses frequently through the novel, especially when
Cadence is describing the terrible migraines she suffers as she tries to
remember.
The other
narrative technique that Lockhart uses with great effect is the insertion
throughout the narrative of versions of a fairy story about a rich and powerful
king with three beautiful daughters.
Recommendation: This is a high-interest novel
that will thoroughly engage readers in Years 9 - 10. Consider it too for less
academic Year 11 students. Its only flaw as a class-set novel is that you will
have to threaten your students with something very dire indeed if anyone
discloses the ending before everyone has finished reading.
This would also
be a great text for Area of Study: Discovery. Discovery is occurring on two
levels: you have the process of Candace trying to remember, to overcome her
selective amnesia. That is a process of the slow reveal, as piece by piece
glimpses of that fifteenth summer on the island come back to her. But there is
another process of discovery - that of the reader. We share in Candace's
gradual revelation, but then there is the sudden, terrible shock of the truth.
-HS