AATE Conference Sydney -
October 2012
Choices for English: Great
texts for the Australian Curriculum
Session
T6-13. Presented by Deb McPherson, Helen Sykes and Ernie Tucker
Deb was unfortunately ill on the day but was
involved in planning this session and in writing many of the annotations below.
In the session Helen and Ernie presented some of the best recently published
texts for secondary English classrooms. Our selection includes titles that
meet the requirements of the cross-curricular priorities of the Australian
Curriculum but it also includes a range of other quality texts that will engage
students working on that curriculum.
As usual, there were too many titles to cover in
the session, so we have included annotations on all the titles we should have
liked to cover, not just those that we spoke about during the presentation.
The notes below have been arranged in
alphabetical order. You can browse the 'Recommendations' headings if you are
looking for texts to suit a particular year level or type of reader.
The 'Wide reading links' heading lists themes,
topics and genres to which each title belongs. These links are those that are
used in the presenters' teacher reference book, Choices for English: books, films and other texts that work,
published by Nelson Cengage Learning.
Please note we have reluctantly inserted a dash or
two in place of the vowels in a few words that might have been caught up by
your school internet filter. We like to quote directly from the texts we talk
about and to give you a feel for the language used, but we have had problems
before with our notes being rejected when teachers have tried to download them.
If you have any queries about this list, you can
email Helen Sykes on hsykes@me.com.
Antipodes: Poetic Responses
edited by Margaret Bradstock. Phoenix Education, 2011. ISBN
9781921586392. 163 pp.
This very useful anthology focuses on poetry that is about the
relationship between blacks and whites in Australia. There is an excellent
introduction by Elizabeth Webby outlining the changing attitudes of white
Australian writers and the eventual appearance of Australian Indigenous voices.
Many of the poems published here, especially those of recent writers, are ones
that you won’t find in other anthologies. There’s an exciting selection of
contemporary works, as well as some classics. Poets represented include W. C. Wentworth, Mary Gilmore, Kenneth
Slessor, Judith Wright, Rex Ingamells, Douglas Stewart, James McAuley, Francis
Webb, Les Murray, Geoff Page, Anita Heiss, Samuel Wagan Watson, Tony Birch, Jeff
Guess, Judy Johnson, Chris Mansell and John Mateer.
Recommendation:
You will draw on this regularly in your teaching, from Years 7 - 12. A class
set would be a good investment, especially given the Australian Curriculum
requirement for Indigenous texts. There is also a teacher's book that provides information about the poets and the
poems and activities using individual poems and groups of poems. - HS
Audition
by Stasia Ward Kehoe. Penguin, 2011. ISBN 9780143566595. 468
pp.
Small
town farmer’s daughter from Vermont, Sarah, is the narrator of this verse novel
about arriving in New Jersey on a classical ballet scholarship to finish her
final year in high school. She is both excited and afraid of looking like a
hick next to the slick city girls with their fashionable clothes and tight
bodies. She endures the silence of strangers until her talent is recognised and
she is promoted following the admiration of Rem, the principal male dancer who
has ambitions as a choreographer. When Sarah shines on tour, Rem’s public
kisses lead to his apartment where they develop his dance together and the
dance ends in his bed.
Kehoe
knows the big-city sophistication of the dance scene intimately, with
convincing detail of the perils of dieting, blisters, muscular aches, jealousy,
intense competition, loneliness and the grinding boredom of the routine
classes, balanced with the thrills of successful performance and sexual
initiation. The choice between Sarah as a dancer and Sarah as a woman with
other possible futures is well portrayed. There is no Hollywood ending,
although the abruptness of the end is not quite satisfying.
Recommendation: If
your school can cope with the virgin sex scene, this well-written verse novel
will be a valuable antidote to those that romanticise both the sexual and the
dance experience. I worked in a performing arts school for nine years, so
believe me. This is an easy read for Years 9 – 10; despite the page length, the
word count is much lower and the unexplained literary, dance and music
references fit the context well.
Wide reading links:
a question of gender, body image, challenge and endurance, coming of age,
choices, music. - ET
Beauty Queens
by Libba Bray. Allen & Unwin, 2011. ISBN 9781742377070. 396
pp.
The
cover features the bikini-clad torso of a blonde with a ‘Beauty Queens’ sash diagonally across
one side and a bandolier across the other. But wait, the bandolier contains not
bullets, but lipsticks. You’ll understand why I kept placing this book lower in
my pile of books to review. However, as it is written by Libba Bray, the
brilliant writer of Going Bovine, I
had to succumb.
It’s
a satire, not just of beauty contests but of most things I think are
unfortunate American practices, such as reality TV, shock jocks, Christian
hypocrisy, corporate secrecy and exploitation of emerging nations, support for
dictators, oil and gas exploitation and attitudes to sexuality. Thirteen state
finalists in a national Teen Dream Beauty Contest are placed in a Lord-of-the-Flies, desert-island
scenario, except that the island is also occupied (I use the term advisedly) by
a US corporation corruptly supporting an Elvis-Presley-fan president so that
the oil and gas found there can be brought to America where those ‘comforts’ belong.
There’s
lots of fun with the literary references, a baton not a conch, and the two
teams, not tribes, call themselves ‘The Sparkle Ponies’ and ‘The Lost Girls’. Many text types are
used, including footnotes, commercial breaks, ‘Miss Teen Dream Fun Facts’ and TV
program transcripts. It’s so over the top in its satire that I wondered how far
Libba Bray was prepared to go, until I gave up when a crew of hunk pirates from
a film crew land on the island and a depilatory cream ‘Tache Off’ proves to be explosive.
Recommendation: It’s
too funny to miss unless you have the misfortune to be in a school where
references, however satirical, to sexuality (one of the girls turns out to be a
boy who hopes to win the contest to pay for his transgender surgery), ‘Christian Pole Dancing’ and chastity or
‘purity rings’ put
this book, as the Americans would say, ‘off limits’. This would be great fun to
do with Years 10 or 11, either after Lord
of the Flies or as an introduction to satire, and as those girls have to
live off the land, you can add this book to the few that approach the
sustainability cross-curriculum area.
Wide reading links:
satire, body image, power, other countries, a question of gender, the role of
the media, narrative forms. - ET
The Best Day of My Life
by Deborah Ellis. Allen & Unwin, 2012. ISBN 9781742379142.
168 pp.
The opening sentence reads: ‘The best day
of my life was the day I found out I was all alone in the world.’
Valli
doesn't know how old she is - probably nine or ten. Her job is to pick up coal,
any stray lumps that she can find. She has to be quick about it, as the bosses
regard this as stealing. She is not allowed to go to school, although she hangs
around the open-air classroom when she can and has taught herself to write in
the dirt with a stick. On this particular day she learns that the family she
lives with are not her relations, as she has always believed; they had been
paid to take her as a baby after her unmarried mother died in childbirth. The
discovery sets her free in a way: there is no reason to stay in Jharia,
scavenging for lumps of coal. So she hides in the back of one of the coal
trucks.
This is an easier read than some of Ellis's other
novels, such as the Parvana series, but
some teachers may worry whether it is too dark for primary or junior secondary students.
When the truck drivers find Valli hidden in their load, they try to sell her to
a brothel. She is saved when the madam recognises that Valli is showing signs
of leprosy. Valli becomes one of the many homeless street kids struggling to
survive on the streets of Kolkata.
The novel exposes with Ellis's usual perceptiveness
the plight of lepers and of street children in India, but it is not depressing.
Valli is a wonderfully resilient and engaging character, funny and bright. As
always, Ellis provides young readers with a positive and inspiring ending.
Jharia is a real place. Just as a study of Trash can be enhanced by looking at
photos of the huge garbage dumps in Manila, a study of The Best Day of My Life should include some of the images of Jharia
that can be found on the internet: the women in their brightly coloured saris
carrying on their heads huge baskets of coal as they toil up the narrow steep
trails that Ellis describes; the children blackened by coal dust; the air thick
with choking dust.
Recommendation: This is well worth considering for class set use
in Year 7. Yes, it is dark - but it is also a celebration of the triumph of the
human spirit, and a demonstration of our common humanity, no matter how
different our circumstances. Consider as well an author study of Ellis's
impressive body of work.
Wide reading links:
homelessness, living on the edge, resilience, stories with an Asian setting or
Asian characters. - HS
Beyond Courage
by Doreen Rappaport. Candlewick Press, 2012. ISBN
9780763629762. 228 pp.
This is currently only available in hardcover.
Rappaport
succeeds in her aim to tell the mostly unknown stories of those Jews who
resisted the Nazi Holocaust and those righteous gentiles who supported them.
These non-fiction accounts use photographs and personal accounts of survivors,
supported by the poems written by the Theresienstadt inmates. Rappaport
counters the preconception that the Jews acquiesced in their capture,
incarceration and slaughter and provides the research evidence from all over
Europe to support her position. Most of our students know about Anne Frank and
Oscar Schindler, but here are many other, unsung heroes. Moreover, we know
about the famous people who escaped in time, and several novels have been
written about the kindertransport
where parents had the terrifying task of sending their children off into an
unknown future. However, we don’t know about the ordinary people who endured or
resisted or contributed in essential services, such as the forging of papers,
or the many others who hid Jews in their cellars and attics. Many of these
endured the hatred of their countries’ patriots because they had to assume
attitudes of pro-Nazism to cover their secret activities.
The
text is divided into five parts: the realisation, saving the future, in the
ghettos, in the camps and partisan warfare. The most striking account for me
was the successful flight and long-term establishment of a secret shtetl village
in a Belarus forest that sheltered 1 230 people. The numerous photographs of
the camps and the survivors are both enlightening and disturbing, especially
the one of a peephole into a gas chamber.
Recommendation: Use
this graphic book to support the large body of Holocaust fiction for years 9 –
12.
Wide reading links: the
Holocaust, refugees, the migrant experience, World War II, resilience,
overcoming adversity, friendship across cultures. - ET
Black Painted Fingernails
by Steven Herrick. Allen & Unwin, 2011. ISBN
9781742374598. 210 pp.
Herrick,
Australia's best-known writer of verse novels for children and young adults, uses
prose this time with multiple narrations from four different points of view but
beginning in familiar territory with a first-person present-tense narration by
another of his large gentle boys - James, who is driving from the city to his
first practice teaching session in a small country town. Naïve James is a
sucker for exotic Sophie, twenty-two-years old and supremely confident, who
tosses a coin with him to win a hitch in his new car. Sophie is the country
girl returning home to Hillston in western New South Wales and Herrick moves
the narration into the third-person past tense to tell her back story from the
age of fifteen when her mother left Sophie with a thirteen-year-old brother, an
older brother and her father. Meanwhile, Herrick switches again briefly from
the road trip to bring in James’s parents, who worry about their only child’s
absence and the silence of his mobile, keeping the immediacy of the present
tense before reverting to the past tense of Sophie and the crisis with her
younger brother that caused her to leave home abruptly.
The
stories move back and forth as the two drive west, with an amusing interlude
when they share a motel room, until the relationship has grown to the point
where Sophie’s secret is revealed and James, with this abrupt initiation into
the harsher realities of Sophie’s life, decides that he can phone his parents
and be surprised by their acceptance of what he fears was his disappointing news
for them.
Recommendation: As
usual with Herrick, this is an easy read with short chapters and high interest
levels for young adults who aren’t reading most fiction that they are given at
school. He flirts with the sentimentality of the story but, to me, he always
has something to say about young adult life in Australia. The brief sexual and
drug references should not cause any problems for those schools who need these
alerts. Use this story in an author study of Herrick, with a series on life in
rural Australia fiction or as an easy introduction to multiple narratives.
Years 9 - 10.
Wide reading links:
brothers, families, challenge and endurance, coming of age, generations,
identity, choices, journeys, rural life, a question of gender, narrative forms.
- ET
Black Spring
by Alison Croggon. Walker Books, 2012. ISBN 9781921977480.
287 pp.
This
is a wonderfully rich, compulsively readable, transformation of Wuthering Heights. Australian writer
Alison Croggon has set her story in a landscape just as bleak and hostile as
that of the Yorkshire moors, but it is a country that exists purely in the
imagination: characters have names like Damek, Lina, Kush and Hammel. And
whereas Brontë allows - but never confirms - the possibility of the
supernatural, Croggon's world is full of dark magic, wizards and witchcraft.
Croggon has retained Brontë's dual narrators: the outsider, Hammel, is just as
self-deluding and pompous as Lockwood, while the housekeeper, Anna, is in many
ways a salt-of-the-earth type like Nelly Dean. The narrators frame a story of
passion, obsession, cruelty and vengeance, in language that frequently echoes
that of Wuthering Heights.
Croggon’s
plot is as fascinating as much for its departures from that of Wuthering Heights, as for its
similarities. The persecutor of the Cathy and Heathcliff characters (Lina and
Damek) is not Hindley, Cathy's brother and heir to their father's estate, but a
brutal outsider, Emerek Masko, who takes over the estate after Lina's father’s
death. There is a younger Lina, as there is a younger Catherine, but there is
no Hareton character, meaning that the resolution that is so significant in Wuthering Heights is impossible in Black Spring. There is also no Isabella
so that, astonishingly, the Heathcliff character (Damek) marries and mistreats
the younger Lina, daughter of his great love.
Some
readers do not enjoy transformations of much-loved texts, just as some are
reluctant to watch film versions, but I saw Croggon’s novel as a huge tribute
to a great work, as well as a very intriguing novel in its own right. While I
admired very much Croggon’s achievement, reading Black Spring has impressed me even more of Brontë’s genius,
especially her extraordinary control as a writer.
Recommendation:
It would be a pity to have students read this before they have read Wuthering Heights. There is no reason
why you can't use Brontë’s novel with bright kids in Years 9 or 10, especially
girls. A comparison with Black Spring
would be excellent preparation for the kind of transformation study that is
already a requirement in NSW for Advanced students and is likely to be a
requirement for all students in a senior national curriculum.
Wide reading links:
retellings, horror, love stories. - HS
Blood Brothers
by Carole Wilkinson. black dog books, 2012. ISBN 9781742031897.
367 pp.
This
is Book 4 of the Dragonkeeper series.
It is currently only available in hardcover.
After
the success of the first three books, Wilkinson has moved her setting 400 years
forward to the chaotic period of the warring kingdoms that followed the
destruction of the Han dynasty and its capital Luoyang. Here the story moves
back and forth from the ruins of the city into the mountains where the Buddhist
monks shelter in a poor, secret monastery. Tao, the central character, is fifteen
and a novice from a formerly rich family who now shelter in their summer house
in the hills. Tao is learning Sanskrit from an elderly monk and is copying rare
sutras to preserve them from the invading barbarians (or nomads, as Wilkinson
chooses to call them).
So
once again I enjoy Wilkinson’s research and her convincing historical setting,
which now supports the story of the Buddhist period in which Tao sees a statue
of the Buddha for the first time, is appalled by the un-Buddhist behaviour of a
charlatan abbot who wants to build a golden pagoda and get the support of the
barbarian leader.
And
of course, there are dragons, especially Kai, who at 466 years old is in a
petulant, adolescent stage. He has chosen Tao to be his dragon keeper but at
first they cannot talk to each other and Tao, being a novice in a remote
monastery, has no social skills. Enter, from the ruined cellars and cisterns of
the city, a twelve-year-old girl, Pema, who rescues them from the nomad attack
and is bent on a very un-Buddhist revenge.
I
enjoyed Wilkinson’s closely woven carpet of a story in which the violence of
the nomads, the magical powers of the dragons and the pacific precepts of the
Buddhists are kept in constantly interesting patterns of action. As usual, the
dragons are totally believable and fascinating, especially with the conceit of
Kai’s adolescent mood swings.
Recommendation: Years
7 - 8 will enjoy this easily read fantasy, turn the pages with the action and
absorb a good introduction to one of the pillars of Asian culture.
Wide reading links:
stories about China, historical fiction, fantasy, children in war, friendship,
identity, cultural diversity. - ET
Bluefish
by Pat Schmatz. Candlewick Press, 2011. ISBN 9780763653347.
226 pp.
This is currently available only in hardcover.
This
is a very impressive American novel about three teenage misfits. The
characterisation is terrific: each of the three is an outsider for quite
different reasons. They are thrown together by circumstances and the unlikely
bond they form is transformational in all their lives. Travis is new to the
school and desperate to hide the fact that he is unable to read. The title word
'bluefish' is the name of the reading group to which Travis was assigned in the
early years of school - the group who failed to learn to read. Travis has come
to believe that the bluefish defines him -
‘smiling because it
was too stupid to know it was stupid.’
Most
of the novel is third-person limited narration, with events seen through Travis’s
eyes. We come to know him intimately - his loneliness and isolation, his
prickly relationship with his difficult grandfather, his low self-esteem and
his essential decency. Through his eyes we also get to know Bradley, the nerdy
middle-class black student who is constantly victimised by the school bullies, and
the mysterious Velveeta. The third-person narration is interrupted from time to
time by brief letters from Velveeta to someone called Calvin - someone whom we
realise is dead. Velveeta’s bubbly, confident manner is a facade. She is as
desperate to conceal the realities of her life in the caravan park with her
dysfunctional mother and abusive stepbrother as Travis is to conceal the truth
about his reading.
The
hero of the novel is to some extent the English teacher, Mr McQueen. I’ll admit
to a soft spot for books that show the difference that good teachers can make
to the lives of young people. There’s also a terrific local librarian who
provides a sanctuary for Velveeta when she can no longer take refuge in Calvin’s
caravan.
This
novel is quirky, funny and moving. It’s a book about friendship and resilience,
about healing, about accepting loss, about standing up to the bullies and about
the importance of self-belief. But most of all it’s a great read, with a wholly
satisfying resolution.
Recommendation: Most
of the really successful class-set books are ones that engage kids’ emotions on
quite a deep level. Bluefish is such
a book. Travis’s grief for his dog, Rosco - his only friend - will ring
especially true to young readers. Most will identify with the struggles that
all three characters face to find meaning in their lives. Although the plots
are very different, Bluefish reminds
me of Sachar's Holes: fairly
accessible text, not too long, with short, easily digested chapters. I wouldn’t
choose it if there were kids in my class who couldn’t read at all, as the
subject-matter would be too sensitive, but I think it would be a great success
with most classes in Years 7 and 8.
Wide reading links:
school life, friendship, bullying, coping with grief, resilience. - HS
Children of the King
by Sonya Hartnett. Penguin, 2012. ISBN 9780670076130. 266
pp.
This is currently available only in hardcover.
Hartnett
writes her extraordinary books for a diverse audience, from picture books for
young children to novels for adults and older teenagers. Children of the King, like The
Silver Donkey and The Midnight Zoo,
is written for readers in the Year 5 to Year 8 group. All three novels are
strikingly individual, each quite unique. All are complex narratives that weave
together different plot strands and draw on different literary traditions in a
way that Hartnett makes to appear effortless. All are explorations of
significant periods of the past.
The Children of the King
is on one level a story about the London children who were evacuated during
World War II, although Cecil and Jeremy are very different from the children of
the slums that we know about from Goodnight
Mister Tom. Cecil and Tom are privileged and wealthy; they travel by
first-class rail with their self-indulgent and morally bankrupt mother. In
persuading her mother to take in one of the evacuees, Cecil is entirely
self-interested: she treats May as a new toy and is offended when May makes it
clear that she has a mind of her own. Jeremy, aged fourteen, is angry at being
evacuated; eventually he runs away and returns to London, where he finds
himself in the middle of a night of bombing and has his life changed forever.
On
this level alone, the novel is very satisfying. The characterisation is superb,
especially the character development. But this is only one small part of this
intriguing work. Embedded within the children's story is the story Uncle
Peregrine tells in serial-form about the nearby ruins of Snow Castle and King
Richard III, including the story of the young princes. And the young princes
have their own special place in the narrative, because Children of the King is - among other things - a great ghost story.
Hartnett
has huge respect for her readers. She knows that they can cope with ‘cruel’ stories - stories about war and
death - and she knows that reading about a world that can be cruel is one way
of learning to cope.
Recommendation:
This would be a wonderful book to share with gifted readers, but it would work
best at Year 5 or 6, perhaps shared by a small group of readers within a class.
It has always been difficult to find books that challenge good readers in the
Year 5 to Year 8 age group - books that challenge them intellectually by the
quality of the ideas explored and by the sophistication of the writing.
Hartnett is perfect for this purpose. Her breathtaking prose is a joy.
Wide reading links:
historical fiction, fantasy, children in war. - HS
Cinder
by Marissa Meyer. Penguin, 2011. ISBN 9780141340035. 387 pp.
This
is Book 1 of an intended 4-book series, The
Lunar Chronicles. It’s unashamedly chick lit - and I loved it. It’s
wonderfully intelligent chick lit, playing deliciously with genre. It is a
clever re-telling of the Cinderella story, transposed to some future time in
New Beijing. It is also great sci-fi. After centuries of war the world's
political landscape has been considerably altered but, not surprisingly, the
Chinese empire is a major power. Earth is under threat from the inhabitants of
the moon, humans who have evolved over time to acquire special powers. The
Lunar leader, Queen Levana, is spookily evil - and the Lunars are the
probable cause of the terrible plague that is indiscriminately killing humans,
including Cinder’s young stepsister. Cinder herself is a cyborg, despised by
her nasty stepmother and one of her two stepsisters. She is an engaging
character and it is not surprising that there is a growing attraction between
Cinder and the handsome Prince Kai, a budding romance threatened firstly by the
fact that Kai does not know that Cinder is a cyborg and secondly by Queen
Levana's determination to marry the prince for political reasons. The plot
twists and turns delightfully as Cinder fights to save her prince and Earth
itself, at the same time uncovering some unexpected secrets about herself.
Of
course, as it’s Book 1, the reader is left up in the air. I will admit to
considerable frustration that Book 2 wasn’t immediately available. This is
great fun and I look forward to reading the rest of the series as it is published.
Recommendation:
Make sure that girls in Years 8 and 9 discover this. They will recommend it
strongly to each other once they find it. Although boys are unlikely to want to
read it, it has a place in a unit of work on fairy tales: in particular, have students
explore the clever way in which Cinder's foot (an artificial one, one of her
cyborg parts) is featured in the story.
Wide reading links:
fairy stories, science fiction, love stories, choices. - HS
The Convent
by Maureen McCarthy. Allen & Unwin, 2012. ISBN
9781742375045. 419 pp.
The
story moves to 1926 when Ellen aged 14 has been returned to the Sacred Heart
convent because of her ‘bad blood’. Then we are transported to 1964 and the
fascinating bride of Christ ceremony as Cecilia, aged 19, is inducted into the
closed order of the convent. We learn about the arcane disciplines of the order
and empathise with her brother Dominic and her father who oppose her
ordination, ‘cooped
up like a bloody chook’. The only light touch is Breda, a fellow novice who has
a healthy disregard for regulations and shockingly disappears the night before
her final vows. Then to Peach, in the present time, a first-year physiotherapy
student and an adopted child not interested in learning about her biological
parents, with her sixteen-year-old sister Stella, conceived soon after the
adoption. Her friend Det, an artist with a studio at the former convent, persuades
her to apply for a part-time job serving at the coffee shop there. Det, after
two abortions, reveals her pregnancy but surprises all by deciding to have the
baby. Other complications are with Peach’s ambivalence about her boyfriend and
her sister’s obesity.
The
stony presence of the convent buildings, including the notorious laundries
where the forced adoption girls slaved many hours to wash and iron the linen
for hotels under the harsh regime of the elderly nuns and the naïve compliance
of the novices, dominates the story. Key scenes are Cecilia, surprised by her
grief about giving up her baby, conceived with a revolutionary priest, and
Breda’s escape over the wall with a twenty-three-year-old inmate. Breda nurtures
Cecilia many years later, when she returns to Australia after her flight to
France.
After
the various dramas about convent life and the exploitation of the adopted girls
in the laundry, it was refreshing to read of Peach’s lack of interest in
finding her birth parents. There are no longeurs in this gripping story and
even Catholic schools could not disapprove, as the women keep their faith in
prayer and their need for a god. The short chapters and clear designation of
time, place and narrator facilitate easy reading.
Recommendation: The contemporary story has a few expletives and there are sexual references and birthing details that are totally contextual and should cause no concerns in schools that worry about these things. The strengths of the many convincing characters and the dramatic force of their stories moved me swiftly through the 419 pages. Use this in Years 9 - 11 as a class text or for author study with Maureen McCarthy’s other fiction.
Recommendation: The contemporary story has a few expletives and there are sexual references and birthing details that are totally contextual and should cause no concerns in schools that worry about these things. The strengths of the many convincing characters and the dramatic force of their stories moved me swiftly through the 419 pages. Use this in Years 9 - 11 as a class text or for author study with Maureen McCarthy’s other fiction.
Wide reading links:
the big questions, choices, identity, belonging, power, families, historical
fiction and generations. - ET
The Dream of the
Thylacine by Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks. Allen &Unwin, 2011. ISBN 9781742373836.
This is a hardcover picture book.
This
is a visually stunning picture book about the extinction of the Tasmanian
tiger. Brooks has incorporated images
from the film footage of the last caged and miserable tiger, contrasting with
glorious paintings of the animal in its natural environment. Wild’s text is
haunting and evocative, especially when set against the ageing wooden bars of
the cage and the faint images of the thylacine behind the dominant image of the
wire.
Recommendation: This elegy to the loss
of a species is suitable for class study at any level. Ask students to consider
how the story might have been told differently as a stepping stone to their
exploration of the choices the composers have made. This is a masterpiece. It
is an excellent choice for the Sustainability cross-curriculum requirement of
the Australian Curriculum.
Dragonquest
by
Allan Baillie and Wayne Harris. Walker Books, 2012 (1996). ISBN 9781921977848.
Walker
Books has been republishing, in paperback format, some great Australian picture
books that had gone out of print. I was delighted that Dragonquest was chosen as one of these, as it has always been one
of my favourites. The quest is of course the oldest of all stories: a journey
of adventure in which the hero proves himself by overcoming a series of
obstacles and achieves manhood. Originally told in epic poems, the quest is the
basis of many fantasy and adventure stories, in both books and films. In this
case, the boy joins the famous Dragon Fighter and they go in quest of the last
dragon. Baillie’s words echo the epics - ‘deeds so daring that songs/ will be sung for a
thousand years’. It’s a joy to read the text aloud as the travellers
overcome the terrible dangers in their way: a desert inhabited by deadly desert
snakes, scuttling scorpions and banded wasps, a tangled forest and the ‘witchery
of the trees’, ‘a whispering abyss’, and hills patrolled by two-headed trolls.
The words are supported by Harris’s elaborate, detailed paintings, images that
are a delight to explore. The climax comes with a glorious disconnect between
the words and the pictures, as the boy realises that a true hero does not need
to be a killer.
Recommendation: This is a superb text for exploring the nature of
masculinity. The text is suitable for use in primary schools, but find excuses
to use it as well with secondary students. It’s a terrific example
of writer and illustrator working together to create meaning, rather than of an
artist just illustrating a writer's words. It offers readers the opportunity of
questioning the assumptions about heroism behind the traditional quest stories.
- HS
Edge of the World
by
Ian Trevaskis and Wayne Harris. Walker Books, 2012. ISBN 9781921150210.
This
is a hardcover picture book.
The
setting is a fishing village on the edge of the world. The setting is
unspecified, although there are clues that evoke the far north of the British
Isles: the name ‘Toby
McPhee’, the ‘cobbled streets’, ‘the breakwater’, the snowdrifts, the women and children
huddled close to their ‘hearths’. The time too is not specified, but it
is not contemporary: the clothing of the villagers is old-fashioned, as are the
fishing boats. No one smiles in this dreary world, until the day Toby McPhee
finds a tiny pot of colour. The reason for Toby's sadness is revealed on the
final page.
This
is a richly imagined story about grief and healing.
Recommendation:
This fine picture book can be used from upper primary through to secondary
school. There is quite a lot of printed text, set out as free verse. - HS
Erebos
by Ursula Poznanski. Allen & Unwin, 2012. ISBN 9781742379531. 432 pp.
‘Enter, or turn back. This is Erebos.’ Now who could
resist that invitation, couched in terms of: ‘Are you brave enough or a coward?’
I certainly couldn’t. Erebos drew me
in with all the addictive and suspenseful qualities of an online game, which is
not surprising as a computer game is a central ‘character’ of the novel.
Nick Dunmore
sees people in his school, including his best friend, Colin, acting strangely,
and he starts to connect it with a mysterious package that is being offered to
selected individuals. When he finally gets offered the CD and finds it’s a
fantasy role-playing game called Erebos (named
after the Greek god of darkness), he is eager to play and agrees to the rules -
you must play alone and not talk about the game with anyone (some echoes of Fight Club there!). As Nick’s
character/avatar, Sarius, rises through the levels of the game, he finds that
help is available but that he has to reciprocate in the real world. Initially
asked to undertake seemingly innocent tasks, he soon discovers that the line
between fantasy and reality is blurring, he loses friends and his sense of
right and wrong is imperilled. Erebos
is a dangerous game and Nick and others are being manipulated for some other
purpose outside of the game. When Nick refuses an order to spike his teacher’s
drink, his character is kicked out of the game. His anguish, and that of other
rejected devotees, is akin to withdrawal. But when Nick joins Jamie, Emily and
Victor in an investigation of the true purpose of the game, the reader can
start to see some good in this arrogant and obsessive character.
Recommendation:
Erebos was first
published in Germany in 2010 where it won the Youth Literature prize in 2011.
Judith Patterson translated it for this English edition. Students in Year 9
could explore the methods of manipulation and the nature of addiction – and not
just of games but also of other obsessions. Pozmanski has captured the
sometimes competitive and insular world of the adolescent very well and the
behaviour of the school gamers is all too realistic.
Wide reading links:
fantasy, thrillers and mysteries, technology, choices, school life, hazards. - DM
every day
by David Levithan. Text Publishing, 2012. ISBN
9781921922954. 304 pp.
There
have been a number of ‘wake up in someone else’s body’ books but, in the hands
of a writer like David Levithan, this one may well become a classic.
A, as he calls himself, the sixteen-year-old
main character in every day, has
moved into a new body every day of his life and each chapter in this novel is
another day in that life and that of the various bodies that host him. We begin
on Day 5994 and end on Day 6034. A has to work out, when he wakes up, who he is
today: he can be in the body of a boy or a girl, or a transgendered person; he
can be heterosexual or homosexual; he can be fat or thin, nerdy or athletic,
rich or poor. He can be in a body recovering from drug abuse. His host could be
mean or generous, depressed or happy - and each day it changes. A seems to have
come to terms with his terrible predicament but everything changes when he
meets Rhiannon. As Justin, her boyfriend, he has a day in which to watch her
and appreciate her grace and kindness as well as her vulnerability. Despite all
his lessons in not intervening in the lives of his hosts, A takes her to the
beach and falls in love. Desperate to see her again he visits her in other
bodies and finally decides to try to explain his situation – unbelievable as it
is. During this unconventional courtship one of A’s hosts who suspects he was
‘possessed’ begins an online campaign to seek A out, which begins to take the
form of a dangerous witch-hunt.
Recommendation:
Levithan provides wonderful characters in A and Rhiannon and a powerful and
poignant ending. One of the strengths of the novel is the way the everyday
lives of so many teenagers are explored. Use this story with Year 9 students to
consider issues of identity and perhaps compare and contrast it with Flip reviewed below.
Wide reading links:
fantasy; thrillers and mysteries; identity. - DM
Father’s Day
by Anne Brooksbank. Puffin Books, 2011. ISBN 9780143305682. 261
pp.
Brooksbank
knows twelve-year-old boys, as demonstrated by this engaging and accessible
domestic story of a boy in a small country coastal town saving up for a tinny
and the adventures that follow on the lagoon and river. Sam sometimes resents
the discipline meted out by his Hungarian born father, Joe, who works from home
as a cabinet maker. His mother, Teresa, is the younger wife in a blended family
in which Sam has an adult sister and brother and a younger brother. The
children are happily bonded until Sam discovers that Joe is not his biological
father. His real father disappeared to London before knowing about Teresa’s
pregnancy but now is back in town and creates a family crisis by paying money
into Sam’s bank account to enable him to buy the tinny and outboard motor.
The
resultant strains on the family following the jealous actions of both fathers
are skilfully woven into the more typical adventure story of the boy, his first
girlfriend, his best mate, the boat and three school bullies artfully named ‘The Cane Toads’. Moreover, this is another good story
in which the parents, all three of them, play significant roles.
I
guess the editor had fun arguing that the title should read ‘Fathers’ Day’ but that would have given too much
away.
Recommendation:
This is an easy read for Year seven with attractions for both boys and girls.
Wide reading links:
family, brothers, bullying, friendship, identity, belonging. - ET
The Fault in Our Stars
by John Green.
Penguin Books, 2012. ISBN 9780143567592. 313 pp.
Narrated by sixteen-year-old Hazel, who has
been living with incurable cancer for more than three years, this is a
compulsive read. The narrative voice is hugely appealing: this is a very bright
and very funny girl who knows the inevitability of her fate and is determined
not to be maudlin. Her greatest concern is for her parents: she describes
herself as a ‘grenade’ that
will some day explode, destroying their lives.
There have been a number of excellent YA
books in recent years about teenagers facing death, but this is in a class of
its own. It is unrelentingly realistic about the nature of illness - and the
sometimes worse nature of treatment. Hazel's thyroid cancer has spread to her
lungs and, although a wonder drug has stopped the tumours growing for a while,
she needs an oxygen tank to breathe - something that accompanies her
everywhere. Not surprisingly, she has very little energy and her appearance has
been affected by her treatment, particularly the bloated cheeks caused by
steroids. Hazel describes herself as ‘a normally proportioned
person with a balloon for a head’. She’s hardly the usual
heroine of an achingly tender love story.
The title, of course, comes from Cassius’s
words to Brutus. The Romans believed they could overcome their fate, but the
lives of Hazel and Augustus are more like another Shakespeare quotation - ‘As
boys to wanton flies/ Are we to the gods/ They kill us for their sport.’
Courageous fighting makes no difference. What happens seems cruelly arbitrary.
The title is one of many examples of
intertextuality. An important aspect of the narrative is Hazel’s favourite
book, a story about a girl with a terminal illness. Hazel is desperate to know
what happened to some of the characters at the end of the story. Her search
takes her to Amsterdam, where the author lives, and to a beautiful scene with
Augustus in the Anne Frank house.
It’s impossible to say too
much about the story without revealing important plot twists. Sufficient to say
that most adolescent readers will love the characters and the plot twists and
be torn between hilarity - there is some incredible black comedy - and grief.
Recommendation: This is one of the great books of recent
years. It has the qualities of a classic. Buy a class set and use it for many
years to come. It will be a huge success with Years 9 or 10. It is accessible
for most students, but the use of intertextuality means that it has as well a
great deal to challenge more academic students. There are a few sexually
explicit references, but it would be a very narrow-minded person indeed who
would object to them in their context.
Wide
reading links: love stories,
the big questions, coping with grief, challenge and endurance, overcoming
adversity, resilience, journeys. - HS
Flip
by Martyn Bedford. Walker Books, 2011. ISBN 9781406329896. 296
pp.
This
is another ‘wake up in someone else’s body’ book but Martyn Bedford achieves
something quite dramatic and different in Flip.
When fourteen-year-old Alex wakes up one morning he’s not just in the wrong
room but in the wrong body with an unknown and completely unfamiliar family,
school and friends. Philip Garamond is athletic, good at cricket and girls
while Alex is asthmatic and a clarinet-playing chess nerd. It is to Philip’s
body that Alex’s mind flees after a near-fatal accident. Both boys were born on
the same day and inexplicitly linked; while Alex lies in a coma his mind
inhabits Philip’s body. He finally learns he is a ‘physic evacuee’ - one among
other PEs on the internet.
Bedford
carefully and incrementally assembles the details that show the terrible trauma
that Alex is going through as he struggles to understand his situation and the
personality and reputation of the identity he has assumed. He softens the hard
edge of Flip, as Philip is called; he helps clear the table to his sister’s
astonishment, apologises to his ‘mother’ for his behaviour and rejects Flip’s
two girlfriends at school for another, unpopular girl. He is desperate to return to his home and
family but when he skips school and enters his real parents’ home in his new
body his efforts are misunderstood with terrible results. Meeting up with Rob,
another evacuee, provides a lifeline but Alex must find a way back into his own
body and that means forcing Flip out of it.
Recommendation:
There is much to discuss in the text, the different personalities, the
pressures on people, family life, the nature of identity, the humour and peril
of life in a different body and the appropriateness of the appendix of other
evacuees stories. Students in Year 9, particularly boys, should explore this
book with relish. - DM
Bedford
begins with a humorous narrative reminiscent of Freaky Friday: fourteen-year-old Alex, skinny, chess-playing,
clarinet-playing London boy wakes up in the muscular body of Philip, aka Flip, cricket star, school stud,
disruptive, uninterested student and living in Yorkshire. And it’s six months
later. Supporting this is a splendidly acerbic older sister, Teri, who provides
more fun with her commentary on her even more hopeless than usual brother.
There are humorous events associated with food preferences, the chaos of faking
his way at school and finding his new Yorkshire family posh in contrast to his
working-class and altogether tougher London life. Only the family dog suspects
that Flip is no longer the consciousness inside his body.
Next
the interest lies in how Alex investigates what happened to him (he’s lying in
a London hospital in a vegetative state after a hit-and-run accident). His
parents’ phone is now a silent number, his mother’s work colleague threatens
him with the police and his best chess-playing friend David also calls the
police when Alex, with Flip’s body and Flip’s voice, runs away to London to see
his real parents and persuade his friend to help him.
The
mood is skilfully changed as Flip’s parents, concerned about the changes to
their son, attempt to support him through his increasingly bizarre behaviour,
which deteriorates into increased nightmares and rages. After internet
searches, Alex finds that he is suffering from ‘Psychic Evacuation’ (PE) and meets a
man in his twenties, Rob, who attempts to teach him how to live in his new
body. The tensions grow as Alex/Flip vacillates between the two personalities,
especially when he is attracted to Cherry, who shares his musical interests but
is reviled by Flip’s male and female admirers.
Recommendation: The
pace of the story is well sustained towards a conclusion that kept me wondering
how the writer was going to get out of his own trap. The ending will create
much discussion, especially as the writer managed to successfully overcome my
disbelief throughout most of the story. Years 9 - 10.
Wide reading links:
science fiction, humour, identity, body image, families, friendship, living on
the edge, school life, a question of gender. - ET
Friday Brown
by Vikki Wakefield. Text Publishing, 2012. ISBN 9781921922701.
334 pp.
Vikki
Wakefield’s second novel is as gripping as her debut book, All I Ever Wanted, and invites comparison with Sonya Hartnett’s All My Dangerous Friends with its
psychological force and gothic characters. In a prologue, Friday, the
seventeen-year-old narrator, takes me back to the eleven-year-old whose mum
told her that all her family’s women were cursed to die in watery circumstances
and, although her mum dies of cancer, it is pneumonia that finishes her. In her
unexpressed grief, Friday leaves her wealthy grandfather’s house where her
mother was nursed, refusing his money, and taking her swag and the only photo
of her unknown father, she hitchhikes as a reminder of how she and her mum were
always on the move.
However,
the predictable search for her father is drastically stopped when, sheltering
exhausted in a railway station waiting room, she meets a mute albino boy,
Silence - ‘part
feral child, part old man’. From being the centre of her mother’s life for sixteen years, Friday needs help to survive on the streets and Silence is her tutor and
also a bag snatcher. He takes her to an overgrown house where she meets a ‘family’ of adolescent squatters who are
‘all really f-cked up’
but under the care and discipline of Arden, female, dreadlocked and powerful,
who doubts that Friday is damaged enough to fit in. Arden’s lover, Malik, a drug
dealer, is the only one who appears to be physically attractive to Friday’s
eyes. Arden, however, is attracted to Friday and, Fagin-like, gives her an
induction break-and-enter robbery test to be accepted into the family, each of
whom must contribute $200 a week to Arden in rent.
Arden’s
family and their power games move the novel into more of a mystery thriller
mode as the victim of the robbery, Wish, turns out to be a previous member of
the squat and charms Friday, who wonders whether she has inherited her mother’s
man obsession.
When
the squat is burnt down in suspicious circumstances, Arden takes them all bush
and the pace quickens as Arden’s control begins to fail and Friday is the only
one with the knowledge and experience for them to survive when the creek flash-floods.
Only Silence is close to Friday when jealousy and rivalry peak and the novel
takes its darkest turn in a thrilling climax.
Recommendation: Years
9 - 12 will find this novel hard to put down and Wakefield provides plenty of
talking points about structure and characterisation, even relating to the Sustainability
item in the national cross-curriculum area of learning. An author study or
class set reading or use as part of a unit on psychological thrillers would all
be attractive alternatives. There are few expletives in the terse dialogue and
the violence is mediated with emphasis on threat and fear rather than
depiction.
Wide reading links:
crime fiction, thrillers and mysteries, body image, coping with grief, gangs
and cliques, homelessness, living on the edge, unlikely friendships, power,
outsiders, overcoming fear and a question of gender. - ET
Holier than Thou
by Laura Buzo. Allen & Unwin, 2012. ISBN 9781741759983. 291
pp.
Laura
Buzo confirms the talent she showed in her first book, Good Oil. The glimpse she gave there of adolescents working with
adults is now extended to writing about young adults in their twenties. Holly,
the narrator, is a new graduate social worker, renting an inner city flat for
the first time with her partner, Tim. Nick is the experienced social worker and
partner in the field. Buzo takes the story back and forth in time as Holly
fills the readers in on the formation of her friendship group that went back to
Year 3 with Daniel and high school with Abby, Lara and the unattainable
Liam whom she lusts after.
Holly
fascinates me as the ‘woman
of steel’. Her inner doubts and trials as she experiments with men and her
cheery exterior gradually reveal the grief that lingers too long after the
harrowing death of her father, witnessed at home where her mother cared for him
during a long decline with cancer. Holly, like Buzo, is an astute observer of
life and her witty repartee makes for an entertaining read.
Recommendation: Years
9 - 12 students will enjoy this and have opportunities to think about entering
the work place and how easy it might be not to care about the disadvantaged. If
your school can cope with the occasional four-letter word in some of the dialogue
and a few drug and sex references, this book will prove very popular.
Wide reading links:
the world of work, a question of gender, the big questions, coping with grief.
- ET
Hugo
directed by Marin Scorsese. 2012. Rating: PG.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
by Brian Selznick. Scholastic Press, 2007. ISBN
9780439813785. 533 pp.
The
Invention of Hugo Cabret is only available in hardcover.
While The Invention of Hugo Cabret was
published in 2007, I thought a new review would be useful in the light of the
wonderful Martin Scorsese film adaptation. The
Invention of Hugo Cabret is the story of a young boy in Paris in the 1930s
and a homage to an early pioneer of film. Twelve–year-old Hugo lives in the
walls of the railway station. When his uncle, the station clockmaster, does not
come home, the boy is left to look after himself and to attempt to keep out of
the hands of the grasping Station Inspector. Hugo keeps the clocks running and
steals to keep himself alive. The ill-tempered owner of the station toyshop
takes his father’s notebook when he catches Hugo, and the boy tries to buy it
back by fixing a mechanical mouse. He makes friends with Isabelle, the
toymaker’s godchild, and together they try to solve the mystery of the
automaton Hugo had found in the rubble of the fire that killed his father. The
toymaker is revealed to be film-maker Georges Méliès and his despair and anger
at the loss of his films turn to joy as his craft and art are re-discovered. 
Selznick
uses pages of pictures to tell the story, not just illuminate it. He moves the
narrative from print to pictures and the reader follows, moving seamlessly from
reading to reading and viewing. The pictures are wonderful: charcoal sketches
that propel the reader/viewer into Hugo’s life and life in Paris in the 30s.
The book appears massive, and yet reading time is short as the pictures carry
so much of the narrative. Students who are daunted by reading large books may
find some inspiration in how easily they will read this one.
In
the film, Hugo, Martin Scorsese has
magnificently extended Selznick’s visual homage to the pioneering film-maker,
Georges Méliès. His film delivers a glorious opening sequence that moves across
Paris and into the grand railway station, and then rushes down the platform to
swoop into the face of the station clock to discover an eye looking out. It’s
Hugo’s eye of course, and we join him in the labyrinthine tunnels and stairs
behind the walls of the station as he winds the clocks. The cinematography is quite
extraordinary. Asa Butterfield is arresting as Hugo and Chloe Grace Moretz
as Isabelle shows warmth and intelligence. Ben Kinsley captures both the rage
and the genius of Méliès. Sacha
Baron Cohen plays the Station Inspector with some comic menace.
Recommendation: Students in Years 7 and 8 will be able
to explore the origins of film and compare the different techniques the director
and the author/illustrator employ to tell the same story. While
students may not gain the 3D experience in the classroom, a close study of book
and film will be illuminating.
Wide reading links:
historical fiction, technology, resilience. - DM
The Hugo Movie Companion
by Brian Selznick. Scholastic Press, 2011. ISBN
9780545331555. 256 pp.
The Hugo Movie Companion
by Brian Selznick provides excellent background material for the study of the
adaptation of the novel, The Invention of
Hugo Cabret, into the film Hugo. Lavish
historical illustrations, extracts from the novel and film stills make this
look behind the scenes an engaging production. Background information on the
author’s original book and interviews with the director and cast members, as
well as information on the various aspects of filming - including set construction,
art direction, stunts, special effects and cinematography - provide a wealth of
material to support the close study of this film in Years 7 or 8.
Recommendation:
Highly recommended for your professional library if you intend to teach the
book and/or the film. - DM
I Am Thomas
by Libby Gleeson and Armin Greder. Allen & Unwin, 2011.
ISBN 9781742373331.
This
is a hardcover picture book.
I Am Thomas
is a wonderfully insightful exploration of the character of a young man who is
leaving childhood behind him but who fails to meet the expectations of his
family and his society. Both the words and the images are frequently ugly:
images of harsh, hostile faces in black and white accompanied by words like ‘spitting angry words across the empty
spaces’. Greder has made
interesting use of different font sizes and types and the hateful words leap
off the page, as Thomas is urged to ‘think like
us’, ‘be like us’. Most of the story is told by Thomas himself in the first
person, until the climactic ‘But Thomas would not.’ The following three
openings are image only, with Gleeson using the same technique as she did with The Great Bear, also illustrated by
Greder, where she recognises that sometimes pictures can be more powerful than
words. The images in the resolution use colour again - colour that has not been
seen since Thomas abandoned his childhood toys.
Recommendation: This is being widely used as a related text in New
South Wales for the Area of Study: Belonging. It would be useful too in
Victoria as a text to look at for the Exploring Issues of Identity and
Belonging Context study. But it can be used in any English classroom,
preferably with students from Years 8 or 9 upwards. Students will understand
the pressure on Thomas to conform and the deep sadness that comes with his
insistence on resisting that pressure. They will argue passionately about what
happens at the end. They will also have the opportunity of exploring a wide
range of visual literacy techniques and how such things as framing,
positioning, the use of colour and the use of fonts make meaning. - HS
Inanimate Alice
Inanimate Alice represents an epiphany of sorts for me: a turning
point in my understanding of the amazing appeal of the digital text. Many
thanks to Prue Greene, the Senior Curriculum Support Officer English K-12 at
the NSW Curriculum and Learning Innovation Centre, who let me know about this
remarkable site.
Inanimate Alice was
created to be read and viewed online. This interactive novel was created as a
story that unfolds over time and on multiple platforms. As the website says it ‘uses
text, images, music, sound effects, puzzles and games to illustrate and enhance
the narrative.’ Education Services Australia, Bradfield Company Productions,
Promethean Planet and Everloop are some of the players involved in its
creation.
Inanimate Alice is
the story of Alice at different times in her life as she travels with her
parents around the world. Her story is told over four (at this stage)
increasingly interactive and complex episodes. As Alice grows older the story
duration becomes longer and more sophisticated and the interactivity becomes
more demanding. In episode one, set in China, Alice is eight and the episode
lasts five minutes. Alice’s father has gone missing and she and her mother set
out to find him. In those five minutes you share Alice’s anxiety about her
father, you travel in the four wheel drive with her mother through confusing
and intimidating landscapes, your sense of time is challenged and you too can
seek refuge in the games and puzzles Alice plays as the journey continues. In episode
two, set in Italy, Alice is ten and the viewing time is longer. In episode
three, in Russia, Alice is growing up. She is thirteen and hiding in an
apartment from some sinister figures who are making trouble for her father. It
feels as if you are in the closet with her. It takes at least fifteen minutes
to participate in this episode. In episode four Alice is fourteen and the
reader/viewer finds her in Great Britain. In this thirty-minute episode Alice
is settled in a school and delighted that her school has boys, lots and lots of
boys! As I read, viewed, listened to (and
participated in) the episodes I really felt drawn into this new medium for
storytelling.
Recommendation:
Inanimate Alice is
a sure fire way to engage and stimulate students. Students will enjoy and be challenged by the text that
will also support their literary, cinematic, and artistic literacies. With really edgy music, mesmerising video and graphics,
embedded puzzles and games, and an invitation to participate in the story, how
could it miss? The artistry and production values in this digital text are of a
very high quality. I particularly liked the paintings by Alice’s mother, but I
suspect students may prefer the games and puzzles. This digital text comes with
extensive teaching ideas and materials that are freely available online. Set
aside some time to read, view and experience Inanimate Alice and you won’t be disappointed. Neither will your
students. -
DM
The Ink Bridge
by Neil Grant. Allen & Unwin, March 2012. ISBN
9781742376691. 288 pp.
This new Australian novel is a compelling read. It has a
great deal to offer for whole-class study, with a particularly memorable
representation of the experience of Omed, a young Hazara. The narrative has
three main parts: the story of Omed in Afghanistan under the Taliban and his
desperate – and unsuccessful – attempt to find asylum; the story of a
traumatised Australian teenage boy, Hector; and a final section in which Hector
goes to Afghanistan to try to search for Omed. The first two parts are limited third-person
narrative, the world seen first through Omed’s eyes and then through Hec’s. But
the third part is first-person narration in Hec’s voice – the voice of a writer
who is telling both Omed’s story and his own. This is metafiction: the
narrative makes clear that other story pathways and other resolutions are
possible, and readers will disagree about the choices the author has made. The
third-part also includes the introduction of a new character, an American woman
of Afghan heritage, who has returned to the country to help establish schools.
Her function in the narrative is to explain the world of Afghanistan to Hec and
some scenes, in which he sees the country through the eyes of a tourist and has
to be corrected by Arezu, are rather clunky.
The boys Omed and Hec are linked: both suffer trauma and lose
the power of speech as a result; both have lost the ability to trust others
but, when thrown together in a soul-destroying candle-making factory in
Dandenong, they recognise a kinship. This is essential to the structure of the
novel but telling the boys’ stories as parallel lives does have some problems:
Hec has indeed been through a terrible experience but it is scarcely on the
same scale as Omed’s pain. Hec’s trauma is a domestic and personal tragedy;
Omed suffers even greater family tragedy but his trauma is shared with his
whole nation.
A great strength of the novel is the sense of place. Grant
spent time in Afghanistan and the evocation of the landscape and people is
superb. The Melbourne setting is just as detailed and precise, with the
Westgate Bridge and its tragic history as focus.
A further strength is the disturbing representation of the
ugliness of Australian racism, through the voice of a poisonous foreman at the
Dandenong factory who rants against those of his workers who ‘don’t even speaka
de lingo’ and are as ‘dumb as dogsh-t’. Read his rant on pages 138 and 139 and shudder. If you
think this is an overstatement of racist attitudes, just have a look at the
bile that is spilt in responses to right-wing blogs such as that of Andrew
Bolt. Grant has sadly got this particular Australian voice just right.
Recommendation: This is a great text to use with a mature Year 9 or 10.
Parts of it are unforgettable: beautiful, strong and disturbing writing. It
forces readers to confront the conditions in Afghanistan and the horror of the
refugee experience. It forces them as well to consider Australian responses to
these problems. There is much to argue about, including the author’s narrative
choices.
This is in a completely different league from other titles
available about Afghan refugees. Gleitzman's
Boy Overboard and Girl Underground, Gleeson's Mahtab's Story, Evans' Walk in My Shoes and Hawke's Soraya the Storyteller are children’s
stories, designed to educate young readers about the refugee experience. The Ink Bridge is a complex and
sophisticated young adult novel, flawed in some ways, but deeply disturbing.
The crude language may cause problems in some schools.
Wide
reading links: asylum
seekers, the big questions, challenge and endurance, friendship across
cultures, coping with grief, other countries, overcoming adversity, refugees,
stories with an Asian setting or Asian characters, journeys, multicultural
Australia. - HS
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf
by Ambelin Kwaymullina. Walker Books, 2012. ISBN 9781921720086.
This is Book 1
of The Tribe.
Ambelin Kwaymullina is a Western Australian lawyer
from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region. In this first novel she has
created a believable future world in which much of the world has been destroyed
by an environmental catastrophe called the Reckoning. Three hundred years after
this event people with psychic abilities such as sleepwalkers, firestarters and
skychangers are appearing. They are called Illegals and are banned and
persecuted, or in rare cases granted an exemption so the government can use their skills. Ashala is a sleepwalker,
which means she can move about undetected when asleep, and she leads a group
called the Tribe who are hiding out in the Firstwood. The novel opens with a
captured Ashala about to be interrogated by Chief Administer Neville Ross, who
uses a machine that detects victims’ memories and displays them on a screen.
Justin Connor, an Enforcer who tricked his way into the Tribe, has betrayed
Ashala, or so it seems. The story proceeds through memory flashbacks
interspersed with real-time action to a surprising conclusion. Kwaymullina has
provided plot clues along the way and the story unfolds in an intriguing and
compelling manner. Tribal members such as Georgie, with her ability to see into
the future, and Ember, who manipulates memories, add to the mix, as does the
enigmatic Justin.
Recommendation: The pace and excitement in this novel are impressive
and the strong environmental themes and connections to Indigenous lore make
this text an absorbing one for Year 9 classroom study. The arresting cover will
attract students and there is a website at http://www.thefirstwood.com.au with
a book trailer, author details, press release and reviews and downloads. The
book trailer could be used as a model for the promotion of other texts the
class is reading.
Wide reading
links: action
adventure; fantasy; thrillers and mysteries; utopias and dystopias, indigenous Australia. - DM
Into That Forest
by Louis Nowra. Allen & Unwin, 2012. ISBN 9781743311646.
184 pp.
Into That
Forest is a
mesmerising account of two girls living with thylacines in Tasmania in the
1830s and it is going to find a swift place in many Australian classrooms. In
this novel Louis Nowra has created a completely believable story of wilderness
survival and civilisation conflict.
When Hannah’s parents take their six-year-old Hannah
and Becky, her eight-year-old friend, out for a boat ride and river picnic they
are unaware of the storm that is approaching. After the boat breaks up and
Becky and Hannah are thrown into the river, they are pulled out by a thylacine.
They are the only survivors and appear certain to die of starvation and
exposure when, in desperation, Hannah follows the female thylacine (whose cubs
have been shot) back to her den. Hannah takes suck from the thylacine while the
older Becky at first tries to cling on to the remnants of civilisation. The
male and female thylacines help the girls to survive. Hannah and Becky come to
relish raw meat, they communicate as tigers and they help the tigers herd and
hunt wallabies and other fauna. As a pack, they make the journey to the sea to
feast on mussels. They pass the shack of the human who makes a living out of
killing tigers and, as the seasons pass, they even steal and kill his sheep.
The girls lose their language and their culture, until Becky’s father coming
looking for her. Their recapture and Mr Carson's attempts to pacify them and
bring them back to the human world make for painful and engrossing reading.
When Hannah proves more recalcitrant, she is packed off disguised as a boy on a
whaling ship, while Becky is sent to school. Becky suffers from the taunts of
others and a disastrous appearance in the school play when she reverts to
animal behavior sends her running back to the wild. The attempt to recapture
her involves Hannah and has tragic consequences.
Hannah tells this story as a seventy-eight-year-old
woman whose language skills are still poor. This tale is disturbing and
challenging but Nowra’s skilled writing allows the story to ring true.
Recommendation: Some school communities may find some aspects of the
novel confronting. However, the tale could not have been told without the vivid
depiction of human life as animals. Year 9 and 10 students will find much to
discuss and examine in this powerful novel about the nature of humanity,
civilisation and wilderness survival. Make sure to have copies as well of the
picture book, The Dream of the Thylacine
(see review above).
Wide reading
links: the big
questions. - DM
Liar & Spy
by Rebecca Stead. Text Publishing, 2012. ISBN 9781921922947.
225 pp.
Newbery
medal winner, American writer, Rebecca Stead is fast becoming the inheritor of those classic writers Louise
Fitzhugh and E L Konigsburg, who had such insights into that age around eleven
to thirteen where children, as Shakespeare put it, are ‘like
standing water’ between child and adolescent, between unconscious naivety and
knowing presumption. This is the age that Stephen King beautifully encapsulated
in his short story and the subsequent film, Stand
by Me: the age of lost and changing friends, the last age before games and
pretend become lost to peer group pressure and conformity.
Like
The Mixed Up Files … and Harriet the Spy, Liar & Spy is a brilliant evocation of this age but also a
page-turning spy club adventure involving smart, isolated, inner-city kids who
enjoy playing detective using the very qualities of imagination and observation
that the school bullies declare weird and freaky. Like Konigsburg, Stead has
established a tradition of using scientific information in her stories. This
time, it’s the Year 7 science teacher’s notorious series of lessons on taste
that reach a climax with the taste test that is certain to be further proof
that the narrator, Georges, taunted as ‘gorgeous’ and ‘the freak’, is again
isolated while the vast majority of the class rush for the water tap and carry
on about the terrible taste. However, both Stead and her science teacher
character have a philosophic attitude to what he calls ‘the taste of human
experience’ and the results of the taste test prove that the close observation
and especially the people watching of the spy club game do change the social
balance of the classroom and give a bittersweet victory to the uncool players.
Recommendation: This
will make an excellent class set book for Year 7: although easy to read, it has
barely hidden depths that will involve all in a mixed-ability class and
challenge those who pick up more of the clues to why Georges and his new friend
Safer are social isolates. Along the way, young students will also be learning
about more advanced ways of reading to pick up the clues, as well benefit from
the other social and scientific bonuses that Stead supplies. Otherwise, a box
of the child spy genre stories will be popular.
Wide reading links:
thrillers and mysteries, bullying, families, friendship, gangs and cliques,
identity, power, other countries, and overcoming fear. - ET
Life an Exploded Diagram
by Mal Peet. Walker Books, 2011. ISBN 9781844281008. 413 pp.
Mal
Peet’s humorous narration is sharp in intent but always entertaining as he
adopts the character of Clem, born in 1945, named after Clement Attlee, the
Labour Party Prime Minister, after his mum was terrified into labour by a
maniac Nazi flying a kamikaze mission against the nearby Norfolk air base. As
Peet confesses later, in an author’s note, this memoir-like account is ‘reality
through the twisted lens of fiction’.
Clem’s
father, George, was one of those lads from the nine thatched houses in the
village who, finding no work in 1932, joined the army engineers and survived
Dunkirk, unlike his father in World War I who died in a French field in his
‘manure coloured uniform’. George returns as a complete surprise to his wife,
Ruth, who is living with his flinty mother, Win, in the same house in the
traditional farming village. George works as a mechanic on the new farm
machines that are transforming the landscape, gets a new council house and is
appalled that Win assumes that she will also live there - and even more appalled
when Ruth cannot face preventing her.
Peet
distances the narration by placing Clem in New York many years later. The
details of the traditional farming life and the changes that came after the
war, the flinty Norfolk accent and Win’s Norfolk peasant-tough attitude give
the narration authenticity and strength. Woven into the back stories of the
parents and grandparents in chapters that vary, rather than alternate, is
Clem’s story. He takes the eleven plus exam in 1956 and, to his and the
family’s horror, he and his best friend Goz win scholarships to the ancient,
stuffed-shirt, tie-and-stupid-cap Newgate College, where they are guaranteed to
‘get some stick’ from both the college seniors Gestapo and the local boys from
the estate. However, Peet as Clem declares, ‘I am not going to bang on about
teen novel “My School Hell” and he succeeds, the key moment being provided by
Goz, who responds to the seniors’ description of them as either maggots or
worms with splendid, if over-optimistic repartee, ‘P-ss off, you great p--fter.’
The
focus shifts into the wider world of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, with
satirical comparison between the madness of the Mutually Assured Destruction
(MAD) policies on nuclear warfare, his first love affair with sophisticated Frankie
who will not die a virgin and Ruth’s conversion to the Brethren, ‘1950’s
Taliban’ who shave their heads, put on their white gowns for the rapture of the
end of the world and scandalise the town. This delicious blend of tragedy and
farce produces a most enjoyable climax. However, the denouement taking the
story of the lovers further into the future is, in Peet’s own words, ‘a little
too neat’ for the ending of this unreliable memoir.
Recommendation:
Use this very accessible and engaging black comedy in Years 10 or 11 to
contrast with other war fiction, with biographies or with Peet’s own dramatic
account of World War II Holland in his earlier novel Tamar. Use it as part of an author study of Peet's consistently
impressive work. The sexual references, including occasional ‘phallicism’, are
mediated with typical humour and the few coarse language usages (as seen above)
do not have any of the four-lettered variety. I’d liaise with the history
teachers and teach this novel as the students study World War II, and there
would be a prize for those who find the occasional historical error.
Wide reading links:
historical fiction, love stories, satire, war stories, children in war,
families, generations, choices, other countries, rural life, a question of
gender, narrative forms. - ET
Losing It
by Julia Lawrinson. Penguin, 2012. ISBN 9780143205654. 247 pp.
After
Melvin Burgess published Doing It in
2003, no one else has been game enough to write about adolescent sexual
experiment, let alone writing from the girls’ point of view. Enter West
Australian writer, Julia Lawrinson. Like Burgess, she achieves the right
balance between serious information and humorous events. The characters can
laugh about these later but the reader has a good laugh at the time.
Four
Year 12 girls decide to call themselves ‘The GeeGees’ and make a pact to lose
their virginity before the Year 12 formal but to keep the drama of it secret
until then. They believe that deliberate action is preferable to doing it drunk
and unremembered on a beach during schoolies week. Lawrinson gives each girl
character a first-person narration of the adventures and misadventures
involved, with flashbacks to explain their individual ways of seeking and using
a suitable male partner. What could go wrong does go wrong, but all four do
succeed in finding their own sexuality.
Recommendation: If
your school can cope with orgasm, Lawrinson has chosen her dialogue carefully
so that the only four-letter word occurs in Philip Larkin’s notorious poem, ‘They
f--k you up, your mum and dad’. Your students should have access to this
informative and amusing book, especially so that the protected ones find out,
as does the religious family girl, ‘So this is what teenagers were supposed to
be like’.
Wide reading links:
a question of gender, coming of age, friendship across cultures, identity. - ET
Marked
by Denis Martin. Walker Books, 2012. ISBN 9781921977541. 285
pp.
I
hate boxing but there is an interesting and detailed interlude about training
and tactics in a match, in contrast with some wise advice from a teacher about
how to deal with bullies.
Martin
gets the psychology right and then moves the events swiftly from the mystery of
Kat’s fear and secrecy to a dangerous entanglement with criminals who do not
hesitate to abduct and kill anyone who gets in their way. He writes with the
psychological realism and tension that makes a mystery thriller so much more
engaging.
Recommendation:
Complete with cliff-hanger chapter endings, coincidences, casual slaughters and
fight or flight conflicts, this story rates highly for ease of reading
comparable with the best of Horowitz and would go very well with books by him
and Muchamore, David Keren’s When I Was
Joe or its sequel, Almost Time,
and Gordon Reece’s Mice in a unit of
work on mystery thrillers. Otherwise, as an easy read it would make a popular
book for a class set in years 8 to 10.
Wide reading links:
action adventure, crime fiction, thrillers and mysteries, bullying, challenge
and endurance, hazards, living on the edge, other countries, overcoming fear
and school life. - ET
Mountain Wolf
by Rosanne Hawke. Angus & Robertson, 2012. ISBN
9780732293871. 213 pp.
Set
in contemporary Pakistan, in the mountainous tribal regions, this is a gripping
story of how fourteen-year-old Razaq, who looks young for his age, is the only
survivor in his family of an earthquake. However, his beauty betrays him into
the evil child abduction traffic when his wish to search for his uncle in the
city is exploited by unscrupulous men and women who gain his naive trust. It is
only when he is locked in a small room by the madam of a brothel that he begins
to understand what she has planned for him to pay off the ‘debt’ of his
‘rescue’.
The
girls and boys have been taught to dance and now he is to learn massage. The
madam has locked him up because, as the younger girl victim explains, ‘she
needs to be sure that you will cooperate’. ‘She stumbled over “cooperate” and
Razaq frowned.’
The
girl has already begun to work and danced with the other women and girls in the
hall then ‘danced for a man’ in her room.
With
similar euphemisms and sensitivity for both her characters and her teenaged readers,
Hawke does not avoid damning the child traffickers. Young readers, like Razak,
are allowed to slowly perceive the realities. When Bilal, an older worker warns
him to be careful because of his beauty, he explains cryptically, ‘Some people
cannot understand beauty, and what they don’t understand they destroy.’ Bilal
has been castrated.
Hawke
succeeds with her project because she knows, as a former aid worker, the
country and the society very well. Moreover, she’s a good writer so her story
is not only convincing but eventful and suspenseful. While Razaq tries
unsuccessfully to find his uncle and avoid his fate, his uncle is searching the
city to find him, and, with the aid of an international child protection
agency, he rescues him.
Recommendation: Use
this book along with recent others by Deborah Ellis and Libby Gleeson so that
our Australian children may understand that refugees are more than the ‘boat
people’ of the headlines in the mass media.
Wide reading links:
stories with an Asian setting, asylum seekers, the big questions, body image,
hazards, homelessness, living on the edge, power, resilience. - ET
Never Fall Down
by Patricia
McCormick. Harper Collins Publishers, 2012.
There are terrible images, sounds and smells in Never Fall Down; they stay with you long
after you have finished reading the book. There are murders, betrayals and
beatings and an overpowering sense of hunger and fear as genocide claims nearly
two million lives in Cambodia. Never Fall
Down is a story of survival and courage amidst a great evil.
Patricia McCormick’s novel is based on the real
experiences of Arn Chorn-Pond, who as a boy of eleven lived through the killing
fields of Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over the country from 1975-79. It
is a chilling book in so many ways. The early pages show a normal village with
markets and commerce, with kids playing and family squabbles. Then the
black-clothed Khmer Rouge come and force the people out of the village. Arn and
his family are marched into the country. People die on the march; they fall by
the wayside, shot and beaten by the soldiers that guard them. Minorities,
families with soft hands, doctors and teachers, musicians – all are initial
targets of the guns and the beatings, and the mass graves accumulate. Arn is
separated from his family. He survives through guile and luck. He learns to
play the new songs for the Khmer Rouge (the others are all forbidden) on the
khim, a Cambodian musical instrument. His group often plays to mask the sounds
of the prisoners being killed. When the Vietnamese army invades Cambodia, Arn
becomes a different sort of victim, a Khmer Rouge boy soldier who picks up a
gun and becomes part of a group called the Little Fish. The boy soldiers are used
as bait to catch the bigger fish of the opposing army. Weakened by hunger and
guilt, Arn finally staggers over the border to Thailand and into a hospital. An
American man, Peter Pond, adopts Arn and two other boys and takes them to America.
In the author’s note at the end of the book McCormick
explains that she added to Arn’s ‘recollections with her own research – and my
own imagination – to fill in the missing pieces’. She realised that she had to
tell the story using Arn’s own syntax, to capture its simplicity and clarity.
She says it was like ‘trying to bottle a lightning bug’. McCormick travelled to
Cambodia with Arn to visit the places his story happened and to verify his
recollections.
The title is the advice Arn took to heart - never fall
down because, if you do, you will die. He survived to speak in St John the
Divine Cathedral in New York in 1984 about his country and his life. This
cathartic experience helped him to deal with his nightmares and his guilt. He
went on to found ‘Children of War’, an organisation that aids children held
hostage by war and violence and started ‘Cambodian Living Arts’, a group that
helps preserve the traditional arts of Cambodia. Arn has been the recipient of
the Amnesty International Human Rights Award and the Spirit of Anne Frank
Outstanding Citizen Award.
You can hear Arn Chorn-Pond and Patricia McCormick
discuss the book on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-A_Y1kjJww and read an interview with Patricia McCormick at her
website http://patriciamccormick.com/never-fall-down/.
Recommendation: This powerful and disturbing novel does end with a
sense of optimism that McCormick puts down to Arn’s belief in the power of
forgiveness and his own efforts to support his fellow Cambodians. However, you
may wonder whether this savage material is appropriate for your adolescent
students. I can only say they are the lucky ones, to be able to read about such
terror and not have to live through it. To know there is such evil in the world
is to be armed against it.
Wide reading
links: life stories,
refugees, war stories, overcoming fear, stories with an Asian setting or Asian
characters. - DM
Night Beach
by Kirsty Eagar. Penguin, 2012. ISBN 9780143206552. 315 pp.
Kirsty
Eagar reminds us that she knows her beach and surf, with a brilliantly
evocative opening scene on the crunchy beach sand after winter rain. Her
narrator, Abbie, working on her
art project for Year 12, feels the links between the mysteries of artistic
creation and the moods of the weather and the sea. The local surfers want to
keep the waves to themselves and, led by bullyboy Greg Hill and ‘the committee’
of older surfers who should have grown up, are vicious to outsiders. Abbie is
almost an outsider in this misogynistic culture and her older step-cousin Kane,
a semi-professional surfer just returned from making a film in Indonesia, is
mysteriously blackballed by the Board Riders’ Club by the boys ‘with the right
dads’. Something went wrong on a remote island in Indonesia and one of his
surfing mates has not returned. Kane is paranoid with guilt and has sudden mood
changes, but Abbie also feels vulnerable as Year 12 pressures grow and her
divorced parents seem no longer to care for her. Only the sea feels like home.
The
narrative grows increasingly surreal as Abbie loses the relics she has kept
from her dead grandfather, the locked store-room door beneath Kane’s bedroom
has a mysteriously powerful attraction, dogs gather in the night and the rip in
the surf reverses while the surf bullies become increasingly violent. Eagar
uses short chapters to drive the pace and the mood towards a gripping climax.
Recommendation: If
you have surfers in your class, as I have had, I know that this is the only
book they will read. They’ll fake it for the other titles, so you need this
one. Use it in Years 9 - 10 with other mysteries and/or sporting stories such as Eagar’s
first surfing novel, Raw Blue. You
should not be surprised to hear that there are some drug and sex references and
some expletives, all suitably mediated for the readership.
Wide reading links:
thrillers and mysteries, horror, the sea, sport, gangs and cliques, a question
of gender. - ET
The
Odyssey
by Gillian Cross, illustrated by Neil
Packer. Walker Books, 2012. ISBN 9781406303674. 176 pp.
I suspect this will always remain in hardcover. It is a
large, heavy book with beautiful paper - a work of art in itself, an object to
be treasured. As one reviewer has noted, this has to be a book, not an ebook.
I have always admired the writing of British author Gillian
Cross so I was keen to sample her re-telling of Homer’s epic. What I didn't
expect was that I’d become hooked on the story and find myself compulsively
turning the pages, eager to discover the next episode in Odysseus’s spectacular
adventures, as if I’d never heard the story before. Cross has retained the
famous Homeric phrases like ‘wine-dark sea’ but the narrative is also
delightfully modern:
But
it was too late to escape. She called Antiphates and he came charging out of
the palace, licking his lips. He snatched up one of the sailors in a huge fist
and grinned horribly.
‘Supper!’ he said.
The consequences are terrible: Odysseus’s sailors are shown ‘sobbing
with grief and shock’ as they pull away desperately from ‘the hateful shore’.
One chilling adventure follows quickly on another. In the Land of the Dead
thousands of souls ‘came fluttering up from the underworld, with hollow, eerie
cries’. This is great stuff - much more spine-tingling than the animated
monsters of the movie screen.
Cross’s compelling narrative is supported by Neil Packer’s
boldly elaborate and detailed illustrations. Some are lavishly coloured, with
stylised figures that seem to have stepped off a Grecian frieze into the
contemporary world; others are brooding, black silhouettes. They are unlike
anything I’ve seen before in a children’s book; one commentator has used the
word ‘edgy’ to describe them, and that’s a good choice of adjective. They are
endlessly intriguing, a perfect companion to the words.
This is a brave book. Some critics have harshly rejected it,
but young readers will love it - for the pace of the narrative, the delicious
thrill of fear at the monsters, the final satisfying resolution and those
endlessly fascinating illustrations. I intend to buy a copy for my
nine-year-old grandson, but it will work as well for secondary school students.
Recommendation:
What to do about it? A class set would be a great investment but would put a
big hole in your budget. Half a class set - one between two - would work, or a
half-dozen copies so students can read it in small groups as part of a study of
myths and legends, with the book passed from one group to another during the
course of the unit of work. Cross’s narrative is worthy of being read aloud,
but the experience of this book requires that the reader can explore the
pictures while reading the words, so one read-aloud copy won’t work. If it is
quite beyond your budget, make sure that the library has more than one copy and
that it is heavily promoted.
Wide
reading links: action adventure, thrillers and mysteries, myths and
legends, challenge and endurance, overcoming fear, journeys. - HS
On
Shakespeare
by John Bell. Allen & Unwin, 2012.
ISBN 9781743311738. 414 pp.
This is an admirable addition to any English teacher's
professional library. It is about Shakespeare - and only, quite occasionally,
about John Bell and his distinguished career as Shakespearean actor, director
and scholar. Bell does draw on his experience of playing a role or directing a
play from time to time to add insight to his discussion, just as he remembers other productions he has
seen, but this is a solid reference work about Shakespeare, not a memoir.
There are useful chapters on the histories, the tragedies,
the comedies, the Romans and the romances, as well as insightful essays on some
individual plays. There is a particularly perceptive discussion of the sonnets,
including an overview of different theories about whether they are
autobiographical. I suspect that there is very little that has been written
about Shakespeare that Bell has not read, and his exhaustive knowledge informs
the text. He does not subscribe to any of the theories that Will Shakespeare
from Stratford was not the author of his plays, and he produces a wealth of
evidence to support the belief that only a man with Will Shakespeare's
background could have written the body of work that we have.
Of particular value are a number of fictional pieces, the
best of which for English teachers is the first four pages of the introductory
chapter ‘The great Globe’. This is written from the perspective of a young and
nervous actor who is about to go on stage at the original Globe in ‘the new
play, Hamlet, by Master Shakespeare’.
He’s playing the role of the soldier Barnardo, so his job is to shut the
audience up by shouting the first words of the play: ‘Who’s there?’ These few
pages give a terrific picture of what Shakespeare's theatre was like. I
recommend strongly that you use it with your students. There are also fictional
interviews with Robert Greene (the rival playwright who called Shakespeare ‘an
upstart crow’), with Ben Jonson (another contemporary playwright, who called
him ‘the wonder of our stage’) and with John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of
Shakespeare's theatrical colleagues to whom we owe the publication of the First
Folio.
Recommendation:
I’ll admit to something of a weakness for collecting good reference books on
Shakespeare, but this one has a worthy place on my shelves. It is very
comprehensive and readable. - HS
Other
Brother
by Simon French. Walker Books, 2012.
ISBN 9781921720833. 244 pp.
French’s
characterisation is outstanding. His kids are always totally believable. No one
in your class is likely to think that in Other
Brother, Kieran, the eleven-year-old narrator, Bon his cousin, their friend
Julia or Kieran’s little sister Gina would not do the things they do and say
the things they say. For example, French cleverly begins two years before the
main action when Kieran is only nine, so that his annoyance and resentment with
his parents for making him play with Bon, his hitherto-unknown cousin, is more
believable than it would have been two years later, when his feelings quickly
fester into jealousy and bullying when this weird kid with a long plait of hair
and a silly knitted hat with bobbles dangling comes to stay and Kieran is
forced to share his bedroom. Kieran’s aloofness is writ large by the open
friendliness shown by Gina, the little sister.
Even
the best of characters are useless without a good story to tell. French’s
characters drive the story: kids will want to turn the pages. Tension rises.
Why is Bon here? Why did Kieran’s exotic aunt Renee take Bon to live in the
Dodge City caravan park and why has she now gone and left him to be shared between
Nan, who cannot cope with him for more than a few days at a time, and Kieran?
When his friend Julia talks down to him like an adult and tells him that Bon
needs him to be his friend, it is completely believable that the normally
well-behaved middle-class Kieran is embarrassed to be seen at school with Bon
and joins in stomping on Bon’s hat and tripping him up in the corridors. Why
are Julia and her mum also living in Dodge City when they obviously don’t
belong there? What is disturbing Bon’s dreams? Where does Bon go when he
disappears out the bedroom window at night?
Adult
readers sometimes object that children’s and young adult writers narrow their
field to focus on social issues, but I think that this is unfair to writers
like French who are game to risk this label and the fatal accusation of being
didactic by leading young readers to think about the big questions. ‘Am I my
brother’s keeper?’ ‘How do I cope with the Other? ’
However,
readers also need to be entertained, and French achieves the realism of happy
family life and school friendship without the boring predictability that is
found in many children’s fiction books. Kieran strains to overhear his parents
to discover the mystery of his aunt and the chaotic life she leads. Dad and
Kieran escape to the shed when they don’t want to deal with the complications
raised by mum, aunt and nan. Six-year-old Gina is always likely to blurt out
the truth that Kieran doesn’t want told. And the parents are kept in the focus
of the story, not shuffled off over the border.
I
found the ending very satisfying: I do like writers that achieve an ending.
Recommendation: I’m
confident that Other Brother will get
good responses from students in Years 5 - 7 because Simon French is one of the
few writers I know who writes quality literature that is accessible to all in a
mixed-ability class.
Wide reading links:
the big questions, bullying, families, friendship, belonging, outsiders and
school life. - ET
Pan’s
Whisper
by Sue Lawson. black dog books, 2012. ISBN 9781742032061. 346
pp.
Pan
(Pandora) is a very angry teenager dressed and made up as a Goth, hiding a scar
under her hair fringe and beneath threatening eyes. She is taken by a social
worker into middle-class suburbs which she scorns as Legoland, where she is
cared for by plastic people, experienced foster parents Rose and Ian, who also
have two other foster children, Livia, the same age, and Nate, who is in Year
6.
Lawson
gives her story the immediacy of Pan’s first-person present-tense narration,
varied with her brief letters to her older sister Morgan, which link with a
third-person narration of Pan’s memories of her chaotic life with her mother,
Kylie. The mystery of Pan’s anger develops with problems in the new school,
where she seeks to hide herself between angry outbursts triggered by mistrust
and misinterpretation of peoples’ motives. This links with her intelligent
responses to Romeo and Juliet, with
which she is familiar from her previous school but she can only see that she is
fated to always stuff up her life.
Her
talisman is a soft toy cat with a zippered pocket, into which she has put the
few toys and photos that had not been lost in the many house moves that her
mother Kylie made in her manic-depressive mood swings. Lawson controls the pace
of the revelations by making her character suppress most of her past so that
clues given to the reader emerge from the various crises she suffers at school
and in foster care. Detention with the art teacher, who is painting the
backdrops for the school production of West
Side Story, becomes the main support for her rehabilitation as younger
readers might not recognise the skilful patience of the foster parents. Hunter,
a talented musician in her class, was too good a character for me but he
provides another character who is rejected then gradually trusted and
befriended.
Lawson
mediates the chaos and violence of Pan’s past life and the final crisis that
took her away from her mother and older sister and into care.
Recommendation: This
I found totally believable and convincing, as it encourages readers to
interpret the younger Pan’s experiences as she is protected by her older sister
from Kylie and the men in her life. The result is an accessible text that would
appeal to most students in Years 8 – 10.
Wide reading links:
families, kids as carers, living on the edge, friendship, outsiders, school
life. - ET
Parvana's Promise
by Deborah Ellis. Allen & Unwin, 2012.
ISBN9781743312988. 201 pp.
The
book opens in an American military prison in Afghanistan, where a teenage girl
has been detained as a possible terrorist. Despite intense pressure, the girl
refuses to answer any questions. As the reader realises that the girl is indeed
Parvana, the story moves to flashback - returning, at intervals, to the
interrogation room or Parvana's prison cell. We learn that Parvana's mother had
established a school for girls just outside the village near the refugee camp
that the family ended up in in Parvana's
Journey. Older sister Nooria and Parvana's friend Asif were on the staff.
While Parvana's mother had had some success in attracting financial donations
for the school, there was constant opposition and threatened violence from some
of the village men, who disapproved strongly of education for girls and women.
Ellis
exposes the enormous difficulties faced by girls and women in Afghanistan
today. She pulls no punches with her representation of the American military:
they are not in the business of winning hearts and minds; they are actively and
rightly feared. The book is both a condemnation of western interference and a
celebration of strong and courageous women. It could be argued that Ellis is
positioning her readers quite deliberately to share her views of the situation
in Afghanistan today, but personally I think she should be thanked for doing
so. This book will make many readers angry and a little less likely to dismiss
the sufferings of women in Afghanistan because they are ‘the other’, not like
us.
Recommendation:
This will work especially well with girls in Years 8 - 10, although it would be
great if you could get boys to read it too. It is certainly powerful enough to
consider for whole-class study. While there is additional meaning and poignancy
for those who have read the previous books in the Parvana series, it can stand alone.
Wide reading links:
war stories, refugees, children in war, challenge and endurance, resilience. - HS
Pennies for Hitler
by Jackie French. HarperCollins, 2012. ISBN 9780732292096.
311 pp.
The
publisher calls this a ‘companion piece’ to Hitler's
Daughter, but they really have little to do with each other, except that both
are stories about Hitler's Germany and both are written for a Year 5 to Year 8
audience. This is longer and more difficult than Hitler's Daughter but it is a compelling read, impeccably
researched as always by French. The novel opens in 1939. Georg's father, an
English academic, has lived and taught happily in Berlin for fifteen years.
Like many English people of Jewish origin, he has never identified as a Jew and
cannot see that Hitler's campaign
against Jews has anything to do with him. He has ignored warnings from his
English sister that he should get out of Germany, convinced that his
considerably academic reputation will protect him. The book opens with a
terrible scene as the university graduation scene turns ugly as demonstrators
attack students suspected of being Jewish - and Georg's father is thrown to his
death from the window. The narrative follows the boy's frightening escape to
Aunt Miriam in London and then his eventual evacuation to New South Wales.
The
success of the book depends at first on the fast-moving action but then the
focus is on Georg's character, as he struggles to understand that everything he
had been taught was wrong. He struggles too with the fact that he feels that he
must hide his German identity in wartime Australia, even from the family who
have taken him in and given him so much love.
The
resolution is very satisfying.
Recommendation:
I still prefer Hitler's Daughter for
class set use - partly because it is shorter and a little simpler, but also
because of the interesting use of the narrative framework. But this is a great
read. Recommend it to students as a follow-up to Hitler's Daughter.
Wide reading links:
war stories, children in war, the Holocaust, refugees, journeys. - HS
Punchlines
by Oliver Phommavanh. Puffin Books, 2012. ISBN
9780143306511. 193 pp.
This is just as
funny as Phommavanh's previous novels, Thai-riffic!
and Con-nerd, but its main characters
are also quite a lot older - Year 10 students at Fairfield High School, making
this a more suitable text for secondary students. It accurately reflects the
diverse community of Fairfield. The protagonist, Johnny, is of Laotian background
and the love of his life, Josie, is Australian-Cambodian. Johnny's dad acts as
MC for weddings and birthdays in the area and there is a delightful picture of
the culture of the Fairfield region. Johnny's ambition to be a stand-up comic
is helped by his English teacher, who encourages several students to take part
in a student competition, culminating in finals at the Sydney Opera House.
This is a warm and
positive story with a strong basis in supportive family life.
Recommendation:
This is a fairly easy read and would be fun to share with students in Years 7
or 8, especially those from a community such as the one represented here. There
is still very little YA literature reflecting the diversity of Australian
society.
Wide reading links: humour, multicultural Australia, school life, families,
friendship. - HS
Ruby Moonlight
by Ali Cobby
Eckermann. Magabala Books, 2012.
Ali
Cobby Eckermann’s Ruby Moonlight is a
series of interconnecting poems that starts with the massacre of an Aboriginal
family by white settlers on Ngadjuri land in South Australia. The
sixteen-year-old girl is the only survivor. She grieves for the dead and
slashes her skin, a mark for each deceased family member. She moves away,
living off the land until she encounters Miner Jack, living a solitary life in
a shack in the bush. She observes his behaviour and finally joins him at his
fire. Friendship grows slowly until they become lovers.
Ruby
(as Jack named her) slips away when other whites arrive with their bigotry and
demands. She has the opportunity to join the passing Cloud mob and the older
dancer who desires her. Jack sees her ‘joy in belonging’ at their fireside.
Ruby stays this time, but the tryst cannot last. When vicious whites come
hunting her and Jack, she leaves with the returning dancer and his warriors.
This
delicate shared history of a white man and a black woman in ruthless times is a
lyrical pleasure. It confronts brutal issues often with direct description and
contemplates nature and relationships with grace and beauty.
Recommendation:
This is short and accessible and could be used in classrooms from Years 8 - 12.
Ruby Moonlight is the winner of the
2011 indigenous writing fellowship from the State Library of Queensland. - DM
Sea Hearts
by Margo Lanagan. Allen & Unwin, 2012. ISBN
9781742375052. 360 pp.
In
Sea Hearts Margot Lanagan takes the
myth of the sea-wives and turns it into a mesmerising tale of an island where
men turn to magic to obtain beautiful, compliant wives from the sea. The author
of this magic is Misskaella Prout, a plain child who grows to womanhood on
Rollrock Island with the knowledge that she can charm human bodies and souls
out of the seals and so revenge herself on the men and women of the island who
mocked, exploited or spurned her. As more and more men turn to the witch to
procure them sea-wives the island women gradually leave their men to return to
the mainland. The abducted sea-wives yearn to return to the sea with their
children, and one boy is prepared to help them recover their seal coats and
plan an escape.
Margo
Lanagan charts the human heart through two generations, in all its desires and
love, its anguish and despair, with exquisite prose and devastating revelations
about the nature and limits of humanity. Her ability to create a divergent or
alternative landscape and domain is extraordinary.
Margo
Lanagan won the CBCA Book of the Year Award for Older Readers for Red Spikes in 2006 and her Black Juice collection has hypnotic
short stories, including the unforgettable
‘Singing My Sister Down’.
Recommendation: This
novel presents a fine opportunity for Year 9 or 10 students to look at myths
and legends and how they can be appropriated and to appreciate the compelling
enchantment of Lanagan’s style and the issues of gender, power and prejudice
that she raises.
Wide reading links:
fantasy, the sea, love stories, myths and legends, a question of gender,
outsiders. - DM
Stoner & Spaz
by Ron Koertge. Candlewick Press, 2011 (2002). ISBN
9780763657574. 169 pp.
Ben
has retreated into his private world of the movies, ‘a bit player in the movie
of my life’, while his wealthy grandmother guardian over-protects and dresses
him such that the school students interpret this, and his silence, to mean that
he thinks he is better than everyone else.
Colleen,
a notorious easy lay when she’s high, takes up Ben in revenge against her jock
boyfriend: ‘This is not a date, I’m helping the handicapped.’ Colleen helps Ben
undress and introduces him to sex, and Ben, with the help of a sympathetic
neighbour, makes a documentary movie and becomes a Lazarus to his amazed fellow
students. However, there is no Hollywood ending and in 2011, the writer,
Koertge has produced a sequel, Now
Playing, Stoner & Spaz II.
Recommendation:
For Years 9 - 11. Obviously, there are drug and sex references but little or no
coarse language worries for schools with those concerns. Otherwise an essential
book for every high school.
Wide reading links:
living on the edge, body image, humour, identity, unlikely friendships,
outsiders, overcoming adversity, school life. - ET
The Taste of River Water
by Cate Kennedy. Scribe Publications, 2011. ISBN 9781921844003. 96 pp.
Poetry
that is intelligent, compassionate and accessible is always to be welcomed and
Cate Kennedy’s poems have the added advantage of taking ordinary experiences
and illuminating them with wisdom and understanding. Images range from a
farmer’s portrait of her children seeing rain for the first time in the rural
photography competition of ‘8 by 10 colour enlargements $16.50’ to eating a
guava, experiencing motherhood or tasting river water.
Recommendation: Kennedy’s
poems will enable students in the Year 9 or 10 classroom to empathise and
identify with a broad range of Australians. Kennedy’s rural insight should
prove particularly valuable in introducing urban students to regional concerns,
allowing rural students to see representations of their own areas and
experiences and allowing all to explore the universality of honest and graceful
insight and reflection. - DM
Tea with Arwa
by Arwa El Masri. Hachette, 2011. ISBN 9780733627835.
368 pp.
Arwa
El Masri makes an important point about the texts available in schools when she
was growing up in the 1980s:
Some of the English
novels we read about migrant stories, like Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta, were of other cultures
finding their way in Australia but we read none about my culture. (page 110)
Thankfully
in 2012 there are now some books available like The Glory Garage and Does My
Head Look Big in This? to represent Islamic culture, and El Masri’s own book
will make a contribution to greater cultural understanding and tolerance. She
writes well about the difficulties and joys of growing up in different
countries (Saudi Arabia and Australia), the daily life in a Muslim home and her
experiences as the wife of a celebrated footballer. Arwa El Masri explains her
decision to wear the hijab while acknowledging that her two sisters do not wear
it.
Recommendation: This
non-fiction text would prove a good resource for teachers to use in Years 9 and
10 to explore knowledge about life in Australian for Muslim families and about the
practices of Islam. - DM
There is No Dog
by Meg Rosoff. Penguin Book, 2011. ISBN 9780141327181. 243
pp.
The
front cover quotes from Anthony Horowitz: ‘Genius’, but there is no question
that some readers will find this quite offensive. It is unquestionably
blasphemous. For those who are not offended, it is also very, very funny and
further proof of Meg Rosoff's extraordinary versatility as a novelist. Each of
her five novels is totally and utterly unlike the others.
Rosoff
has begun with the premise: if God created the world, what kind of God must he
be - given the state of the creation? She comes up with the interesting premise
that God must be a teenage boy - very intelligent and creative, capable of
bursts of genius, but easily bored, lazy, self-indulgent and over-sexed. Rosoff’s
‘God’ is called ‘Bob’ and he is one of a pantheon of gods whose temperaments
are not unlike those of the Greek or Roman deities. Most of them preside over
much more interesting and functional worlds than little Earth - ‘miles off the
beaten track in a lonely and somewhat rundown part of the universe’. Bob’s
mother actually wins the job of God of the Earth in a poker game and gives it
to her teenage son. For centuries Bob has been harassed by his assistant, Mr B,
who tries to get him to take his responsibilities seriously. But Bob is much
more interested in falling in love and Lucy, the new assistant at the zoo, is
exactly the kind of human female that attracts him. As was the case with the
Greek and Roman gods, love affairs between gods and mortals never end well, and Bob’s passion for Lucy has disastrous consequences for the weather.
This
novel is totally ridiculous and great fun. Rosoff shows her hand as a superb
social satirist, with a gallery of amusing minor characters.
Recommendation:
It's unlikely that you would be able to use this as a class text, although it
would be a great way to introduce kids to satire. In fact, even putting it on a
reading list might call down the wrath of parents on your head. However, do
introduce selected students to Meg Rosoff. - HS
This is Not My Hat
by Jon Klassen. Candlewick Press, 2012. ISBN 9780763655990.
This is a hardcover picture book.
This
is a picture book that delights quite young children. There is minimal text and
the story is told mainly by the images. A cheeky little fish speaks directly to
the reader. He boasts that he has stolen the cute little hat that he is wearing
from a much larger fish who was asleep at the time and knows nothing of the
theft. The little fish is heading for the thick grasses so that he can hide.
Recommendation:
This is delightful, but it is not something that you will use as the centre of
a unit of work. However, I am always looking for picture books in which the
words and the images tell different stories, and this is a superb example of
such a text. The little fish’s narrative is contradicted by the pictures. The
tiniest details, such as the shape of the big fish’s eye, tell us all that we
need to know.
You
only need a teacher copy of this but I can't think of a better text to
illustrate the point that words and pictures do not always complement each
other. - HS
Three Summers
by Judith Clarke. Allen & Unwin, 2012. ISBN
9781742378275. 252 pp.
Set
in rural Australia in the 1960s, this may shock your girls who mostly have no
understanding of how limited options were for
young women just a few decades ago. Ruth is unusual in so far as her
grandmother has brought her up with the expectation that she will go to
university, unlike her best friend Fee who, like most of the other girls in her
year, marries and has her first baby immediately after leaving school. When
Ruth gets the high exam marks and a scholarship to go to the University of
Sydney, her priest - and her grandmother's friend - is so shocked that he
preaches against her decision, warning of the moral perils of the big city and
the evil world of academia.
This
is only one aspect of a story that is part love story, with Ruth's yearning for
the wealthy and attractive ne’er-do-well Tam Finn, and part celebration of
friendship as Ruth and Fee remain close friends during their very different
lives.
As
always Judith Clarke creates real and credible characters, as well as evoking a
strong sense of time and place. The novel is made up of three unequal parts. By
far the longest section - more than half the book - is set in the 1960s, in the
small country town that Ruth has grown up in. For me this was by far the most
interesting and the strongest section of the novel. Part 2 is quite short,
outlining Ruth’s life in London as a successful academic and Fee’s limited but
contented family life at home. Part 3 sees Ruth at sixty returning to
Australia, fostering a difficult teenage girl who reminds her of the boy Tam
that she yearned for so many years earlier.
Recommendation:
Offer this to your girls in Years 8 and 9. It is a strongly feminist book,
grounded in memories of how limited the choices were for girls not so long ago.
Wide reading links:
historical fiction, friendship, rural life/urban life. - HS
Tufff ...
by Bille Brown. Phoenix Education, 2012 (1990). ISBN
9781921586545. 47 pp.
It
is very difficult to find good plays for the junior secondary English
classroom. Almost all the ones that work are dramatisations of novels, so I was
delighted to learn that Phoenix Education had decided to issue a new edition of
this accessible original playscript. The setting is an Australian beach on a
wintery morning with an engaging monologue by a teenage boy sitting at the
water’s edge in his wheelchair. Rosebury is very bright and very self-aware,
accustomed to pity from adults because he is wheelchair-bound but completely
accepting of his situation. He jokes about doing ‘all my walking with my mouth’
and being ‘a paralympian talker’. Nevertheless, he is wary when he hears other
boys coming down to the beach, knowing that they will probably bully him.
This
is a great story of friendship that develops between three boys and what it
means to be ‘tufff’. There is lots of humour and lots of warmth in a short play
in a familiar idiom.
Recommendation:
This fills a gap. It’s obviously a play for boys, although girls will enjoy it.
However, you can’t turn the three boys’ parts into girls’ parts - this is very
much about masculinity, especially Australian masculinity. You could use this
alongside a novel like Mo Johnson's Boofheads
and the picture book Dragonquest. - HS
Ubby’s Underdogs: The Legend of the Phoenix Dragon
by Brenton E. McKenna. Magabala Books,
2011. ISBN 9781921248313.
This is a wonderful contribution to the range of Indigenous
texts available for use with secondary students. Firstly, and most importantly,
it is the work of an Indigenous Australian. Secondly, it is a richly inventive
and beautifully presented text that will engage many of our students, including
some who have been reluctant to engage with what has previously been offered to
them in the classroom. This is the first volume in a planned trilogy. It is a
fantasy graphic novel that is set in Broome and draws on the lives and stories
of both the Indigenous peoples of that area and the many newcomers from around
the world who have made Broome such a fascinating multicultural community. This
has some links to manga but its style is ultimately its own. Ubby is a tough
streetwise Indigenous girl who is the leader of ‘a rag-tag group of misfits who
make up the town’s smallest gang’ and who, against all the odds, triumph over
the bigger, nastier gangs who constantly challenge them. Ubby’s Underdogs fight
their assailants with the help of the entrancing character Sai Fong, a tiny
sickly little girl recently arrived from China who discovers that she has
awesome powers.
This is an action movie with terrific special effects
presented in comic-strip format and with authentic Australian voices, including
Aboriginal English.
Recommendation: Use this anywhere from Year 7 - 10, especially with those
students who love graphic novels. - HS
Unforgotten
by Tohby Riddle. Allen & Unwin, 2012.
ISBN 9781742379722. 128 pp.
This is currently available only in hardcover.
Unforgotten
is a haunting text that begins and ends with the phrase ‘nobody knows’. White
angels, like carved stone statues, come to earth to guide, warm and support
people, but one angel is overcome by the task and weakened, falls to the
ground. With help from ordinary people the angel is able to soar again. Tohby
Riddle’s graceful text captures beautifully the wistful, fragile nature of
these ‘impossible birds’.
The
structure of Unforgotten is
interesting. The text is divided into three sections. The first shows an
industrialised landscape and the visitation of the angels. The second
chronicles the fall of one of the angels and the third shows us its recovery,
aided by the people who support it. The pages are full of appropriated and
often layered photographs, pictures of falling and flying angels and a diverse
collection of humanity shown realistically and in sketch form. It is as if we are peering through a telescope
with darkened edges at familiar and yet altered landscapes that are sometimes
presented as collages that can be stretched or scratched and distorted. Another
aspect of this beautifully produced picture book is the reproduction of the
printed text on one of the last pages so the reader can reflect on the words in
total after viewing the whole text.
Recommendation:
This evocative and poignant picture book is well worth discussing in classrooms
from Years 7 - 10. The small red leaves that feature in the book and on its cover
share a visual link with Shaun Tan’s A
Red Tree. Both books would make a powerful impression in the classroom. - DM
The Unforgotten Coat
by Frank Cottrell Boyce. Walker Books, 2011. ISBN 9781406341546. 99
pp.
Boyce,
the writer of Millions has done it
again with this gem of a book that shines with the warmth of his humour and
indomitable human spirit. Julie, the narrator, tells this story of the
Mongolian coat still in the school lost property many years later. In the coat
pockets there are Polaroid photos that take the adult Julie back to that last
summer in Year 6 when Chingis and his inseparable little brother Nergui join
her class in the Liverpool area of northern England. Two kids with ‘mad coats
and hats’ in the heat of summer.
Chingis
takes over, appoints Julie as the ‘Good Guide’ that all nomads need, as Boyce
entertains me with his humorous account of the power struggle inevitably won by
Chingis, bearing the name of the great Khan as all Mongol males do. His
favoured response is, ‘No, we are nomads.’ If you’ve ever taught newly arrived
ESL students, you’ll smile at the bossy sound of his language. Chingis is a
totally enchanting character, protecting his little brother from the demon that
makes people vanish and inducting him into the mysteries of Liverpool football
as the boys are ‘learning themselves ordinary’.
Julie
and her friends of both sexes enjoy researching Mongolian life led by Chingis
who still has the sand from the desert in the pockets of his grandfather’s coat
along with the Polaroid photos of his homeland. The tone of the story changes
when Chingis swaps his brother’s coat for Julie’s Everton football kit and her
mother insists on driving to the menacing tower block flat to return it to his
tearful and clearly fearful mother.
When
the boys run away, leaving one coat at the school, Julie goes after them (as
they expect no less from their ‘Good Guide’) and discovers the poignant secret
of the photos. She brings them back home only to feel that she has betrayed
them when they vanish as the ‘demon’ from immigration has them deported. Boyce
adds an author’s note explaining the gestation of his fiction and expressing
his despair that ‘a country that authorises its functionaries to snatch
children from their beds in the middle of the night can’t really be called
civilised.’
The
story is much enhanced by the presentation with pages ruled and margined like a
school exercise book, supported with many Polaroid photos.
Recommendation:
Use this engaging, easy-to-read story in any year. Younger students will enjoy
the humour and appreciate the contrasting pathos while older students will be
intrigued by Boyce’s sophisticated language skills that leaven the humour and
nostalgia with the force of fable.
Wide reading links:
fables, asylum seekers, the big questions, brothers, friendship, living on the
edge, cultural diversity, the migrant experience, stories with Asian
characters. Years 5 - 11. - ET
The Watch that Ends the Night: Voices from the Titanic
by Allan Wolf. Candlewick Press, 2011. ISBN 9780763637033. 466
pp.
This
is currently available only in hardcover.
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.
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 9 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.)
Wide reading links:
historical fiction, life writing, re-tellings, challenge and endurance,
families, technology, cultural diversity, power, the migrant experience,
refugees, the sea, a question of gender, the role of the media, narrative
forms. - ET
When We Were Two
by Robert Newton. Penguin Books, 2011. ISBN 9780143566830.
193 pp.
This
much-awarded novel focuses on an aspect of Australian history that young people
probably know little about. During World War I, recruits from country towns
marched to the coast to join up. The two boys who are the protagonists of this
story are taken under the wing of such a group of would-be soldiers, marching
across the mountains from Walcha to Port Macquarie. The boys have already made
a long journey from Gunnedah, where they have fled an abusive father. The older
boy, Dan, hopes that they might be reunited with their mother, who had left
home some time before. Younger brother Edie is brain-damaged, after a
near-drowning accident.
This
is an episodic novel that follows the stages of Dan and Edie's journey. Along
the way they encounter and get the better of a pedophile, meet a girl to whom
Dan is strongly attracted, and travel with a Chinese hawker who is subjected to
racist violence. Dan feels heavy responsibility for his disabled brother, who
becomes the recruits’ mascot and flag-bearer. The novel is ultimately a bildungsroman, with Dan developing into
manhood as a result of his experiences.
Recommendation:
This is a deeply moving book that offers rich possibilities for class study in
Years 7 and 8.
Wide reading links:
journeys, war stories, brothers. - HS
Wildwood
by Colin Meloy, illustrated by Carson Ellis. Viking, 2011.
Wildwood
engages the reader from its opening line: ‘How five crows managed to lift a
twenty-five pound baby boy into the air was beyond Prue, but that was certainly
the least of her worries.’ Prue and her friend Curtis follow the murder of
crows into the Wildwood (the Impassable Wilderness outside Portland USA), to
rescue her baby brother, Mac. In doing so they cross into a clandestine world
of dangerous creatures and mystical figures engaged in a violent conflict. The
evil Governess and her coyotes are struggling to gain control of the Wildwood
and Prue and her brother are pivotal pieces in her plan. Secrets about Prue’s
parents’ dealings with the Governess provide a vital revelation as the two
sides converge at the Plinth: one group determined to save Mac, the other to
destroy him.
Recommendation: This
complex and entertaining adventure, with its richly detailed landscape and
culture (the maps and illustrations by Carson Ellis are wonderfully
complementary) would provide Year 7 and 8 students with opportunities to
consider Meloy’s diverse characterisation and explore aspects of the fantasy
genre.
Wide reading links:
fantasy, action adventure. - DM
Wonder
by R. J. Palacio. Bodley Head, 2012. ISBN 9780370332291. 313
pp.
This is currently available only in trade paperback.
This is an easy and engaging read. Don't be discouraged by
the page count: the font is of a comfortable size and the chapters are short.
The story grips the reader from the first. August was born with severe facial
deformities and, despite many operations, still causes strangers in the street
to gasp with horror. Because of his disfigurement, he has been home-schooled.
Now, at Year 4 level, his family has reluctantly decided to take the risk of
sending him to school.
The novel is narrated in August’s voice - and it is the
voice that engages the reader. The fact that August is only ten would normally
be a disadvantage for high school readers, but there is nothing childish about
this voice. August is bright and cheerful and accepting of his situation. He is
also acutely aware of how others react to him and is extremely courageous. As
he struggles to make his way in the hostile school environment, the reader
cheers him on.
It has been said that books about characters with a
disability should first and foremost be great stories that just happen to have
a disabled character, rather than stories that focus on the disability. But
good books often break the rules. Yes, this is a book that is basically about
August's disability, but readers everywhere are responding to it with great
enthusiasm. I think the reason for the novel's success is that the real focus
is on August's courage and resilience.
Recommendation:
This will work very well as a Year 7 class set novel, but check with your
primary feeder schools, as it is already being widely read by primary school
readers.
Wide
reading links: challenge and endurance, living on the edge, resilience,
school life, overcoming adversity, families. - HS
The Wrong Boy
by Suzy Zail. black dog books, 2012. ISBN 9781742031651. 256
pp.
I
thought I could not bear to read another story of the Holocaust, but Melbourne
writer Suzy Zail uses her Hungarian father’s wartime experience to tell a
gripping fictional account of what happened to the Budapest Jews who were sent
to Auschwitz in 1944. Because, I hope, that no Australian reader is ignorant
about the general history of the Holocaust, Zail uses the dramatic irony of
this knowledge to heighten tension. For example, the first shower is undergone
with water, not gas, and the twins are flattered by the interest of the nice Dr
Mengele.
Hanna,
the fifteen-year-old narrator, benefits from being blue-eyed and fair-haired,
unlike her sister Erika, and her talent as a pianist saves them both. Her
gentile music teacher has been also imprisoned for teaching Jews, so she asks
the commandant to audition Hanna for the camp orchestra which she leads. Thus
Hanna is taken from her filthy environment, cleaned and dressed in good clothes
(we know where they came from) to compete with a girl she knows to be the
better player in the audition. However, the commandant’s son, sixteen-year-old
Karl, is also in the room, resentful of his father keeping him in the camp
mansion instead of being in Berlin at university. When his father asks him who
the better player is, Karl chooses Hanna and so he becomes ‘the wrong boy’ of
the title.
Hanna
feels like a traitor every time when she rehearses and performs and guilty when
she is able to snatch some food from the kitchen garbage, until she learns that
Karl supports the survival methods of the inmates, and she joins them to
smuggle food to others. Prior to this revelation, there is fear, tension and
ambiguity about Karl. As Erika says about the will to survive: ‘the point is,
to stay human.’
Zail
mediates the details but does not avoid many, especially with the character of
the hut kapo, a tough Jew selected to keep order there. When the Russian army
approaches, the few able inmates hide. Hanna hides on a cess pit as the Nazis
burn records and march out as many prisoners as they can. Then what was suspected
about ‘the factory’ with the tall chimney is revealed.
Unusually
for this genre, Zail chooses to continue the story back to Budapest and ends
hopefully with Hanna’s letter to the Russian general, pleading for Karl’s
release.
Recommendation: This
is a good text to use with Holocaust fiction and non-fiction with students in Years
8 – 10, where it should provoke lively discussion on matters such as why the
concentration camp officers wanted to listen to classical music and if it did
anybody any good.
Wide reading links:
the Holocaust, children in war, World War II, choices, refugees, music. - ET
