SWSETA meeting May 2014
I was invited to speak to a meeting of the South-west Sydney branch of the English Teachers' Association of New South Wales. The meeting was held in Campbelltown on Tuesday 13th May 2014.
I was asked to talk about new titles that would work in the English classroom, as well as to say something about the new prescribed text list for HSC. The annotations below cover a wider range of titles that I was able to cover in the meeting.
You will notice that there is a recommendation at the end of each annotation. You can skim the recommendations if you are looking for a text of a particular type.
10 Futures
by Michael
Pryor. Woolshed Press, 2012. ISBN 9781742753768. 229 pp.
This is a clever
and very accessible anthology of ten linked short stories. Each story is set at
a different time in the future, allowing Pryor to explore a fascinating range of
'what if'? scenarios in the best science fiction tradition. The stories are
dated from 2020 to 2120 (the year 2110 is missing), but they are not organised
chronologically. The anthology opens with the story '2100', one of the most
positive futures represented. It ends with the nightmarish world of '2060', a
grim picture of severe rationing and narrow lives where the countries of a
seriously overpopulated world have been at war with aliens for more than twenty
years.
In the world of
2100, robot technology has been developed to such an extent that daily life is
managed by household robots. These robots, such as the much-loved Portia, are
not only unfailingly efficient and knowledgeable but have developed pleasant
human-like personalities. But what if the artificial intelligence they have
acquired has evolved to the point where the machines have become human? As well
as Artificial Intelligence, Pryor explores in this anthology such issues as the
consequences of a global financial collapse, of global warming and of
overpopulation, the impact of a pandemic, the ethical dilemmas arising from
cloning and genetic selection, and even the mixed blessings of medical science
ensuring vastly increased human longevity.
The stories are
linked by the use of the same protagonists in each story. This is an original
and interesting idea. There is no suggestion that Tara and Sam, who have 'been
best friends forever', live for more than a century. In every story they are
approximately the same age. Pryor is signalling that he is writing metafiction:
not only is he asking 'what if?' about his science fiction scenarios, he is
asking: 'What if I place these two characters that I have imagined in each of
these very different worlds?' Not only does this use of the characters provide
the anthology with a satisfying sense of unity, it offers the reader an
opportunity to empathise, as these are warm and engaging characters. Tara is
bright and feisty, a thinker, prepared to challenge authority if necessary, at
some cost to herself. Sam is more cautious but loyal and protective; much
quieter than Tara, he is an artist who loves working with his hands.
This is not the
kind of science fiction that proposes lots of wacky future technological
inventions. These future worlds are firmly based in our world today and simply
explore the consequences if certain current trends develop further. Every story
throws up ethical questions. For example, if human life is reduced to
subsistence living after a global financial collapse, what do you do with a member
of the community who is not doing his share? If neighbours with young children
beg you to take them in but they may be carrying the virus that has killed
billions around the world, how do you respond? If your life and the life of
your best friend depend on betraying an innocent man, what do you do? These are
unquestionably worthwhile questions for readers to explore.
These are
well-written stories, not all with neat endings. There are interesting motifs
repeated throughout, adding further to a sense of cohesiveness, such as Sam's
casual use of expressions from both Mandarin and Hindi, in the same way as
twentieth-century teenagers adopted Americanisms. Readers can learn a lot about
the nature of the short story by looking closely at what Pryor has done here.
Recommendation:
Most people seem to be
recommending this for class study in Years 9 and 10, but it is well within the
reading capacity of many students in Years 7 and 8. As always, it depends on
the abilities of the class you are teaching. Wherever you use it, it will allow
you to tick off the Australian Curriculum requirement for a text that explores
the concept of 'sustainability'. In fact, I can't think of a better text for
this purpose. As suggested above, it covers as well the 'ethical understanding'
general capability and it would be easy to cover as well 'critical and creative
thinking'.
The new syllabus
recommends that students experiment with others' imaginative texts by changing
aspects such as place and characters (Stage 3 Objective C). This text provides
them with an excellent example of characters being transposed into different
settings. As well as providing a model for students' own writing, Pryor
provides opportunities for in-depth discussion of the nature of fictional
characters.
Short story
anthologies that work well in the classroom are fairly rare. This is a very
welcome addition to the resources available to the secondary English classroom.
It is highly recommended.
The
Accident
by Kate Hendrick. Text Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781921922855.
260 pp.
This is both a thoroughly engaging novel, perfectly
pitched at its intended audience, and a very sophisticated piece of writing
from a first-time writer. I was hooked by about page 3. The first of the
The second voice is that of Will, also in Year 12. Will
feels completely overshadowed by his much more assertive sisters - older sister
Lauren and younger sister Morgan. Mum, a writer, has effectively withdrawn from
family life after her husband walked out on the family. The children mostly
fend for themselves. Will is concerned but helpless about the family
dysfunction and especially worried about the uncommunicative Lauren, who has
recently and unexpectedly returned home, after having left abruptly some time
previously.
Eliat, the third voice, is the eighteen-year-old mother
of two-year-old Tash. Eliat, who has spent her entire life in a series of
unsatisfactory foster homes, has been taken in by Rose-Marie and Terry, a
childless well-to-do couple, who are supporting Eliat at school and taking on
most of the burden of raising Tash. Eliat, who is anything but the
stereotypical teenage mother (one of her Year 12 subjects is Maths Extension
2), has learnt not to care about people. She is often impatient with school,
bored that she already knows everything covered by the Biology syllabus, and
resents Rose-Marie, who is irritatingly perfect. Torn between love for Tash and
an addiction to risk-taking behaviour, she rebels against Terry and
Rose-Marie's attempts to restrict her wild social life.
All three characters are complex and interesting, and
they are supported by a cast of minor characters who also come to life. Part of
the success is Hendrick's skill with dialogue, including the representation of
the first-person voices. The voices are quite distinctive: Sarah describes her
Art teacher as 'reassuringly scatty', while Eliat calls her Biology teacher 'a
cow'. Will, who wants to be a writer, is much more self-reflective than the
other two. The story is told in 33 short chapters, alternating from Sarah's
voice to Will's and then Eliat's. But it's more complex than that. Each chapter
is headed:
before
after
later
and, each time, one of the words is in bold type. Each
chapter is not only a different voice but it's in a different time - before,
after or later than the pivotal accident. Sarah and Will are both doing Year 12
at the same school, but Will's is the 'after' story and Sarah's is 'later':
Will is in Year 12 the year before Sarah changes schools. Sarah never meets
Will, but she becomes friends with his sister Morgan as they work together in
the darkroom in the school's art department. There is a further connection:
Will's other sister Lauren had been in a relationship with the doctor that
saved Sarah's life on the night of the accident - the night he and Lauren ended
their relationship. We know from Will's story that Lauren is troubled; it is in
Sarah's story that we learn why. So there are both several connections between
Will and Sarah, and yet at the same time no direct connection. The connection
between Sarah and Eliat is in contrast very direct and totally random: Eliat
just happens to be on the scene on the night of Sarah's accident and helps the
doctor to stop the bleeding.
Hendrick begins the novel with Sarah's voice. We find it
easy to identify with her but, initially, Will is less sympathetic and Eliat is
antipathetic. We hardly notice as we read but gradually Hendrick shifts our
perceptions, so that by the end of the novel we understand Will and our heart
bleeds for Eliat. One of the strengths of the novel is undoubtedly the
characterisation, but I was even more impressed with the narrative structure.
Hendrick pulls together the different strands of the narrative and the
different time frames with an effortlessness that is impressive.
Recommendation: This
is highly recommended for class set use for a comprehensive Year 8-9 class. Students
will engage with the very different ways Sarah, Will and Eliat deal with the
difficulties in their lives. It's ultimately a very positive book, offering
glimmers of hope while shunning easy happy endings.
Amina
by J. L. Powers. Through My Eyes series. Allen &
Unwin, 2013. ISBN 9781743312490. 192 pp.
This is the
second title in Allen & Unwin's valuable new series 'Through My Eyes',
novels about children living in conflict zones. The first book was Rosanne
Hawke's Shahana, set in Kashmir.
Amina is set in
2011 in Somalia, at a time when the streets of Mogadishu were still controlled
by the militant Islamist rebel group, al-Shabaab. The second series of the SBS
documentary Go Back to Where You Came
From (2012) featured Mogadishu, claiming
that it was one of the most dangerous places on earth - but it was worse in
2011. Amina's house has sustained a grenade attack that has destroyed most of
the upper storey. The streets nearby are full of abandoned and destroyed
houses. Many residents have fled to refugee camps in Kenya. No one dares to
speak freely and al-Shabaab soldiers are everywhere. Venturing out to the local
market - where there is little food, because of drought - is full of risks.
Amina's father
is targeted and kidnapped by al-Shabaab because he is an artist. Her brother
Roble is snatched off the street by a truckload of rebel soldiers looking for
new recruits. Amina is left alone with her seven-month-pregnant mother and her
frail grandmother. Neighbours are frightened or unwilling to help; the
neighbour most able to offer support is suspected of having betrayed Amina's
father to the rebels. The family have no income. Amina and her grandmother make
one perilous journey to the market to try to sell one of her father's paintings,
only to be ripped off by a conman who steals the painting.
The story is
told in the third-person, through Amina's eyes. Amina is an interesting
character. Like her father, she wants to be an artist and she wants her art to
make a statement about the future of Somalia. At great risk, she draws with
charcoal on the walls of abandoned buildings, including lines of her own poems.
She leaves in the ruins what would be called in Sydney 'art installations',
created from a variety of found objects. All her work is signed. Before he is
kidnapped, her brother Roble had argued that her artwork was putting all their
lives in danger. She replies: 'Our lives are always in danger.'
This is a
survival story. The family suffer near-starvation and there are grave fears for
the expected baby. Young readers are given a satisfying resolution, as the
situation improves for the family and Amina's artistic talent is recognised,
but it is no cheap happy ending. Amina's father is almost certainly dead and
brother Roble's whereabouts are unknown.
Recommendation: As well as allowing students to see the
world through the eyes of someone living daily with danger and starvation, this
gives worthwhile insights into the life of a devout Muslim family, whose values
conflict with those of the extreme fundamentalists who control the streets.
This novel is strong enough to be considered for whole class use. It would work
best with Year 7, preferably a girls' class. It is also a terrific title to
include in a selection of titles about children in other countries.
Australians
All: A History of Growing Up from the Ice Age to the Apology
by Nadia Wheatley, illustrated by Ken Searle. Allen &
Unwin, 2013. ISBN 9781742370972. 281 pp. Hardcover.
Aimed at an upper-primary lower-secondary readership, this
is a magnificent achievement. Wheatley
Wheatley chose to tell Australia's history through the
stories of individual children and adolescents. Some are people who grew up to
have a place in more traditional Australian histories but many are unknowns,
offering a diverse range of insights. The diversity is important: this history
includes the lives of women, the lives of Australia's Indigenous people and the
lives of some of the many migrants who have built this nation. The stories are
mini-biographies, most just a page long. They are illustrated with Ken Searle's
paintings, as well as historical photographs and drawings.
The greatest strength of the history in my opinion is the
story of our Indigenous peoples - especially of the traditional way of life
that 'provided a healthier diet and much more leisure time than the lifestyle
endured by the peasant farmers of Europe'. Wheatley records the stories of a
number of Indigenous children whose families returned each year to homes that
provided a rich supply of food in the right season.
Wheatley suggests that the way to approach this book is
to browse at random. I began that way but was so impressed with the quality of
the writing and the amount of information that I did not know that I soon
turned back to the beginning and read the book, including the introduction,
from beginning to end. I read quite slowly, savouring the insights. I can see
myself re-reading quite soon.
The book has an appendix that gives us information about what
happened to the children and their families in later life. There is also a
glossary.
If you are buying Christmas presents for 8-14-year-olds,
put this on your shopping list. I'm not claiming that their eyes will light up
in the same way as if you give them the latest Wimpy Kid or teenage paranormal
title, but this should be in every home. Many kids who begin to browse will be
drawn in as I was.
Recommendation: You
probably won't use this directly in your English classroom but make sure that
there are several copies in the library and send students to it regularly for
research purposes. There is much here that is relevant to the national
curriculum cross-curricular priorities.
Note:
Wheatley conducted a great many interviews during her research for Australians All. She collected her
interviews with Indigenous Australians in a book called Playground (Playground: Listening to stories
from country and from inside the heart compiled by Nadia Wheatley,
illustrated by Ken Searle, with Jackie Huggins as consultant. Allen &
Unwin, 2011. ISBN 9781742370972. 97 pages). It is an excellent resource for
study of Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures.
The ABC's Hindsight
program recently recorded an interview with Nadia Wheatley, where she talks
about ten of the stories she collected. We hear directly from some of the
people whose childhood stories appear in the collection. The interview can be
found at http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/children-in-history27s-page/5188998.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life,
death and hope in a Mumbai slum
by Katherine
Boo. Scribe Publications, 2012. ISBN 9781921844638. 288 pp.
This beautifully
written and fascinating book is factual text but the reading experience is very
much like that of reading a novel. Boo is an American journalist and the book
is based on years of first-hand research in the Annawadi slum that is adjacent
to the Sahar International airport in Mumbai. The slum is hidden from the
airport by a wall of advertising for expensive Italian floor titles that
promise to remain 'beautiful forever'. The juxtaposition between the
extravagant lifestyle promised by the advertising and the fragile shacks of the
slum, with their dirt floors, in many ways sums up the Mumbai Boo is reporting
on.
Boo chose to
present her research by telling the story of three families who live in the
slum. The first is the family of Abdul, who is possibly sixteen, possibly
nineteen, and the family breadwinner; Abdul has become a skilled recycler,
scavenging though 'the things that richer people threw away'. The second is the
family of the ambitious and ruthless Asha, who aspires to be the next slumlord;
her daughter, Manju, is the only college-going girl in Annawadi but regrettably
does not share her mother's pursuit of material gain at all costs. The third is
that of Fatima, universally known as One Leg, who is desperately jealous of
Abdul's family's relative prosperity. In a self-destructive rage, Fatima burns
herself grievously in a fire and blames Abdul. Much of the narrative of the
book centres on this incident and its consequences.
These people are
real people that Boo met in the slum, but she writes about them as if they are
characters in a novel, so that they come vividly to life, and she informs us
about them by telling their stories. Boo supplements her main characters with a
large cast, especially of road boys, scavengers that Abdul knows, and corrupt
officials. In the world Boo presents, corruption is endemic at every level,
especially amongst the police, lawyers and court workers, from the highest to
the lowest. Innocence is useless in the justice system; money and influence are
everything. The conditions in gaol are even worse than those of slum existence.
At the end of
the book, Boo contemplates the situation where the pressure of survival is so
great that people simply cannot afford compassion for others:
It is easy, from a safe
distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption,
where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly
hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are
good, and that many people try to be ...
Recommendation: This text is written for adults and it
is a sophisticated and fairly demanding read, but as mentioned earlier it is
beautifully written and offers unforgettable insights into the lives of those
who are forgotten in the huge societal changes brought about by globalisation.
It could work very well as the non-fiction choice for a mature Year 10 class.
Big
Thursday
by Anne Brooksbank. Puffin Books, 2013. ISBN 9780143567165.
256 pp.
Nat is crazy about surfing, like his dad, Luke. The beach
has always been there for him, as he lives on
There are lots of novels about kids living in
dysfunctional families or in difficult social circumstances, but novels about
kids from comfortable backgrounds suddenly being plunged into a quite different
lifestyle are rare. Brooksbank depicts very well the increasing strains on the
family, especially when Luke's mother decides to take the children to live for
a time with her parents in Tasmania. Nat misses his best friend Sam, the girl
he likes - Grace, and the surf, but most of all he worries about his father's
state of mind. Brooksbank gives us a resolution that offers some hope but no
easy answers.
Recommendation: If you
have kids that love surfing, this is a must-read for them. There are two
terrific sequences where Nat and Luke fight the ocean. If you are located on
the northern beaches of Sydney, this is also a terrific choice: there is
something special about a book set in a familiar location. For other readers,
this is a satisfying story of a boy facing difficulties in his life. It would
work as a Year 7 class novel. Add it to wide reading selections of titles about
families or about father-son relationships.
The Black-bearded Bai and
Other Plays from Asian Folklore
by
Richard Baines. Phoenix Education, 2013. ISBN 9781921586699. 168 pp.
This
is a collection of six short plays, all based on traditional tales from Asia
and all written to be read and performed in secondary English classrooms. The
tales are from Vietnam, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and India. The
stage adaptations have been made with an eye on students' tastes: these are
very modern adaptations, with lots of action, some wicked - and often black -
humour, and plenty of visual gags. There are detailed stage directions, both at
the beginning of each script and throughout, and some suggestions for classroom
discussion and follow-up at the end of each play.
My
favourite is the title story, 'The Black-hearted Bai', described as a play
about 'the triumph of intelligence over brute force'. The brutish bully gets
his comeuppance very satisfactorily, but there is an amusing twist at the end
where the triumphant good guy reveals nefarious plans. When 'The Director' -
one of the cast - complains that that's not the proper ending, he is told that
this is the modern version. The play uses in an exaggerated way the sort of
distancing techniques characteristic of Brechtian theatre: students who perform
'The Black-hearted Bai' will never have problems understanding Brechtian
theatre.
The
last play in the collection - 'Harisarman' - has sequences of the kind found in
Bollywood musicals. It would be great fun exploring examples of Bollywood film
with students as preparation for their staging their own version.
Recommendation: These plays offer a good balance of
action, excitement and humour, as well as an introduction to the folktales of
Asia. They are practical scripts that students will be able to perform. They
will have most fun if they can perform them on a real stage with lighting, but
they will work in the classroom too. They would be best with students in Year 9
or 10, as some references are a little too mature for younger classes. They are
also a great springboard for students working to turn other traditional tales
into playscripts.
Butter
by Erin Lange. Faber and Faber, 2013 (2012). ISBN 9780571294404.
345 pp.
Some of the best class set novels over the years have
been books about bullying. Nothing quite get kids so fired up as injustice.
Every kid knows what it feels like to be bullied, and quite a few know what
it's like to bully others. This novel asks them to think about another
situation: what's your position if you don't actually participate in the
bullying, but you are aware of it and just look on?
What makes that question especially relevant is that this
is a very contemporary novel. It is set in the world that adolescents actually
inhabit these days but that few writers of adolescent novels have yet fully
caught up with: a world lived online. This is the world of nonstop text
messaging and of Facebook. We've had a few books about cyberbullying, and there
has been considerable discussion about the effects of anonymity on behaviour.
But this goes a lot further. This is a world in which a lonely outcast can have
an online romance with a girl from the popular set and where the school freak
can be transformed overnight into a media star on the web. It's a world where
spectacle dominates to the extent that normal moral conventions and human
empathy are lost in the excitement of the moment. It's a world in which
ordinary, good kids can condone evil.
Butter is
narrated in the first person by a very intelligent, self-deprecating voice.
Butter is his nickname, one that was conferred on him by the bullies in a very
cruel moment that is one of the memorable scenes of the novel. It's not until
the last line of the novel that we discover his real name. In his teens, Butter
is excessively obese - about 420 pounds or 190 kilos or more than 28 stone. His
doting mother fluctuates between plying him with food as a token of her love -
'pecan waffles, Canadian bacon, and poached eggs' for breakfast - to trying to
persuade him to try one of the latest diets. His father seems defeated,
probably not even aware that it is a very long time since he has spoken directly
to his son. Butter's conviction that he is an embarrassment to his father is
just one of the bitter facts of his life. At school he is a freak and a loner.
His only consolations are his music - he is a talented saxophonist - and his
online, anonymous relationship with Anna. Anna and Butter have never spoken;
she is falling in love online with the charming and witty, 'JP', the pseudonym
Butter has adopted. He has built up a profile for his online identity: a
popular and sporty boy from the private school across town.
We learn a lot about Butter from his relationships with
some of the adults in his life, particularly Doctor Bean, the doctor who
manages his diabetes, and the Professor, the music teacher at his college. As
readers, we like and care for Butter, sympathise with his hopeless infatuation
with Anna, appreciate his humour and intelligence. His fellow students see only
his size.
In a moment of despair Butter sets up a website and
declares that, on New Year's Eve, he will eat himself to death on webcam. That
declaration transforms his life. Students are divided about whether he is
serious or not but all of them are fascinated. Butter, from being a complete
loner, is adopted by the in-crowd and is caught up in a social whirl. There is
huge interest in what Butter will eat at his final meal. As a diabetic, Butter
realises that he actually can kill himself by eating the wrong things; a severe
allergy to strawberries is an added bonus.
The tension in the story depends of course on whether or
not Butter will go through with his threat - and whether any of the students
who have followed him on his website will try to prevent the suicide.
Recommendation: This
is a high-interest, well-written novel that keeps readers turning the pages.
Like a lot of the best books, it's both very funny at times and
heart-wrenchingly sad. It's a great class set novel for Years 8-9, raising a
wealth of ethical questions about bullying and about social values. While it
will be a success with any class, try it with one of those lower-stream classes
where most kids don't really want to read: this will get them in.
Crow Country
by Kate
Constable. Allen & Unwin, 2011. ISBN 9781742373959. 252 pp.
No one likes to
be uprooted from a familiar and comfortable home and taken to another environment.
This time-slip
novel has echoes of Playing Beattie Bow.
Kate Constable is the author of the powerful Chanters of Tremaris trilogy. Crow
Country was the winner of the Children's Book Council Australia, Book of
the Year (Younger Readers) 2012 and of the Patricia Wrightson Prize for
Children's Literature in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2012.
Recommendation: The Indigenous relationship to country
is an important theme in this novel. Students in Year 8 should enjoy exploring
this well-crafted novel and the text lends itself to addressing the cross-curriculum
priority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ histories and cultures.
The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
adapted by Simon Stephens, based on Mark Haddon's novel.
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013 (2012). ISBN 9781408173350. 100 pp.
This playscript of Haddon's famous novel
was first performed in London in August 2012. A slightly adapted version was
transferred to the Apollo Theatre in March 2013. The play has played to
rapturous audiences in London and has won more Olivier awards in 2013 than any
other previous play, matched only by the musical Matilda.
As English teachers know, a play that is a
huge success in performance does not necessarily translate into a script that
works in the classroom, especially for students who have limited experience of
live theatre. It is obvious from accounts of the 2013 London performance that
the director has made innovative use of both visual and sound techniques, but
the script stands up very well on its own, read silently or read aloud
collaboratively in the classroom. Nor is a knowledge of Haddon's novel
necessary; while some teachers will want to use the novel and the play side by
side, to explore the ways in which different media tell the same story, the
play can be read and appreciated on its own.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time tells the story of Christopher, a teenage boy with
behavioural difficulties. While his behaviour has many similarities to that of
people who suffer from Asperger Syndrome, Mark Haddon has always insisted he is
no expert in mental illness and the play is not about any particular condition.
Rather, it is about difference, about seeing the world quite differently from
most other people. The novel used first-person narration with disconcerting
success to allow the reader to view the world through Christopher's eyes. The
triumph of the play is that it uses all the resources of theatre to achieve the
same effect. The play is a powerful emotional experience, capturing
Christopher's bewilderment in a world that makes no sense. It is both very,
very funny and achingly sad.
The play is non-realistic in style. The
stage directions at the beginning inform us that all actors remain on stage
throughout, unless prescribed otherwise. They go on to inform us that:
There is also a dead dog. With a fork sticking out of it.
As with the novel, the language is often
offensive, reflecting the violent frustrations of the adults in Christopher's
life. The first few lines of the play, as Mrs Shears reacts to the sight of her
dead dog, are shockingly offensive. Students need probably to be forewarned,
but it would be sad if students in Years 10 and 11 are not mature enough to
cope with the use of such language in context.
Scenes run into one another at a very fast
pace, making this an enthralling read (and, I'm sure, a compelling theatrical
experience). You will want to read it straight through with your students
first, just for the story, even if they know the novel. The emotional impact is
strong. Later, you can experiment with ways in which certain scenes could be
presented. One of the most interesting is the scene when Christopher goes to
the railway station when he decides to seek out his mother. There is a painful
speech in which he explains the laborious way in which he gets there and then
we have five voices, which the stage directions tell us should be pre-recorded:
Voice One Customers seeking access to the car
park please use assistance phone opposite, right of the ticket office
Voice Two Warning CCTV in operation
Voice Three Great Western
Voice Five Cold beers and lagers
Voice Two CAUTION WET FLOOR
Voice Four Your 50p will keep a premature baby
alive for 1.8 seconds
Voice Three Transforming Travel
Voice Five Refreshingly Different
Voice One It's delicious it's creamy and its only
£1.30 Hot Choc Deluxe
It's an aural and visual bombardment of
station announcements, spruikers outside some of the shops at the station and
the many, many advertisements, signs and notices. It runs on for two pages of
script. It's appalling over-stimulation, a panic-inducing nightmare. In amongst
it all there comes the announcement:
Voice Three Dogs must be
carried
and then again:
Voice Three Dogs must be
carried at all times
Christopher interprets everything with terrible literalism.
Will he panic because he doesn't have a dog to carry?
The mindless litany ends by repeating:
Voice Three Dogs must be
carried at all times
It's no wonder at this point that a
policeman, alerted by the lady at the cafe, comes up and asks Christopher if he
is all right.
Students can have fun experimenting with
the way this scene, which runs for a couple of pages, would be played and how
the sense of intense panic is created. They might like to consider as well what
the effects might be of lighting (perhaps strobe lighting) and sound.
Just as a scene like this is non-realistic,
there are lots of moments in the play when the illusion is deliberately broken.
For example, Christopher objects that the policeman is too old - 'too old to
play a policeman'. The illusion is completely broken at the end, where
Christopher - who is an extremely talented mathematician - is not allowed to
explain his mathematical proof:
Siobhan You
don't have to tell us how you solved it.
Christopher But
it's my favourite question.
Siobhan Yes,
but it's not very interesting.
Christopher I
think it is.
Siobhan Christopher
people won't want to hear about the
answer to a maths question in a play.
Look
why don't you tell it after the curtain call?
When
you've finished you can do a bow and then
people who want to can go home and if anybody wants to find out how you
solved the maths
question then they can stay and you can tell them at the end.
So the final scene, after the curtain call,
is 'A Maths Appendix' - which the stage directions say is to be delivered:
'Using as much theatricality as we can throw at it.'
Recommendation: This is
highly recommended for use with Years 10 or 11. The play itself is highly
engaging, but I love the fact that it allows lots of opportunities for
exploring the fact that a playscript is a skeleton to be fleshed out in
performance. The Bloomsbury edition of the play includes quite extensive
teaching ideas. There is a youtube
clip showing the cast at the National Theatre in London working on the play at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2bV75ITXJw. A performance of the play was
filmed and has been shown in some Australian cinemas under the National Live
program.
The Debt series
by Phillip Gwynne. Allen & Unwin, 2013.
Catch the Zolt: 1. ISBN 9781742378442.
275 pp.
Turn off the Lights: 2. ISBN 9781742378435.
265 pp.
Bring Back Cerberus: 3. ISBN 9781742378596.
279 pp.
Fetch the Treasure Hunter: 4. ISBN 9781742378602.
349 pp.
Yamashita's Gold: 5. ISBN 9781742378619.
388 pp.
Take a Life: 6. ISBN 9781742378626. 467
pp.
This six-book thriller series is, in my opinion, Phillip
Gwynne's best writing since Deadly, Unna.
The story is based on an improbable premise about an
ancient Calabrian feud that resulted in 'The Debt' - a deadly dangerous
obligation that must be met by each elder son as he turns fifteen. The Debt
cost the protagonist's grandfather, Gus, a leg - which put a definite stop to
his promising career as a runner. The representative of the next generation,
the protagonist's father, seems to have paid the debt and has become an
extremely wealthy businessman. His son, the protagonist, Dom Silvagni, lives a
spoiled and expensive life in Halcyon Cove, a gated community on Queensland's
Gold Coast. He attends the exclusive Coast Boys Grammar, which I hated
immediately, where he is an indifferent student but a star of the running team.
For me, one of the strengths of the writing is the social
satire. Gwynne is merciless in his attack on the idle and corrupt rich and on
the pretensions of elite schools. For the intended audience, the strength that
they will appreciate is the black humour, which includes what can only be
called the 'yuck factor'. There are lots of pooh jokes as well, but there are
also stomach-churning details such as the requirement that, as each instalment
of the debt is paid (there are always six), the teenager is branded on the
inner thigh with a hot branding iron, spelling out progressively the letters of
the word PAGATO, meaning 'paid'. Dom's father has the full word branded into
his flesh; his grandfather's branding is incomplete. Dom will have to accept at
each stage of a successfully completed instalment a similar branding; the only
alternative, if he fails like his grandfather to deliver the payment, is that
he will lose a pound of flesh.
Each instalment of the debt presents a different and
seemingly impossible challenge. In the course of accepting each challenge, Dom
finds himself in a variety of extremely risky situations in a range of
different locations, accompanied by some very odd characters, including a very
dodgy private detective, a couple of street kids, a seventeen-year-old escapee
from the law known as the Facebook bandit, and a South American taxi driver who
mysteriously turns up over and over again just in the nick of time. There are
countless shoot outs, car chases, breathtakingly dangerous boat trips,
helicopter rescues and landings in light planes with unqualified pilots. Most
of the locations are on the Gold Coast or in northern Queensland but Instalment
Four involves a trip to Rome and a very scary excursion to Calabria.
You may have noticed that the page count increases with
each book or 'instalment'. This series is designed to get kids hooked as
readers, and I think it will work well with some. The plot is compelling, with
some major surprises reserved until Instalment Six.
I usually read the first book in a series and then sample
one or two others, but it's rare for me to read my way through a series. I'll
confess that I enjoyed these enough to read all six of them.
Recommendation:
Include these in a wide reading selection of action adventure thrillers for
Years 7 and 8.
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
There have been a number of excellent young adult 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.
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 will be a huge success with Years 9 or
10. 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.
The film is about to be released and is predicted to be a great success.
The First Third
by Will Kostakis. Penguin Books, 2013. ISBN
9780143568179. 248 pp.
This celebration of family is great fun - and
at times quite sad. Billy's grandmother has explained that life is made up of
three parts: 'In the first third you're embarrassed by your family; in the
second, you make a family of your own; and in the end, you just embarrass the
family you have made.' Billy's Yiayia, who has held the family together for so
many years, is getting old and frail. She gives Billy her bucket list - things
he must do for her before she dies, all involved with bringing the family
together.
The book opens with a traditional Greek family
lunch, a copious spread with much too much food, just like so many other family
celebrations - except that, on this occasion, the banquet is spread out on
Yiayia's hospital bed. As Yiayia is in that bed and inclined to move suddenly
when excited, quite a lot of the food ends up on the floor.
Billy is devoted to his grandmother and takes
her bucket list very seriously, impossible though it seems. There is much
hilarity in his attempts to find a new partner for his mother by impersonating
her on internet dating sites and some sadness as he tries to work out how to
help his two brothers, both of whom are leading miserable lives. Billy is aided
in his project by his best friend, Lucas, who is one of the great characters in
the novel. Lucas is irrepressible; he takes his cerebral palsy in his stride
but finds it harder to deal with the fact that, as a gay man, he might never
find a partner because of his disability.
There are lots of jokes in this novel,
including the ones Billy composes when he has an unexpected stint as a stand-up
comic. A lot of the jokes are aimed at Billy's Greek ethnicity, including his
grandmother's poor English, but they are jokes that celebrate and unite, not
jokes that denigrate.
Recommendation: This is a great read for both boys and girls
in Years 7 and 8. Humour is always welcome, as are titles that reflect our
multicultural society.
The First
Voyage
by Allan Baillie. Penguin, 2014. ISBN 9780143307679. 184 pp.
Set thirty thousands years ago, this novel explores what it must have
been like for Australia's first peoples to make the journey from what is now
Timor to the shores of what we call Australia. The stretch of water to be
crossed was narrower then than it is now, but it was still substantial, given
the fragility of the boats that were used and the total ignorance of the boat
people as to what might lie at the end of the journey.
The story is told through the eyes of a teenage boy, Bent Beak, from
the tiny Yam tribe. Bent Beak's people have been on the move for some time:
they had lived previously on Long Island, with its huge mountains and 'the
jungle that roared at night', but that had been only a short crossing, made on
a calm day, to an island that was visible across the water. The Yam tribe's
enemies, the much larger tribe - the Crocodile people - had also come from Long
Island, and more of them cross over to Bird Island every day. Bent Beak's
father and other members of the Yam tribe have been killed by Crocodile
warriors, whose spears have sharp flint stones that are superior to the spears
the Yam tribe use for hunting and fishing. The Yam tribe Elder, Eagle Eye,
knows that the only way to save his people is to move on again - to follow the
birds that fly south. In a postscript, Baillie identifies Long Island as the
Indonesian islands where Flores, Lembata, Pulau Alor, Ataura and Palau Wetar
can be found today.
We share Bent Beak's journey, as the warriors cut the tall black
bamboo that they will use to construct their fragile rafts, as they struggle
against the attacks of the Crocodile people, and as the women and children
gather food and water to take with them on the voyage. As their food and water
dwindle, their greatest threat is the unknown: they have no idea how far away
the land that Eagle Eye insists must be there might be. There are five rafts in
the beginning, but they are separated in a terrifying storm. Bent Beak's raft
finally breaks up on rocks on the shore of a land that is bountiful in some
ways - an abundance of oysters and fresh water - but threatening in others,
occupied by giant animals unlike anything the Yam tribe has seen before.
While The First Voyage can
be categorised as historical fiction, it is also a kind of fantasy. This is a
superb imaginative adventure on the part of the author, as he uses his
knowledge of the landscapes and of the sea to picture what the journey might
have been like for Bent Beak and his companions.
We come to know well each member of the tribe on Bent Beak's raft.
Bent Beak himself is an engaging character and we share his concern for the
safety of the girl he loves, The Wind, and of the orphaned Waterlily. The old
man, Eagle Eye, who had the courage to persuade his people to venture into the
unknown, dies almost in sight of land, but a new life, Moonlight's baby, is
born. Distant smoke even suggests that other rafts have survived the journey.
I don't usually reveal as much as that about the ending of a novel,
but the ending is not what is most important here. We know this is a story
about the first peoples coming to Australia, so we are not surprised that some
of them make it. The interest is in the journey - the fascinating detail of the
getting there. Baillie brilliantly imagines those details, especially the
construction of the bamboo rafts.
While the link is never made specifically, the reader can't help but
think of other boat people making perilous voyages in fragile craft to escape
their enemies, as the Yam people fled the Crocodile tribe.
Recommendation: This
short, fast-paced novel offers young people a fascinating insight into what
might have been. It deserves a place in our selection of titles to explore
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures. It will work well
as a class set title with Years 7 and 8. It would be interesting to use the
opening sections of Wheatley's Australians
All alongside a reading of this novel. Wheatley presents the history as we
know it, with some insight as to where our knowledge has come from; Baillie has
drawn on this knowledge but has shaped it with his imagination to give us a
sense of the lived experience.
Flora's War
by Pamela
Rushby. Ford St, 2013. ISBN 9781921665981. 238 pp.
Flora has been
visiting Egypt for years, accompanying her archaeologist father. This year she
is
It is the
setting - so beautifully researched - that is the novel's great strength. There
are detailed descriptions of the work that is being done to uncover the tombs
from the time of the pharaohs, as well as superb pictures of the wealthy hotels
and the comfortable mansions inhabited by the ex-pats. The descriptions of the
overflowing hospitals and the conditions on the trains carrying the wounded are
just as well researched. Perhaps most memorable is the account of the ward for
men who have been mentally damaged by their experiences.
Recommendation: This is a satisfying coming-of-age
novel and a useful addition to young adult fiction about World War I. It is for
readers in Years 7 and 8.
Forget
Me Not
by Tom Holloway. Currency Plays, 2013. ISBN 9780868199696.
80 pp.
Whenever I go to the theatre, I am looking for plays that
might work in English classrooms. Sadly, very few are appropriate, even when
they're good. This one, which was performed at Belvoir Theatre in 2013, will, I
think, work in Year 10 or Year 11 classrooms.
The language is a bit confronting but appropriate to the
context, and I think most senior classes will cope with it. It tells the
terrible story of a child taken from Liverpool when he was aged three and sent
with many other children to a new life in Australia. It is based on detailed
research about the more than 3 000 children who were shipped to Australia from
England as orphans between the end of World War II and 1970. Gerry, now around
60, has always believed he was an orphan. He was brought up in a brutal
Australian institution and was severely damaged by the experience. His life has
been unhappy and often violent. It is his daughter, Sally, who insists that he
contacts the authorities and try to find out who he is.
The play is non-realistic in style and is not arranged
chronologically. The most gripping scenes are those between an inarticulate
Gerry and the frail old woman, Mary. It is a while before we realise that Mary
is, in fact, Gerry's mother, mourning for the child she gave up because she was
persuaded by the authorities that he would go to a better life. It takes even
longer to realise that the scenes between Gerry and Mary are imagined. By the
time Gerry and Sally get to Liverpool, Mary is dead.
I try as often as possible not to disclose endings, so I
apologise for that. However, I don't think it will spoil your appreciation of
the play.
There are of course a lot of other resources about these
stolen children, including documentaries, some fictionalised accounts written
for young adults, and David Hill's autobiographical account.
Recommendation: If you
are wanting a new play for Years 11 and 12, this might be worth considering. This could also be an excellent related text for the Area of Study, Discovery, as the whole plot pivots on the realisation or discovery that those scenes between Gerry and his mother are imagined, not real.
Girl
Defective
by Simmone Howell. Pan Macmillan, 2013. ISBN
9780330426176. 294 pp.
This is a confidently written, very
contemporary thriller. The protagonist, Sky, is anything but confident: she is
the 'girl defective' in a seriously unconventional family. Her mother has left
them some years previously to follow her career as an offbeat artist in Japan;
her father lives in a world of his own, making a precarious living selling old
vinyl records; and her little brother, Gully, has serious emotional problems.
Sky herself feels inadequate and immature, especially when she's in the company
of her friend, Nancy. Nancy, who is four years older than Sky, is worldly and
world-weary, making Sky feel very naive and inexperienced. The novel is at
heart a sympathetic coming-of-age novel as Sky struggles to come to understand
herself, her family, the boy Luke she falls in love with, and the world around
her.
While the plot is intriguing, it is the
characters who make this novel so powerful. Howell is especially convincing in
portraying Sky's immediate family. Gully, who is ten but seems younger because
of his hang-ups, is the star: he hides from the world behind a pig snout mask
that he refuses ever to take off. The reader shares Sky's worry about how
vulnerable he is. Dad, who drinks too much and is generally pretty hopeless,
begins a bumbling but rather sweet relationship with one of the local cops, a
woman from his past. Sky comes to share Luke's obsession with finding out what
happened to his sister, Mia, who has been found dead in the canal.
The setting of the novel is Melbourne's St
Kilda, and it is the gritty side - the homelessness, the prostitutes, the drug
trade - behind the tourist glamour that Howell focuses on. Sky lives in an area
where it is unsafe to walk home alone at night. Teenage parties are broken up
by police. Girls like Mia and Nancy get caught up in the apparent glamour of
the pop music seem, and some of them end up dead.
Howell writes beautifully, with great economy:
She put on her mirrored shades even though it was night. For a
moment I saw myself reflected. I looked like a small, dark thing. Like a possum
or a raisin. I'd never been kissed, never had a boyfriend. I didn't even know
any guys other than Dad and Gully. Before Nancy I never smoked or drank, what I
knew about sex you could ice on a cupcake.
With the lights soft and everyone's faces all shiny happy I felt
flooded with warmth - it was like we'd been infected with a buzzing, shaggy,
loveliness that I guess meant the best kind of family.
The Scenic Railway would have qualified as an old St Kildan. It had
been around since 1911. Its white wood lattice lassoed the park and made all
the other rides with their Day-Glo and bad murals look crass and eighties. From
the highest point I could see St Kilda's up-down streets, her patches of green,
her apartment blocks like computer monitors stacked on top of each other.
Recommendation: I can't say that I enjoyed this novel, but I
admired it. I wouldn't use it as a class set, but I would certainly recommend
it to girls in Years 7-9.
The Girl
from Snowy River
by Jackie French. Angus & Robertson, 2012. ISBN 9780732293109.
343 pp.
The time is 1916-1919 and the setting is a rocky farm on
the high slopes of the Snowy Mountains. Flinty sees her brothers and neighbours
go off to war. Some, such as Flinty's brother Jeff, never return; others, such
as older brother Andy and the boy she loves, Sandy, have changed markedly and
refuse to talk of their experiences overseas. Flinty's mother dies of a heart
attack when she hears of her son's death and her father succumbs to the
influenza that swept the world post-war. Rather than staying to look after the
family when he gets out of the army, older brother Andy has gone a-drovin' in
Queensland. So Flinty, at seventeen, looks after younger siblings, Joey and
Kirsty, and tries to eke a living out of trapping rabbits.
French brings together a wide variety of different
elements to tell Flinty's story: stories of the soldiers of World War I and of
the traumas they brought back with them; stories of the nurses on the
battlefields; the very different experiences of Australia's Vietnam troops;
Banjo Paterson's ballads, including the legend of Clancy of the Overflow and of
a wild ride to round up mountain brumbies; the struggles of small farmers in a
bleak environment; French's own personal experience of crippling back injury.
Part of me believes that it shouldn't work, but French is a magic storyteller
and as usual she engages her readers. The element that is most unlikely is the
presence, in 1919, of the ghost of a Vietnam veteran; Nicholas, who has lost
both legs in Vietnam and is in a wheelchair, belongs fifty years into the
future and - most oddly - is acquainted with the rather formidable old lady
Flinty will become. Nicholas (from the future) and the seventeen-year-old
Flinty become friends and confidants; she encourages him to try the artificial
limbs that might allow him to walk again and he reassures her that, while life
will be hard, happy times are ahead. By juxtaposing Nicholas's experience as a
Vietnam veteran alongside the experiences of returned soldiers from World War
I, French is able to explore ideas about the wastefulness of war.
This is a grand, sweeping story with some nail-biting
moments, especially the two terrifying horse rides. It's an excellent
historical novel, vividly evoking both time and place, but its strongest appeal
is the character of Flinty. Girls will empathise with her courage and
resilience and will rejoice in the eventual happy ending when Sandy admits that
he has never stopped loving her.
Recommendation: Like so many of French's novels, this
could work as a class set - for girls in Years 8 or 9, although it would not be
my first preference from the very impressive body of work that French has
produced. Make sure to introduce it to your girls; add it to a selection of
historical fiction, or love stories, or stories about resilience.
Greek
Myths: Stories of Sun, Stone and Sea
by Sally Pomme Clayton and Jane Ray. Frances Lincoln
Children's Books, 2013 (2012). ISBN
This is a lavishly illustrated
collection of some of the best-known Greek myths, including that of Pandora,
Perseus and Medusa, and Orpheus and Eurydice. The narration is very accessible
and would be great to read aloud. There are brief notes at the end of each
story, linking the myth to the modern world: the Temple of Delhi is still there;
you can walk through the Lion Gate at Mycenae, just as Agamemnon did; Mount
Chimera in Southern Turkey still burns. There is also an appendix with a useful
list of Greek gods and goddesses.
Recommendation: This is an excellent addition to your collection of traditional
stories. In paperback, it could be worth considering as a class set purchase,
allowing a unit of work specifically on Greek mythology.
Hate is Such
a Strong Word
by Sarah Ayoub. HarperCollins Publishers, 2013. ISBN 9780732296841. 246
pp.
Sophie is in Year 12 in a school in Sydney's Bankstown where nearly all
the students are Lebanese. She is uncomfortable at the prejudice being shown to
a new student, Shehadie, because he has an Australian father and is not
considered to properly belong. She is also stressed by what she sees as
the restrictive demands of her parents on her social life. She is aware that
her parents are clinging to the ways of the village that they left behind in
the 1970s, and she knows that in modern Lebanon cultural practices have
changed, but she cannot get her father in particular to see reason.
Every chapter begins with 'I hate ...' The constant litany is that she is
an outsider, partly because of her parents' restrictions but also because of
who she is. Her fellow students, for example, think that she's strange because
she has decided to research the experience of asylum seekers for one of her
school subjects. A lot of the 'hating' is about the trivia of teenage girls'
existence, but the larger questions about stereotyping and discrimination are
there as well.
This is a well-intentioned book that makes a contribution to the small
group of young adult novels that reflect our multicultural society. Ayoub has
chosen to make Sophie a Lebanese Christian, and the Lebanese-dominated school
she attends is a Catholic one. Sophie's own values (despite railing against her
parents' old-fashioned views) are conservative: she intends, for example, to
remain a virgin until she marries. The novel is in many ways a celebration of
the success of Australian migration and of the contribution of Lebanese
migrants to Australian society.
The novel ends on a very positive note: 'Hate is such a strong word ...
But I LOVE the fact that I'm going to find myself, so that someday I'll stop
using it.'
Recommendation: This is a
good coming-of-age story for girls in Years 7 and 8.
The
Incredible Here and Now
by Felicity Castagna. Giramondo Publishing Company, 2013.
187 pp.
This is first-person colloquial narrative in the voice of
fifteen-year-old Michael from Parramatta. In very short chapters that are more
like vignettes, it tells Michael's story during the most difficult summer of
his life, the summer his older brother Dom, whom he hero-worships, kills
himself driving recklessly. Dom's death devastates his family and Michael is
left bewildered and directionless.
While this is clearly about the effects of loss and about
coping with grief, it is also specifically about growing up in Sydney's
multicultural western suburbs. It begins by suggesting that 'West' is something
despised by some other Sydneysiders and sets out, I think, to prove that 'West'
is full of real human beings. I had some problems with this. I feel in some
ways it confirms the stereotypes about the western suburbs, but others
disagree. This has been shortlisted for the CBCA Older Readers' Awards for
2014.
Recommendation:
While it would not be my choice, this is something that should be looked at if
you are teaching in the western suburbs.
by
Fabio Geda, translated from Italian by Howard Curtis. David Fickling Books,
2012 (2011). ISBN 9781849920988. 224 pp.
Translated from Italian, this is based on a real-life story.
When his village in Afghanistan was taken over by the Taliban, ten-year-old
Akbari was taken across the border into Pakistan by his mother and then
abandoned. She had to return to look after the rest of the family but felt
that, by smuggling her son into Pakistan, she was giving him at least a chance
at life, whereas she felt that, as a Hazara, he had no possibility of survival
in their valley in Afghanistan. Akbari, who eventually gained asylum in Italy,
told his story in detail to Italian novelist Fabio Geda. Geda insists that the
account he has written should be read as fiction. He has recreated Akbari's experience
as truthfully as possible, while acknowledging that no one can remember every
detail of a traumatic five-year journey. From time to time, the narrative is
interrupted by Geda's voice, questioning Akbari.
Geda tells the story beautifully, beginning with the voice
of a ten-year-old child trying to come to terms with the fact that his mother
has abandoned him amongst strangers. The boy is remarkably resilient and
resourceful but his story is full of heartbreak. At home the boy's Hazara
people had been hated by both the Pashtuns and the Taliban. The Pashtuns had
forced the boy's father and other Hazaras to drive illegal trucks across the
Iranian border; the father had been killed by bandits on such a trip. The boy
and the rest of his classmates witnessed the Taliban shoot their teacher,
because he had refused to obey a decree to close down the school. At one stage
Akbari makes a perilous crossing of the mountains from Iran to Turkey, walking
for many days in deep snow and watching many of the group die from hunger and
cold. On another occasion he is smuggled in a tray underneath a truck, crammed
in with some fifty other asylum seekers, suffocating in the dark. That is one
of the most difficult sequences of the story to read. Geda recreates the crush,
the stench, the utter darkness, and the panic. The boy was imprisoned under the
truck for three whole days.
By the time he is eleven and a half, the boy has managed to
get to Iran where he does a man's work on a building site. After four months
during which his pay goes to the people smugglers, he is able to save - money
that is needed when he is twice repatriated by the police. Herat, the town
closest to the Iranian border, 'is full of traffickers waiting for people to be
repatriated. You barely have time to get beaten by the police before the
traffickers pick you up and take you back.' He has three years in Iran but
tires of living in constant fear - not of repatriation but of being
incarcerated in the infamous detention centres. It is for that reason that he
eventually risks the terrible crossing into Turkey.
Illegal work was plentiful in Iran but it is hard to find in
Turkey and the boy joins three other Afghan boys in a nightmarish sea trip to
Greece. The boat that the people smugglers supply them with is a dinghy - an
inflatable dinghy. They have no navigation equipment. None of the boys has any
sailing experience; none of them can swim. Their voyage is another frightening
sequence.
Akbari was fortunate to arrive in Greece just as the Greek
government was desperately trying to finish the venues for the Olympics.
Illegal workers were in great demand and it was possible to make some money.
Eventually he smuggles himself into Italy in a container in the hold of a ship.
The novel is quite short, told in brief, understated
episodes. It's easy to forget as the journey precedes that the boy is still
just thirteen, fourteen or fifteen years old, facing on his own the most
terrifying ordeals.
Recommendation:
This is an important exploration of the reality of life for asylum seekers. It
is an accessible read, appropriate for students in Years 7 and 8, but it also
has that timeless quality that means that adults will read it too. It could be
used at any level in secondary school, either for whole class sharing or as one
of a group of books about the asylum seeker experience.
I Was Only
Nineteen
Words by John Schumann, pictures by Craig Smith. Allen & Unwin, 2014.
ISBN 9781743317235. 32 pp. Hardcover.
This picture book begs for a place in the classroom. Schumann has drawn
on the words of the famous Williamson song to tell the story of a young
Australian who was sent to Vietnam. Craig Smith's illustrations do more than
just illustrate the story. It is from the end papers that we get the context:
at the front of the book, we see a child and an old man looking at photographs;
at the end of the book, they are marching together in what seems to be an Anzac
Day march. Their story continues to be told by the pictures throughout the
book: as the old man asks the doctor about his health on the right-hand page,
we see the boy waiting for his grandfather in the doctor's waiting room on the
left-hand page. Other illustrations are of the grandfather's memories of his
time in Vietnam.
There is an epilogue, which is a letter from John Williamson, explaining
the significance of the song and how it came to be written.
Recommendation: This is a
great way to introduce the history of the Vietnam War to students. The book
will work with any class, from Year 7 to 10. It would be a great related text
to use with the film, The Sapphires.
Jamie Reign: Last Spirit Warrior
by P. J.
Tierney. Angus & Robertson, 2013. ISBN 9780732295196. 385 pp.
This rollicking
adventure for readers in Years 5 - 8 is set in Hong Kong's New Territories. The
setting
Jamie is a huge
fan of the legendary kung fu expert, Master Wu, but has always assumed that he is not Chinese enough
to ever participate in the ancient rituals of the Way. Jamie's world is turned
upside down by the arrival of Mr Fan, an old man with surprising powers. To
Jamie's astonishment, the last spirit warrior whom Mr Fan seeks - and who is
needed to save the world - could just possibly be Jamie himself.
Jamie's
adventure takes place in the company of an engaging cast of characters - the
indomitable Wing, who is even worse at kung fu than Jamie, the mysterious and
highly skilled Jade, and the obscenely wealthy Lucy. The presence of such
strong female characters ensures that the book is as appealing to girls as
boys. For girls, there's an extra bonus in the discovery of Jamie's mother's
extraordinary story as a warrior.
There is plenty
of action and the novel moves swiftly, against the well-realised setting of the
fishing village and the dangerous waters around it. Some of the most exciting
sequences occur on the remote island of Chia Wu that is the site of Mr Wu's
warrior school. Jamie at first seems an unlikely hero, but, as the reader
becomes better acquainted with his courage, his selflessness and resilience, we
cheer him on.
The fantasy
elements, including the spirit powers that Jamie discovers, are blended
seamlessly with the realistic details of the setting.
Two sequels are
on the way: Jamie Reign: The Hidden
Dragon and Jamie Reign: The Lost Soul.
Recommendation: This
is a great addition to a Year 7 - 8 action adventure or fantasy box of wide
reading titles. It would work well too as one of a selection of action
adventure titles with Asian settings, alongside titles such as The Young Samurai series by Chris Bradford, A Ghost in My Suitcase and The Hidden Monastery by Gabrielle Wang, the Moonshadow series by Simon Higgins, Tales of the Otori trilogy by Lian Hearn, Eon and Eona by Alison Goodman, Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society and Chinese Cinderella: The Mystery of the Song
Dynasty Painting by Adeline Yen Mah, the Vermonia
series by Yo-Yo and the Dragonkeeper series by
Carole Wilkinson.
Jandamarra
by Mark Greenwood and Terry Denton. Allen & Unwin,
2013. ISBN 9781742375700. 48 pp. Hardcover.
This picture book is a great retelling of the story of
Aboriginal warrior Jandamarra. Greenwood's very accessible text emphasises the
intelligence and resourcefulness of the young man torn between conflicting
loyalties. After being chained and imprisoned, Jandamarra decides to fight for
his people. His unmatched knowledge of the area and his skills enable him to
continually evade pursuit. Eventually, badly wounded, he is shot by an
Aboriginal tracker, who cries as he takes aim.
Greenwood's text is beautifully supported by Denton's
watercolours. The focus here is on the magnificent Kimberley landscapes. Denton's
paintings are presented in various ways. They range from a dramatic two-page
spread of cattle being driven along the Lennard River into the huge, rocky
ranges to comic-strip style frames, one group of three showing Jandamarra,
standing on the edge of a cliff, shooting the hat off a startled trooper below.
The variety works very well. The paintings are not just illustrations: they
reward close reading.
Recommendation: This
is aimed at an upper primary-junior secondary audience but you could use it
with any year. It's a worthwhile addition to the resources available for the
Indigenous cross-curriculum priority.
Joyous and Moonbeam
by Richard
Yaxley. Omnibus Books, 2013. ISBN 9781862919877. 170 pp.
This short
novel for young adults is an engaging read. The story is told mainly through
the voices of the two characters, Joyous and Moonbeam, interspersed with a
series of letters to Joyous written by his Mamma. Joyous tells his story to an
unknown 'mister'; it is only right at the end of the novel that we guess, not
the specific identity, but the likely profession of the man questioning Joyous.
Joyous, a big man aged thirty-three, works in a sheltered workshop. I was a
little unsure of his unconventional use of language at first: 'doopy-do',
'truesome, 'a swish-wash of beer and stinks', 'honkingly', 'kookity'. But the
language is wonderfully expressive and flawlessly maintained by Yaxley, so that
it becomes inseparable from the character. Joyous is visited in the workshop by
an unhappy teenage girl, Ashleigh, whom he names Moonbeam. Moonbeam's family is
falling apart after the birth of a stillborn baby and she is acting out her
sadness by lashing out at home and at school. Moonbeam is recording her story,
on the advice of the school principal who is about the only adult she still
respects. Her voice is very, very different from that of Joyous and completely
authentic. As well as their two voices and the letters from Mamma, there are
some scenes between Joyous and Moonbeam that are told entirely in dialogue.
There are no speech marks, no 'he said' or 'she said', but the voices are so
distinctive that there is never any confusion.
Yaxley
skilfully reveals the stories of each of the characters. Joyous's story is dark:
he has been brutally bullied at school, abused physically and mentally by his
thuggish stepfather, wrongly accused of theft in the shop where he loved to
work, confined to pointless craft work in the sheltered workshop. But Joyous
lives up to his name. His whole life is infused with love for his Mamma and
dedication to the philosophy of the father he never knew: 'All life is joyous.
The good bits are naturally joyous but even the bad bits can be too. You just
have to work them around a little.'
Mamma's letters
reveal a number of secrets: Joyous's story is not quite as he believes it to
be. But his philosophy triumphs over all.
This is a book that lifts the spirits, despite
the brutishness of stepfather Sammy-K and the cruelty of school bullies like
Matthew Berrings. The style - especially the sections in Joyous's idiosyncratic
voice - might seem strange to readers at first, but they will enjoy exploring
Yaxley's success in using distinctive voices to create his characters. The book
is short, with many short chapters, and it moves at a fast pace. I've seen
reviews from some young readers who are disappointed with the ending - perhaps
because they missed some vital clues. The book demonstrates very well the importance
of close and attentive reading.
Recommendation: This could be an interesting choice for class set use in Years 7
or 8, or even with a less academic Year 9 class.
Jump
by Sean
Williams. Allen & Unwin, 2013. ISBN 9781743315866. 396 pp.
This is Book
1 in the intended trilogy, Twinmaker.
It will be followed by Crash and Fall.
This is a
complex science-fiction thriller that has been much praised by sci-fi fans. It
is set in a post-
Clair's best
friend, Libby, is seduced by a promise that she can use d-mat to achieve
Improvement - to change her body so that she will be perfect. Clair becomes
concerned that Libby has suffered serious personality change, and she sets out
to investigate what is going on.
Clair's quest
takes her to all kinds of locations and into great danger. In the company of
Jesse, regarded as a freak at school because he and his father will have nothing
to do with modern technology, she survives bomb explosions, gun fights and
endless chases. Her only guide is the mysterious voice of Q, who speaks to her
through her personal communicator and provides her with information that saves
her life on many occasions.
The novel has
a cliffhanger ending that will ensure readers will want to read the next
volume.
Recommendation: This is well-written and well-executed and
no doubt deserves the huge amount of praise that has been lavished on it by
sci-fi fans. I personally found it difficult to read.
Light
Horse Boy
by Dianne Wolfer,
illustrated by Brian Simmonds. Fremantle Press, 2013. ISBN 9781922089137. 119
pp. Hardcover.
This is a handsome
hardcover volume, a companion volume to the previously published Lighthouse Girl. It's a fictional story,
firmly based in research, of a young man from the country who joins the Light
Horse Regiment at the beginning of World War I and sails off to war. His ship
picks up German survivors from the Emden;
he discovers that the Emden's captain
shares his rapport with horses and confesses, in a letter to his sister, to
feeling uneasy about his perception that the 'enemy' is not all that different
from friends and family back home.
Jim serves at
Gallipolli, where he sees his best friend Charlie blown to bits, and then on
various battlefields in the Middle East, in both the medical corps and the
veterinary corps. He is severely wounded in Palestine and returns to Australia
believing that he will probably be blind for life.
The story is
told mostly in letters between Jim and his sister Alice, supported by other
documents, and interspersed with some short passages of conventional historical
narrative. The text is enhanced by the dramatic black and white sketches and by
many photographs from World War I.
Recommendation: This will work as a class set text in
Years 7-9. It could be used as a companion text to Michael Morpurgo's War Horse, as both are well-researched
fictional accounts of the part played by horses in World War I, or it could be
used alongside Lighthouse Girl. Lighthouse Girl uses the same narrative
technique of telling the story through a range of different kinds of text, both
written and visual. There are a number of direct connections between the two
books, including the fact that it is Fay's lighthouse on Breaksea Island off
Albany that is the first thing that Jim sees when he tentatively removes the
bandages from his eyes. Both are beautifully told, exciting and often moving
stories of the experiences of Australian young people in World War I.
Midnight:
The story of a light horse
by Mark Greenwood and Frané Lessac. Walker Books, 2014.
ISBN 9781921977718. Hardcover.
This is based on
the true story of Guy Haydon from the Hunter Valley who joined the 12th Light
Horse Regiment, taking with him the horse, Midnight, that he had raised and
trained from birth. It tells the story of their trip to war, their separation
when Guy spent four months at Gallipoli, and then their reunion, serving in the
desert. Guy and Midnight were among the eight hundred men and soldiers who
stormed the ancient town of Beersheba, held by three thousand Turks. Guy was
wounded but survived but Midnight was killed in the attack.
The story is
told in bold and fairly simple paintings that represent the vivid colours of
the desert. Mark Greenwood's text is spare, with a lot of use of short powerful
sentences: 'Guy braces for the bullet', 'Hours quiver by' and 'Shrapnel kicks
up dust'. There is also frequent use of evocative incomplete sentences such as:
'A jostle of horses and buckling straps' and 'Weeks in the saddle'. The refrain
- 'Coal black. Star ablaze. Moonlight in her eyes.' - occurs at the beginning,
at Midnight's birth, and is then repeated at the end of the book as she dies.
Recommendation: This would be a great support to a unit
of work based on Michael Morpurgo's novel, War
Horse. It could be used at any level.
A Monster Calls
by Patrick
Ness. Walker Books, 2012 (2011). ISBN 9781406339345. 240 pp.
This
is very special – a book that will haunt you. Thirteen-year-old Conor is
suffering a recurrent and terrifying nightmare, triggered by the fact – that he
is attempting to deny – that his mother is dying. So when, just after midnight,
Conor hears his name being called and finds that the yew tree from the
graveyard on the hill has transformed into a huge and threatening monster at
his bedroom window, Conor isn’t even frightened: this real-life monster is much
easier to deal with than his nightmare. The monster is and does everything
monsters are meant to do, roaring and threatening to eat Conor alive with its
‘raggedy teeth’, shattering glass and wood and brick, but Conor can cope with
it. The dialogue between Conor and the monster is a joy. Over a series of
nights, the monster tells Conor stories – stories that finally enable him to
accept that his mother will die.
In
this hardcover edition Ness’s beautifully written text is complemented by the
evocative and scary black and white drawings. The story is totally absorbing
and achingly sad, while at the same time providing that glow of satisfaction
that a reader experiences when a story is perfectly told.
The
origin of this book is equally sad. It was begun by Irish writer Siobhan Dowd,
who died of cancer in her early forties. The publisher asked Patrick Ness,
author of the brilliant Chaos Walking
trilogy, if he could finish it. Ness makes it clear that he did not attempt to
write the book that Dowd might have written; instead he used the ideas she had
been developing to inspire his own story, which he dedicates to Siobhan.
Recommendation: I would love to read this
aloud, over several lessons, to a class. Years 7 and 8 are the intended
audience, although I think most classes would be mesmerised. It’s a great
horror story. Kids love horror stories but really good horror is hard to find.
But it’s also a powerful exploration of the pain of dealing with the death of a
loved one. Make sure to leave time for some attention to the detail of Ness’s
writing and his genius for finding the right word. The morning after that first
encounter with the monster, Conor is getting his own breakfast, relieved that
he doesn’t have to eat his mother’s health-food-shop cereal and bread: ‘It
tasted as unhappy as it looked.’ This will become a classic.
Murder
at Mykenai
by Catherine Mayo. Walker Books, 2013. ISBN 9781922077943.
389 pp.
This is a lively and entertaining story about the
friendship between teenage boys, Odysseus from Ithaka and Menelaos from Greece.
Set a decade before the beginning of the Trojan War, it's a fast-moving account
of weapons training, wrestling, chariot racing and general teenage-boy
risk-taking, against a dangerous political background that includes the
assassination of Menelaos's father. Odysseus is a particularly appealing
character, bright and mischievous, with that self-confidence that comes from
knowing that you are loved and supported by your family: his parents, Laertes
and Antikleia, are positive, forward-looking characters. Menelaos's life has
been much less fortunate: well into adolescence he has been confined to the
women's quarters because of tragic family secrets. He is forced to flee Mykenai
when his father is assassinated and ends up in the brutal care of a tutor,
Palamedes, who both rapes and flogs him. Menelaos survives largely because of
the loyalty and persistence of his friend, Odysseus.
This is a terrific action novel from a first-time author
from New Zealand. There are some very funny scenes, including the opening
sequence when a runaway and very angry ostrich disrupts a ceremonial
procession, but there are also some dark moments. Odysseus and Menelaos find
themselves in a violent and treacherous world. Menelaos is so despairing of his
humiliation by Palamedes that he deliberately puts himself in the way of a
spear when hunting with Odysseus.
Recommendation: Most
students in Years 7 and 8 study Ancient Greece and it's surprisingly hard to
find good fiction that helps students to visualise the world they are learning
about in their history classes. You could use Murder at Mykenai as a class novel, especially with a class of
boys, in Year 8 while they are studying Ancient Greece. Be warned, however,
that the rape and violence might be disturbing to some readers. It would be fun
to explore the way the author combines knowledge about Ancient Greek life in
the bronze age with Greek mythology. It would also be fun to explore
connections with Homer's telling of the Trojan War. I especially enjoyed the
young Menelaos's infatuation with the beautiful young Helen.
Naveed
by John
Heffernan. Allen & Unwin, 2014. ISBN 9781743312483. 197 pp.
This has been
published as part of an excellent new series, 'Through My Eyes', stories about
children living in conflict zones. Heffernan has written an engaging story
about a resourceful and courageous teenage boy living close by Bagram Airfield,
the huge American airforce base in Afghanistan. Naveed is the sole supporter of
his widowed mother and his irrepressible younger sister, Anoosheh, who - like
so many others in countries that have been battlefields - has lost both her
legs after stepping on a landmine. Naveed makes an uncertain living finding
work wherever he can - making deliveries and stacking the shelves for
shopkeeper, Mr Waleed; helping with the lunch time orders at Mr Hadi's chai
house; washing cars. When desperate, he scavenges at the tip, but the gangs
that control the trade there are dangerous, and he cannot afford a beating that
would disable him to the extent that he could not work. The landlord who rents
the family their one-room hovel will not wait for the rent, and Naveed's mother
and sister are dependent upon him for their next meal.
Naveed
occasionally shares the little food he has with a stray dog. She is a big dog,
although starving. His kindness to the dog saves his life when she defends him
against the gangs. From that moment on, Naveed and Nasera are inseparable.
While the story
is told mainly from Naveed's point of view, there are occasional chapters from
the point of view of Jake, an Australian serving as a dog handler with the
military. It is the dog, Nasera, that Jake first notices; he is looking for
Afghans who can become dog handlers and continue the work of detecting
explosives after the Australians and the other westerners leave Afghanistan.
While Naveed is much younger than the recruits he was wanting, he and Nasera
prove to be a formidable team. The opportunity of a real job and a regular
income transforms Naveed's life.
This very
readable story gives great insight into the lives of ordinary Afghans living in
desperate circumstances.
Recommendation: This is a great novel for class study
in Years 7 and 8. Students will relate to Naveed and enjoy the story of his
dog, Nasera, and Jake's dog, Stingray. There is plenty of action and danger, as
well as some hope for the future.
Use this alongside other titles about the lives of Asian children such as Spilled Water by Sally Grindley, about child factory workers in China; Parvana, Parvana’s Journey and Parvana's Promise by Deborah Ellis, about conditions for
girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban; Ellis’s companion story, Shauzia, about an Afghan girl refugee in Pakistan; The Best Day of
My Life by Deborah Ellis, about a homeless Indian girl
suffering from leprosy; Homeless Bird by
Gloria Whelan, about the plight of
young widows in India; Trash by
Andy Mulligan, about the lives of children scavenging in the rubbish tips of
Manila; The Wild by Matt Whyman, the grim story of two
brothers growing up in the poisoned wilderness of Kazakhstan; Mahtab's
Story by Deborah Ellis, about a girl and her family
forced to flee Afghanistan and Shadow
by Michael Morpurgo, about life in Afghanistan.
Never Fall Down
by Patricia
McCormick. Harper Collins Publishers, 2013 (2012). ISBN 9780552567350. 224 pp.
This
is an intensely disturbing novel, firmly based on a real-life story. It begins
with an eleven-year-
Patricia
McCormick’s chilling novel is based on the real experiences of Arn Chorn-Pond,
who somehow survived when more than two million of his fellow-countrymen were
starved or slaughtered. The title is taken from the advice Arn was given -
'never fall down', because, if you do, that will be the end of you.
Arn survives on
his wits and through sheer luck. He is
protected because he plays the khim in an orchestra performing the new songs
for the Khmer Rouge. Often they are forced to play to mask the sounds of
killing. Later, he becomes a child soldier, used as a bait to trap the invading
Vietnamese. Arn's experiences are vivid: the sounds, the smells and the images
stay in the reader's mind long after the book is closed.
Arn Chorn-Pond
survived to become a peace activist.
Arn Chorn-Pond and Patricia McCormick
discuss the book on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-A_Y1kjJww. There is also an interview with
Patricia McCormick at her website http://patriciamccormick.com/never-fall-down/.
Recommendation: Never
Fall Down is both powerful and disturbing. Some people will argue that
young people should be protected from stories as grim as this; others will
insist that it essential to know such history, in the hope that it may not be
repeated. McCormick is an extremely talented writer for young people and has
managed a delicate balancing act between presenting the truth of Arn's
experiences but providing readers as well with some sense of hope about human
resilience.
Consider using the book as a class novel
with Year 9.
Wide
reading links:
overcoming adversity - physical, mental, environmental; war stories; children
in war; stories with Asian characters or as Asian setting.
New Guinea Moon
by Kate
Constable. Allen & Unwin, 2013. ISBN 9781743315033. 288 pp.
The time is December 1974, nine months before Papua New
Guinea gained independence. After an argument with her mother, sixteen-year-old
Julie finds herself at Port Moresby airport on a visit to her father, Tony,
whom she has not seen since she was a toddler. Tony is a pilot based at Mt
Hagen.
The novel is about Julie and Tony getting to know each
other, but it is also about Julie discovering Papua New Guinea and its people,
including the Australian ex-pat community. The ex-pats are divided about
independence: many who have lived in the country for years want to stay but
others intend to leave, convinced that the locals will be unable to govern
successfully. Some ex-pats are patronising and contemptuous of the locals.
Constable exposes the ugliness of colonialism. But Julie is fortunate to meet
Simon Murphy, who has a Papuan mother and an Australian father, and she becomes
very uncomfortable with the colonial attitudes. For a while, she is torn
between Simon and her father's boss's son, Ryan, but Ryan's racist arrogance
alienates her.
Constable grew up in Papua New Guinea, where her father was
a pilot, so she is writing from real knowledge. The setting is vividly
recreated.
Recommendation: This
is a gentle romance and an engaging coming-of-age novel that will appeal to
girls in Years 7 -8 .
Parvana's Promise
by Deborah
Ellis. Allen & Unwin, 2012. ISBN 9781743312988. 201 pp.
This is the fourth book in the Parvana series, a sequel to Parvana, Parvana's Journey and Shauzia.
It is the most powerful and disturbing book in a series that has been widely
used in secondary school classrooms. While Ellis as usual provides readers with
an inspirational resolution, the overwhelming impression that this book leaves
is of the ongoing devastation in Afghanistan, including the brutality of the
American military.
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.
Past the Shallows
by
Favel Parett. Hachette, 2013 (2011). ISBN 978073363049. 320 pp.
This
is a compulsive read. It is the story of three brothers, Joe, Miles and Harry,
and their difficult relationship with an angry and brutal father. It is set on
the remote south coast of Tasmania, where the boys' father makes a precarious
living as an abalone fisherman. Perhaps the major character is the sea: a wild,
dangerous and threatening sea that is both an exhilarating challenge for the
older boys when they are surfing and an indomitable power that takes the lives
of fishermen.
The
narration is third-person limited. We move between the viewpoint of the
enchanting nine-year-old Harry, an innocent narrator, and that of his
fourteen-year-old brother Miles, who tries to protect Harry from his father's
wrath. At the beginning of the story Miles is reluctantly helping his father on
the boat during school holidays but an accident to a crewman means that Miles
will have to work full-time in the job he hates so much, alongside his
irrational father. While other abalone fishermen make very good livings, Dad is
a failure who, in desperation, fishes illegal grounds.
Older
brother Joe has had to leave home after Dad broke his arm. Harry is left on his
own for many hours a day while Miles and Dad are away at sea. He builds a
relationship with a mysterious recluse, whose gentleness and care contrast
sharply with his father's neglect and violence.
At
the heart of the story is a dreadful secret from the past.
Recommendation: I recommend this highly for
class set use in Years 10 or 11. It is beautifully written. The sense of place
- including the evocation of the sea - is superb and the characters are well
realised. Harry and Miles wring the reader's heart and the tragedy - inevitable
in so many ways - is a shock.
This
could be well used as a related text for Area of Study, Discovery, as the
sudden discovery of the secret from the past is pivotal.
by Steven Herrick. UQP, 2012. ISBN 9780702249280. 214 pp.
This warmly funny verse novel is a celebration of
dusty little Australian towns and, especially, of little country schools. Herrick
uses his familiar method of telling the story through a range of voices,
Recommendation: This
is one of Herrick's verse novels for younger readers, aimed at a primary school
audience. You could use it as a class set text in Year 7, although I would
choose other titles by Herrick ahead of this one for an extended unit of work.
However, especially as it is such a quick read, it could be interesting to have
students in any year look at it to analyse how it is Herrick so successfully
creates character; it would be good for students to use it as a model for some
of their own experimental writing.
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
young adult literature reflecting the diversity of Australian society.
Pureheart
by Cassandra Golds. Penguin Books, 2013.
ISBN 9780143204275. 189 pp.
The first chapter -'The Dream' - is a
prologue: a boy dreaming the same disturbing dream every night, of being a
knight desperate to rescue the damsel in distress. In the second chapter the
knight and the damsel come face to face and we begin to assume that they are a
real boy and girl in a real, harsh world, but they are presented to us in a
kind of magical mist.
Although there is a very strong bond
between Deirdre and Gal (Galahad, yes, really), Deirdre believes that they have
met only twice in their lives: when they were five and then again at twelve.
Together at age five they shared an experience that was so traumatic that
neither can remember it, although they both believe it is vital that they do
remember. Their time together at age twelve was just as unsettling. Deirdre,
who had been home-schooled until age twelve, finds school an alienating place,
especially as rumours are rife that the grandmother with whom she lives is a
witch. Gal rescues Deirdre from a terrifying incident where bullying gets out
of hand. That is the last day at school for both of them: Deirdre returns to
home schooling and Gal is expelled. She believes, wrongly, that that was the
last time she saw him, although she is aware of how strong the bond is.
This is a confident blending of realist
fiction with a fantasy world in which an old block of flats becomes a
nightmarish magic maze. While on one level Pureheart
is a celebration of love, the story is very dark and makes uncomfortable
reading at times. At its heart is the character of the Grandmother, who has
said:
Justice has to be done. Or revenge. It doesn't matter. It has
to happen. It's built into the scheme of things. But the funny thing is ... it
usually doesn't happen to the person who deserves it. That's just the way it
goes. Little girls cannot pay their fathers back. They don't have the power.
But then little girls grow up and get some power of their own. So the revenge
happens to someone else, someone they have power over, someone who wasn't even
born when it all happened. Someone innocent, like you.
The 'you' refers to both Deirdre and Gal,
on whom the Grandmother tries to wreak vengeance. She is a terrifying
larger-than-life character who has Deirdre totally in her thrall. Her words are
full of poison:
And although you will long for it, you will never have my
total love again. Neither will you win the love of anyone else. Some things are
unforgivable, Deirdre. This is one of them. You are unforgiven, and love is
denied you, for the rest of your life.
Love triumphs in the end, but at terrible
cost.
Recommendation: This is a
compulsively readable, beautifully written, dark fairytale, drawing on the
traditions of Arthurian legend. It will be captivate fantasy readers in the
Year 7 - 8 age group.
The Rainbow Troops
by Andrea
Hirata, translated by Angie Kilbane. Vintage Australia, 2013 (first published
in Indonesian
The
title in Indonesian is Laskar Pelangi. The novel was a record-breaking
bestseller in Indonesia and has been translated into many languages. Based
closely on the author's childhood, it tells the story of a very poor community
on the Indonesian island of Belitong, a place where some people at the time
were very wealthy as a result of the huge tin-mining operation. The wealthy
mining executives live comfortable lives on The Estate, but the daily paid
laborers, like the narrator's parents, live a precarious existence. Fishermen,
like the parents of the narrator's best friend, Lintang, are even poorer. For
such parents, sending their children to school is a huge sacrifice, not just
because of the unaffordable school fees but because even the youngest children
can be employed for a pittance as coolies or as shop assistants.
Ikal, the
narrator, is one of a small group at Muhammadiyah Elementary, a school so poor
that the teachers aren't even paid, surviving at a subsistence level on work
that they do outside school hours. The school and its students are despised by
the privileged, who attend the PN School, a centre of excellence. Ikal's school
has trouble even buying chalk, and survival seems unlikely. Against all the
odds, the devout old man, Pak Harfan, and the fifteen-year-old girl, Bu Mus,
not only keep the school
This is an
inspirational story of great charm and occasional sadness. It is also a
fascinating insight into a way of life very different from our own.
Recommendation: The Rainbow Troops is written for adults. While it would probably
be best as a senior text, it may be suitable for an advanced Year 10 class. Use
it as well as a source of related material; many of the most charming scenes
are relatively self-contained. The quality of the writing is superb.
A film based on
the novel was released in Indonesia in 2008. Laskar Pelangi, directed by Riri Riza, broke all box-office records
for Indonesian films. It is rated PG in Australia and is perfectly appropriate
for showing to students in Years 7 and 8. The film is available, with English
sub-titles, on YouTube. Be warned,
however, that it is two hours long and, while delightful, it is not
action-packed. Selected scenes may work better - and be just as useful in exposing
students to an unfamiliar way of life - than showing the film in its entirety.
Refuge
by Jackie French. HarperCollins, 2013. ISBN 9780732296179.
272 pp.
This is very different from the many novels about the refugee
experience that I have previously read. The backcover blurb does, I think, give
some clues that it is different, but I read this in ebook where there is no
backcover blurb to consult, so it was a wonderful surprise as the story
unfolded. It begins much as I had expected: teenager Faris and his grandmother
Jadda are on a small crowded boat on a grey sea under a grey sky. We learn
something of their story: the flight of Faris's father from home five years
earlier to avoid arrest, their need to move to much poorer accommodation, the
warning that they too were about to be arrested, the sale - piece by piece - of
family jewellery to buy them the smugglers' help. Like so many others who have
come to Australia by boat, Faris experiences a terrible storm that is too much
for the fragile boat. Chapter 1 ends with Faris and Jadda being swept overboard
by a gigantic wave.
The surprise begins with the opening of Chapter 2. Faris wakes in a
soft bed in a beautiful bedroom in a luxurious house. Breakfast, with a smiling
Jadda at the top of the table, is a buffet of everything he could dream of.
Gradually the reader becomes suspicious that all is not quite as it seems: the
pet koala gnawing a chicken leg is a pretty good clue.
French has made the transition seamlessly from the grim realism of the
first chapter to a fantasy world - an Australia that Faris had imagined, based
mostly on tourist websites. He leaves his fantasy house for his fantasy beach
but discovers a different beach altogether:
This
wasn't his beach! He had never seen this beach before.
It
was a small beach, ending in two jagged cliffs of tumbled black rocks at either
end. Six great stones rose like giant's teeth across the small bay, with a few
metres of rippled blue water between each of them. Small waves purred a little
way up the beach, then slipped back, leaving the shine of water on the sand.
Faris discovers children playing on the beach. Again,
there are little clues that this is not what it seems. A boy of about Faris's
own age wears 'a strange woollen suit, with short pants and long grey socks'.
An older girl wears a head shawl, with bright green pants and a long shirt. An
older boy describes Faris as 'a new cove'. Descriptions of clothing and the
type of speech characters use usually give us clues to context - time and
place, but the clues we pick up here are all contradictory.
French is not just telling us Faris's story. She is
telling us the stories of all the children who have come by boat to Australia
over the centuries. Even the First Australians came by boat, and they are
represented in the character of Mudurra, who fishes with a spear on the beach.
French mentions in the novel twenty-five children who have played on the beach,
including those from Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and French ships that predated
Captain Cook. But she concentrates on a handful: Susannah, who came from Ireland
in the 1920s; the little Greek boy Nikki, who arrived in the 1950s;
fifteen-year-old Billy, the convict boy who grew up to become an important
citizen and the patriarch of a large family; Afghan teenager Jamila, who
arrived in the early 1990s; and David, also thirteen, a Jewish boy from Austria.
In the fictional biographies French provides at the end of the book, each of
these children - like Faris - passes from the real world in which he or she was
dying to the fantasy world of the beach and then returns to reality, to live a
productive life in modern Australia. Only the First Australian, Mudurra, and
the Sudanese girl Juhi who falls in love with him, remain in the past, perhaps
60 000 years ago.
Faris remains the main character. Not only do we have
much more detail about his past, before he boarded a boat in Indonesia, than we
have about any of the other children, we also learn a great deal more about
what happens to him after he arrives in Australia. But French has been careful
not to tell us too much: Faris's nationality or religion are never mentioned.
He could be from any one of quite a large number of countries. Because the
detail is not there, any stereotypes the reader might be inclined to bring to the
text are not relevant.
This is an awesome task that French has set herself - to
tell the story of all of Australia's peoples - and it works beautifully. The
transition between fantasy and realism is completely credible, and the novel
becomes a celebration of nationhood.
Recommendation: This
is a superb choice as a class novel for Years 7 or 8. It is also an excellent
text to tick off both the Asian and Indigenous cross-curricular priorities.
You could use Refuge alongside Gleitzman's
Boy Overboard and Girl Underground, Gleeson's Mahtab's Story, Evans' Walk in My Shoes and Hawke's Soraya the Storyteller. All of these are about asylum-seekers coming to Australia, as is the beautiful picture book, Ziba Came in a Boat.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by
Mohsin Hamid. Penguin Books, 2008 (2007). ISBN 9780141029542. 209 pp.
This
is a superb text for senior study. It is short enough and easy enough to be
accessible to less academic streams, but the ideas explored will challenge your
most talented students. The whole novel is a dramatic monologue. The speaker is
a young Pakistani who has spent a lot of time in the United States where he had
great success, first as a student and then as a businessman. But 9/11 changed
everything for him. Here he is in a cafe in Lahore, talking to a stranger. Over
the course of the afternoon and evening we learn his story, as he tells it to
the stranger. We never hear the stranger directly, although we can guess at
some of what he says and what he does from the narrator’s comments. The
stranger is probably an American, possibly a military type, and he becomes an
increasingly sinister figure as the afternoon progresses. Is it a wallet or
perhaps a gun that is in his inside coat pocket? What is his purpose there in
Lahore? The tension mounts, climaxing in a violent but ambiguous ending.
Recommendation: I have had very positive
reports of the success of this in the classroom. It allows for an intelligent
exploration of issues raised by the ‘war on terror’: the simple good/evil,
black/white dichotomies are questioned. It is mostly being used in Year 11, and
in Victoria it is set for study for Year 12, but it is within the capabilities
of a good Year 10 class.
This
could also be a valuable related text for the Area of Study, Discovery. The
whole point of the very skilful use of the dramatic monologue is a gradual
reveal - a gradual discovery of who the stranger is and what his presence there
in Lahore may be. There is also the use of a moment of sudden discovery and
self- discovery as a pivotal plot moment: that shocking recognition when the young
man realises, just for a moment, that he is in some ways glad about the 9/11
attack on America.
Rooftoppers
by Katherine Rundell. Faber and Faber, 2013. ISBN 9780571280599.
278 pp.
This quirky and original novel is an unexpected delight.
The setting is eccentrically old-worldy but the narrative is very contemporary,
almost post-modern.
The novel's opening gives a good taste of what is to
come:
On the morning of its first birthday, a baby was found floating in a
cello case in the
It was the only living thing for miles. Just the baby, and some
dining-room chairs, and the tip of a ship disappearing into the ocean. There
had been music in the dining hall, and it was music so loud and so good that
nobody had noticed the water flooding in over the carpet. The violins went on
sawing for some time after the screaming had begun. Sometimes the shriek of a
passenger would duet with a high C.
The baby was found wrapped for warmth in the musical score of a
Beethoven symphony. It had drifted almost a mile from the ship, and was the
last to be rescued. The man who lifted it into the rescue boat was a fellow
passenger, and a scholar. It is a scholar's job to notice things. He noticed
that it was a girl, with hair the colour of lightning, and the smile of a shy
person.
Charles, the scholar, adopts baby Sophie, despite the
disapproval of the National Childcare Agency. Their domestic arrangements are
unconventional but completely rational: Sophie as a child has a propensity to
break plates, so for some years Charles and Sophie eat their meals off the many
old books in the house. They write messages for each other on the wallpaper in
the hall. Sophie by age seven knows a great deal of Shakespeare but not much
about the way nice Victorian young ladies are expected to behave. She insists
on wearing trousers, which are much more suitable than skirts for one of her
favourite occupations, tree-climbing. Trousers for little girls are not
available in the shops so 'Charles sewed four pairs himself in brightly
coloured cotton and gave them to her wrapped in newspaper. One of them had one
leg longer than the other. Sophie loved them.' Miss Eliot, from the National
Childcare Agency, does not, insisting that girls don't wear trousers. She's
even more incensed when Sophie - who lost her mother on her first birthday -
insists that she remembers her mother wearing trousers. Miss Eliot is not
convinced by Sophie's argument that wearing trousers is better for
tree-climbing because otherwise people below might see the climber's pants:
Miss Eliot 'was not the sort of person who admitted to wearing pants'.
I fell completely in love with Charles. His eccentric and
loving relationship with Sophie is a joy, but we are not surprised when the
National Childcare Agency announces that the twelve-year-old Sophie is to be
taken from Charles and placed in an orphanage. Sophie, who has always insisted
that her mother did not drown, finds a clue that her mother may have been
French and Charles and Sophie escape - at great danger to Charles for defying
the authorities - to Paris.
In her attic bedroom in the cheap little hotel in Paris,
Sophie forces open a skylight and finds a whole new world on the rooftops,
including the homeless children who prefer the rooftops to the streets.
Rundell's representation of the lives of the rooftoppers is wonderful. This is
of course fantasy but it is grittily, credibly realistic, and it has the
ability to shock us into seeing afresh the tragedy of child homelessness. We've
read all about it before - the lives of poor children in Victorian England,
homeless teenagers in contemporary western cities, slum children in Asia - and
to some extent we've become immune through familiarity. Rundell's success is
using her fantasy world of the rooftoppers of Paris to enable us to feel the
hunger, the fear, the pain and the cold.
It is the rooftoppers - the extraordinary Matteo and his
friends - who help Sophie to look for her mother. Charles remains totally
endearing; readers always remark on Sophie's courage but it seems to me that
Charles is the bravest character in the novel because, unlike the children, he
knows the consequences if things go wrong:
I suggest, Sophie, that you don't mention this to the educational
authorities. Throwing children across rooftops is frowned upon, I believe.
Rundell has a wonderful way with words: her descriptions
constantly surprise. The following sentence tells you all that you need to know
about Charles' room in the cheap Paris hotel:
There were two spindly chairs, on which a succession of bottoms had left
their mark, and two rugs, on which a good deal of expense had been spared.
Sophie's first reaction to Paris is captured like this:
It was ten minutes' walk; ten minutes through cobbled streets, and
window boxes full of red carnations, and children eating hot buns in the road;
ten minutes in which Sophie's heart looped the loop and danced a jitterbug and
generally behaved in a way entirely out of her control.
Some of the best lines come from Charles, who describes
the grey, disapproving men from the welfare agency as 'moustaches with idiots
attached' and Sophie as 'bright enough to start a forest fire'. The coffee at
police headquarters tastes 'like liquidated carpet'.
A lot of writing for young people is rather bland. We
avoid giving them books that might be difficult and editors make sure that the
reading level is appropriate. We need more novels like this that stretch
readers' emotions and imaginations and that teach them that language is a joy
to play with.
Readers will differ about the novel's resolution. I find
it totally satisfying. I don't need an epilogue telling me what happened next.
I have come to love these characters and I trust them to make good choices.
Recommendation: Girls
who are good readers will love this from about Year 4 upwards. It would be
entirely appropriate as a class set for Year 7, although you will need to work
hard at first to get the boys engaged. Make sure to include it on any reading
lists for gifted Year 7 readers.
The Sapphires
directed by Wayne Blair (2012).
The
Sapphires: The Screenplay
by Tony Briggs. Phoenix Education, 2013. ISBN 9781921586712.
Even the best of Australian films have a
hard time with the Australian box office, but this lively, upbeat film was
enthusiastically embraced by local audiences when it was released in 2012. It
is based on the highly successful stage musical that was also written by Tony
Briggs, telling the real story of four young Aboriginal women who meet Dave, a
feckless Irish musician, who is looking for a new act to revive his career. The
girls love music, by which they mean Country and Western; Dave introduces them
to Soul Music, so that they can perform in Vietnam for the American Marines.
Part of the appeal of the film are the
many musical numbers and the great sense of fun, at times interspersed with
real black-and-white television of the war in Vietnam. While the film touches
on the futility of the Vietnam War and the reality of racism in Australia in
the 1960s, the issues are not pursued in any great depth.
Recommendation: The Sapphires can be used to
meet both the Indigenous and the Asian cross-curricular perspectives. The film
is usefully rated as PG, making it available at any level, from Years 7-10. The
existence of the filmscript is a bonus for class study.
Bran
Nue Dae, directed by Rachel Perkins (2009) is
also rated PG and would be a useful comparison to The Sapphires. Music, humour and a great sense of vitality are common
to both. The picture book I Was Only
Nineteen is a worthwile companion text.
Shadow
by Michael Morpurgo, illustrated by Christian Birmingham. HarperCollins
Children’s Books, 2010. ISBN 9780007339600. 288 pp.
This is a moving story about the refugee experience from one of the UK’s
best writers for children. Morpurgo was inspired by the story of the Australian
sniffer dog that went missing in Afghanistan for 14 months. The dog he writes
about was used by the British to detect explosives, but it disappeared after an
attack and was presumed to have been killed. The dog turned up months later
many hundreds of kilometres away in the caves where Aman, his mother and
grandmother are trying to survive.
Aman and his mother make the terrible journey from Afghanistan to try to
join relatives in England, including several days locked in the back of a truck
with many others without food or water. The story is narrated by 15-year-old
Matt, who becomes Aman’s best friend at school and who is horrified when, after
six years living in the UK, Aman and his mother are denied refugee status, are
arrested and are about to be deported. Matt’s narration is interspersed with
Aman’s story, told to Matt’s grandfather in the visiting room at the detention
centre.
Recommendation: Morpurgo
achieves admirably his purpose of allowing young readers to understand that
boys like Aman are just like them, not ‘the other’. This would make a great
Year 7 class set. However, you may have to struggle against students’ initial
assumption that the book looks a bit young for them. The font is a comfortable
size and there are Birmingham’s wonderful illustrations, so that the format
seems to be that of a book for younger readers. However, the characters are in
their mid-teens and the content is perfect for junior secondary.
This is a great book to use alongside John Heffernan's Naveed.
by Rosanne Hawke. Through My Eyes series. Allen &
Unwin, 2013. ISBN 9781743312469. 206 pp.
This is the first title in an exciting new series from
Allen & Unwin called the 'Through My Eyes' series, novels about children
living in conflict zones. There could not be a better author than Rosanne
Shahana lives in the area known as the Line of Control,
the border that divides Kashmir in two. Her tiny village is on the Neelum River
that runs along the border on the Pakistani side. It is an area of ongoing
conflict involving not only Indian and Pakistani soldiers but also militia who
have their own agenda. Shahana has lost her mother and older brother in a
militia attack on the village. Her father has been killed trying to cross the
river to sell his goods on the other side. For a year or so Shahana and her
young brother Tanveer lived with their grandfather, but he has died the
previous winter. Shahana and Tanveer now survive alone in their tiny isolated
house on the side of the mountain, some distance from the village. Shahana's
grandfather had left her a valuable legacy: the ability to embroider, a skill
usually confined to men. She earns enough to buy them food but is aware that
the trader, Mr Nadir, is exploiting her; worse, she knows that Mr Nadir's
carpet factory depends on the slave labour of young boys from penniless
families and that Mr Nadir is plotting to get Tanveer to work for him.
Shahana and Tanveer's lives change when they rescue a
fifteen-year-old boy, Zahid, from wild dogs. Zahid comes from the other side of
the Line of Control. He is looking for his father who, like so many men, has
disappeared, possibly victims of the militia.
While there are several very exciting incidents,
including a chilling scene when Mr Nadir tries to auction Shahana as bride to
the highest bidder, the strength of the novel is in the characterisation and in
the depiction of the lifestyle. Students may well be shocked by a world in
which a thirteen-year-old girl is left to raise her nine-year-old brother,
where children can be exploited by evil, greedy men like Mr Nadir, where homes
have no running water or electricity and where food almost never includes meat.
They may well be impressed by Shahana's perseverance, resourcefulness and resilience.
Recommendation: This
is strong enough to be used as a class set novel. It will work best with girls
in Year 7-8. It is a great title to add to the resources available for
exploring the cross-curricular perspective, Asia. Add it to a wide reading selection
of titles about children in Asia - or, more broadly, children around the world.
Song of
the Slums
by Richard Harland. Allen & Unwin, 2013. ISBN 9781743310052.
370 pp.
Harland is a
master of the genre that has become known as 'steampunk'. Song of the Slums follows the success of Worldshaker and Liberator, set in an alternative nineteenth century England. King
George IV is on the throne and the country is dominated by the plutocrats, who
have made enormous fortunes from their industrial enterprises that leave cities
like Brummingham choking in foul smog and millions of people living in slums.
After many years of war with Europe, peace has come to England - and that is
not good for the plutocrats, many of whom have factories designed to produce military
hardware.
While this is
steampunk, it is also, as Harland admits, 'gaslight romance'. Both genres are
beautifully combined in Chapter 1 of Part 1 when Astor, her stepfather and her
mother arrive in an airship at the aerodock of the monstrous Swale House to be
greeted by the hugely powerful Swale brothers. Astor has been led to believe
that she is coming to Swale House to be betrothed to the youngest Swale
brother, Lorrain. She is shocked and horrified to discover that her stepfather
has virtually sold her to the Swales as governess to their three revolting
children.
While Astor has
some hope of winning the love of the very handsome Lorrain, everyone who is an
experienced romance reader knows that her true love will be - after many
obstacles - the mysterious servant, Verrol, who acts the part of the perfect
servant but soon demonstrates that he has hidden qualities. Verrol whisks Astor
away in a breathtaking escape as she is being escorted to the dungeons by the
vindictive children. They are given temporary refuge in the slums by Granny
Rouse and her gang but must earn their place by proving their worth as
musicians.
Harland's
decision to shift the invention of rock and roll back a century is outrageous
and wonderful. Astor's musical background has consisted of the harp and
classical piano but her survival depends on her becoming a rock and roll
drummer. To her surprise, she becomes addicted to the new sound and, with the
other band members, works day and night to get it right. The descriptions of
the band's performances when they win over audiences that are initially
indifferent or hostile are compelling reading, more exciting in my opinion that
the many action-packed encounters where Astor, Verrol and their friends fight
thuggish militiamen, evil plutocrats or corrupt parliamentarians.
Recommendation: This is a terrific, fast-moving read,
crammed with action and imagination. It
will be enjoyed by readers from Years 7-10, of both sexes. Make up a
wide-reading selection of alternative histories or of steampunk and gaslight
romance, or simply make sure that it is in selection of fantasy novels.
A Taste of Cockroach; Stories from the Wild Side
by Allan Baillie. Penguin Books, 2014 (2005).
ISBN 9780143003373. 192 pp.
This terrific collection of
Baillie's stories, mostly set in South-East Asia, has just been reprinted. They
are all fiction, apart from the introductory story about Baillie's trip as a
young man, recently disabled, into the mountains of Nepal and his dilemma when
offered by a village elder, as a welcoming courtesy, a drink of water that he
knows is highly likely to be quite dodgy. It's a typical humorously
self-deprecating Baillie story, recording a typical Baillie moment in which his
natural courtesy and kindness cost him.
There is an excellent range of
stories in the collection. One of them is a short story version of the picture
book Rebel! (see annotation above),
set at the time of the generals in Burma. 'The Pencil' is the story of a young
girl intercepted by the Taliban on her way to her forbidden school. My
favourite, 'Only Ten', has as its protagonist a boy from Lebanon rather than
from one of the countries of Asia, but it is telling the universal story of a
refugee child viewed with some suspicion by his new Australian classmates.
Baillie's decision to tell the story in the first-person plural, so that we are
exposed to the group-think about the strange new arrival, is masterly.
Recommendation:
This collection is a great resource for Asia and Australia's Engagement with
Asia. You will use the stories across Years 7 to 10.
To Brave
the Seas: A Boy at War
by David McRobbie. Allen & Unwin, 2013. ISBN 9781743313077.
230 pp.
This is an interesting World War II story, told in the
first-person by fourteen-year-old Adam, who joins the merchant navy when war
breaks out. McRobbie served in the merchant navy (although not during World War
II) and he brings to life the world on board, its rituals and its language, as
well as a
McRobbie points out in an Afterword that, on a percentage
basis, more merchant sailors died in World War II than in any other branch of
the services. Adam's ship is torpedoed and only a few of the crew make it to
the lifeboats. Some of the more remarkable incidents in the story are based on
real wartime events, such as the discovery by shipwrecked sailors of an
abandoned oil tanker in mid-Atlantic, which they board and, with some
difficulty, sail home. The triumphant scene towards the end of the book where
Adam's captain decides to ram a U-boat in neutral Portugal is fictitious but
satisfying.
This is a celebration of the courage and decency of
ordinary men, whose behaviour is contrasted with that of the bosses. When
Adam's ship is torpedoed, for example, his pay is immediately stopped; his
employers take no interest in his fate from the moment when he is unable any
longer to work the ship. Similarly, when Adam and his mates bring home the
valuable oil tanker and its cargo, the owners, initially, intend to charge them
for the clothing and food they have taken from the ship's shop. When a clever
lawyer wins compensation for the men for salvaging the ship, they pass the
money on to the families of the tanker's dead crew, demonstrating a compassion
and selflessness that is very different from the rapaciousness of the
shipowners.
Recommendation: This
very readable historical novel gives young readers an insight into a world very
different from their own. It will be enjoyed especially by boys in Years 7-8.
Make sure to include it in wide reading selections for that group.
Tufff
...
by Bille Brown. Phoenix Education, 2012 (1990). ISBN
9781921586545. 47 pp.
Written more than 25 years ago, this was the first play
written by actor and playwright, Bille Brown. It toured schools in Queensland
at the time and was followed by a season at the Royal Court Theatre in London,
leading to Brown's first commission to write a play for the Royal Shakespeare
Company. This edition has been slightly updated but few changes were necessary:
issues to do with friendship and bullying have changed little in 25 years.
The play has only three characters - boys aged between 11
and 13 - but Brown was insistent that it could be played by adult actors just
as well as boys. The truth of the relationships and the skill with which the
relationships develop will transcend the actual physical appearance of the
three people on stage.
The play opens with a superb monologue by Rosebury,
sitting in his wheelchair on a beach facing the ocean, listening to the
whispers from a cowrie shell, and thinking about the way his brain compensates
for the weakness of his body: 'My mind can run and I do all my walking with my
mouth.' Rosebury is at first anxious when he realises two 'tufffs', Springle
and Blackburn, have come down to the beach. Springle and Blackburn are typical
bogans, boasting of their bullying, their smoking and drinking, and general
misbehaviour, while threatening Rosebury. But Rosebury uses his brain - his wit
and his ready tongue - in a contest that leads to bonding and friendship.
This is a very funny play, with lots of clowning and
physical action, but it is the dialogue that is so delightful.
Recommendation: It is
very, very difficult to find original plays for the classroom. Most of the ones
that are worth reading are adaptations of novels, so this is great to have.
Best of all, it is simple enough to use with Years 7 or 8, where there is the
greatest dearth of good material. Keeping in mind, however, Brown's advice that
it could be played by adult actors, it could be used at any level. While you
will probably want to begin with a reading in class, make sure that you give
students opportunities to experiment with some of the very funny sequences that
depend on actions rather than words, such as when Springle and Blackburn throw
stones at the tramp offstage or Blackburn acts out his father coming home from
the pub. As only three characters are involved, this can be done in small
groups, so that everyone is involved.
This is
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. That doesn't mean, of course,
that girls can't play boys.
Ubby’s Underdogs: The Legend of the
Phoenix Dragon by
Brenton E. McKenna. Magabala Books, 2011. ISBN 9781921248313. 160 pp.
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
This is an
action movie with terrific special effects presented in comic-strip format and
with authentic Australian voices, including Aboriginal English.
The sequel, Heroes Beginnings (9781922142139) has
now been published.
Recommendation: Use this anywhere from Year 7 - 10,
especially with those students who love graphic novels.
The
Vanishing Moment
by Margaret Wild. Allen & Unwin, 2013. ISBN
9781743315903. 183 pp.
Set in
contemporary Australia, The Vanishing
Moment focuses on the lives of two young women
Bob's story is
about the past, leading to homelessness and gaol. Arrow's story is about the
present, although her present is influenced strongly by a terrible trauma in
her past. Marika's story is completely in the present. Her happy and successful
life has been shattered by one single shocking moment.
Arrow and Marika
are engaging characters with whom readers identify. Arrow, who has recently
finished school, is just a little younger than Marika, who has been immersed in
a tertiary-level art course for a couple of years. Both are bright, personable
and attractive, but they become paralysed by sudden misfortune: in both their lives
an unexpected and unforeseeable moment has changed everything. Both girls have
loving and supportive families but the trauma each experiences causes great
strain on family relationships. The coincidence of their meeting leads to a
friendship that promises to bring healing to them both, until the shock of the
climax of the novel.
The novel
explores the way in which a moment in time can change lives. Margaret Wild also
raises the possibility that there may be multiple universes and that it may be
possible to choose, at a significant moment, to live an alternate life. The
difficulty, as the novel reveals, is that there is no way of knowing whether
that alternate life would be better.
Margaret Wild is
a highly regarded Australian writer known mostly for her picture books and her
verse novels. Although this novel is written in prose, Wild's experience in
those media influences her writing in The
Vanishing Moment. The writing is extraordinarily economical, each word
having earned its place on the page. Wild's images are a joy, original and
often surprising. The description of place is so vivid that each scene could be
drawn with great accuracy. The style is so accessible and effortless that it is
only on a second reading that the reader realises just how perfect the word
choice is and just how well the text sounds read aloud.
Recommendation: This is strongly recommended as a class
set novel for Year 8-10. You can use it at any level. More sophisticated
readers will appreciate the skill of the narrative and the quality of the
writing, but all readers will be intrigued by the mystery that surrounds the
characters and the connections between them.
War
Horse
by Michael Morpurgo. Egmont, 2007 (1982). ISBN
9781405226660. 182 pp.
Despite all the publicity that accompanied the
advertising for the stage performance of Morpurgo's novel, War Horse was not a bestseller when it was first released. In fact,
it took two years to sell as
This is a very moving war story, told through the
experiences of farm boy Albert and his beloved horse Joey, which is
commandeered by the British army at the beginning of World War I. Morpurgo has
based the story on meticulous research: many thousands of farm horses crossed
the Channel to be used in the war effort and most of them were injured and
killed by the deadly new weapons of war. Morpurgo is very successful in evoking
the terrifying atmosphere of the battlefield.
The most interesting feature of this novel is Morpurgo's
decision to use first-person narration - in the voice of Joey, the horse. It
shouldn't work; it should seem clunky, or cute, or sentimental. But it's
exactly right, and very powerful.
Interestingly, the ending of the stage performance is a
little different from that of the original novel and, I think, an improvement.
That's a question that you could explore with students.
Recommendation:
Consider this as a class set novel for Year 7. Use it as the centre of a unit of work that explores the stories of horses in World War I in a variety of forms, including the app listed below, the picture book Midnight: The Story of a Light Horse, the illustrated story Light Horse Boy, and Morris Gleitzman's forthcoming novel Loyal Creatures. There is also a hardcover edition of War Horse illustrated with images from the magnificent stage musical.
War
Horse app
produced by Touch Press. $9.95
This is a rich resource to support the study of Michael
Morpurgo's novel War Horse, but it
would be valuable as well for any work on World War I. It includes an ebook
version of the novel, which also has audio, the text read by author Morpurgo
while the lines he is reading are highlighted. There is an engaging
eighty-minute performance version of the novel, presented by Morpurgo
accompanied by two musicians. There is a detailed World War I timeline; readers
can browse the entire timeline or they can follow one of a long list of
'themes', such as horses, the war at sea, civilians, particular theatres of war
and particular battles. There is also a section in which various experts talk
about the role that horses played in World War I and their fate.
twenty-two different
voices. The voices are those of real historical people who were on board,
ranging from the wealthiest of passengers to a refugee girl whose money has
been stolen. There are voices from the crew as well as the passengers, some of
them surprising: several times we hear the voice of the ship's rat. The voice
of the undertaker who has been sent to retrieve as many bodies as possible is
particularly disturbing: there are not enough coffins, and even in death
priority must be given to the first class passengers. The most surprising voice
of all is that of the iceberg itself. Most of the voices are repeated many
times throughout the story, so that we come to know each character well.
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 Watch That Ends the
Night: Voices from the Titanic
by
Allan Wolf. Candlewick Press, 2013 (2011). ISBN 9780763663315. 480 pp.
This
superbly researched account of the sinking of the Titanic is told in verse-novel form, using
Despite
the fact that we know the ending, this is an absorbing read. The tension builds
as the inevitable disaster comes closer, and we don't know in most cases which
of the voices we have come to know will survive. The verse is superb, with a
skilful use of different verse forms to suit different characters.
There
are very detailed notes at the end, providing biographical information about
each of the characters.
Recommendation: This is highly
recommended for class set use in Years 10 or 11. It will work with most
students, because the verse is accessible, but it could be a particularly
interesting text to study with potential Extension 1 and 2 students.
Wonder
by R.
J. Palacio. Corgi Children's, 2013 (2012). ISBN 9780552565974.
320 pp.
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
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. This has also been
published in a format designed for the adult market (Black Swan, ISBN 9780552778626). It could be an interesting choice to use
with less able older readers, even in Years 10 or 11.
Wonderfully comprehensive list of texts to excite and explore. Thank you so much for your insight and thoughts.
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