Children’s Books: Born to Write by Charis Cotter

There’s a lot to love about award-winning children’s author Charis Cotter’s Born to Write: The Remarkable Life of Six Authors (Annick Press). Here Cotter delivers very good mini-biographies of half a dozen children’s authors: Lucy Maud Montgomery, C.S. Lewis, E.B. White, Madeleine L’Engle, Philip Pullman and Christopher Paul Curtis. Each of these, perhaps with more support material, would have been sufficient for a slender book. But combined as they are, Born to Write reads like a mini-encyclopedia of children’s authors.

By drawing connections between her half dozen subjects, Cotter goes deeper than you would expect: illustrating how early experience can shape a life and push an individual one way. Or another.

“And when they grew up,” Cotter writes at one point, “instead of forgetting what it felt like to be a child, they remembered, and put it into their books.”

As well, Cotter perfectly captures the essence of the book culture of childhood and shares that with her young readers:

If you love reading books, you know what it is like to lose yourself in a story. Your bedroom drops away and you’re in the world of the book, side by side with the hero or heroine. Your ticket to those other worlds depends on the strength of your imagination and the power of the words you’re reading. The best writers scoop you up and take you on a ride that ends only on the last page of the book.

Born to Write is a good and interesting book about books and the culture of reading. This is a good one to share with the youngsters in your life.

Children’s Books: Death on the River by John Wilson

In Death on the River (Orca Books), veteran children’s author John Wilson weaves a compelling tale with his first person, present tense account of the final days of the American Civil War.

We see the horrors of war through the eyes of Jake Clay, a young soldier who enlisted after his brother was killed in battle. Young Jake is wounded and taken prisoner in his very first battle:

I come to with a pair of Rebel soldiers holding an ankle each and hauling me, upside down, over the breastworks. I feel like my head is going to explode every time it bumps against a log. It doesn’t, but I keep blacking out.

John Wilson has written over 20 books for this age group, all of them focused on illuminating some aspect of history for young people. He does a great job. In fact, sometimes in Death on the River if anything it’s too good an illumination. Though he (thankfully) brings little of the actual gore, we feel the horrors of war very keenly. It’s a lesson it’s always good to remember: one we are not able to forget.

Children’s Books Shadow of the Leopard by Henning Mankell

Internationally bestselling author Henning Mankell talks about the first time he met Sofia. He was in Mozambique in the early 1990s. Passing a hospital, he spied a small girl in a wheelchair and he stopped to talk with her. “I still don’t know why,” he says on his blog.

Though Sofia’s story didn’t come to him all at once, he was able to piece it together over time. Sofia and her sister had been running at the side of a road when a landmine was detonated. Sofia’s sister died instantly. Sofia herself suffered many injuries. And Mankell, ultimately, was compelled to tell her story.

Today, many years later, Sofia is one of my closest and dearest friends. No one has taught as much as she about the conditions of being human. Nor has anyone taught me more about poor people's unprecedented power of resistance. Those who are forced to survive at the bottom of society in a world we all share and inhabit; so unjust, brutal and unnecessary.

Though Mankell is best known for his Curt Wallander novels, his books for children are very, very good and, in his own country, extremely admired. Three books into his Sofia series (after Playing With Fire and Secrets in the Fire) Sofia is a young woman of 20 with two children of her own and another on the way. Her domestic challenges turn life-threatening when her ex-partner drags her into the savannah and leaves her to die.

Shadow of the Leopard (Annick Press) is classified as a children’s book, but I’m not entirely sure why. Though the young adult readers this book is intended for will certainly enjoy it, adults will also be compelled by Sofia’s story and Mankell’s commanding voice.

Children’s Books: Guinevere’s Gamble by Nancy McKenzie

The Arthurian legends have inspired countless tellings and retellings though few of those have been for children. Nancy McKenzie corrected that a couple of years ago with Guinevere’s Gift, intended to be the first book in the series she is calling the Chrysalis Quartet. Guinevere’s Gamble (Alfred A. Knopf) is the second book in that series.

The strong female heroine in this series is likely to make this a book favored by girls aged 10 to 14. As Booklist said, this series puts a “feminine spin on a tale more typically focused on men.” And though Guinevere’s Gamble is the second book in the series, you will understand what’s going on with no trouble if you’ve not yet read the first one.

Children’s Books: Smudge’s Mark by Claudia Osmond

From the outset, Smudge’s Mark (Simply Read Books) is dense and meandering and at first seems quite incomprehensible. And I couldn’t put it down. If you think those things don’t seem to go together, welcome to the club and read on. I’m still not sure I understand how it happened, but I do know I’d read another book by this author.

One of the most powerful things about Smudge’s Mark is the strong and personable voice of the narrator, Simon, a.k.a. Smudge. “My grandpa was a wicked prankster,” Osmond-as-Simon begins. “Usually after working the part-time midnight shift at the mushroom farm, he’d make his way home to 49 Stone Elements Drive in the darkness of the early morning.” And the correct response would seem to be: who cares? At this point -- the beginning -- Osmond has seemingly done nothing to insure we care at all. And yet, oddly enough, we do. It is as though, with those first simple words, Simon waltzes into our lives as though he hasn’t a care in the world. And then, layer upon layer, we learn of all the dark places: all the things that are at stake and by then we realize that while we weren’t paying attention, Osmond has somehow -- magically? -- made us care.

Smudge’s Mark is, in its own strange way, a very good book. At story’s beginning, we meet Simon in a moment of quiet, almost introspection. By journey’s end, Simon has more or less preserved life as he knows it as well as Emogen, a hidden realm with a strong connection to Earth.

Smudge’s Mark is intended for older children -- what the industry likes to call young adults -- but I suspect it will find its place with the nine-to-twelve-year-old set. The book does not try to be either Harry Potter or Coraline, but young readers who enjoyed those books are likely to respond to elements of Osmond’s debut novel.

Children’s Books: Time of Trial: Volume 4, The Laws of Magic by Michael Pryor

Time of Trial (Random House Australia) is the fourth of Michael Pryor’s delightful Laws of Magic series, set in an alternative Edwardian England.

Once again, Aubrey Fitzwilliam and his friends George and Caroline are needed to save the world, as one of the characters observes wryly in the novel. This time, after the usual opening scene of magical mayhem -- in this case, cloud ships attacking a university cricket game in which George and Aubrey are playing. It’s during a trip to Holmland (Germany in our universe) where Lady Rose, Aubrey’s mother, is speaking at a symposium.

But this is where the evil Dr Tremaine, Aubrey’s nemesis, is living. He has influence in high places. Very high places. And then there are the golems, which are far from the lumpy clay things of folklore; you can make them very lifelike, so that it’s impossible to tell them from real people till they’re deactivated. Who can be trusted? Certainly not characters who can get sucked into telephones, as in one memorable scene.

Then there’s the pearl Aubrey took from Tremaine in the last novel -- what mystery does it hide? Our heroes are about to find out -- and they won’t like it.

It’s not all bad, though. Aubrey now has a Beccaria Cage, which reunites the body and soul he tore apart in a stupid experiment before the start of the first volume. If only it hasn’t been sabotaged...

As always, the adventure tears along at a breakneck pace, and is very funny. It doesn’t let you go easily; there’s a twist near the end, just when you think the main story is over.

I found myself falling comfortably back into this universe, enjoying it as much as ever. It’s rarely that a series can continue for this many volumes without losing something, but though it will need to finish some time, at least for this story arc, The Laws Of Magic is one series that doesn’t go downhill.

I think the series will become a fantasy classic. Bring on Volume 5!

Children’s Books: Wow! Animal and Wow! Earth

Wow! Animal and Wow! Earth, like all Dorling Kindersley books, are beautifully presented and gorgeous to flip through. And, like most books in this imprint, they are full of snippets of information, just right for children like my nephew, Max, who are good readers, to browse through and call, “Hey, Dad, did you know that starfish push their stomachs out through their mouths to absorb food?”

Both books are divided into sections that enable children who need them for homework to look up what they want. Wow! Animal has a well laid-out animal classification page that explains how classification works. Wow! Earth starts with the galaxy and works downwards.The double-page spread on the solar system has a paragraph about each planet, with all the information the young researcher will need or that the browser like Max will love to know. A pity it doesn’t mention Pluto. Just because it’s no longer considered a planet doesn’t mean it’s no longer there. But there’s only so much you can fit into a book like this, I suppose.

Wow! Animals reminds me of the books I used to read when I was a child and is nicely broken down, though those ones used to begin with prehistoric animals. But children who read it for fun will enjoy it for the same reason I did: this is a fascinating world and there are some wonderful and horrible creatures in it.

Both books also have good, clear indexes at the back and have handy glossaries. I should repeat, however, that DK Books are usually for good readers. The words are long and difficult and not all of the hard words are explained in the glossary. But if you have a bright, inquisitive child in your life, or a classroom library, or run a primary school library, buy it and watch those young eyes light up.

Children’s Books: Liar by Justine Larbalestier

Micah Wilkins lies automatically. She not only lies to family, classmates and police, she lies to the reader. Over and over. Right until the last page, you don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. Not even then.

Micah was Zach’s outside-of-school girlfriend, who ran with him, but now Zach has died and everyone is a suspect: Micah, Zach’s best friend, his official girlfriend -- everyone!

Why is Micah so fast ? Where did she get that incredible sense of smell? Why is it necessary for her to take the pill, apart from the obvious? And why does Micah’s father’s family live out in the middle of nowhere, not bothering with modern technology?

After a time, we realize that Micah isn’t the only member of her family to lie. Her father is a natural liar. Her grandmother is another. She has lied to her son and to Micah. There is a network of lies in the family, centered around “the family illness.”

I can’t go into any further detail without giving too much away. You may guess it as you read -- but bear in mind that Micah is a liar and while she tells you one ending, there are hints in the book that what has happened to her at the end is something very different.

Liar bounces around, backwards, forwards, flashbacks, family history, her own history, and somehow it works and clues build up, but Justine Larbalestier is her typical nasty self and never lets you be sure. All I can say is that at the end, I was thinking “Ouch!”

This may Larbalestier’s best book yet. Highly recommended for older teens -- younger ones tend to like things predictable and may not be happy to have to decide what really happened at the end.

Children’s Books: By the Light of the Harvest Moon by Harriet Ziefert, illustrated by Mark Jones

It’s difficult to imagine a prettier fall book than By the Light of the Harvest Moon (Blue Apple Books) by veteran children’s author Harriet Ziefert. Mark Jones’ illustrations hold a luminous, full-bodied quality.

In some ways, the story is unremarkable: a farm in the midst of autumn’s hold. Yet there is a difference here in a special fall magic that sees the leaf people emerge from their sylvan retreats and get busy with their own fall fair-type celebrations.

The story is sweet and the illustrations, as previously stated, are luminous. If you’re looking for a book that will help you and your child celebrate autumn in charming style, you’d have a tough time going wrong with By the Light of the Harvest Moon.

Children’s Books: Vulture’s Gate by Kristy Murray

Some time in the future, much of Australia is Mad Max territory. The outback is filled with folk killing each other, wiping out settlements and running freak shows. Sydney is in ruins with gangs fighting each other and the authorities, from the anti-elder Festers to the nut-case Sons of Gaia who want to wipe out everybody.

Oh, and there are very few women or girls left after a mutated form of bird flu not only killed most females but made it very difficult for the few survivors to produce anything but boys. There is still some technology in service of the Colony government, producing “drones” and “chosen” boys who get to live comfortably with two male parents.

Callum, who has been living with his two fathers in the outback, is kidnapped and sold to a circus, from which he escapes on a motorbike and meets Bo, a girl living on her own since the death of her engineer grandfather, with only the company of a pack of “roboraptors” which hunt for her. Together, Callum and Bo ride off in search of his missing fathers, accompanied by roboraptor Mr. Pinkwhistle, which is as much a computer as a robotic dinosaur.

But there are things Callum’s Colony employee fathers never told him. Like what happens to drones who aren’t useful any more -- and what happens to any girls unlucky enough to be taken.

Vulture’s Gate is an enjoyable adventure kids should like, though I’m not sure at which age group it’s aimed. It reads like YA fiction, but the characters are all very young; Bo is older than Callum, but neither of them has reached puberty. And we’re never told exactly how Australia has been left in ruins -- surely not just the bird flu? It is implied, anyway, that there may be women in other countries. And there is still enough technology to keep the race going, however nasty its use.

But it’s possible to suspend disbelief for the length of the novel, which is a nice road story. The chapters are short enough to make it work for reluctant readers and the characters are good. Who would have thought a robotic dinosaur could be as cute as R2D2?

New This Month: The Devil You Know by Leonie Norrington

cDamien’s father, 88, is coming back. Damien is not happy. 88 is violent. Like many other perpetrators of domestic violence, he is constantly apologizing and promising to reform. Damien doesn’t believe it, but his mother is prepared to take her ex back. His only comforts are a book called Dangerous Creatures and the drawing and cartooning with which he can express his inner feelings.

What Damien isn’t expecting is that his father will be considered cool by his schoolmates, because of his fabulous motorbike, to the point where it will get him an “in” with the elite crowd. What happens to his friendship with the school outcasts? Will hanging out with the school bullies make him willing to be one himself?

The Devil You Know (Allen & Unwin) depicts vividly Arnhem Land, where the author herself lives. Aboriginal culture runs through the story, though the main characters are white Australians. Damien’s drawings are woven beautifully into the tale; the novel begins and ends with pages of graphic story. Artist Michael Camilleri has worked well with the story, doing a lot more than just illustrate. His beautiful illustrations are an integral part of the tale, as they are Damien's.

Children’s Books: Robot Riot by Andy Griffiths

Robot Riot (Scholastic) is the fourth book in Andy Griffith’s Schooling Around series featuring the students of Grade 5B at Northwest Southeast Central School. But like the others in this series, the book pretty much stands alone.

The stories are all over-the-top humorous and the characters mostly have names that suit their personalities. Gretel Armstrong, for example, is strong; Jenny Friendly is the nice one; Grant Gadget is the son of an inventor and invents plenty himself.

The stories are seen from the viewpoint of Henry McThrottle. In this latest adventure, Henry is convinced that logical, unemotional new girl Roberta Flywheel is a robot from the future, planning to wipe out the population of Earth, starting with the students of 5B.

As always, it’s delightfully silly and still makes good points about friendship. And wouldn’t we all like to have been in Mr Brainfright’s class, with a teacher who loves bananas enough to dress up as one and teaches that the world would be a better place if we would all just look at it through colored cellophane once a day?

Andy Griffiths is one of the most popular children’s writers in Australia, for good reason. He knows kids love to laugh and they love over-the-top laughs.

Children’s Books: Parliament of Blood by Justin Richards

I have always wondered what would happen if vampires kept turning people into other vampires every time they bit someone. Most books suggest that it isn’t that simple, that the majority of victims simply die, or that vampires are born rather than made.

Parliament of Blood (Bloomsbury) gleefully runs with the notion that getting bitten infects your blood and turns you into a vampire almost immediately unless you can get hold of silver and holy water right away in order to clear the infection. Late in the Victorian era, the vampires have come to realize that they’re going to run out of supplies if they’re all awake at once. They operate in shifts, sleeping for decades or centuries and waking up to take their turn. Another problem: with the development of photography, they’re finding that they don’t show up. Humans are going to figure it out sooner or later.

Time to waken the Lord of the Undead, an ancient Egyptian mummy who conveniently speaks English. Luckily for the London vampire community, they have members in high places, centred around a gentleman’s club known as the Damnation Club. Unluckily for them, they have to contend with young engineer George Archer, currently working at the British Museum in a mysterious department not known to the general public, his boss Sir William, former pickpocket Eddie and their friend Liz.

The action is almost non-stop as the friends work in their various ways to stop the vampires taking over the Empire. Justin Richards has become known as the author of entertaining fantasy adventures for children and this delicious romp doesn’t disappoint. Kids will love it. Although it’s supposed to be for readers from ten to f14, I’d place it slightly higher, as the characters are nearly all adults or young adults. Still, just hand it to your kids. They will work it out.

Children’s Books: Torn Pages by Sally Grindley

Lydia and her younger siblings, Joe and Kesi, are African AIDS orphans, trying to survive alone. Lydia has had to leave school to support her brother and sister. Most of the villagers are suspicious of them. Their own grandmother, who is well-off, not only won’t take them in but is actively undermining them. She firmly believes her son married beneath him and that it was his wife’s fault he died of AIDS, even though it was the other way around.

The only comfort Lydia has is their mother’s “memory book,” written especially for her as the mother was dying. But her grandmother has plans that might take away even this comfort.

Torn Pages (Bloomsbury) is a touching story that looks at a real problem in the world and brings them down to a human dimension. The children in the story are sympathetic characters you can care about and they don’t simply accept their troubles. At the end, there is hope for the future.

Suitable for children in late primary school to early secondary.

Children’s Books: Just MacBeth by Andy Griffiths

In 2008, Australia’s Bell Shakespeare Company commissioned humorous children’s writer Andy Griffiths to write a script for the company to perform as a children’s introduction to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Just MacBeth is the resultant work, in print, illustrated by the equally funny artist Terry Denton.

Andy Griffiths is enormously popular in Australia for all his work, but especially for the “Just” series which feature characters Andy, Danny and Lisa. Andy fancies beautiful Lisa. In this story, he gets to be married to her. When the three teens have to prepare a scene from Macbeth for school, the witches’ potion whisks them into 11th century Scotland, where they find themselves playing out the roles of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and Banquo. Danny, as Banquo, finds himself with a son who’s older than he is.

Andy rather enjoys being Macbeth, because as King he will be able to eat as much Wizz Fizz as he wants, order people around and gets to be married to Lisa. The scary thing is that he and Lisa make a very good Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who have no problem in killing people, including Banquo/Danny.

This makes an excellent introduction to Shakespeare. Some of the Bard’s lines are used in the course of the play, and the meanings are pretty much explained. Let’s face it, Macbeth may be a short play, compared with some of Shakespeare’s others, but it’s confusing.

For those of us who are reading the book instead of seeing the play, Terry Denton provides hilarious cartoon commentary on the side of each page and even the page numbers are funny, beginning with an increasingly-disgruntled head of Shakespeare who complains about being the world’s greatest playwright, reduced to supporting page numbers, is replaced by a number of other page-holders, including a haggis, devoured by a machine and returns, defeating all other page-holders.

Fans of the Just stories will enjoy this once they get over its being in script form instead of a short story. Schools can buy class sets and have fun playing it out in class.

Children’s Books: Ghost with A Message by Mary K. Pershall

Ruby Clair is a girl who sees dead people. Well, the ghost of her cousin Nicola, anyway, plus any ghosts Nicola sends her way. Because she can see ghosts, Ruby can help them adjust. Ghost With A Message (Penguin Books Australia) is the second book in the Ruby Clair series. The ghost is a small child who has a message for her family, but can’t speak any better than any other three year old.

Ruby wants to help, but it makes things awkward for her with her friends and family, to whom she can’t explain what’s going on. Somehow, she manages to work out what the ghost child is trying to tell her, help the ghost’s family and make a new friend.

This is a gentle story with both humor and serious elements. It is a book that girls in middle to late primary school should enjoy.

Doctorow’s Little Brother Optioned for film

Author Cory Doctorow has announced that his vastly entertaining young adult novel Little Brother (Tor Teen) has been optioned for film.

Early this morning, Doctorow blogged that “Don Murphy, producer of such films as Natural Born Killers and From Hell, has bought a film option on Little Brother. I’ve talked it over with Don and feel confident that if he makes the movie that he’ll do it justice -- I’m guaranteed a spot as a consultant to ensure that it all comes out right, too!”

Little Brother was among January Magazine’s picks for best children’s book of 2008. Here’s what January contributing editor Iain Emsley said about the book at that time:

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is a timely book which teases out the implications of the war on terror and comes in a year which Neal Shusterman’s Unwind was published in the United Kingdom. Both novels challenge us to ask “what type of world are we now living in?” Doctorow asks us to continue questioning the underlying logic of the post 9/11 world which has been presented to us. Marcus, a teen hacker, is caught up by the security services in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. His treatment leads him to start using technology to subvert the increasingly authoritarian environment and to link together with his friends and acquaintances. It is a call to arms but it does consider the implications of technology in a social context rather than just seeing it as a panacea. It is quite possibly his most thought-provoking novel to date.

Children’s Books: The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks

Catherine Jinks is one of the most versatile writers I know of. Historical fiction, SF, fantasy, thriller, ghost stories, children’s, YA, adult -- there are very genres she hasn’t set her pen to at one time or another.

In The Reformed Vampire Support Group, she visits the vampire story, although I suspect this is not the kind of novel that would be relished by all the girls at my school who are devouring the Twilight series. If anything, this sends up the vampire tale.

Catherine Jinks asks her readers to think -- really think -- about what being a vampire might involve, especially in modern Sydney. You can’t eat anything you used to enjoy. You’re unlikely to be able to drive, unless you got your licence before you were turned. If you were elderly, like Bridget, a former nun who was turned at the age of 80, you’ll have arthritis and other aches and pains involved with being elderly forever. You still have to make a living, but you can’t do a normal job. Not if you turned in 1908, anyway. Nina, the narrator, who died in the 1970s, writes adventure novels with a feisty vampire heroine. But Nina was turned at 15, which means she will be a teenager forever, with all the problems this involves.

These vampires don’t live in crypts, though they do have weekly group therapy sessions at the local Catholic church. This means they have to find homes with blackout facilities. And they have nothing to do all night but watch dull television shows.

Fortunately one of them has discovered a way to avoid fanging humans, which they really don’t want to do, as biting humans always turns them and the last thing they need is a planetful of vampires.

But someone has killed a vampire. They have to find out who it is and persuade them not to do it again. Trouble is, there’s more to it than vampire killers.

The Reformed Vampire Support Group has a lot of fun with the vampire genre, especially right now when everyone and his dog is publishing it. All I can say is that the authors of the Deadly Serious vampire tales deserve everything they get in this deliciously funny novel.

Catherine Jinks triumphs again!

Children’s Books: Nibbling on Einstein’s Brain by Diane Swanson

Nibbling on Einstein’s Brain (Annick Press) is a newly revised edition of a book that was initially published in 2001. This new edition is more-ish in every way: it’s longer, brighter and better realized, intended to provide children with a gentle foundation for scientific learning.

In a way, the book is based on the idea that a little science can take you quite a distance, especially when it comes to dispelling the myths that bad science spread around.

Nibbling on Einstein’s Brain is really quite good. Where non-fiction books aimed at this age group can be overly simplistic and facile, Swanson is expert at sharing information in a fashion that is both lucid and interesting. And, truth be told, she should be good at it: she’s over 70 books into a career of doing just that!

Subtitled The Good, The Bad and the Bogus in Science, Nibbling on Einstein’s Brain is the perfect primer to the way science works in our lives and the various roles it can play. In some ways, the book does even more than that: touching at times on ideas that are quite philosophical in nature, at others sharing skills crucial to critical thinking. Nibbling on Einstein’s Brain is a whimsically illustrated treasure trove of learning for young minds.

New this Month: The Puzzle Ring by Kate Forsyth

The Puzzle Ring (Scholastic) begins in Australia, where 13-year-old Hannah is living with her mother, Roz, a science teacher, but the action quickly moves to Scotland and stays there. Roz receives a letter from her missing husband’s grandmother, Belle, who pleads with her to return. Hannah finds out that her father was a Scottish lord, although the only money the family has now comes from tourist visitors.

Meeting some local children, Hannah is soon heavily involved in adventures involving a family curse, a puzzle ring that has to be reassembled before the curse can be lifted and a search for her lost father. The only problem is, she may just have to time-travel to solve all these problems. Right back to the time of Mary Queen of Scots, in fact.

In some ways, this is a good old-fashioned children’s book of the kind I, at least, grew up on. Apart from suggestions that some characters’ parents might not have been married and characters in the past indicating that Mary Queen of Scots is no better than she should be -- and you can’t change history -- there’s nothing in here that you wouldn’t find in one of those books, except for a detailed afterword that discusses the different theories of time travel and wormholes. There’s also an explanation of the story of Queen Mary and a recipe at the end for marmalade cake, as made by the author’s mother.

This book will be perfect for the little girl in your life who likes fairies, although be warned: the author makes it clear from early in the novel that the cute little fairies most children think of have no connection whatever to the ones in folklore. They’re more like Tolkien’s Elves but can also be thoroughly terrifying.

It won’t hurt children to find this out -- and they may even be interested enough to check out the “real” faerie for themselves.

Kate Forsyth is a well-known Australian writer of children’s fantasy. She actually managed to score five junior-section Aurealis Awards for a fantasy series one year!

Children’s Books: Auslander by Paul Dowswell

Peter had been living in Poland with his mostly-German parents before World War II, on a farm his mother had inherited from her Polish relatives. When the parents are killed, Peter goes to an orphanage, but not for long. A few weeks later, he is taken to Berlin, where he is adopted by a well-off family, the Kaltenbachs. At first, he enjoys his new lifestyle. The Kaltenbachs are kind to him and everyone admires his blonde, blue-eyed Aryan features.

But Professor Kaltenbach is involved in so-called racial science research, benefiting from experimentation on prisoners, and the eldest daughter, Elsbeth, has a dark secret of her own.

When Peter meets Anna, daughter of parents who are not enthusiastic Nazis and secretly help Jews, he has the chance to assist his new girlfriend and her family in their acts of rebellion. But there will be a terrible price to be paid if they are caught. And meanwhile, the war goes on around them.

Auslander (Bloomsbury) is a well-written novel that has interesting characters -- some based on real people -- and shows what it might have been like to live in wartime Germany, where children denounced parents, schoolmates spied on schoolmates and a word said to the wrong person could get you executed. Even Christmas carols had been altered to include Hitler, while there were swastikas on Christmas trees and dolls’ house wallpaper. The author’s notes at the end assure the reader that even the more bizarre elements of the story are true. There is also adventure near the end, as Peter and his friends flee the Gestapo.

Auslander should appeal to young adults who are interested in Holocaust-era fiction. Recommended.

New this Month: Worldshaker by Richard Harland

In an alternative universe, Worldshaker (Allen and Unwin) is one of a number of “juggernauts” which fly around the world with permanent residents. Due to something that happened in the mid-19th century, the timeline diverged from ours into a world in which the Victorian era never really ended. In the early 21st century, Queen Victoria the Third reigns aboard the flying ship Worldshaker, with her consort who changed his name to Albert when they married.

Class distinctions are strictly observed aboard Worldshaker. Col Porpentine and his family are aristocrats and hereditary Supreme Commanders of the ship. Below them are those who are merely rich from trade and below all of them are the “Filthies” who are kept in slavery below decks, doing the work that keeps the ship running. Some of them are hauled up like fish on a line to be turned into Menials, servants to the upper classes -- and as Menials are always obedient and utterly silent, there is the strong possibility that they have been modified.

One night, Col wakes up to find a Filthy in his room. Her name is Riff and she is not keen to be turned into a Menial. Somehow, Col finds himself involved in Riff’s troubles and as a result, having major troubles of his own. Nobody has ever told him or his fellow upper decks what is going on in their society or how it got started. Now he must decide what he is going to do about it -- and learn some nasty home truths about members of his own family.

I’ve always enjoyed steam punk -- science fiction centred around the Victorian era -- and this is a very good example of the genre. Despite the serious elements, it has plenty of the dark, often over-the-top humour typical of this author. The characters are also humorously over-the-top, and it works well.

I am told Worldshaker has already been bought for the North American market. If you live there, be patient. It will be well worth the wait.

Children's Books: My Extraordinary Life and Death by Doug McLeod

Although Doug McLeod is best known in Australia as a television writer -- The Comedy Company, Full Frontal and Sea Change and script-editing Kath and Kim -- when he has written books they have usually been for children or young adults. His comedy background led to his writing humorous and downright silly books. Sister Madge’s Book of Nuns, one of these, was on the Australian Children’s Book Council short list.

My Extraordinary Life and Death (Ford Street Publishing) started life as a commissioned blog. Now it’s out there as a book and very amusing it is, too. What the author has done is to “story” genuine Victorian-era illustrations with a supposed autobiography. Even the front and back cover flaps are part of the book. The front flap features “other books you may care to enjoy” -- Shakespeare the Extremely Early Years (a baby), Simple Tricks A Child Can Do (a complicated circus acrobatic performance) and Queen Victoria: Party Girl. The back flap directs you to the Web site which explains all.

The drawings are accompanied by a truly over-the-top storyline. For example, an illustration of a Victorian gentleman and a gardener with a shovel accompanies, “Father had a no-nonsense approach to education. If Denise or I were naughty he would tell the gardener to bury us for several hours.” It’s a good example of the style and humour of the book in general.

I suspect this book will be enjoyed more by adults or good readers who get the jokes than by younger, average or reluctant readers. It is still worth having, though, for its sheer, entertaining silliness.

Children’s Books: Cicada Summer by Kate Constable

Kate Constable, the Tamora Pierce of Australian YA fantasy, is back after two mainstream YA novels for Allen and Unwin’s Girlfriend Fiction imprint. The Girlfriend books were good enough, but fantasy is what this author does best, so her return to the fantastical is very welcome.

Unlike the Chanters Of Tremaris series, Cicada Summer (Allen & Unwin) is set firmly in present-day Australia, complete with drought. It has some elements of Tom’s Midnight Garden and Bid Time Return, but gives the time travel theme a twist. I won’t say more about this lest I spoil the ending.

Eloise, a gifted artist who has “gone quiet” after losing her mother in a car accident, has been taken back to her father’s home town in country Victoria, and left with her crotchety grandmother, Mo. Mo has been writing a book about sea voyages for 20 years, despite never having seen the sea, and has panic attacks on leaving the house and yard. She isn’t crazy about having her granddaughter stay, but feels Eloise is better off with her than with her father, who is throwing all his energies into building a convention center in the town.

Exploring, Eloise visits the huge house owned by her father’s family, which is falling to pieces, and finds herself travelling to a time when the house is an artist’s retreat run by a family with a daughter about her own age, Anna. To her surprise, Eloise finds herself becoming Anna’s imaginary friend, whom only Anna can see or hear. Could Anna be her mother? Eloise doesn’t know, but she does start talking again, if only with Anna. Meanwhile, can she stop her father and his latest girlfriend from tearing down the old house for a convention center?

As well as being a good story, this warm-hearted, gentle tale has plenty of meat for class discussion.

Children’s Books: White Cave Escape by Jennifer McGrath Kent

Like its predecessor, 2007’s Chocolate River Rescue, White Cave Escape (Nimbus Publishing) is high drama for young readers: junior thrillers so gripping, even reluctant readers are swept along. Chocolate River Rescue was nominated for four children’s book awards in its publication year. White Cave Escape maintains the same level of quality storytelling with its drama. There’s no reason to think this one won’t demand all the attention that first book in this series did.

Set in the White Rocks of New Brunswick, the same five engaging youngsters readers met in the first book find themselves alone in the woods trying to outpace a forest fire. The only way they can see to survive is to wait the fire out in the legendary White Caves. What they don’t see coming: the White Caves will be an adventure all of an entirely different nature.

White Cave Escape is a slender, non-intimidating book with large print and a wallop of a story. A winning combination for readers aged eight to 12.

The Old Woman and the Hen by P.K. Page

Fans of the poet P.K. Page -- and I imagine there to be platoons of them -- will have to get their hands on a copy of The Old Woman and the Hen, a charming chapbook that would make a lovely gift, a sweet read to a child or even a nice self-indulgence for fans of 93-year-old Page, even though publisher Porcupine’s Quill advises that the book is “a small treasure intended to be shared by grandmothers, grandfathers -- or other doting adults -- with beloved youngsters between the ages of 5 to 8.”

Canadian poet Page won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1957 and was appointed a Companion to the Order of Canada in 1999. In 2002 her collection, Planet Earth, was short listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is one of Canada’s most celebrated and beloved poets.

The Old Woman and the Hen is illustrated withy original woodcut engravings by Alberta artist Jim Westergard. It’s a tiny, special, lovely little book clearly intended to be cherished.

Children’s Books: Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld

There’s an almost crazy amount of charm in every inch of Duck! Rabbit! (Chronicle Books) by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld. It’s a children’s picture book intended for people three and up and -- somehow, as if by magic -- it is more than the sum of its parts.

I suppose you could say that the “story” involves conflict and the resolution of it but, to be honest, even calling it a story takes it a little far. More like a conversation -- all off-screen -- on the nature and identity of the title creature.

“It’s a duck and he’s about to eat a piece of bread.”

“It’s a rabbit and he’s about to eat a carrot.”

The only reason those two lines are worthy of remark is that they’re said about the exact same image. And that same image crops up again and again with different backgrounds and different ideas of what it is (“Duck! Rabbit!) and what it’s doing. While that doesn’t really sound like enough on which to base a book -- or, for that matter, a review -- there’s something about how it all comes together that small children will find comforting. There’s not enough here for older children to call “story” but they’ll find it amusing and new readers will be able to master all of the simple words before long.

FEMA Pulls Controversial Coloring Book

Maybe it’s not a laughing matter. It strikes me as ironic, though, that on May 1st -- Free Comic Book Day -- USA Today should report that FEMA had a removed a “controversial coloring book,” from their Web site for fear it would prove upsetting to some children. From USA Today:

But Rose Olmsted, coordinator of the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team that produced the book after tornadoes hit Glenville, MN, in 2001, defends the project. She tells the Tribune that it was clearly made “as a tool for parents to use with an adult to help children put meaning to what has happened because words are hard to come up with.”

The cover of the coloring book shows a twister carrying away the roof of a house, a sedan that’s been completely crushed and the World Trade Center with one of the towers in flames and a plane on the approach. Inside, similar images wait for children to add color of, I suppose, varying lurid hue, depending on their own mood and temperament.

“We removed the content from our Web site after reviewing www.FEMA.gov for appropriate material,” said FEMA spokesman John Shea in a statement. “FEMA for Kids assists children in understanding disasters and we will continue to post appropriate material that supports its mission.”

Oddly, I’m a bit torn on this one. On the one hand, governments pulling books for any reason always make us look askance. And a pause is definitely the correct response. And a question.

On the other, I’m not sure a coloring book is really a very good tool for helping children bring meaning to frightening world events. How is coloring discussion? And can’t we just sit down with our kids and talk? Why do their need to be tools involved? In my own experience, children have a lot more going on between the ears than we tend to give them credit for. Trusting them with actual information and engaging them in conversation can be a surprising and bonding experience: enriching for both parties.

Meanwhile, if you want to download the comic for yourself and have a peek, The Smoking Gun ran a link when they broke the story. USA Today’s story is here.

Young Adult: Fate by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I loved it when Publishers Weekly described Fate (Delacorte) as being in the “teens-with-special-powers-and-destinies genre” and that really doesn’t miss the mark. Let’s face it, between PC Cast and Stephanie Meyers, this a deliciously well followed part of “literature” these days.

Barnes’ offering is not worse than many others and, in many ways, it’s quite a bit better. I share PW’s issue with the author’s use (overuse?) of italics. Barnes uses them for protagonist Bailey’s trips into the otherworld when she moves beyond being a high school student and becomes the third fate, she who holds the destiny of the world in her slender hands.

Fulbright scholar Barnes writes intelligently and -- for the most part -- engagingly. Did the world actually need yet another ancient mystical being? Sales appear brisk so, apparently, it did. Fate is recommended for readers 12 and up. The book follows 2007’s Tattoo.

New This Month: Inferno by Robin Stevenson

Aside from being a name to watch in the world of young adult publishing, Robin Stevenson’s story is the type of overnight success that really is one. While on maternity leave from her job as a social worker and counselor in 2005, Stevenson began to write seriously. Four years later, she is the author of six books.

The most recent of these is Inferno (Orca), Stevenson’s take on the teen angst novel. She does a terrific job, capturing the impossibly large emotion and the power that propels teenage girls. I think back on that age and shudder. One gets the feeling that Stevenson is able to recreate that feeling for herself with ease. Or it feels like ease, at any rate though, admittedly, good writing almost always looks like that.

In Inferno we meet 16-year-old Emily, though we meet her as Dante, after a series of events have caused her to rethink herself. Having read The Divine Comedy, she recreates herself as Dante because, as she tells someone early on, she liked what the author said about “how we need to take responsibility for the world. As individuals, I mean.”

Clearly, Dante is intelligent and somewhat different. These things, together with Stevenson’s understanding of human nature and developmental behaviors, combine to create a character young readers will have no trouble relating to. We all feel different sometimes. We all feel a desire for reinvention on occasion and so we relate to Dante who seems, at times, hell-bent on creating a divine comedy of her own.

Are there elements of the story and aspects of Dante’s character that seem stereotypical to this subgenre? I think so. But where do stereotypes come from? Readers who are on the other side of Dante’s 16 will remember that age and identify with the character. This is skillful writing featuring a strong female protagonist. A good story well told.

First Book for First Dog

After one whole day of being first dog to the American First Family it was announced that first Portuguese Water Dog, Bo, would star in his own canine romp to be published next week. Bo: America's Commander In Leash.

Publisher Mascot Books says the book will follow the First Family’s new dog “on an exciting adventure as he learns all about the White House and experiences the traditions that make it such a special place.”

According to The London Telegraph the book’s illustrator has been working on the book for the last couple of months, leaving space in places where the dog would appear when he was actually chosen. Once Bo was named and shown, he could quickly be inked in and -- voila! -- instant (ahem) art.

Virginia-based Mascot books is on familiar ground here, specializing as they do in children’s books about school mascots. As well, they have a division that hand-holds would-be authors through the publication of self-published books for children. It seems a safe bet that their timely unveiling of Bo: America's Commander In Leash and the international press attention the book has received will push this small publisher to a whole new level.

Children’s Books: A World Full of Ghosts by Charis Cotter, illustrations by Marc Mongeau

A World Full of Ghosts (Annick Press) comes this close to being a really terrific book. Certainly, the idea is a good one: a catalog of ghost stories from around the world -- 25 of them in all -- skeleton spirits of Alaska, Jamaica’s rolling calf, the legless Yurei of Japan, background for Halloween and the Day of the Dead.

Presented in picture book form with luminous illustrations by Marc Mongeau, the information is good, the illos are great and there’s no problem at all with the idea.

How does A World Full of Ghosts fall short? In a way, it’s in the planning that it doesn’t quite come together. The stories are uneven, both in content and in the telling. For example, some of the stories are told in a straight-up, no nonsense non-fiction style. (“In Hawaii, the ghost gods are everywhere: in the trees, the roaring wind, the mighty volcanoes, and the pounding waves of the sea.”) Others are told from a more personal viewpoint. (“We had two cats: Loki, a white cat, and Bear, a beautiful Siamese.”) Was A World Full of Ghosts initially envisioned as two books that got blended into one? I’m not sure, but I think children might find this overlapping narrative voice somewhat confusing. I know I did.

That said, there is much here to recommend the A World Full of Ghosts, not the least of these are well told encounters with a dimension most children ages eight to 10 will find exciting.

Children’s Books: The Gimlet Eye by James Roy

In this third installment of the spin-off of the popular Quentaris shared-world series, a character from the original series is actually killed off, something that doesn’t usually happen in shared universes. As it happens in the prologue, it’s no secret.

The Archon, ruler of Quentaris, is dying. His horrible nephew Florian is persuaded to finish him off rather than wait for his inevitable death. Florian’s “friend” Janus (as in the two-faced god?) reminds him of the prophecy that declares that anyone who kills the previous ruler will rule properly himself. Janus, of course, has his own agenda.

Meanwhile, the adult magicians have been banished to a very nasty part of the city (well, they can’t be exiled elsewhere, short of being thrown overboard, since Quentaris has been travelling from one vortex to another). The younger ones, such as Tab Vidler, former Dung Brigader and recently an apprentice magician, and her friend Amelia, have been spared the dungeons, but left to their own devices. Tab is back to shovelling dung, though on a farm rather than the streets, while Amelia is working at a pub. Torby, the boy rescued in the first novel, The Spell of Undoing, is lying in hospital in a catatonic state. Nobody knows how this happened, except, of course, the reader.

That conceited ac-tor, Fontagu Wizroth the Third, has been ordered to do a command performance of a play called The Gimlet Eye for the new Emperor’s birthday, and he’s thrilled. Tab, Amelia and their friend, the former pirate Verris, can’t persuade Fontagu that there’s something fishy going on...

In my opinion, this one is the best so far in the new series. We learn more about the characters and their feelings. The adventure is exciting but straightforward enough for the young readers for whom this is an introduction to fantasy. At the same time, there’s a murder in the first chapter; there’s no tiptoeing around the issue. What happens to the adult magicians is also scary. But there’s still plenty of humor, maybe more than there’s been since the original series. In the end, Fontagu is shown in a more positive light than before.

The only thing is, while you can probably get something out of this book without having read the others, you really do need to have read them to understand properly what’s going on. The series is no longer a lot of related but individual titles.

Recommended for children from mid-primary to early secondary school.

Where the Wild Things Are Now

The film version of Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic, Where the Wild Things Are, will fill a screen near you this fall.

The screenplay was written by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, with Jonze directing Forest Whitaker, Katherine Keener, Paul Dano and James Gandolfini.

Viewers who just can’t wait for the film to open can get a real solid tease from the film’s trailer, released today.



Where the Wild Things Are was published in 1963 and won the Caldecott Medal in 1964. According to Wikipedia, adaptations of the book have been numerous and have taken many forms, including an animated adaptation in 1973, a children’s opera, a failed Disney CGI project in 1983, a ballet and a stage musical.

Sendak, who will be 81 in June, is also the writer/illustrator of In the Night Kitchen, often listed among the most frequently banned books of the 20th century. At the time of his birthday last year, The New York Times’ Patricia Cohen offered up a dark portrait of Sendak:

That Mr. Sendak fears that his work is inadequate, that he is racked with insecurity and anxiety, is no surprise. For more than 50 years that has been the hallmark of his art. The extermination of most of his relatives and millions of other Jews by the Nazis; the intrusive, unemployed immigrants who survived and crowded his parents’ small apartment; his sickly childhood; his mother’s dark moods; his own ever-present depression — all lurk below the surface of his work, frequently breaking through in meticulously drawn, fantastical ways.

He is not, as children’s book writers are often supposed, an everyman’s grandpapa. His hatreds are fierce and grand, as if produced by Cecil B. DeMille. He hates his uncle (who made a cruel comment about him when he was a boy); he hates anything to do with God or religion, and Judaism in particular (“We were the ‘chosen people,’ chosen to be killed?”); he hates Salman Rushdie (for writing an excoriating review of one of his books); he hates syrupy animation, which is why he is thrilled with Mr. Jonze’s coming film of his book “Where the Wild Things Are,” despite rumors of studio discontent.

“I hate people,” he said at one point, extolling the superior company of dogs, like his sweet-tempered German shepherd, Herman (after Melville).

He is, at heart, a curmudgeon, but a delightful one, with a vast range of knowledge, a wicked sense of humor and a talent for storytelling and mimicry.

The New York Times piece is here.

Jonez’ film will open October 16th.

Children’s Books: Loose Leashes by Amy and Ron Schmidt

The art in Loose Leashes (Random House) is all photo-based. The kind of charming, carefully set up and almost painfully clear photographs of dogs very popular in the 1990s. The big difference here is that each photo is paired with a little poem -- one that rhymes -- that turns the photo into a story.

Can you feel my eyes upon you, melting you with my stare?
I know we’re very different. We’d make an awkward pair.

This next to a photo of a very small champagne-colored dog -- perhaps a French bulldog? -- and a Great Dane of the same color, but 20 times larger.

Ron Schmidt is a photographer who once-upon-a-time focused on models and celebrities but who now specializes in “taking photos of man’s best friend.” Amy Schmidt, Ron’s wife, was responsible for the poems and her bio informs us that, as a couple, they advocate for “animal welfare and literacy.” Which means they’re hitting on all cylinders with Loose Leashes. And it really is a thoroughly charming book. Little readers aged three to eight should enjoy the wonderful photos and the happy prose.

Children’s Books: How to Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier

If you’ve only read this writer’s wonderful but grim “Magic Or Madness” trilogy, in which the heroine could choose to die young or go insane, you’re in for a surprise from the very, very funny How to Ditch Your Fairy.

Magic is here again, but there are no penalties for using it and no actual magic users anyway.

Imagine a world in which everyone is born with their own personal fairy. You don’t see or hear it, you just see its effects. It might be an always-on-time fairy or one which ensures that cats like you or that you have good hair. You don’t, unfortunately, get to choose. There are ways of exchanging fairies with a co-operative friend, but they’re not easy or pleasant.

Charlie, who attends New Avalon Sports High, is stuck with a parking fairy, which helps find the perfect parking spot. The trouble is, Charlie doesn’t even like cars and is only 14 anyway. Why, she complains, couldn’t she have been born with a shopping fairy like her friend Rochelle, who can always find wonderful clothes at great prices? Or an “every-boy-will-like-you” fairy like that awful girl Fiorenze, who has a constant train of boys following her, including the cute new boy Steffi, who looked like boyfriend material when Charlie first met him?

She just has to get rid of that fairy! Fiorenze, whose parents are fairy experts, is surprisingly willing to trade, and the girls find a way to do it quickly. But Charlie soon finds that you need to be careful what you wish for, as does Fiorenze. Time to find another way to ditch their respective fairies and hope that their places will be filled with more congenial ones. It’s a more dangerous way, but hey, they’re desperate!

This novel is hilarious. It’s a perfectly good young adult novel of the sort teen girls enjoy, but goes where the average teen girl novel doesn’t. One element makes all the difference.

Highly recommended for girls from 14 upwards.

Children’s Books: The Devil’s Paintbox by Victoria McKernan

You can’t think what a relief it is. After wading through stacks of the sort of blood-soaked stories currently in vogue, it was delicious to settle in and enjoy Victoria McKernan’s latest historical adventure, The Devil’s Paintbox (Alfred A. Knopf). Surely kids are ready from a respite from all that unreality? I know I certainly was.

The Devil’s Paintbox is set in 1865. Orphaned brother and sister, Maddy and Aiden Lynch, must struggle through a 2000 mile journey along the Oregon Trail. McKernan captures the danger and beauty of the American West with time-traveling accuracy. Older children will enjoy this new adventure from the author of the award-winning Shackleton’s Stowaway.

The Devil’s Paintbox is a wonderfully crafted story rich in historical detail: you can almost smell the saddle leather; feel the pangs of hunger and the sharp bites of fear. And not a fang or a wand in sight.

Children’s Book: The Nest by Paul Jennings

Paul Jennings is best known as the author of quirky, over-the-top and often laugh-out-loud funny books, both short stories and very short novels for reluctant readers. As such, he never even got near the annual children’s book awards, though he kept winning prizes voted on by the children themselves. His books sold in the millions, and were adored by children but they just didn’t win prizes from adult judges. In 2006 he finally wrote a full-length semi-autobiographical novel, How Hedley Hopkins Did A Dare, and that got on the annual short list of the Children's Book Council of Australia.

In recent years, the collections of funny stories children love so much have dried up. I have had to keep telling my young library users that no, that thick book of short stories by Paul Jennings wasn’t new, it was just a collection of stories they had already read. There was one book for adults on how to get your kids reading, but that was all.

Now we find that he has, after all, been writing something, this time for young adults. And so sorry, fans of Jennings’ humor, but this book isn’t funny: not even a tiny bit. The Nest (Penguin Australia) is for those who have left the realm of over-the-top humour and want teen angst.

In some ways, even Jennings’ funny books were about angst. That’s what made them funny. They were about the awful things that you go through when you’re growing up, exaggerated and made over-the-top funny. The Nest is just about angst.

In some ways, though, it does still go over-the-top. The average teenager having troubles with family and friends doesn’t suffer vivid mental images of murdering his father and wonder if he’s going insane.

Teenager Robin lives with his father in Victoria’s snow fields. Kids ski as a part of daily life, not as a sport. When Robin was a baby, his mother left, leaving only a couple of relics, which Robin has kept hidden. There is a mystery here. He doesn’t know why she left, though his father keeps telling him it was because of Robin, and he has never found out where she went.

Robin doesn’t seem to have many friends, if any. He is attracted to the beautiful and moral Charlie, who is an environmentalist and raises money to bring refugee children to the snow for a holiday. His feelings are all over the place -- anger with his father, whom he believes has driven his mother away, horror at his own mental images, love for Charlie, confusion and hurt that his mother has never made contact. He expresses his feelings in his short stories, which alternate with chapters of the novel.

It’s a good young adult novel, in an interesting setting, with very good rite-of-passage issues. I would have liked to have seen some resolution of the problems between Robin’s father and himself. Robin does the right thing, even saves his father’s life, but...

The novel does finish with one of Robin’s stories, in which he recognizes that the “snake” he fears is a part of himself and needs to be dealt with. We can only hope that this will end with his reconciliation with his father, some time after the novel ends.

Children’s Books: A Small Free Kiss in the Dark by Glenda Millard

A Small Free Kiss In The Dark (Allen and Unwin) by Glenda Millard is a story about ordinary people in an unexpected war.

Skip, a boy who has been living in abusive foster homes, runs away. On the streets, he meets Billy, an old man who has his own painful memories and has been living rough or in refuges. Billy has learned how to survive there without losing his soul and he has begun to teach Skip how to do the same when, overnight, the city is bombed.

The old man and young boy take refuge, at first, in the State Library, where they meet Max, a little boy who was waiting for his mother to pick him up after school when the bombs started to drop. The city is becoming less and less safe and the three head along the railway tracks towards Dreamland, a now-abandoned amusement park by the sea. There, they are joined by dancer Tia and her baby, Sixpence. Skip overcomes his grief at his loss of his father with this family, something he has not known in a long time. Billy also needs to purge his own grief at having made a mistake that lost him his own son.

The city in the novel is clearly meant to be Melbourne, but is never named and there are some differences. We are never told who the invaders are, or why they have invaded, because that’s not the point. The point is, how might people treat each other when suddenly home is no more -- for anyone? In A Small Free Kiss in the Dark, people can be kind to each other -- even an invading soldier can suddenly realize that this horror isn’t what he signed up for. There is a new family made up of Skip, who can’t remember having a family apart from a soldier father suffering post-traumatic stress disorder; Billy, who lost his child; Max, who had a family and misses his mother and Tia, who has become a mother far too young and has no one to care for her and her child.

The book provides food for thought and should appeal to children of 11 or 12 and upwards.

Children’s Books: Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw by Jeff Kinney

By Ian Buchsbaum, as told to his father Tony

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw (Amulet) is the fourth book in the highly successfuly kids’ series; however, it’s the third one your kids can read, since the previous book was a do-it-yourself diary. The series is about a kid named Greg who lives in a world of mischief. Because this is Greg’s diary, the book contains lots of little stories -- and sketches that help to bring those stories to life.

In The Last Straw, Greg spends time trying to impress a girl named Holly. Also, his brother Rodrick does some crazy antics and his little brother Manny makes up a new word (“ploopy”). Trouble is, their mother doesn’t like the word, so Rodrick breaks it up into syllables (“pl,” “oo,” and “py”) and says a different one each day to Greg. Fun! There’s another kid named Shawn, who has a new baby brother.

Greg’s little stories are written in a quick, easy style that’s fun for kids to read. I’m pretty addicted, to tell the truth. The sheer number of little stories throughout the book feels just like every kid’s day -- lots of stuff to do and think about, and lots of fun to have.

I really enjoy the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, and lots of my friends do too. Basically that would be everybody in my class. The Last Straw is my favorite one, and it’s so good that I’m bummed that I have to wait for the next one. (Note to Jeff Kinney: Please hurry!)

Children’s Books: The Diary of Laura’s Twin by Kathy Kacer

In The Diary of Laura’s Twin (Allen & Unwin) we meet Laura, a middle class Canadian Jewish girl about to do her bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony Jewish girls do at the age of 12. She has already raised money for African charities and as far as she is concerned, she has done her bat mitzvah project.

The rabbi running the bar/bat mitzvah preparation class has other ideas. He asks his students to do another project, in which each of them will be “twinned” with a child who never had the chance to do their own coming of age during the Holocaust.

At first, Laura is annoyed. She has studied the Holocaust at school and right now, she has homework, sports and other activities to keep her busy. However, she agrees to pay one visit to Mrs. Mandelkorn, an elderly woman who hands her a diary, translated into English, of a girl called Sara Gittler, who was in the Warsaw Ghetto, just before the uprising. Despite herself, Laura is drawn into Sara’s story. She begins to wonder how she would feel if, like Sara, she had a lot more to worry about than her own small problems. Sara’s diary also inspires her to help a friend find the courage to do the right thing after witnessing an incident of racist vandalism. If people had had such courage during the war, she believes, perhaps the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened.

The Diary of Laura’s Twin ends with some biographies of real people involved in the Ghetto uprising, plus a man who looked after orphans, mentioned in the novel. It includes some useful Web sites for those who want to follow up the subject. The photos throughout the book are well chosen and remind you that while the characters are fictional, the background isn’t. In these days of Holocaust denial that’s important.

I declare my interest, here, as the child of Holocaust survivors, one of whom, my father, was a survivor of the Ghetto uprising. As such, I found it hard even to start this book, though I’m glad I did. To be honest, I didn’t find it quite as powerful as Once, Morris Gleitzman’s child Holocaust novel. However, it’s a good introduction to the subject for children. Apparently, “twinning” is a genuine activity, which the author had witnessed, giving her the idea for the story. I haven’t heard of it, myself, but found it interesting.

The language is simple and even reluctant readers should be able to manage it. Recommended.

New Today: Evermore by Alyson Noel

Into the ever-increasing fray of books attempting to compete with Stephanie Meyer’s phenomenally successful Twilight series, Alyson Noel offers up her first paranormal romance for young adults, Evermore (St. Martin’s Griffin).

Sixteen-year-old Ever lost her parents, sister and even the family dog to an accident. Beyond the obvious tragedy, Ever is different than she was before. With a single touch she can get more deeply inside a person than she would ever want. She can hear their thoughts, sense their tragedies, even see their auras. And it sets her apart even more than she would otherwise be: she is different in so many ways.

As soon as she meets Damen, she senses a kindred spirit. But what, exactly, is beyond his gorgeous and exotic façade? And does Ever really even want to know?

Aside from the obvious metaphors of teen angst and separation (Oh, the pain!) Evermore is certainly no worse than some of the paranormal schlock the competition is churning out. In some ways, it’s much better. The writing here is clear, the story well-defined and narrator Ever has an engaging voice that teens should enjoy. And, anyway, schlock is in the eye of the beholder. One can not go anywhere teenagers can be seen right now, without seeing one of them clutching a Twilightish-looking book. Subtext: they’re reading when not so very long ago, they were not. That’s about as much as anyone buying books for teens can ever ask.

New next month: yet another offering from the mother-daughter team of P.C. and Kristin Cast. An embargo keeps us from mentioning anything much about the book at all just yet, but we will say it’s called Hunted and is part of the Cast’s House of Night Series. It is the fifth book in the series -- after 2008’s Untamed. Hunted goes on sale on March 10th and, properly shelved in a bookstore, you’ll find it not very far from Evermore and the same sophisticated young readership has definitely been kept in mind.

Children’s Books: Everything Beautiful by Simmone Howell

Riley Rose is stuck at Spirit Ranch Holiday Camp, just when she was about to get close and personal with that hunk Ben. It’s filled with Christian teenagers and camp counsellors who blow bugles at you and make you sing around camp fires, when you’re not memorizing Bible quotes or having presentations on the domestic life of the mallee fowl.

Of course, there’s the very hunkish Craig, but he’s not all he seems. Besides, he’s with Riley’s roommate, Fleur, and Fleur is not about to share. Then there’s Dylan, who used to be Craig’s friend and is equally good-looking, before an accident left him in a wheelchair. He’s back at camp, but no one seems sure what the accident actually was, and he’s not saying.

Riley has her own issues, centered party around her mother’s death from cancer, her father’s new partner and her own overweight state.

There’s an entire genre of fiction about a wilderness camp and a troubled teenager who finds answers there, despite being originally reluctant to go. I have reviewed one, Solo by Alyssa Brugman, in the last year. Everything Beautiful isn’t quite as grim as Solo, although it’s also readable and broken into easily digestible short chapters.

Riley has issues to sort out, but she also has things to teach the other campers, even those who mock her weight and call her a slut. That is perhaps less common in summer camp fiction. Before the novel is over, she is also feeling sympathy even for the worst of them, which helps her. And the beautiful Ben, when he appears, is a comical character rather than the hunk she remembers.

I do have a nitpick or two. Dylan’s accident turns out to have been far less dramatic than was implied at the start and has no real bearing on the story. It would be OK if the issue was about how he handles his confinement to a wheelchair, but he seems to have sorted out most of that before the story begins. I can sort of see why the author plays around with the possible reasons for the accident, but for me, it didn’t quite work.

Still, Riley is a likeable, sympathetic character and the novel makes some serious points in a humorous context. Teenage girls will enjoy it, whether or not they follow it up by seeking out Thomas More’s Utopia, which is quoted throughout the book.

Funke Demanded Fraser for Inkheart

Though authors get notoriously little say about who gets cast in movies made from their books, Cornelia Funke put her foot down when the time came to cast the film version of Inkheart. From the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

A film studio, says author Cornelia Funke, “doesn’t want the writer to say who the leading man should be” in a film adaptation of the author’s book. That didn’t stop her from insisting Brendan Fraser be cast in the leading role of Mortimer Folchart in the film - in theaters Friday -- based on her hugely popular novel Inkheart by threatening to withdraw her book from the project if she didn't get her way.

Funke told Newsday we’re in a “golden age of children’s books.” The author, who has been called the German J.K. Rowling, is certainly in a position to know:

The bestselling children’s author has sold 15 million copies since beginning her career as a writer, published 47 books of varying types in 43 countries and seen six of her stories turned into movies -- including “Inkheart.” “Book eaters” are what she calls people like herself, for whom literature is as essential “as chocolate” and whose numbers may even be growing.

“I think we want the feeling that life has a beginning and an end - and a center,” she said. “We want to feel that everything falls in place. It’s a classic way of dealing with our existence.”

The film version of Inkheart will open January 23rd. It is directed by Iain Softley (Hackers, The Wings of the Dove, The Skeleton Key) and stars Fraser, as well as Helen Mirren and Paul Brittany.

Author Snapshot: Marie-Louise Gay

Most recent book: On the Road Again! (with David Homel)
Born: Québec City
Reside: Montréal
Birthday: June


What’s your favorite city?
Montréal, of course.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
I live in Montréal. In the summer I might cycle to the top of the mountain, le Mont-Royal, which is in the center of Montréal, have an ice-cream cone and enjoy the view of my city floating on the St. Lawrence River. In the winter I might cross-country ski or skate on the Mont-Royal.

What food do you love?
Wild salmon. Pesto. Fresh raspberries.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Grasshoppers.

What’s on your nightstand?
Piles and piles of books.

What inspires you?
Traveling. Reading. Music. Colours and light.

What are you working on now?
A lot of different things: a puppet play for children; a poster for a Festival of theater, art and music for children; a new book project...

Tell us about your process.
I work every day from eight in the morning to the middle of the afternoon. I let my thoughts wander as I sketch little storyboards or characters that I am developing. As a story starts to take form, my drawings get more and more precise, and they, in turn influence the story. And after months of this creative doodling, many ideas and sketches thrown away or redone, a book is born.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Out the window, all the trees in my yard are encased in ice and shining in the sun. In my studio I am surrounded by hundreds of books, plants, sketches and interesting pictures pinned to the walls; seashells, sandollars, starfish on my windowsill, paintbrushes, pens, coloured pencils in jars, paints, pastels and so on...

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
In my late 20s, after illustrating for a decade, I thought I could try my hand at writing also. I fell in love with the process.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I would either be an actress (actually, I was a child actress) or an architect.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
I am most happy at the very beginning of writing and illustrating a story, when absolutely everything is possible.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
There is nothing easy about being a writer or an illustrator.

What’s the most difficult?
When you are lost in your story and cannot find your way out.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
“Which is your most favorite book that you have written ?”
“Where do you get your ideas?”

Please tell us about your most recent book.
On the Road Again! is the second novel I have written with my husband David Homel. A family of four, two parents who are writers and artists and their two boys, Charlie and Max, have fantastic adventures while traveling off the beaten track. This time the family lives in a small village in France for a year. The eldest boy tells the story and comments with great humour upon their new life, their adventures and how his parents totally embarrass him.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I can’t, because then everyone would know.

New This Week: 3 Willows by Ann Brashares

It’s hard to take a book like 3 Willows (Delacorte) seriously. Not with a pedigree like this one. And not when it’s fallen off such a familiar tree.

Author Ann Brashares is the author of the mega-selling Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books. The books have sold nine million copies and inspired a couple of movies. Read that: they’ve been super popular. And while fans seem fully prepared to love whatever Brashares thinks to follow them up with, it’s difficult to not wonder why she’s opted to follow such a familiar road.

At 14 Polly, Joe and Ama -- the girls in 3 Willows -- are younger than their Sisterhood counterparts, but one could argue that could just give them the opportunity to grow through more books before the author has no choice but to be done with them. Their adventure and their spirit here is not terribly different, either: they even live in the same time and have a pair of shared jeans.

That said, these three girls have their own personalities and their own problems and challenges: 3 Willows really is more than The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants recast. Readers who loved the Pants books will eat 3 Willows right up.

New from Pooh

Insiders are banking that the first new book about Winnie the Pooh in 80 years will be one of this year’s significant sellers. From The Times Online:

We haven’t heard from Pooh Bear in 80 years but, in a move that Eeyore would doubtless expect to end in disappointment, the guardians of A. A. Milne’s estate have sanctioned a third book of ursine adventures.

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood will be published in October and booksellers are already inking it in as a Christmas bestseller.

The Wall Street Journal chimes in with a voice that is predictably more edged in the business of business:

The troubled book industry, in need of titles that will pull readers into the stores, will get a much-needed jolt this fall when the first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” and “The House at Pooh Corner” is published Oct. 5 under the title “Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.”

Refreshingly -- and, we think, appropriately -- The Telegraph made it all about the joy:

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood will reflect Milne's idea that "whatever happens, a little boy and his bear will always be playing", author David Benedictus said.

Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh have been fixed firmly in the imagination of British children since Milne and illustrator EH Shephard created the characters in the 1920s.

But up until now they have been left in the “enchanted place”, as Milne called the wood.

Though in some ways Benedictus seems almost bizarrely overqualified to tackled the Pooh story, it will be interesting to see what he dreams up.

Who Crossed the Road?

In a new piece for The Los Angeles Times, Word Play columnist Sonja Bolle asks an important question: why has the humble chicken played such an important role in children’s literature?

Among children’s book enthusiasts, there are passionate collectors of chicken books. What is it about chickens? I wondered as I looked at the new crop of children's books. What do chickens represent? Do chickens have personalities?

In the course of answering her own questions, Bolle visits with some books featuring chickens, as well as a few that don’t. It’s a charming piece and it’s here.

And here’s something slightly related: while you’re reading Bolle’s piece, keep in mind that it is now possible to order The LA Times, as well as many other newspapers and newsmagazines, for your Kindle. Talk about a green alternative: and delivery is pretty much instant.

H.I.V.E. #3: Escape Velocity by Mark Walden

Escape Velocity is the third of Mark Walden’s H.I.V.E. novels. While a number of loose ends are tied up in this one, it produces some more, including a new antagonist to the heroes, and there will be more in the series -- perhaps a new story arc, now that this one is finished. One prediction I made in my review of the first novel turned out to be correct, if not complete, since there was more information in the second novel.

In this series, the heroes are all villains. H.I.V.E. (the Higher Institute of Villainous Education) is a sort of Hogwarts for young super-baddies, run by G.L.O.VE, an organisation of international criminals. Each of the students has a special skill of one kind or another. The hero, Otto Malpense, has three friends whose particular skills help him to save the day. Scottish Laura is a computer genius who had been caught hacking into a military communications system to find out what the other girls at school were saying about her. American girl Shelby is a former jewel thief who can open any lock. Otto’s best friend Wing is brilliant in martial arts.

Otto has discovered that he can use his mind to interface with computer systems. It’s a skill he’s going to need. After saving the school and the world from an insane artificial intelligence overlord in the previous book, the friends discover their troubles aren’t over by any means. Principal Maximilian Nero has been kidnapped by a mysterious organisation called H.O.P.E (one has to love all these acronyms). His bodyguard, the ninja Raven, appears to have been killed while attempting to rescue him. Number One, head of G.L.O.V.E., doesn’t seem to care. He has his own plans, including replacing Dr. Nero with a woman who had betrayed the school in the previous novel. She, in her turn, has her orders. One of these seems to be “extracting” Otto and his friends from the school, taking them to an unknown destination. Just as well that Raven isn’t dead after all, and that some other characters thought dead are also still alive.

The first book in this series was very funny as well as an entertaining adventure. The whole notion of a school for super-villains was delightful. The trouble is, you can only get away with the joke for one novel, as the author seems to have realized, so the next two novels have put the accent on the adventure and pretty much left out the humor. Another problem is that you forget that these characters are supposed to be in training to be the next generation of super-villains of the kind who plot to take over the world and try to kill James Bond. Dr. Nero is starting to turn into Dumbledore, if not as shrewd or witty. Otto and his friends enjoy their studies, but really, they’re just a technical version of wizards. I think, in the next book, we need to be reminded what these teenagers are actually supposed to be studying, or what’s the point? There’s a tiny bit of humor, but very little.

Still, as an adventure, it works. There’s a lot of hardware and software in this book -- ah, if we could only create invisibility suits in real life.

New Today: Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers

The opening lines sums things up perfectly:

Imagine Four Years.

Four years, two suicides, one death, one rape, two pregnancies (one abortion), three overdoses, countless drunken antics, pantsings, spilled food, theft, fights, broken limbs, turf wars – every day, a turf war – six months until graduation and no one gets a medal when they get out. But everything you do here counts.

High school.

Cracked Up to Be (St. Martin’s Griffin) is blogger Courtney Summers’ debut novel. It’s so fresh and simple -- and the topic is in some ways so familiar -- sometimes it hurts.

Parker Fadley sets off to have the perfect senior year. She is perfect. She has the perfect boyfriend, is the captain of the cheerleading squad and has perfect grades. Then smething happens and it all comes apart. She dumps the beau and cheerleading in practically a single swoop. Worse, she starts failing school, drinking and her parents are on suicide watch. And all of it told in Parker’s own humorously deadpan voice. “Chris and Becky are still furious with me,” Parker tells us at one point. “They won’t look at or speak to me and, I won’t lie, I feel pretty accomplished about it. Somebody give me a gold star.”

If there’s difficulty here, it’s might be deciding where in a library it goes. Cracked Up to Be is accomplished enough to be read by adults, but it seems clearly intended for teen and tween readers. (Unfortunately, the publisher didn’t make this clear with their submission package.)

Wherever it ends up, though, Cracked Up to Be is an engaging tale; one whose greatest accomplishment might be in the whispers it makes for its author’s career. Summers has places to go, that’s obvious. I’m anxious to see where she lead us next.

Best Books of 2008: Children’s Books

The Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara with Susan McClelland (Annick Press) 216 pages
As I read The Bite of the Mango, Mariatu Kamara’s account of, at 12, suffering at the hands of soldiers in Sierra Leone, I thought often about the first time I read Anne Frank’s story of hiding in a Dutch attic during WWII. The major difference, of course, was the thing that so upset me about Frank’s tale when I was a child: the outcome was very dire. Kamara, on the other hand, survived, while certainly not unscathed, at least seemingly stronger. Like Frank’s story, though, Kamara’s journey is very real: sometimes distressingly so. Soldiers -- some of them still children themselves -- cut off both Kamara’s hands. Kamara survives, however, and makes her way ultimately to Toronto where she meets journalist Susan McClelland. It was McClelland who would help Kamara craft her experience into a compelling, unmissable book.
“What does it feel like,” asks Ishmael Beah in a touching foreword, “to be unable to wipe away your own tears of deep sadness, to stand without hands to push you up?” As Beah points out, The Bite of the Mango is a chillingly honest account of one child’s journey through tragedy, brutality and -- ultimately -- to survive and thrive in a new place. -- Sienna Powers

Born to Read by Judy Sierra, illustrated by Marc Brown (Knopf) 40 pages
Born to Read makes you smile. It’s like you just can help it. From the cadence of Judy Sierra’s signature rhymes to Marc Brown’s bold, colorful and exceedingly cheerful illustrations, every column inch of Born to Read is packed with happy goodness. It’s a great book. Young Sam just knows he was born to read and, using his special talent, he sets on a mini version of what looks a bit like a Forest Gumpian expedition. Until he meets up with book stealing baby giant Grundaloon, that is. Sam has to use his hard-won reading skills to outwit and outsmart the determined baby. Four to eight year olds must suspend belief and ride along. It shouldn’t be hard, Born to Read is a wonderful book. -- Sienna Powers

Crossing The Line by Dianne Bates (Ford Street Publishing) 215 pages
Crossing the Line tackles a serious problem, among teenage girls in particular: self-harm. The book doesn’t promise all the answers, but it does take an honest and brave look at a nasty subject, and allows us to feel sympathy for the heroine, Sophie, when she isn’t scaring us. We can understand why she does what she does, even as we shudder. When you have little or no control over your life, you may feel that this is something you can control, as anorexics do, even if the perception is wrong. It’s the sort of novel that teenage girls will find gripping and thought-provoking. Certainly, it fulfils my own criteria for a good book: a good story and characters you can care about. -- Sue Bursztynski

The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum by Kate Bernheimer and Nicoletta Ceccoli (Schwartz Wade Books) 40 pages
This is one of those rare children’s picture books that just works on every level. Though Kate Bernheimer has never before written for children, her writing is well known and respected and as the editor of Fairy Tale Review, she’s certainly never out of depth with the material she’s chosen here. On the other hand, Nicoletta Ceccoli is a highly regarded illustrator of children’s books. It’s not difficult to see why. In 2006 she was awarded the silver medal by the Society of Illustrators. In 2001 she won the Anderson Prize, awarded annually to Italy’s top children’s book illustrator. Her illustrations for The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum are wonderful. This is work so luminous, it seems backlit even on the page. The details are splendid, as are the colors and the otherwordly quality you see throughout works very well with Bernheimer’s story about a girl trapped within her magical world. The book is recommended for children aged four to eight, but this is a stunning book: it’s my guess many of this edition will end up in the hands of collectors. -- Monica Stark

The Dragon in the Sock Drawer by Kate Klimo (Random House) 176 pages
I don’t remember the last time I encountered a children’s book with a premise as clever as the one Kate Klimo’s The Dragon in the Sock Drawer (Random House) is based upon. Here’s the idea: when an ordinary rock -- a thunder egg -- tucked into a 10-year-old’s sock drawer hatches into baby dragon, there are a few challenges. For one thing, it turns out that baby dragons are extremely noisy. For another, as cousins Daisy and Jesse discover, finding out what to feed an infant dragon is nearly impossible. The Dragon in the Sock Drawer is the whole package: smart, sometimes wise, thoughtful and funny. Klimo’s debut effort has the feel of an instant classic. -- Monica Stark

The Incredibly Ordinary Danny Chandelier by Laura Trunkey (Annick Press) 212 pages
Danny Chandelier is not as socially or physically impressive as his sisters. He’s not real smart or exceptionally good looking or great at sports. Or anything. His parents pack him off to boarding school: Lily Brook in Poplovastan where, the brochure tells him, “being not so good will finally be enough.” Once he arrives, however, he discovers, that not only is nothing as promised, it’s not even what it seems… if the school is even there at all. This is the first novel of a wonderfully talented new author who tells her story with skill and enchantment. With elements of magic, an engaging plotline bent on a thrillerlike pace and characters that breathe… and make horrible mistakes, The Incredibly Ordinary Danny Chandelier is a perfect debut. I can hardly wait to see what Trunkey dreams up next! -- Linda L. Richards

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (HarperCollins)
Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is a timely book which teases out the implications of the war on terror and comes in a year which Neal Shusterman’s Unwind was published in the United Kingdom. Both novels challenge us to ask “what type of world are we now living in?” Doctorow asks us to continue questioning the underlying logic of the post 9/11 world which has been presented to us. Marcus, a teen hacker, is caught up by the security services in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. His treatment leads him to start using technology to subvert the increasingly authoritarian environment and to link together with his friends and acquaintances. It is a call to arms but it does consider the implications of technology in a social context rather than just seeing it as a panacea. It is quite possibly his most thought-provoking novel to date. – Iain Emsley

Loathing Lola by William Kostakis (PanMacMillan) 352 pages
A laugh-out-loud novel with a serious point to make about our obsession with celebrity and the way we drool over gossip column stuff, whether it’s true or not. Nerdy Courtney Marlow sees her selection as star of television reality series Real Teens as a chance to be a good role model for the teenagers who watch the show, and to raise money for charity. Boy, has she got it wrong! Worse still, everyone wants a piece of the action, including her father’s dippy second wife, the Lola of the title. The author, a teenage boy with no sisters, somehow manages to get it absolutely right about girls. A very promising start to what is sure to be a great career. Plenty of laughs. -- Sue Bursztynski

Poison Ink by Christopher Golden (Delacorte) 279 pages
Christopher Golden has been writing for young adults for a long time and with great success. If you have to ask why, you haven’t read him: he’s terrific. And he also knows what older kids and teenagers like to read: his bibliography is likely as tall as you are. I loved Poison Ink, one of Golden’s most skillful books to date for his handling of several delicate topics. Poison Ink starts out like a straight-up peer pressure story and ends up completely ensnarled in a tale that leans towards magic realism and teen horror. So what is Poison Ink? It might be best not to try to nail it down. The book is engrossing, well-conceived and written and very tough to put down. A terrific book that should enchant those young women it’s targeted at, plus quite a few more. -- Monica Stark

Pool by Justin D’Ath (Ford Street Publishing) 188 pages
Centered around a community swimming pool in which a miracle once occurred and which has become a part of a flourishing pilgrimage industry in a small town in Victoria, Australia. Teenager Wolfgang Mulqueen, pool attendant and butterfly expert, has personal and family problems. His friendship with a blind girl and fascination with the black butterflies which have started to appear in the town are all mixed up with the miracle that turned his town into a place of pilgrimage. The mystery is solved, sort of, and Wolfgang becomes closer with his family -- more I can’t tell you without giving it away. This book was deservedly short-listed for the Young Adult section of this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. In my opinion, having read all the short-listed books, it should have won. Buy it, even if you’re not a fantasy fan. -- Sue Bursztynski

Screw Loose by Chris Wheat (Allen & Unwin) 336 pages
A very funny novel about a bunch of over-the-top Melbourne teenagers -- bossy rich girl Chelsea, who’s having to handle the idea of her mother shacking up with a man who is not only working-class vulgar, but the father of a schoolmate she doesn’t like, Matilda the dingo girl who has pinups of Inspector Rex in her room; obsessive-compulsive Zeynep, who boils her boyfriend’s shoelaces and gets arrested for suspected terrorism; streetwise Khiem who’s trying to reform from his life of crime; Georgia who is planning to come out of the closet while fleeing an arranged marriage with a nutty prince. Screw Loose is even crazier than Looselips, to which it’s a sequel, possibly even funnier. All I can tell you is that one of our students defied her bedtime curfew, reading this one under the blanket. -- Sue Bursztynski

Word of Honour by Michael Pryor (Random House Australia) 433 pages
Third in the delightful Laws of Magic series set in an alternative Edwardian England. The hero, Aubrey Fitzwilliam, has barely started university when he and his friends George and Caroline find themselves having to save the world again, this time from an old enemy who is building something nasty under the city streets and performing light opera above them. And someone is trying to steal from the museum this world’s version of the Rosetta Stone, which might just be able to help Aubrey overcome his condition (he’s technically dead). You’ll need to go back and read the others if you haven’t read them yet, but it’s well worth the effort. If you like steam punk, the Bartimaeus trilogy or even Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom stories, you’ll love this series. -- Sue Bursztynski

Holiday Gift Guide: Snow Party by Harriet Ziefert, illustrated by Mark Jones

I was a little sad to learn that Mark Jones, who illustrated Harriet Ziefert’s Snow Party (Blue Apple) has never built a snowman. It doesn’t show in his work, though. Or maybe it does. Jones’ snow people live and breathe and interact in a way quite beyond anything we’ve experienced. And so maybe that was his secret weapon. And maybe that’s part of the reason that Snow Party works so well. Perhaps Jones has brought a wistful wishfulness to his illustrations. A “what should be” or, perhaps, “what might have been.” I like to think so, anyway. And it would explain a lot.

Snow Party is intended for very young children. It is sweet and gentle and fun and it celebrates the season in a way that manages to be both non-denominational and non-moralistic. To many of us in the 21st century, the Christmas season has come to be a time of sharing and sweetness and family and food. Snow Party celebrates those ideals. With charm. A lovely, gentle book.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling

In the final chapter of the Harry Potter tale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hermione Granger inherited a book of wizarding children’s fairytales from Professor Dumbledore, who had known that she would be able to use the clues in the text to work out ways of defeating Voldemort. Only one of them, “The Tale of the Three Brothers,” was described in detail, because that one was important to our trio’s quest, but Ron mentioned the others and we learned that they were as familiar to them as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are to Muggle children.

Soon after publication of that book, author J.K. Rowling actually wrote the stories mentioned in the novel, illustrating them herself, and six beautifully-bound, handwritten copies were given to friends, a seventh sold for charity and bought by Amazon. Of course, fans who were already hungry for more Potter were frustrated that they might never see these stories. However, one year later, the first mass-market edition has been published just in time for the holidays and we can all read them.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a slim, hardcover volume is the right size to fit into a child’s hands and be carried in a backpack or large pocket. It’s a visual treat, with delicately-drawn illustrations strongly reminiscent in style of Pauline Baynes, who illustrated C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books.

There are five stories, along with an introduction by the author, who never leaves the Potterverse, writing about it as if it was all true. She thanks Minerva McGonagall for allowing her to use notes by Dumbledore which are attached to each story. She gives the history of Beedle the Bard, a 15th century wizard, and comments on the difference in style between wizard and Muggle fairy tales. The only mention of the real world here is the fact that the book is being used to raise money for the children’s charity, the Children’s High Level Group, founded by Rowling herself. There’s also an afterword by Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, who has worked with Rowling on this charity.

The stories (“translated from the original runes by Hermione Granger”) are “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot,” “The Fountain of Fair Fortune,” “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart,” “Babbitty Rabbitty and Her Cackling Stump” and, of course, “The Tale of the Three Brothers.” All of the stories have a moral and -- in case we didn’t notice it -- each is accompanied by notes by Professor Dumbledore. These notes mention that some of the stories which show Muggles in a favourable light (“The Wizard and the Hopping Pot”) or feature Muggle-wizard marriage (“The Fountain of Fair Fortune”) have been banned in the past or re-written. Some of the notes are hilarious, such as Dumbledore’s reminiscence about Hogwarts’s only attempt to put on a school show, a pantomime version of “The Fountain of Fair Fortune,” in which the students in the lead roles got into fights, a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship broke up and the Great Hall nearly burned down. The teacher involved eventually moved to the wizarding world’s version of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but never produced that pantomime again. The mind boggles at the image of wizard actors, but it opens that universe just a little more for us.

There is a certain poignancy, not to mention irony, in the notes attached to the final tale. For example, Dumbledore admits he might be tempted by Death’s more dangerous gifts, even knowing, as he does, that you can’t really bring anyone back from the dead. It also makes you think more deeply about some of the final events of Deathly Hallows.

The stories are charming and have the flavour of fairytales, but you really do need to be familiar with the universe that Rowling has created to appreciate them. There’s no point, for example, in giving them to children to read before they’ve read the Harry Potter books. It’s a spinoff, just like Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them and Quidditch Through The Ages.

A good choice to complete your Harry Potter collection. It barely needs reviewing for the hungry fan, but it’s well worth buying.

Review: The Serial Garden by Joan Aiken

Today in January Magazine’s children’s section, contributing editor Iain Emsley reviews The Serial Garden by Joan Aiken. Says Emsley:

Joan Aiken’s The Serial Garden collects all of the Armitage family stories together in one volume. Initially written on a whim, they span Aiken's published writing career from the 1950s until the present decade. Now best remembered for the Dido Twite books, an alternate England that began with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Aiken is one of the strongest authors of the post-war boom in children's fantasy. Building on the work E. Nesbit and John Masefield, she brought a sense of Englishness and a matter of factness to the field.

Born in 1924, Aiken was the daughter of the writer Conrad Aiken. However, it was her stepfather, Martin Armstrong, who accidentally gave her the impetus to begin the Armitage stories. He wrote a series for Children's Hour on the BBC in the late 1930s called Said the Cat to the Dog which Aiken drew on for a skit called “Yes, But Today is Tuesday” in which the Armitage family wake up on a Tuesday to find a unicorn in their garden.

The full review is here.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Graveyard Book By Neil Gaiman

Bod -- short for Nobody -- has been orphaned early, by a murderer known only as “the man Jack” who had killed his entire family and is still on the hunt for him. Not until late in the book does he learn why.

In the meantime he is rescued by a community of ghosts in the graveyard on the hill of a small but ancient town. There, he is cared for by the kindly ghosts of Mr. and Mrs. Owens, tutored by other ghosts and mentored by the only graveyard inhabitant who can leave the cemetery for food and other things a living child might need: Silas, a vampire. Between his toddler years and his late teens, Bod has many adventures.

Sound familiar? It should. In fact, in an afterword to The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins), author Neil Gaiman admits he was thinking of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, although Gaiman’s tale also has a strong flavour of Ray Bradbury, if you can imagine that most American of writers as British.

The Graveyard Book is more or less a series of connected short stories; in fact, Chapter four, “The Witch’s Headstone,” was first published as a short story.

It works, in any case. Like all of Neil Gaiman’s works, this one is very readable, with the elements of good story and good characters. Despite its gruesome background, this novel is gentle, quite suitable for children to read.

Chris Riddell’s beautiful cartoon-like illustrations go perfectly with the text.

Highly recommended.

Children’s Books: Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta

Australian, readers will certainly have heard of Looking for Alibrandi, Melina Marchetta’s wonderful first novel about the immigrant experience, seen through the eyes of a young Italian girl living in Sydney, trying to cope with various teen problems, including those headaches you have when you’re having to worry about all the old ladies of the community who mind your business for you. Even if you’re not Australian, you may well have fallen in love with Sydney through the gloriously warm, feel-good movie based on the novel.

In the last few years, Marchetta has written two other books, Saving Francesca and On the Jellicoe Road, both of which were a long way from Alibrandi.

In her fourth novel, she has returned to the migrant experience. Or, to be more accurate, the refugee experience. However, she’s done it in a way that many writers have used to make comments about our world: through the medium of speculative fiction.

In Finnikin of the Rock (Penguin Australia), the title character has been travelling the various lands to which half the population of his homeland, Lumatere, have fled since the royal family was murdered and many Lumaterans massacred by the followers of a usurper.

Ten years have gone by and Finnikin and his mentor, Sir Topher, have been visiting the various refugee camps and rulers in the kingdoms surrounding Lumatere. Nobody can get in or out of Lumatere, which is surrounded by a magical mist that was produced by a dying priestess as she was being burned at the stake. Only the rightful heir can lead the refugee Lumaterans home and dispel the mist. There is a rumour that Prince Balthazar -- one of Finnikin’s two best friends -- may still be alive, but no one has seen him since his family died. Should Finnikin and Topher try to create a new homeland for the exiles? Should they trust Evanjelin, a novice of the Lumateran Goddess, who says she can walk through the sleep of the people behind the mist and knows what is happening at home? There is, in fact, something very familiar about her.

There’s magic in this novel, as you’d expect in fantasy, but that’s all. There are no dark lords, no evil sorcerers or large-bosomed witches, no immortal Dark Riders to chase a Chosen One. And when you do finally learn about the Chosen One, you think that if you were chosen that way, you’d plead with God to choose someone else!

There are only humans, good and bad. The bad ones are ordinary people, doing what they can get away with. Even the usurper king is wisely kept offstage rather than made the novel’s villain. Not all Lumaterans are good guys. Some have lost their identity and children are growing up without their language or culture.

In some ways, I think Finnikin of the Rock might have worked better if we could see a few Lumaterans who aren’t victims and who are so comfortable they don’t want to return, despite losing their identity. But the story takes place only ten years after the exile and wounds would still be raw.

Still, it does work, at least partly because the author doesn’t beat you around the head with the message as some writers and artists have done in recent years.

Marchetta manages to explore the overall issue of the refugee experience without preaching about any individual group. The style reminds me just a little of Howard Fast, who, apart from his famous historicals such as Spartacus, managed to write a lot of thoughtful SF and fantasy.

I’m not sure how teenagers will feel about a novel which is written like fantasy but isn’t really fantasy, but it’s a good story, with enough action to hold interest, and despite the apparent male focus, it has plenty of strong female characters.

Well worth a look.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman

If you’ve never encountered the book before, reading it is like stumbling across a lost treasure.

First published in 1985, a decade before The Golden Compass ever saw the light of day, Philip Pullman’s mystery series featuring 16 year old Sally Lockhart provides a glimpse at a sort of proto-Lyra Belacqua.

The Ruby in the Smoke (Knopf) was the first of four Sally Lockhart Mysteries, a series set in Victorian London. In the first book, Sally is trying to solve the mystery of her father’s death. Pullman aficionados will know that all of the Sally Lockhart books were well received when they were first published, and they have never been out of print. However, if you weren’t at the time paying close attention to children’s literature, it would have been possible to miss them as it would be another decade before Pullman became really well known after his Dark Materials trilogy belted him into the stratosphere. When it was first published in the United States in 1997, The Ruby in the Smoke was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a Booklist Editor’s Choice and was nominated for the Edgar.

Knopf has chosen to republish all four Sally Lockhart mysteries at the same time: The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well and The Tin Princess are all available in very handsome and reasonably priced paperback editions, and just in time for holiday gift giving for the young mystery reader on your list.

Children’s Books: The Time Paradox: Artemis Fowl Book 6 by Eoin Colfer

In Eoin Colfer’s The Time Paradox: Artemis Fowl Book 6, and only a short time after returning from Limbo, saving an entire fairy species and finding the world has moved on by three years, 14-year-old Artemis -- who should be closer to 18 by now -- has another crisis to deal with. His beloved mother is dying of a magical plague that nearly destroyed the main fairy race some time ago. The only cure for it lies in the past, in an animal the younger Artemis had helped to wipe out.

Time travel is possible with the help of demon warlock Number 1, so Artemis travels back nearly eight years with his friend, fairy police operative Captain Holly Short, in hopes of changing the past. But older Artemis has developed a set of ethics and, although he’s still a genius, he has to compete with his younger self who is a criminal genius and firmly convinced that the end justifies the means. Also, he wonders what Holly will say when he has to confess to her the lie he told to convince her to come along on the time journey.

The pair soon find themselves in the middle of a non-stop adventure involving people from their past -- friends, friends-to-be and one particularly nasty enemy. They’re also having to fight to keep their precious almost-extinct animal from the clutches of a crazy cult that hates animals so much that the members are mostly vegetarians who will happily wipe out entire species but won’t eat them!

As with all Eoin Colfer’s novels I have read, I happily sat back and let myself be swept along. The author has cleverly worked out his time paradox so that the ending explains things about the beginning of the series. Despite that, there are hints that this is not the last in the series, though he’ll have to end it some time -- I mean, how long can Artemis stay a teenager? And what about Minerva, the girl genius he met in the last novel? Will she turn up again?

As in the previous novel, there are “Gnommish” letters forming a message at the bottom of the pages, but I can’t tell you what they say because there is no key at the back of this one. I think there should have been, since it’s less bother than having to go back and haul out Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony. I simply ignored the letters and enjoyed the story.

One more little nit-pick. The novel takes place over the space of three days. During that time, almost nobody seems to eat, sleep or go to the bathroom. Not just that they don’t -- they don’t have time to do it! Well, maybe younger Artemis does, because he has his faithful bodyguard Butler to pilot the plane and make arrangements for him. But present-day Artemis and Holly don’t. Now, it may be that fairy biology allows them to stay awake for long periods (and by the way, fairies do go to the bathroom, as is mentioned in passing). But older Artemis is awake -- apart from a bit of unconsciousness -- the whole time. He gets tired now and then and finally sleeps when the main danger is over. But that’s after three days of running around from Ireland to Africa and back and travelling through time.

Still, the book is a fine addition to this delightful universe. I’ve said it before and will say it again: this series is going to be a classic.

Children’s Books: Word of Honour by Michael Pryor

Rejoice! Aubrey Fitzwilliam, that Miles Vorkosigan of alternative universe Edwardian England, is back for yet another deliciously entertaining outing, along with his friends George and Caroline.

After their excursion to Lutetia (Paris) in Heart of Gold, the trio are finally back to start their first term at university. But Aubrey is never going to be allowed to study in peace. For one thing, he’s still having trouble with his condition (being technically dead). He hasn’t told his parents, though Caroline has figured it out. Then there’s the outing on a new submersible ship for the navy, which someone is trying to sabotage. And that’s not all they’re trying to do. Someone tried to assassinate Lady Rose, Aubrey’s scientist mother, while she and Caroline were on an expedition to the Arctic. And Aubrey’s nemesis, Mordecai Tremaine, formerly Sorcerer Royal, who had killed Caroline’s father while attempting to start World War I, is back in Albion, singing in light opera. Only trouble is, Aubrey seems to be the only one who can recognize him. What can he be up to?

Aubrey, George and Caroline have to save Albion yet again, and very enjoyably they do it too, in yet another breathtaking adventure laced with plenty of humour and characters you care about.

For those who missed out on the first two books of this series, the premise is that magic not only works, but can be taught. It works like science -- hence the “laws of magic” of the series title. I laughed out loud during one scene when George suggests an outing to see a sleight-of-hand artist (this universe’s version of a stage magician) and Aubrey sneers that these so-called sleight-of-hand artists are just using magic. But because of this one difference, the world is run very differently, though it seems very similar to ours. There are medical magicians and research magicians. Even electricity is run by magic. A magical damper is used in one scene to protect a bank from robbers who might otherwise use magic.

This is a terrific series that just keeps getting better. Start with Blaze of Glory or Heart of Gold then come back to this one. You won’t regret it.

Children’s Books: Sovay by Celia Rees

Several years ago, I read this author’s first book, Witch Child, an historical adventure set in 17th century Massachusetts, in a colony started by people thrown out of Salem for being too extremist. It was an enjoyable piece of historical fiction and the author has since written three more books.

Sovay (Bloomsbury) is set in 18th century England and Revolutionary France. As in Witch Child, the story is seen through the eyes of a young woman. It appears to be inspired by a traditional ballad which was about a girl who dressed as a man and held up a coach to test her sweetheart. The boy in the ballad passed the test. The fiancé of the heroine of this novel fails spectacularly, but it turns out to be the least of her worries.

Sovay Middleton, daughter of a middleclass radical, has been left alone on the estate. Her idealistic father has gone missing, as has her student brother, who has similar opinions to their father. She knows someone is coming with papers that could destroy her family, but when she uses her highwayman disguise to get them, she finds a lot more than she was expecting. Her father has some dangerous enemies.

On her way to London, to find out what has happened, she is helped by a number of good people, including her family steward’s son, an American spy and a genuine highwayman. But she needs to escape England and her troubles spill over into France, where Robespierre rules and all English are considered spies.

Sovay is another enjoyable adventure which may appeal to girls who like a little more than the standard teen romance. The only thing is, there are a number of men who seem to be attracted to Sovay and you aren’t quite expecting the man she ends up with. It’s as if the author has decided Sovay has to have someone and added a character for that purpose. Sovay is a strong character, if a little too perfect and the novel gives a good picture of the era.

Graphic Novels: Henry V by William Shakespeare

It may well be an idea whose time has come. Not simply a graphic novel based on William Shakespeare’s classic work, but the graphic novel, done up three ways.

Based in the United Kingdom, Classic Comics has a name for each portion of the trio of books they’ve published under the Henry V title: Original Text is just as it sounds, the Bard’s original prose, set here against stunning full color illustrations, beautifully reproduced. (“O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarch to behold the swelling scene!”)

Plain Text delivers the same gorgeous illos, but this time with a contemporary translation of the original text. (“It would be great to have some goddess of creative fire, to help us enact this play with a true representation – to have an entire kingdom for a stage and princes for actors and to have royalty watch the performance!”)

Finally, the Quick Text version offers a simplification of the original text. (“If we had some help from the gods, we could give a better performance of this play.”)

Age will not inhibit the reader’s enjoyment of these works. That said, Classical Comics does seem to have aimed their books at young readers: the press kit that accompanied the trio of Henry Vs informs reviewers that the text is currently being test driven by young people at several schools in the UK. They also tell us that lesson plans, whiteboard toolkits and other teaching resources are available for each book.

Meanwhile, Henry V was just the first of these modernized classics out of the gate. Classic Comics has since introduced Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Macbeth, Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and -- just in time for the beginning of holiday 2008 sales -- Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Children’s Books: Araminta Spookie #5: Ghostsitters by Angie Sag

Araminta Spookie #5: Ghostsitters (HarperCollins) is the fifth in a popular children’s series about Araminta Spookie, who lives in a sort of Addams Family mansion with her Uncle Drac, her Aunt Tabby, Brenda and Barry Wizzard and their daughter Wanda, as well as three ghosts: Sir Horace, his page Edmund and their dog Fang.

Don’t worry if your child hasn’t read the four earlier books in this series. The book stands alone quite well.

In this adventure, the adults go off for a week’s holiday in Transylvania, leaving Araminta and Wanda to be babysat. The babysitter is Minty’s cool Goth cousin, Mathilda. Unfortunately, Mathilda, whose parents are ghostbusters, is accompanied by two teenage poltergeists, Jed and Ned, who proceed to turn the house upside down and cause Sir Horace, a mild-mannered old ghost, to threaten to leave. What’s most annoying is that nobody will be making a fuss of Minty on her birthday.

Children should find Ghostsitters to be just gross enough to be amusing, but not truly disgusting. The worst you’ll find in this is grilled gummi bears on toast and inedible pizza that has been dropped in the mud. It’s likely to be enjoyed by children in the middle to late years of primary school.

Children’s Books: Naomi and Ely’s No-Kiss List by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

In Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, the title characters -- two university students in New York city -- have known each other since early childhood. They live in the same huge apartment block. At one point, Naomi’s father had a brief affair with Ely’s lesbian mother and then left. Since then, Naomi has had to look after her own mother, who hasn’t stopped grieving.

Beautiful Naomi can have almost any boy she wants and has had boyfriends (Bruce 1 and 2). The trouble is, the only boy she wants is Ely, the one she can’t have, because he’s gay -- and not only gay, but promiscuous. So the two of them, to keep their friendship intact, have created a “no-kiss list” -- a list of boys neither of them will kiss. When Ely breaks the rules and starts a relationship with Naomi’s current boyfriend, Bruce 2, he risks the friendship -- and Naomi has to ask herself what she really wants and what is most important to her. Likewise, Ely has to decide whether he can keep his current lifestyle going or whether there is something more important to him now.

Cohn and Levithan wrote another book together, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which was set in the course of one night and had a similar style, though the main characters were heterosexual. It was seen alternatively from the title characters’ viewpoints.

This one has more viewpoints, but somehow it works and the various strands pull together. The style is whimsical, the ending is positive and on the whole it’s a readable book, but heavens, how the characters swear! As in Nick and Norah, the book is filled with four-letter words. I have worked with teenagers for most of my career and, while they do use four-letter words a lot and look at you in surprise if you suggest they are swearing, they don’t do it that much. I don’t think it’s necesssary to write it into a book in the interests of “realism” and about half the swearing would have been plenty. You really can overdo it. It is, in my opinion, well and truly overdone in this novel.

Keep this one for the older teenagers in your life.

Children’s Books: The OK Team 2: Better Than OK

In The OK Team, we met Hazy Retina, a boy who discovered that his tendency to fall apart -- literally! -- when he panicked or was embarrassed made him a member of the super-hero community. Hazy formed a team of other young heroes with their own gifts. Despite their klutziness, they somehow managed to combine and use their talents to help save the world -- or anyway, to save the heroes who could save the world.

Some months later, in The OK Team 2: Better Than OK (Allen & Unwin), the team has become more comfortable with its talents, although some members have left. Liarbird, who couldn’t tell the truth, has gone overseas. Switchy, who can turn into anything from an impressive superhero-type to a helicopter, has been promoted and moved on to special training. One replacement is Logi Gal (“Logic Girl!” she keeps protesting) is the team version of Mr Spock. She knows a lot and makes the team think rationally before yielding to impulse. At one point, she doubts her usefulness in a physical fight, but proves vital in other respects. The other new team member, Gamer, lives life like a video game -- and reaps the benefits, picking up skills and rewards that help the team.

But the villains have discovered a new, performance-enhancing drug. S.T.O.M.P. (Serum That Overly Maginfies Powers), which means that even low-level villains can beat heroes who are following the rules. And in the course of an encounter, Hazy has rashly agreed to something stupid. Worse still, one of Australia’s top heroes, Southern Cross, has started to weaken. The hero community suspects why, but Hazy’s mistake means they can’t fix it- - unless Hazy gives up his hero status, or dies.

Another fun book, filled with such delicious silliness as the elephant-headed boy who keeps shooting lemons at Hazy after failing to make it into the OK Team and hero cafés on top of Melbourne landmarks. And it has its say about performance-enhancing drugs, not only through S.T.O.M.P. but through the mouth of Hazy’s father, a competitive cyclist, who points out that those who cheat will never know how good they really are, or if they could have done it without cheating.

There was a hint that there might be more, when Hazy’s parents fight offstage, but there’s no follow-up within this novel. I think one final book in this series might be enough. The first book introduced the joke and it was wonderful to see this bunch of klutzy kids somehow manage to unite and do something important. In this book, their talents are starting to improve. If it ever gets to the point where the team really is “better than okay,” it will be enough to complete the original theme. For the moment, though, it’s readable and fun and children should enjoy it.

Children’s Books: Teen, Inc. by Stefan Petrucha

If Teen, Inc. isn’t turned into a movie, I’ll be very surprised. It reads like a number of films I have seen over the years, though it doesn’t end like them.

Jaiden Beale has been brought up by a corporation. His bedroom is a converted office. He eats in the cafeteria. A committee named him. Another committee oversees everything from his education to his social life. He even has to sit through a Powerpoint presentation on his dating options! He has lived this way since just after birth because a faulty piece of equipmment produced by the corporation killed his parents and the company sees it as the best way to avoid a lawsuit.

Jaiden wants to live a normal life. He has been allowed, recently, to attend a public school, where nobody knows who he is. He’s made a friend and he’s hoping to get a girlfriend, Jenny -- not one of those on the corporation’s list of possibles. But Jenny’s environmentalist father has uncovered something nasty for which the company may be responsible. What happens when the girl Jaiden cares about is part of a movement against the only family he has ever known?

I would have expected that the kids would have made the discovery in their science project rather than just having the father do it, but never mind. Stefan Petrucha’s Teen, Inc. is funny, gentle and charming and it at least avoids the kind of clichéd ending of the movies it resembles. Recommended for mid-teens.

Children’s Books: Shadows in the Twilight by Henning Mankell

Swedish-born author Henning Mankell is best known for his Kurt Wallander mystery series. These are books that dominate bestseller charts all over Europe and are beginning to make inroads in the United States, as well. Mankell’s fans know he’s a wonderful storyteller -- a great wordsmith with a lot to say. However, many who are new to his work don’t know that, in his own country, Mankell is also esteemed as a teller of children’s tales. Even the first few lines of Shadows in the Twilight (Delacorte) tells one why:

I have another story to tell.

The story of what happened next, when summer was over. When the mosquitoes had stopped singing and the nights turned cold.

Autumn set in, and Joel Gustafson had other things to think about. He hardly ever went to his rock by the river, to gaze up at the sky.

It was as if the dog that had headed for its star no longer existed.

Though Shadows in the Twilight follows up an earlier book, A Bridge to the Stars, young readers who are coming to Mankell for the first time won’t feel as though they’ve missed anything. Mankell is a skillfull writer and each work stands alone. This time out, Joel is dealing with shades of truth and coming to understand that sometimes a few words make all the difference in the world.

New this Month: Untamed by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

With Stephanie Meyer’s supernaturally driven series continuing to dominate the teen bestseller charts, it’s unsurprising to find leagues of similarly constructed books nipping at the well-conceived heels of Meyer’s success. There’s nothing new in this. The extreme success of The Da Vinci Code earlier in the decade saw the publication of literally hundreds of books featuring thrilling religious themes -- with varying amounts of success. Likewise, we’ve not yet seen the end of magical boys attending magical schools and learning about magic. Some of these have been terrific. Others terrible. Readers take their chances; that’s just how it goes.

Meyer’s success with the Twilight series has been so huge and so fast, we’ve not yet had time to find ourselves completely enveloped in tales of supernatural teenage angst. But we will. One can almost hear the presses humming. However, young readers with a thirst for books with that sort of bent are ferreting out existing series whose themes run a similar course to those favored by Meyers and her characters.

Among the best of these is the House of Night series being written by P.C. and Kristin Cast. Later in September we’ll see the publication of the fourth paperback original in the series, Untamed (St. Martin’s Press). The success of this series is not difficult to understand. P.C. Cast is a successful veteran author of romantic fantasy and paranormal literature. This is a world she understands. Pushing her over the top are contributions from her daughter, Kristin, who attends Northeastern State University. Clearly, the teenage mindset is something she understands. Together the mother-daughter team are creating a strong brew with the House of Night books, a series that has been hitting bestseller lists hard pretty much since the publication of the first book, Marked, back in 2007.

The protagonist of the House of Night series is Zoey Redbird, a vampyre fledged to train at the House of Night, the school she must attend in order to become an adult vampyre. And thus you have a set up that feels a bit like X-Men meets Harry Potter meets Interview with the Vampire all told in a voice as engaging and spirited as anything recounted by Meg Cabot. And that means good stuff for young adult readers who like a bit of strangeness with their brew.

Children’s Books: The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum

Quite often, the flap material on a book does little to bring clarity to the material within. This is not, however, the case with The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum (Schwartz Wade Books). This single line tells the story absolutely:

Here is an original fairy tale that feels like a dream -- haunting, beautiful, and completely unforgettable.

This is one of those rare children’s picture books that just works on every level. Though Kate Bernheimer has never before written for children, her writing is well known and respected and as the editor of Fairy Tale Review, she’s certainly never out of depth with the material she’s chosen here.

On the other hand, Nicoletta Ceccoli is a highly regarded illustrator of children’s books. It’s not difficult to see why. In 2006 she was awarded the silver medal by the Society of Illustrators. In 2001 she won the Anderson Prize, awarded annually to Italy’s top children’s book illustrator. Her illustrations for The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum are wonderful. This is work so luminous, it seems backlit even on the page. The details are splendid, as are the colors and the otherwordly quality you see throughout works very well with Bernheimer’s story about a girl trapped within her magical world.

The book is recommended for children aged four to eight, but this is a stunning book: it’s my guess many of this edition will end up in the hands of collectors.

Age-Rating Books for Children: Right or Wrong?

While BBC News today asks if age-rating books books for children is right or wrong, I think a better question might be: useful or not? Do parents really need someone else’s opinion on what reading material is “suitable” for their children? Some publishers in the UK seem to think so because, later this year, a scheme to add an “age band” to books will begin:

Each book will carry a specific marking indicating whether they are suitable for readers aged 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen.

Research within the book industry suggests people buying books for children would welcome the guidance.

The mere suggestion of an age writing system for books strikes me as ridiculous and even wrong. I’m not alone in my reaction. Some 750 authors and illustrators have gotten together and formed a group called No to Age Banding. The authors speaking out against age-rating books include Terry Pratchett, Andrew Morton, Anne Fine, JK Rowling, Celia Rees, Neil Gaiman, Roddy Doyle, David Almond, Allan Guthrie, Diana Wynne Jones, Anthony Horowitz and many, many others. The reasons they offer against age banding books are compelling. Here are a few of them:

• Each child is unique, and so is each book. Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless.

• Children easily feel stigmatized, and many will put aside books they might love because of the fear of being called babyish. Other children will feel dismayed that books of their “correct” age-group are too challenging, and will be put off reading even more firmly than before.

• Age-banding seeks to help adults choose books for children, and we’re all in favour of that; but it does so by giving them the wrong information. It’s also likely to encourage over-prescriptive or anxious adults to limit a child’s reading in ways that are unnecessary and even damaging.

We agree. If you do to, you can visit the No to Age Banding Web site and add your voice to the growing number already there.

Children’s Books: The (Not Quite) Perfect Boyfriend by Lili Wilkinson

The (Not Quite) Perfect Boyfriend is the latest in Allen and Unwin’s Girlfriend Fiction series. If they were all the kind of book suggested by the hearts on the covers and the series titles throughout I would probably not be reviewing all of them. Some of the Girlfriend Fiction series are simply teen romances, if well-written ones, but others could be published as straight young adult fiction. In some ways, The (Not Quite) Perfect Boyfriend is one of them. Yes, it’s a teen romance and yes, it sticks to the formula that the heroine, something of a Cinderella, falls for the good-looking guy, who turns out to be a pill, and then ends up with the nice boy she has considered just a friend throughout the story (or, in this story, the one she finds irritating, but has to work with). But there’s more to it and this one is very funny.

Midge (whose full, cringeworthy name, is Imogen) is “sweet sixteen and never been kissed,” unlike her best friend Tahni, who always comes back from holidays with stories about all the cute guys she has dated.

To get Tahni off her back, Midge invents a boy she supposedly met during the holidays. His name is Ben, he is British and romantic and, best of all, he went back to England, so she doesn’t have to introduce him to anyone and after a couple of weeks, she can pretend to break up with him. As she’s intelligent and good with language, she writes e-mail in his name and invents a Facebook profile for him, to fit with the romantic image she has built.

The trouble is, when a gorgeous British boy called Ben turns up at the school soon after, everyone assumes he’s the non-existent boyfriend. Ben is willing to go along with it, and for a while, Midge enjoys her new “boyfriend,” but he has a price for his co-operation. Is Midge willing to go along with this blackmail or will she decide it isn’t worth the price? (And no, it isn’t anything physical). How will Tahni feel, now that Midge has overtaken her one source of pride, her ability to get boys?

And what about George, the other new boy at the school, nowhere near as attractive, with a mysterious past and with whom Midge is stuck on an English assignment? What is he doing on those days he disappears? Why does he doodle all those dragons and medieval images on his schoolbooks? And where did that injury come from?

I must admit, I figured out the mystery about George pretty quickly, but only because I was in the Society for Creative Anachronism and have a half-finished novel on my computer that begins, “The trouble is, my mother spends her weekends hitting Vikings with broom handles.” I doubt the girls reading this novel will work it out so easily and what they will think then, I can’t be sure. But they will have had a good laugh along the way, and thought about friendship and beauty being only skin deep.

Recommended.

Children’s Books: The Dragon in the Sock Drawer by Kate Klimo

I don’t remember the last time I encountered a children’s book with a premise as clever as the one Kate Klimo’s The Dragon in the Sock Drawer (Random House) is based upon.

Here’s the idea: when an ordinary rock -- a thunder egg -- tucked into a 10-year-old’s sock drawer hatches into baby dragon, there are a few challenges. For one thing, it turns out that baby dragons are extremely noisy. For another, as cousins Daisy and Jesse discover, finding out what to feed an infant dragon is nearly impossible.

The Dragon in the Sock Drawer is the whole package: smart, sometimes wise, thoughtful and funny. Klimo’s debut effort has the feel of an instant classic.

Children’s Books: Grk and the Hot Dog Trail by Joshua Doder

In a FAQ at his Web site, author Joshua Doder (who also writes as Josh Lacey) lists the three books he would most like to have written. The three selected speak volumes about this particular writer’s work:

I suppose the books that I would most like to have written are the ones that I’ve read again and again throughout my life, so they’ve become part of me. If I was going to pick three -- because I can’t just pick one -- they would Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray and Tintin in Tibet by Hergé.

If you’re in a position to read books for children and you’ve not yet come across Doder’s Grk books, wait for it because they’re coming fast. The order in which they come will depend on where you live. For instance, in the United States, Grk and the Hot Dog Trail was published by Delacorte just last month, while those that watch book lists out of the UK would have seen Andersen publish the book back in 2006.

The order in which they come to you does not matter: you don’t need to read the Grk books in publication order to follow along. Here is what is important: each book is set in a different county: A Dog Called Grk (Stanislavia); Grk and the Pelotti Gang (Brazil); Grk and the Hot Dog Trail (USA); Grk: Operation Tortoise (the Seychelles); and Grk Smells a Rat (India).

This time out, while playing tourist during a visit to New York, Tim sees that someone has stolen the Golden Dachshund, a statue worth a billion dollars. Only Tim and his dog Grk can save the day. Doder’s Grk books are lightening fast adventures stuffed with sharp-humored charm.

Children’s Books: The Detachable Boy by Scot Gardner

John Johnson keeps losing his head -- literally. And his feet and arms and legs. He is a detachable person -- and not, as he discovers, the only one. In fact, that’s the problem. When John’s friend, Crystal, is kidnapped by men in vinyl suits and taken to an underground base in America, full of detachable people being used as spare parts, he has to follow, while his parents think he’s on a school camp. He can’t afford to buy a plane ticket, but Ravi, his genius friend, designs a suitcase that will fit his bits and posts him to the U.S.

And that’s only the start of a story that becomes progressively sillier and funnier as it goes. It has the grossout factor that kids enjoy without ever becoming too disgusting. The characters are amusing (my favourite is the American pretzel-collector -- among his collection is one shaped like Elvis and another like the Eiffel Tower -- who helps John and Crystal). I did wonder how Ravi, who has a distinctly Indian accent, had a surname like Carter, but never mind. Suspend disbelief. The young readers won’t care.

Heath McKenzie’s delightful illustrations add to the story.

Scot Gardner’s The Detachable Boy (Allen & Unwin) is aimed at boys between the ages of nine and 12, but let the girls read it too -- they’re just as likely to enjoy it.

Children’s Books: Crossing the Line by Dianne Bates

Seventeen-year-old Sophie is intelligent, good at her studies and a fine poet. She also cuts herself when she’s feeling stressed. And she has plenty about which to feel stressed. She has been fostered since early childhood, after losing first her neglectful mother, then her beloved aunt and uncle when they divorced. She has been with one foster-family after another, constantly changing schools and unable to make friends because she keeps moving.

Now it seems things will improve, since she has been allowed some independence and has started sharing a house with the likeable and kind-hearted Amy and Matt. She’s made friends at her new school and is hoping to finish her last year.

Will these be enough for a girl who feels a desperate need for family -- especially a mother? A spell in a mental hospital introduces her to psychiatrist Helen Marshall, to whom she clings, mistaking treatment for affection.

Can her new friends help her? Will Matt’s affection be enough?

Sophie is a lucky girl, actually, to have friends as patient as Amy and Matt. There were times in the book when I felt like telling her to get over it. The first-person narrative worked well, however, making it easier to understand what was going on in her head.

Self-harm has become known as the new anorexia among teenage girls. It has been estimated that one in ten girls in Australia is a self-harmer. Girls who feel they have no control over their lives may cut because that’s something they can control. Sophie does it as a form of release, or even a tribute, in the form of initials cut into her arm. It’s a major issue in this day and age and veteran Australian children’s and young adult writer Dianne Bates handles it well, in a readable and gripping book. The characters and storyline are believable. I believe Crossing the Line (Ford Street Publishing) will make it into classrooms, as it includes a lot of material for discussion.

Highly recommended.

Children’s Books: The Dangerous Alphabet by Neil Gaiman

If you think this is an actual alphabet book, even a quirky one, think again. It does use the letters of the alphabet, but only as an excuse for the 13 rhyming couplets that form a story. The letters aren’t even all in order and sometimes they’re rather strange. For example: “’L is, like ‘eaven, their last destination.” Indeed, there’s a warning at the start of the book: “The alphabet, as given in this publication, is not to be relied upon and has a dangerous flaw that an eagle-eyed reader may be able to discern.” And children are eagle-eyed with pictures. Just ask any child who has run an eye over Graeme Base’s Animalia or the Where’s Wally? books.

It’s a story, using the alphabet to hang on. Most of it is a “piratical ghost story,” starting with “A is for Always, that’s where we embark” in which two Victorian era children start on their adventure on a fish-shaped boat, accompanied by their pet gazelle. Gris Grimly’s deliciously scary illustrations really tell as much of the story as the words. Perhaps more. There are monsters, pirates, treasure, constant movement.

Like everything else that Neil Gaiman is involved with, The Dangerous Alphabet (HarperCollins) is great fun. It’s well worth reading with your child.

Children’s Books: The Equen Queen by Alyssa Brugman

With The Equen Queen, the second in the Quentaris spinoff series, Alyssa Brugman, best known for mainstream teen fiction, enters the children’s fantasy genre.

The city of Quentaris has been in flight for a while now, since being ripped from its home planet and sent spinning into the vortex. It’s in orbit around a new world and it’s not alone. In fact, sky cities are not especially unusual -- there is even an etiquette about greeting them.

Tab Vidler, heroine of the new series, has found her powers of mental communication disappearing, although they return during the course of the novel. But for the time being, she has no way of guessing what are the intentions of the other sky city. The people seem to be friendly enough, and willing to trade useful stuff in return for being taught children’s games. They also throw in thousands of “mood stones” they claim to have traded from another sky city, which they haven’t found much use, but which are pretty. Obviously, these are going to become significant. They also hand over a couple of “equen,” creatures from the planet below which look more or less like horses, but might have healing abilities.

Tab and her friends have adventures, find out the true intentions of the other city, try to handle a newly-hatched dragon which is very hungry, have trouble with those mood stones and find out the truth about the equen before the end of the book. It’s amazing how much happens in the course of a short 163 pages!

Jeremy Maitlnd-Smith’s lush cover and insert and Louise Prout’s delicate illustrations add considerably to the novel, though I can’t agree with her portrayal of Storm, head of the City Watch. Storm is supposed to be a policewoman and fighter, but is drawn with a Greek-style gown and high-piled hair. I always imagined her more as Xena, which the original description of her suggested. Oh, well. The rest of the illustrations are great, especially the dragon.

The original Quentaris novels were centred around a sort of junior Ankh-Morpork, with new characters in each book. For the new series, think Space: 1999 or Star Trek: Voyager. The city is going to arrive at a new world each time. There may be new characters, but since the city is flying through space, there won’t be too much room for anyone not already there, so the focus has been narrowed.

It will be interesting to see how the series proceeds.

Meanwhile, it’s well worth adding this new series to the old.

Children’s Books: Mahtab’s Story by Libby Gleeson

Since the Taliban’s harsh rule sent refugees fleeing Afghanistan, a new genre of fiction has arrived: the child refugee story. In North America, Deborah Ellis specializes in this genre. Several Australian writers have also been doing it, because refugees have arrived there in boats and ended up in detention centres. It’s a huge issue in Australia, where the would-be immigrants are often in these camps for months or even years before a decision is made about their status, and writers -- especially children’s writers -- make statements through fiction. Morris Gleitzman’s Boy Overboard and Girl Underground are particularly good examples.

Mahtab’s Story (Allen & Unwin) is the latest entry in this genre. Like most others of its kind, it is based on a true story, that of a girl the author met at a Sydney high school while researching the book. At least this author has the courtesy to name and thank the young woman whose story has inspired the book; some other writers don’t.

When twelve-year-old Mahtab’s family suffers under the Taliban, they leave their home in Herat. In Pakistan, after a terrifying journey, Mahtab’s father reluctantly decides that the family will be better off if he goes ahead to Australia to arrange things for them. After they have waited without contact for months, Mahtab, her mother, sister and brother decide to follow by boat, a journey that costs them all their money. When they reach Australia they are placed in a detention camp while their claims to refugee status are being investigated. They find help and friendship from the camp’s nurse, who teaches Mahtab English. But the waiting time is long -- and they always have on their minds the possibility that they will be sent back to the nightmare. And where is Dad?

This story is easy reading and well told, a good introduction for children to the refugee experience.

That said, I’d like to add that while all these stories are important, we have had others since Afghanistan. I haven’t yet come across any novels about the experience of African refugees coming to Australia. Their nightmares are just as real and they, too, have stories that need telliing. As a teacher working with African refugee teenagers, I’d like to see them told.

Children’s Books: Screw Loose by Chris Wheat

Screw Loose (Allen & Unwin) is a welcome sequel to Chris Wheat’s hilarious Looselips, which was published several years ago. The new book stands alone, though it helps to have read Looselips. Looselips was set in Melbourne, in a school beside the Yarra River, loosely based on Richmond Secondary College, which was a bone of contention when the new State Government shut it down in 1992 and it refused to close. Vistaview was a Richmond Secondary College that hadn’t been closed, with a multicultural student population, from Vietnamese boy Khiem, who lived in a poor neighborhood and was into crime, to Italian Angelo Tarano, who dreamed of becoming a football hero.

That crazy bunch of students from Vistaview Secondary College is back, loonier than ever. A year has gone by since the events of Looselips. The kids are in their second-last year of school. Other things have changed. Khiem is trying to go straight. Angelo is the newest recruit for the Hobart Cockatoos football team, but has had to pose nude for a football calendar and has been told to get rid of his beloved girlfriend, obsessive-compulsive Zeynep (she boils and irons shoelaces), and replace her with someone the club thinks more suitable. In this case, it’s Matilda Grey, who was brought up by dingoes and is now famous -- a cult figure in Japanese manga, the face of Dingoes’ Dinner dog food, whose pin-up boy is Inspector Rex. But Matilda is going out with Craig Ryan, whose father has moved in with the mother of bossy rich girl Chelsea Dean, who talks to her collection of Barbie dolls and wants to start a boys’ rowing team.

Georgia Delahunty has moved to Mary Magdalene Ladies’ College in hopes of finding a gay girlfriend, but also because she slapped the overly-PC principal at Vistaview when he “outed” her at a school assembly. Not that it does much good, because she slaps the principal of her new school too. Zeynep has been charged with terrorism after trying on a life preserver vest on a plane.

What a mess! But somehow it all sorts itself out at the inter-school social event organized by Chelsea and everyone, both straight and gay, gets a boyfriend or girlfriend. Even Chelsea!

Chris Wheat hasn’t lost his sense of the ridiculous, or his touch for humor. The book is deliciously silly and laugh-out-loud funny. It can only be hoped that there will be plenty more of the same from this author. Perhaps a new set of characters at Vistaview, once this bunch has graduated?

Children’s Books: Ironbark By Barry Jonsberg

Ironbark is Barry Jonsberg’s fourth novel. His first two, The Whole Trouble With Kiffo and the Pitbull and It’s not all about YOU, Calma! were set in Darwin, Australia, where he lives, and were centred around the life and crazy troubles of intelligent, smart-alec teenager Calma. Both books were laugh-out-loud funny, with suddenly shocking endings that weren’t funny at all, but they worked. In Dreamrider, the laughs stopped altogether. It was grim, but there was a twist at the end that readers had come to expect from a Jonsberg novel.

Ironbark also features a disturbed protagonist, though no sudden shock ending, this time. The young narrator, whose name we never discover, has a major problem. He suffers from something called IED -- Intermittent Explosive Disorder -- which means that every so often, he is subject to bouts of rage, during which he simply blanks out. When he wakes, he finds himself in the middle of a trail of destruction and, sometimes, injured people, with no memory of how it happened.

He’s been desperately trying to control his inner beast, terrified that sooner or later he’s going to kill someone -- maybe someone he cares about. After an explosion in a fast food joint in Melbourne, his wealthy father has paid for a psychiatric assessment of his condition, persuading the court that this is a medical disorder, not plain hooliganism. The hero knows that if he’d been poor, he wouldn’t have been spared prison.

As it is, he is put on probation, on condition that he spends time in Tasmania with his grandfather, who lives out in the bush. Presumably out there the young IED sufferer won’t have anything to smash, except maybe some trees. He is to keep a journal -- through which we gradually learn what happened -- and he is to report to the local policeman.

Despite the hero’s city-boy attitude, he and his grandfather soon bond and it turns out the hero enjoys cooking and loves to offer his grandfather new taste sensations. Unfortunately, the policeman, Richie, has decided to make the “hooligan’s” life miserable, harassing him every chance he gets and as the boy has thrown out his medication, it’s only a matter of time before he suffers an explosion. Trying to control his rage is an important part of finding himself.

Jonsberg’s books are always worth waiting for. A teacher himself, he has plenty of connection with teenagers and knows how they think. His language is usually right for the kind of people his characters are supposed to be. Calma uses a lot of long words, but she’s an intellectual. The hero of this book speaks in simpler language. Perhaps a few too many “yo”s and “dudes” but maybe Jonsberg’s students speak like that.

I do have a few nitpicks, though. The ending is sudden -- literally a cliffhanger -- though it is positive. However, there are a number of unanswered questions. For example, who sent the mysterious text message that saved the boy when he was lost, early in the novel? It’s implied, near the end, that it was Richie. Trouble is, he hasn’t actually met Richie when the message arrives and there is no cell phone signal where he sees it. And why is the man following him around in the bush anyway?

Still, it’s a good story, which should appeal to teenage boys.

Author Snapshot: Victoria Holmes

Victoria Holmes is one of the three writers known as Erin Hunter, a pen name Holmes and fellow children’s authors Kate Carey and Cherith Baldry dreamed up to avoid confusing readers with a platoon of author names on the front of their books.

Holmes tells us that two new titles in their popular “Warriors” series were launched in April: Power of Three Book Three: Outcast and the final part of the Graystripe manga trilogy, Warrior’s Return.

“In Outcast,” says Holmes, “our three young heroes -- Lionpaw, Hollypaw and Jaypaw -- travel far from the lake to the mountains, where they meet the Tribe of Rushing Water and find out that the Tribe’s ancestors hold a dark secret linking them more closely to the Clans than any cat imagined. In Warrior’s Return, Graystripe and Millie embark on the final part of their journey to find the Clans. And this time, it’s Millie’s kittypet origins that are needed more than Graystripe’s warrior skills to tackle their biggest challenge yet.”

Meanwhile, readers can be on the alert for Seekers: Book One, which has been screaming up the charts since its release just a few weeks ago. No big cats this time, though. In Seekers, three bears of different species find themselves thrust together in unexpected adventure.

All paws on board? Great: let’s meet Ms. Holmes.


A Snapshot of Victoria Holmes (one of the three writers known as Erin Hunter)...
Born: Berkshire, England
Resides: London, England
Birthday: July 17th
Web site: warriorcats.com


What’s on your nightstand?
A lamp, an alarm clock, a picture of my son Joshua when he was two and a half, and always, always, always a book.

What inspires you?
Anything that isn’t man-made.

What are you working on now?
Power of Three Book Five: Long Shadows; Seekers Book Three (which doesn’t have a title yet, but it might be called Smoke Mountains); a manga trilogy starring Ravenpaw and Barley, Warriors Field Guide: Code of the Clans, planning my wedding and redecorating my apartment.

Tell us about your process.
I use pen and paper to make copious notes on plot, character, dialogue and anything else that pops into my head during the early part of planning a book. Then I create a document on my computer and shuffle everything around until I have a rough outline of the story. Finally, I go through each part adding details until I know exactly what happens in each scene, how the conversations will go, what the characters are thinking, and how the story needs to be moved forward. Once I have all this planned out (usually taking up half the length of the final book), I send it to Kate Cary or Cherith Baldry, my co-writers, who write the script out in full. Once they’ve filled in all the gaps, they send the script to me for a final check to make sure it sounds consistently “Erin,” and then I deliver it to my editor in New York. Yay! I work regular office hours, and most weekends. Writing is a job, but it’s also a way of life.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
I’m in my hotel room in Los Angeles, with three hours to go before I speak on a panel about Writing for Tweens with Cornelia Funke and Rick Riordan. I woke at three am, quivering with nerves -- I just hope I’m not too star struck by my companions to say anything coherent! My hotel room is beautiful, way more glamorous than my apartment back home!

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I’ve always loved reading and writing stories -- and also poems, plays, newspaper articles, pretty much anything involving words. I grew up thinking it would be nice to have the chance to write a book one day; I never, ever dreamed I would be able to make a living by writing alone! I am the luckiest person in the world.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Lots of things! I love horses and dogs, and spent a year riding professionally just after graduating, so my alternative career would be training young horses and helping people with their dogs. I’m particularly interested in troubled animals who need to re-learn normal behavior and the ability to trust.

And if the weather was too cold and wet to be outside with animals, I’d bake cakes for a living. My specialty is chocolate brownies, yum.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
My first ever bookstore event at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Being able to work with nothing more than my imagination.

What’s the most difficult?
Having to rely on my imagination when it would rather be thinking about something else.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Where do you get your ideas?

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Please can I buy you a chocolate chip cookie?

What question would like never to be asked again?
Not so much a question, but someone at a school event once said: “The kids were so disappointed when I told them Erin Hunter doesn’t exist!” OH YES SHE DOES.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
My greatest ambition has always been to be a dancer but I’m too short and ungraceful.

Review: The Ice-Cream Man by Jenny Mounfield

Jenny Mounfield is fairly new to children’s and young adult fiction. The Ice-Cream Man (Ford Street) is only her third novel, though she also has a short story in Ford Street’s recent YA anthology Trust Me!. So far, she’s doing well.

The Ice-Cream Man is a thriller. The book suggests that it’s really not a good idea to play silly jokes on people, especially those you don’t know well. At the same time, it features a protagonist with cerebral palsy, who regards his wheelchair as a tool of independence and has no intention of swapping it for a walker, as his well-meaning parents want him to do. In fact, his friends can hardly keep up with him.

When Marty, Rick and Aaron miss the ice-cream van one hot summer day, they show their annoyance by harassing the driver as the van drives on down the streets of their small town.

Big mistake.

This is a small town, after all. People know each other. Someone knows who they are and where they live. Someone even knows the number of Marty’s new mobile phone, bought by his overanxious parents to make him reachable, since he won’t give up the wheelchair. And he hasn’t told anyone yet!

Aaron has his own problems with a bullying stepbrother. Rick’s problems are even worse. Dad has died recently and his mother has hit the bottle and the sleeping pills. The last thing he needs is to hear the music of an ice-cream van parked outside his home after midnight.

The police aren’t helpful, either, with no details of the stalker or the caller.

When Rick disappears, apparently kidnapped, it’s up to Marty and Aaron to find him -- but that means entering the ice-cream man’s lair...

The Ice-Cream Man is a great introduction to the thriller genre for children in early secondary or late primary school. It shows a fairly positive image of a disabled person, without preaching. Marty is in a wheelchair. It matters to his parents, but otherwise he just gets on with life. In fact, there are some things he can do in the chair that he couldn’t do on foot.

It might have worked better with a photographic cover than the cover illustration of an ice-cream van, though the back cover is a little scarier.

In my opinion, this book is, so far, the best novel published by new Australian children’s and young adult publisher Ford Street Publishing.

Jenny Mounfield, I believe, has a bright future writing for young people.

Children’s Books: The OK Team by Nick Place

Nick Place writes about serious issues and makes them hilarious, while still making his point. His first novel, The Kazillion Wish, featured two children making a wish for an “also-mum” to make their father happy after his divorce. The children -- who had very silly names -- were told they had to earn this wish and went off on a non-stop adventure with lots of silliness and fun.

The OK Team (Allen & Unwin), Place’s new novel, is themed around being happy with what you are and believing in yourself, but he tells it in laugh-out-loud style.

Thirteen-year-old Hazy Retina (again with the absurd names!) has a problem. When he’s frightened or stressed, he has a tendency to fall through walls or just disappear. His parents have become used to it, though his father has the irritating habit of trying to cheer him up with facts about freakish events worldwide. At school, he is teased as a freak. His only comfort is reading his superhero comics.

One night, he is visited by superhero Chameleon (Leon for short) who points out that his supposed disability is actually a power and that he is, in fact, a Hero himself -- Hero, Entry Level, Grade Two, to be precise -- and leaves him with a handbook and a remote control that will gain him access to a special Hero TV channel, which gives the information Heroes need to perform their good deeds against Villains (as opposed to villains). It’s suggested that new Heroes form teams rather than try to work alone.

In his first meeting with the Hero community, Hazy discovers that powers aren’t necessarily useful. They can range from speaking in Morse code to making all your food taste like boysenberry.

When Hazy -- with the new Hero name of Focus -- forms his Hero team, their superpowers don’t seem to be much use either. Beautiful Liarbird can’t tell the truth; her friends communicate by assuming she means the opposite of what she says. Cannonball can fly, but can’t choose his direction and tends to fly into walls. The Torch, grandson of a superhero, can make flames, but only from his index fingers -- not much use to the team, but useful to light villains’ cigarettes. Switchy is a shapechanger, who can change into anything from a crab to an iPod, complete with music, but can’t control it. In fact. he doesn’t actually know what he looks like in his normal body. Yesterday, the Girl Who can See Into The Past, is only with them because she’s Cannonball’s little sister and he has to babysit her.

After this team of klutzes has been defeated 14 times, including once by a bunch of aggressive ten-year-olds, they decide they need some coaching. Fortunately, Torch’s grandfather, whose single power isn’t much help to them, does have some connections in the superhero world and 94-year-old Mr. Fabulous (“You young punks wouldn’t have lasted 10 minutes back in my day.”) is soon on his way to Australia.

In the end, the young Heroes do find a use for their powers, when used together, and when Mr. Fabulous is kidnapped and the Earth is being threatened by a meteor, it’s up to the team to use their powers to find their mentor.

The novel is great fun, and manages to get across its message without hitting you on the head with it. There are many books around in which a bunch of “loser” types work together and succeed, but in this one it isn’t only the kids who need self-confidence, Golden Boy, Australia’s top superhero and Hazy’s hero, has never actually saved the world and is now the only one who can do it. He suddenly loses his confidence in himself -- that’s a huge meteor, what if he can’t do the job? Time is ticking by, and if a superhero can’t stop that meteor from hitting, who can?

The book should appeal to late primary children up to early secondary students and older students who are reluctant readers, especially those who have enjoyed the X-Men stories, though X-Men was never quite like this!

Grabenstein Crosses Over

A change is better than a rest, they say. Chris Grabenstein would know: three years ago, having at one time written television and radio commercials, he saw the publication of his first novel, Tilt a Whirl, on the day before his 50th birthday. That book brought Grabenstein an Anthony Award for Best First Novel. Two more mysteries -- Mad Mouse and Whack a Mole -- followed in 2006 and 2007, delighting a growing readership of folks who are currently looking forward to Grabenstein’s fourth novel featuring New Jersey coastal cop John Ceepak, Hell Hole, due out in August from St. Martin’s Minotaur.

A lot of writers would call that a full dance card. Not Grabenstein, though. The Crossroads, his first novel aimed at a younger audience, was published by Random House just last week.

The Crossroads is a ghost story featuring Zack Jennings, an 11-year-old who has just moved with his family to Connecticut, where he meets up with a haunted tree. On his Web site, Grabenstein explains how he hit on the idea for this particular tale (because kids don’t seem to be shy with that good old question, “Where do you get your ideas?”):

... I was jogging along a country road and saw a roadside memorial made out of a cross and a bucket of flowers nailed to a telephone pole and I wondered, “what if this spot on the road was haunted by the ghost of the person being memorialized here?” From that spark, came the other fifty thousand words in The Crossroads.

Nor will The Crossroads be a one-off. Grabenstein is currently at work on another book for 9- to 12-year-olds featuring these same characters: The Willowmeier. If this author stays true to form, his young fans won’t have long to wait.

Children’s Books: Solo by Alyssa Brugman

Mackenzie is attending a special wilderness camp being run for teenagers with problems. It’s not a brat camp or a punishment. Among the workshops and other activities, the camp offers its attendees the chance to spend 24 hours camping alone in the Australian bush: the Solo. Most of the teens have refused it. Mackenzie has accepted, for reasons that aren’t made clear, though by the end of Solo (Allen & Unwin), the reader understands why she needed that time to herself.

Most of the novel takes place in flashback, as Mackenzie sits by the river or in her tent, recalling all the events in her life that have led her to where she is now. This isn’t easy because, as Mackenzie herself admits, she’s a liar, who has been lying all her life, to her schoolmates -- who are first sympathetic and then angry as they find out -- and to herself. Eventually, most of the truth comes out, although the final part of it isn’t told till the last few pages, not to the reader but to a fellow camper who hadn’t opted for the Solo, but whom Mackenzie thinks would benefit from it, as she has.

By the end, we even understand why Mackenzie would find lying the best way to go, when we find out the tragedy that resulted from her telling the truth for once, to the wrong people; she has been blaming herself ever since.

Alone in the bush, with no distractions, Mackenzie is able to re-live her life, however traumatic the experience is. The ghosts of her past almost literally come back to haunt her, but she fights them and is eventually at peace with herself for something that wasn’t really her fault.

The book is a not-too-hard read in short chapters, though Mackenzie seems to know a lot of long words, maybe as a result of all that talking with counselors, and it has the sort of themes that teen readers like -- lots of angst, for starters -- and Mackenzie has every reason for feeling angst. After all, she has had a lot more to worry about than whether her schoolmates have been talking about her behind her back or whether that cute boy likes her. Homelessness, for example. The fact that nobody likes her, although the teachers and counselors at school are kind and helpful to her. The fact that her mother has kicked her out of the house and her father is gone.

Mackenzie is solo in more ways than the obvious.

My quibble with Solo is that the author built up a character, Callum, early in the book, and then he didn’t play any real role in the story. He was just there to trade deep secrets with Mackenzie in the last few pages of the book and be urged to have a go at the Solo. I’m guessing that girls who read the book will feel a little cheated.

Solo should appeal to older girls who like Maureen McCarthy or Margaret Clark’s grimmer stories.

Children’s Books: The World of Grrym: Allira’s Gift by Paul Collins and Danny Willis

When their grandfather, Fergus, disappears, Allira Hart and her brother Steven are taken to his Victorian country home by their father. Gerald Hart hasn’t seen much of his father for years and is angry with the old man for having wasted the family fortune on his crazy ideas. Like the castle. Niangula isn’t just a folly -- it’s a full-scale fortress which can be defended from the ravening hordes and it’s right in the middle of the Australian bush!

Of course, it turns out that there’s a good reason for having a fortress in the middle of the bush. Niangula is the gateway between two worlds and there are beings in the other world who would like to use it to invade.

Allira has strange powers. She has always known when something awful was going to happen -- and she has been hearing her grandfather’s voice in her head. He was, in fact, kidnapped by a bunch of troll mercenaries, who somehow managed to get past the defenses into our world and take him back into the world of Grrym, where he is the king. They did it on the orders of goblin Queen Morgassa, who had been overthrown by her subjects, with Fergus’ help, because of her tyranny.

The goblins loyal to Fergus want his granddaughter to take over and save them, since she is the only one in the family, after Fergus, to have the Sight. She is their Princess, as far as they are concerned, and has her own elite guard, even if they are so short that she has to sit down on the ground to talk to them properly. Of course, she protests that she wants to be an ordinary kid and anyway, she has to go to school, but comes good when needed.

The second half of the novel features a lot of fighting and sieges by the enemy armies as the action moves to Grrym, while at Niangula Steven is trying to find out what’s going on, family retainer Gardunk is having a hard time keeping control of Allira’s “g’loom,” a temporary illusion conjured up to replace her if Gerald returns from town, where he’s making arrangements for the children to go to school locally.

Who wouldn’t dream about being a Prince/Princess/Chosen One in another world, even if your subjects are a bunch of short, colorful pointy-eared beings? Children do. It has formed the basis of a lot of popular fiction and movies, from Star Wars to Harry Potter. As in the other stories of this genre, of course, the heroine protests that she doesn’t want to be royalty, she just wants to be an ordinary kid, but comes through when needed.

There’s enough action and humor in The World of Grrym (Five Mile Press) to keep young readers highly entertained, though the sequel had better come out quickly as the novel ends on a cliffhanger! The book is beautifully illustrated by co-author Danny Willis, whose pencil-drawn critters are reminiscent of Brian Froud in style. Despite all the goblins, trolls and giants taking part in the battles, the authors don’t forget that the story is centered around Australia. The scent of eucalyptus trees is strong, Australian animals wander about, the displaced Aboriginal spirit makes an appearance (hopefully to play a larger role in the next novel) and the bunyip plays his part in defending his home from otherworldly invaders.

This book should appeal to mid to late-primary school and early secondary students.

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall

It is not difficult to work out why Jeanne Birdsall’s Penderwicks have made such a strong impression on all who have encountered them. At a time when books for children can be incredibly complicated and sophisticated and packed full of moral and mental heavy lifting, it really seems as though Birdsall has just set out to tell a story in classic, old school-style. Kids everywhere seem relieved.

Birdsall’s debut novel, The Penderwicks, was published in 2005 to wide acclaim that would eventually include the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Fans of that book will be happy to see that the sequel, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (Knopf), possesses all the charm of the original.

The Penderwicks are now back from vacation and Mr. Penderwicks’ sister -- Skye, Batty, Jane and Rosaline’s Aunt Claire -- has come for a visit and not without an agenda: she declares that its time for their father to start dating again. The girls don’t agree, and wholesome high-jinx ensues.

H.I.V.E.: The Overlord Protocol by Mark Walden

In the first novel in this series, 13-year-old Otto Malpense found himself whisked off to the Higher Institute of Villainous Education after a major achievement in crime. H.I.V.E. was a sort of Hogwarts for young criminal geniuses, established to channel their abilities into skills that would let them become the sort of super-villains who sit surrounded by henchmen while stroking a white cat with a jeweled collar. Actually, at H.I.V.E. the cat with the jeweled collar is one of the teaching staff, a woman who got stuck in her cat’s body after an experiment intended to give her the grace and stalking abilities of a cat. The collar is to help her speak.

It was explained to the students that while they could commit crime by simple methods, the idea of this training was to help them do it with style. Otto made some friends: Wing Fanchu, whose parents had worked for the organization sponsoring the school, sweet Laura whose computer genius had been used to hack into the computers of the local American military base (she was only trying to find out what other girls at school were saying about her) and American girl Shelby who, at only 13, had already been an international jewel thief. There was a sort of Neville Longbottom character whose brilliance with plants nearly destroyed the school when a plant mutated and went on the rampage.

In H.I.V.E.: The Overlord Protocol, Wing is told his father has died and is allowed to go to Tokyo for the funeral, accompanied by Otto. This is, of course, only the beginning of a non-stop adventure in which something that Wing’s parents did in the past impacts on the present day. The benign school computer which had gone offline in the previous book, has been brought back, but with a new program that makes it completely unemotional. The school’s principal, Max Nero, remembers what happened the last time a computer had emotions -- the Overlord of the title.

The first book was mostly a romp, with plenty of humor and silliness. I mean, a school for villains, honestly -- including a henchman program! And a giant mutated plant stalking the school. However, despite the silly premise, in Overlord Protocol the H.I.V.E. world is starting to look a lot more grim.

The organization running H.I.V.E., known as Global League of Villainous Enterprises -- G.L.O.V.E. -- is split. Some of the members actually want to do evil take-over-the-world sort of stuff. In which case, why have an organization at all? But you don’t let down Number One, leader of the group, if you want a long life. It is at this point that we discover that Max Nero is starting to look oddly like Dumbledore. He loves his school and his students and quite frankly, he thinks the whole point of having G.L.O.V.E is to make sure that crime doesn’t get into take-over-the-world mode. He was there the day Overlord came online and was defeated by Number One. The trouble is, there are villains and villains in this novel’s world and some of them start to look like good guys. The entire story is centered around the lives and adventures of the villain community, with not a single outsider. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next book, now that Nero and his supporters are more or less good guys, while still thinking of themselves as villains!

H.I.V.E.: The Overlord Protocol is full of technology, gadgets and action. There are helicopters, martial arts and ninja robots. And in the end, Otto and his friends couldn’t save the day if they thought like good guys. But as villains go, they’re not likely to be sitting on thrones with cats to stroke either. You have to wonder how the author will manage this problem as the series goes on.

The Changing Face of History

When I was growing up in the 1960s, my father used to bring me all sorts of treasures of knowledge, from weekly magazines that built up into a multi-volume library (“Buy your binder today and get a free index!”) to gorgeous single-volume encyclopedias with paintings of planets and cavemen and dinosaurs striding through tropical jungles. Children have always liked true stories when interestingly presented, whether it’s books about dinosaurs or the Guinness Book of Records. That doesn’t change.

Opening History: The Definitive Visual Guide from the Dawn of Civilization to the Present Day (Dorling Kindersley Books) took me right back to my childhood, except that in those days there were far more paintings than photos. Unlike the books that excited me so much, this one is about human history; there’s no artist’s impression of the Big Bang, say, or of dinosaurs and mostly, cavemen are represented by photos of skulls, tools and fires, with the beautiful cave art of Lascaux to demonstrate communication.

The book is laid out in a combination of themes, including “Rulers and Hierarchies,” “Warriors, Travelers and Inventors” and “Population and Power.” There are timelines, both in the course of the book and at the end, which is a set of national histories, from North and Central America to Oceania.

History includes all the usual stuff: ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, mediaeval Europe, the Industrial Revolution, France and the World Wars. It also offers information about mediaeval Korea, Polynesian expansion, the ancient African states and 17th century Japan, among other things. It extends from the first creatures that might be considered human ancestors to the present problems of climate change and world health.

The world has changed since those books of my childhood were published; the contents of this book show that. History recognizes that the world is a much bigger place than Western publishers and teachers were admitting back then: an irony, in these days of globalization.

Right Book, Right Time by Agnes Nieuwenhuizen

For many years, before her retirement, the name of Agnes Nieuwenhuizen was synonymous with with children’s and YA literature in Australia. Nobody else did so much to promote writing for young people. She arranged traveling writers’ gigs, “Booktalker” sessions aimed at teenagers during the day and interested adults in the evening. In these, writers and illustrators talked about their work and answered questions and new books were promoted. All of these continue after her retirement, through the Melbourne-based Centre for Youth Literature, as do the biennial Reading Matters conferences, which are writers’ festivals centered around books for children and young adults.

What Agnes Nieuwenhuizen doesn’t know about books for young people is probably not worth knowing and some years ago she produced a good books guide to the field. Now, she has produced a new guide, Right Book, Right Time: 500 Great Reads for Teenagers (Allen & Unwin) which includes books in many different genres and has a handy index at the end if you want to look up something specific.

Not all of Right Book, Right Time was written by Agnes Nieuwenhuizen. The section on translation is by her husband, John, who has himself translated several books from the Dutch. Allen and Unwin publisher Erica Wagner wrote the section on graphic novels. Other sections are written by specialists in the particular genre and one each were written by Lili Wilkinson and Mike Shuttleworth, who have continued the program at the Centre for Youth Literature.

This is not a book to read from cover to cover, but good to browse if you love books for young people, to see which of your favorites is represented. It’s also a handy selection tool if you work in a school or local library; I found quite a few books I hadn’t encountered and this will be going on my workroom shelf.

To be honest, not all the books included are ones I would have chosen and there were some choices with which I disagreed, but each to their own, and it’s a good spread. Whether you’re a parent looking for ideas, a teacher-librarian or just someone who likes kids’ books, this one is well worth having.

M Is for Magic by Neil Gaiman

Even if you’ve never read any of Neil Gaiman’s delightful fiction, you might have seen the film adaptation of Stardust, which did justice to the novel and has been compared to The Princess Bride.

M Is for Magic (HarperCollins) is a collection of mostly previously published short stories aimed at younger readers -- teenagers, really, rather than children, as the style of most of them is closer to adult than child. Four of the stories were published in the anthology Smoke and Mirrors. Others were also previously published. One of them is a chapter from a forthcoming novel.

In an introduction, the author explains the title as having been inspired by Ray Bradbury’s younger-reader anthologies, which had such names as R Is For Rocket and S Is For Space. This is appropriate because a number of the stories have a definite flavour of Bradbury. One of them, “October in the Chair,” is actually dedicated to Bradbury, but “The Witch’s Headstone,” which is the chapter from Gaiman’s forthcoming novel, The Graveyard Book, has the feel of Bradbury’s stories about the Family. In it, a young boy has been brought up and taught in a graveyard by ghosts and even a vampire. The stories range from the scary, such as “The Price,” in which the family cat has been fighting the Devil to protect his owners, to the deliciously silly, such as “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” in which two inexperienced teenage boys turn up at the wrong party only to find out that all the girls there actually do come from another planet. There’s “Chivalry,” from Smoke and Mirrors, in which an old lady finds the Holy Grail in a second-hand shop. A young knight comes to ask for its return, but it looks so nice on the mantelpiece…

If you want an introduction to the short fiction of Neil Gaiman, this is a good place to start, and teens or children who are good readers should find it enjoyable.

Children’s Books: “Girlfriend Fiction” 3 & 4

The first two books in Allen & Unwin’s “Girlfriend series,” My Life and Other Catastrophes by Rowena Mohr and The Indigo Girls by Penni Russon, were perfectly good teen fiction that would have worked without those hearts on the covers. The new books are more like the kind of fiction the covers suggest, except that things happen in them that you would never have found in fiction aimed at very young women and older girls back in the 1980s: especially Kate Constable’s Always Mackenzie.

She’s With The Band by Georgia Clark is the story of Mia Mannix. Mia has moved to Sydney from the small Snowy Mountains town where she had lived with her father, a famous artist. She has promised him faithfully to drop the music and concentrate on her art, in exchange for the move. Of course, she doesn’t keep the promise for long. Not with a battle of the bands and two new friends. After all, she’s at a school for the arts, like the one in Fame, except nearly everyone is snooty and unpleasant, all of them wealthy because they or their parents are famous.

And there are boys. A few pages in, we meet the boy who is clearly going to be the one Mia ends up with, but she spends the book picking the wrong boys. Needless to say, it’s happily ever after and she learns her lesson. This book reads like a teen soap, which is fair enough since the author works for a popular Australian teen soapie, so it will probably do well. Girls will like it, though it has a gay character, something that tells you this is the 21st century and teen fiction has changed. Teenagers haven’t, though; “That’s so gay,” is still an insult in most schools.

Always Mackenzie, by fantasy writer Kate Constable, starts as a standard teen friendship story. Girls will understand it because their own lives are full of friends and enemies and wondering why your friend has suddenly stopped talking to you... Nerdy Jem meets popular Mackenzie Woodrow at camp. They make friends. Jem is gradually losing touch with her closest friends, for reasons unconnected with Mackenzie.

Jem finds joy in her new friendship. And then, suddenly, Mackenzie stops talking to her, for no reason she can fathom, and those bitchy girls with whom Mackenzie hangs out become even bitchier.

Well, there’s a kiss on the last page all right, but not the kind teenage girls generally expect in a book with hearts on the cover. Whether this will appeal to the average girl or embarrass her I don’t know. There’s a lot of truth in all that girl angst in the course of the book, but what readers will think of the ending, I’m not sure. Kate Constable is a brave woman -- but this is the 21st century, after all. We can only wish her well.

Children’s Books: Sunny Side Up by Marion Roberts

Sunny Side Up (Allen & Unwin) is Marion Roberts’ first novel. It is gentle and humorous and sad all at once. For me, personally, it has the added pleasure of being set in the Melbourne suburb where I live. I recognize the places described and can assure you that they’re real, as are some of the shops mentioned.

Eleven-year-old Sunday -- mostly known as “Sunny” -- lives with her mother and their dog Willow in a seaside suburb of Melbourne. Every Friday, she and her friend Claud -- short for Claudia -- make pizza and deliver it to regular customers. Not just any pizza, of course -- gourmet pizza! Their business, Pizza-A-Go-Girl, is doing well and has just expanded to include deliveries to the uncle of that awful Buster Conroy.

Now Claud seems to be making friends with Buster, Sunny’s mother has announced that her boyfriend and his children are moving in (Ouch! Brady Bunch stuff!) and Mum still won’t tell her why she isn’t talking to her own mother, Granny Carmelene, who has just sent her first Christmas gift in years.

With all the other stuff happening, Sunny decides to visit her grandmother and, hopefully, discover what’s going on. She doesn’t find out immediately, but she does find out why Granny Carmelene has made contact after all these years and it’s rather poignant. By the end of the book, we find out Buster’s problems and he becomes another friend.

This is well worth a read and should suit children in late primary school or early secondary. Marion Roberts should do very well as a children’s writer and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Review: Diego’s Pride by Deborah Ellis

Today in January Magazine’s children’s book section, contributing editor Sue Bursztynski reviews Diego’s Pride by Deborah Ellis. Says Bursztynski:

Deborah Ellis specializes in novels about children in the world’s trouble spots. For example, one of her early novels, Parvana, was about a girl trying to cope with life in Afghanistan just after the Taliban takeover. It was successful and the first of a trilogy.

Diego’s Pride, set in Bolivia in the early 2000s, is also part of a series, the sequel to Diego, Run! I haven’t read the first book, but had no problem following this one. It begins with a “story so far” and then just gets on with the current tale. Quite often, there is a reference to what happened in the previous book, but you don’t have to have read that one to understand the action. There is a handy glossary at the end of the Diego’s Pride, but you can generally work out roughly what the words mean.

The full review is here.

Review: Airman by Eoin Colfer

Today in January Magazine’s children’s book section, contributing editor Sue Bursztynski reviews Airman by Eoin Colfer. Says Bursztynski:

Eoin Colfer is best known for the Artemis Fowl series, those novels centered around a young Irish genius who burst on the scene by kidnapping a fairy for ransom and who has had several adventures since then.

In Airman, he ventures into Jules Verne territory, with some touches of The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s a breathless, non-stop adventure.

Conor Broekhart was born in a balloon as it was shot down at the Paris World Fair in 1878. This is only the start of his love for flying. He lives with his parents in the miniature kingdom of the Saltee Islands, somewhere between Britain, Ireland and France. The Islands were given to an ambitious knight, Raymond Trudeau, by British King Henry II, to keep his mind off his own kingdom. The place had no natural resources, until diamonds were discovered on the smaller island of the Saltees. The mines have kept the place going for centuries and provided a place to send convicts.

The full review is here.

New Next Week: Someday When My Cat Can Talk by Caroline Lazo

Someday When My Cat Can Talk (Schwartz & Wade) is one of those children’s books that are so beautiful, they make a lasting impression. This is due in no small part to the award-winning duo who wrote and illustrated the book. Caroline Lazo’s books for children have included F. Scott Fitzgerald: Voice of the Jazz Age which was a Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book. Illustrator Kyrsten Brooker’s many books have won armloads of awards including an ALA Notable Book (for Precious and the Boo Hag), a School Library Journal of the Year Award (for Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street) and many others.

What those books have and have not done doesn’t matter: Someday When My Cat Can Talk stands alone. This is one of those children’s picture books where you know all elements are working as soon as you touch it. Dig in a bit further and there’s just no looking back.

By itself, the story is engaging. A little girl’s cat has a secret life no one else knows about or can hope to understand. He travels the world, enjoying everything that a globe-trotting kitty might expect to enjoy, then comes home and doesn’t tell his young mistress about his adventures because -- of course -- cats can’t talk.

It’s a sweet and charming story, told in enchanting rhyme. The book even includes a brief but sharp section called “Facts Behind the Story” for readers intrigued by the fun locations who want to learn just a little bit more. Brooker’s skillfully whimsical paintings with strong elements of collage steal the spotlight, though.

Someday When My Cat Can Talk is a lovely book, sure to delight young children, as well as collectors of this type of work.

Understanding Mommy’s Brazilian Butt Lift

This is not a book we’ve seen (and, please: that’s not a hint. We don’t want it) but today in the LA Times blog, trendspotter Monica Corcoran writes about My Beautiful Mommy (Big Tent Books), a book intended to help kids deal with their mother’s plastic surgery:

Now, there's a book called My Beautiful Mommy written by plastic surgeon, Dr. Michael Salzhauer. It's aimed at helping confused kids understand why Mommy got a new nose and higher cheekbones and a smaller butt and a bigger chest and...

Already, the book is being skewered and it looks pretty horrific from the cover.

And I guess having it be mommy specific might have been a business decision. Could My Dashing Daddy be very far behind?

Corcoran has another idea for a sequel, though: “Maybe the next book should be titled: Mommy Spent My College Money on Lipo.”

Corcoran’s full piece is here.

Review: Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp by Odo Hirsch

Today in January Magazine’s children’s book section, Sue Bursztynski looks at Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp by Odo Hirsch. Says Bursztynski:

Odo Hirsch’s books range from the Bartlett adventures, set in a sort of 18th century Europe, with imaginary countries, to the Hazel Green novels, centered around a block of flats in an imaginary city in an unnamed country, and the children who live there.

Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp is closer to Hazel Green than Bartlett, but is different again. The Hazel Green tales usually have a bit of adventure and a bit of mystery and a moral. This novel is fairly strong on the moral, with some mystery and no actual adventure.

The full review is here.

Review: Michael Sweeney’s Method by Sean Condon

Today, in January Magazine’s children’s book section, contributing editor Sue Bursztynski reviews Michael Sweeney’s Method by Sean Condon. Says Bursztynski:

Michael Sweeney and his friend Dud attend an expensive private school in a wealthy suburb, although they come from a less wealthy area. They aren’t in the “loser” bunch, but aren’t at the top, either; that’s reserved for the rich, cool kids. Michael has never been in trouble at school and actually enjoys most of his studies.

It is their final year of high school. Michael’s decision that they will be kind to the new student, an American boy who doesn’t seem to have made any friends in the first few weeks of school, changes their lives. Tom is friendly and lively and his attitude to life is different from theirs -- different enough to get them all into trouble. He also turns out to be the son of a famous American actor, in Australia for a year to make a film. Nobody has taken an interest in him because the family name has been changed for school purposes, precisely to keep away the hangers-on and the press.

The full review is here.

New Today: Pale Male by Janet Schulman

I can’t think of another wildlife story that has captured the hearts and imaginations of New Yorkers in quite the same way. Since the red-tailed hawk known as Pale Male started squatting on a posh Fifth Avenue apartment building with a series of partners and their offspring in the early 1990s the story has reached epic proportions. Pale Male’s story has all of the elements of a good hero’s tale. Pale Male has had to overcome incredible adversary -- and nasty co-op boards -- in order to get the simple things that we all want: a quiet haven, a comfy nest and, occasionally, an unsuspecting pigeon or maybe a nice, fat squirrel. Viewed from that angle, it seems inevitable that the legend and the poetry that have accompanied Pale Male’s rising fame should inspire a book. Or three.

New today is Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City (Knopf Delacorte Dell). Author Janet Schulman brings obvious passion and a great deal of knowledge to her telling, but it strikes me that the quasi journalistic tone she’s taken here might have been better served by a different presentation. Young readers who persevere will learn an awful lot about Pale Male, his challenges, calamities and triumphs, however Meilo So’s watercolor illustrations leave one expecting a very different sort of book. The paintings, while certainly competent, are also somewhat vapid. I find it difficult to imagine the child who would be captivated by what they see in this book. Schulman’s well-researched and organized material might have been better served by photo-based illustrations or even something a little less amorphous than what we find here. As it is, the package presents a somewhat confusing message, one I’m not sure the younger children in the book’s ages six-to-12 year readership will understand, or that the older ones will sit still to listen to.

Still, of the three children’s books published on this topic in the last 12 months, Schulman’s is by far the strongest editorially. If you want the Pale Male’s tale with all the nuances intact, this is the place to look.

Children’s Book Art Finds Way to Collector’s Hearts

Anyone who has ever looked closely at illustrated children’s books will likely not be surprised to hear that the world at large is finally catching on and the market for the stuff is growing. AP reports:

Once seen as fun but forgettable, the genre is now being featured in mainstream museums and dissected in college art courses.

And as respect for children’s book art grows, the money follows: Buyers are purchasing the illustrations as investments and philanthropists are stepping up.

And though the genre is gaining respect, it’s not yet on an even footing with other types of art, and perhaps never will be.

“I can’t say we’re viewing it quite the way we’re viewing Monets, but I do think there’s been more attention and focus on this,” said Jean Sousa, the Art Institute of Chicago’s director of interpretive exhibits and family programs.

“It’s a distinct entity. It doesn't have to compete with the Monets of the world because it has its own special value as art,” she said.

Would-be collector’s might want to take note: growing interest in children’s book illustrations as well as the establishment of museums like Amherst’s Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and Ohio’s Mazza Museum of International Art from Picture Books at the University of Findlay are contributing to the artform’s market and collectibility. It’s a trend that began a couple of decades ago.

Renewed respect for children’s book illustrations started appearing in the early 1980s, led by Japanese museums that displayed the pieces on par with raku pottery, traditional calligraphy and other undisputedly important art forms.

The past decade has seen a burst of U.S. museum displays and the growth of facilities to preserve and show it, including the Carle’s establishment in Amherst.

Many say the art will have long-term appeal because it crosses generations, introducing children to art and museums while sparking warm memories for adults.

The full AP piece is here.