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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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