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I heard about Black Spring (Walker Books), a work of fantasy inspired by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, at the Reading Matters Conference, where the author spoke, and decided to give it a go. I read Wuthering Heights for school and was curious to see what…
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing: a girl on a yacht with her super-rich banker father; a chance for the family to heal after a turbulent time; the peaceful sea, the warm sun . . . But a nightmare is about to explode as…
Though best known for her children’s books, Kate Forsyth has now written two adult novels in a row on fairy tale themes. Bitter Greens (on this year’s Aurealis and Ditmars lists, the Australian awards for speculative fiction) was about the young woman who wrote a version of…
In Blood Storm (Random House Australia) Princess Zeraphina and Rodden, the King’s right-hand man, are both “harmings,” a kind of vampire who isn’t actually undead, but does need blood; it doesn’t have to be human and they make the most of small…
In the Beech Forest (Ford Street) is not the kind of picture book you read to your five-year-old. It’s aimed at an older age group, around ten upwards. If you can bring yourself to part with the book, you can give it…
If, like me, you’ve grown up on Celtic folk tales, you’ll be familiar with the story of the human male who gets himself an otherworldly bride. With a few exceptions, it’s really only in modern YA paranormals that it’s the other way…
The Outcasts, which is book one of the Brotherband Chronicles, is a spinoff from John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series, through which I’m currently making my delighted way. I admit I had only read the first book in that series, The Ruins Of…
In Burn Bright, Retra, a girl from the Puritan-like Seal community in Grave, followed her runaway brother to the island of Ixion. On Ixion, where teenagers party throughout the night (there is no day) she discovered some terrifying truths about what happened…
The year is 1666. The hero: Jakob, a teenage member of the Hexenjager, a German military witch and demon hunter organization. Jakob has been a member for only about a month when, one night in a cemetery, investigating something fishy involving exhumed…
In Kate Constable’s Crow Country (Allen and Unwin), Sadie and her mother have moved from their lovely Melbourne home by the sea to Boort, her mother’s home town in regional Victoria, where there is a drought. Boort has a history, both for…