Children's and Young Adult Books
Mike Shuttleworth reviews 'Becoming Kirrali Lewis' by Jane Harrison
While Becoming Kirrali Lewis is being marketed as a Young Adult novel, this big-hearted Australian story could fruit-fully be read in many other ways. Playwright Jane Harrison's début novel about a young indigenous woman's political and personal awakening could be labelled as historical fiction, indigenous writing, or even political fiction. Maureen McCart ...
Ruth Starke reviews 'Pieces of Sky' by Trinity Doyle, 'The Pause' by John Larkin, 'Frankie and Joely' by Nova Weetman, and 'Talk Under Water' by Kathryn Lomer
In Trinity Doyle's Pieces of Sky (Allen & Unwin, $16.99 pb, 290 pp, 9781760112486), it has been eight weeks since Lucy's older brother Cam drowned while surfing. Images of his death fill her head and prevent Lucy, a backstroke champion, from returning to the pool. She suffers a panic attack and flees from a training session, unable or unwilling to expla ...
The pleasures of looking at pictures from a young age inspired Albert Ullin. At the opening of this exhibition to mark his donation of eighty works by Australian children’s book illustrators to National Gallery of Victoria, he expressed the hope that they would be recognised as mainstream art.
My postgraduate student frowned. ‘The Gathering? Isn’t that the one where someone sets a dog on fire?’ Spoiler alert: indeed it is. It is the book’s most memorable scene; it is certainly the most horrific. My postgrad had read Isobelle Carmody’s 1993 novel in high school and that was the first memory of it which surfaced. The scene shocked readers a ...
Mike Shuttleworth reviews 'The Flywheel' by Erin Gough, 'A Small Madness' by Dianne Touchell, and 'For the Forest of a Bird' by Sue Saliba
Publishers Hardie Grant Egmont established The Ampersand Project in 2011 as a platform for new writing. Erin Gough’s suburban drama/comedy The Flywheel ($19.95 pb, 306 pp, 9781742978178) is the second book to appear under the Ampersand banner. It is a contemporary slice-of-life tale painted with broad comedic strokes. Set in Sydney’s inner-west, the novel ...
Garth Nix’s Sabriel (1995) remains a high water mark for Young Adult fantasy. With its strong-willed heroine and distinctive setting, which mingled wizardry and necromancy with industrial-era technology, the novel found a devoted following and influenced a generation of fantasy authors.
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Lucy Lam is a studious pupil at a multicultural Melbourne Catholic school. Her mother minds the baby at home and sews high-end chain store clothing in the garage, while her father toils at a hazardous carpet factory. With dreams of following a different path, Lucy sits an exam for Laurinda, an exclusive ladies’ college, and is awarded the inaugural Equal Access sc ...
Ruth Starke reviews 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants' by Mark Rafidi
‘When I think about picture books,’ writes Mark Rafidi in the first line of his foreword, ‘the words of the young girl in David Legge’s Bamboozled strikes [sic] me immediately.’ What strikes me immediately is that Standing on the Shoulders of Giants is a book that hasn’t been properly edited. By the time I reached the final page I wondered ...
Following the success of her first novel, Claire Zorn displays her remarkable talent again in The Protected. Although the books are vastly different (The Sky So Heavy [2013] is a futuristic survival thriller, while The Protected is a coming-of-age story coloured by grief), thematically they have many similarities. Zorn is adept at exploring the challenges and complexities of growing up, and the fallibility of adults.
... (read more)Christine Nicholls reviews a number of Australian children's titles
A relatively unusual occurrence until recently, the publication of a plethora of new Australian Aboriginal-authored and/or Aboriginal-themed children’s books has begun transforming the Australian publishing landscape. A number of these books, like Rhoda Lalara and Alfred Lalara’s charmingly evocative Yirruwa Yirrilikenuma-langwa (When We Go Walkabout: Allen & Unwin, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781743314562), are rendered bilingually, in the latter case in Anindilyakwa, the mother tongue of the majority of Groote Eylandt residents, as well as in English.
... (read more)