Young Adult Fiction
Jessica Au’s first novel, Cargo, is an arresting look at what it means to be young.
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Beatrice May Ross (Bee) is a list-maker, an amateur detective, a taxidermy assistant, and a regular teenage girl. She falls in love, fights with her best friend, and hates her mother’s new boyfriend, like plenty of adolescents. But she does so while stitching together a dead koala and trying to solve the ever-developing mystery surrounding the death of her mentor.
... (read more)The birth of Tom Downs on the banks of the Murray River in South Australia tragically coincided with the death of his mother. His premature arrival – in the breech position – subsequently informs how his life is played out.
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Sixteen-year-old Jemima (Mim) Dodd lives in a dilapidated house on the edge of suburbia, with an overweight, couch-loving mother. Mim’s two elder half-brothers are in remand for drug-related offences, and she is struggling not to be sucked into her neighbourhood’s vortex of sex, crime, and violence. Mim seems to be a victim both of her hostile social environment and her dysfunctional family ...
Stephen Mansfield reviews 'The Dead I Know' by Scot Gardner and 'The Comet Box' by Adrian Stirling
The way nostalgia works, according to theorists, is that we pine for the era just before our own. This may be why the twenty-something musicians of today mine the sounds of the 1980s. But does this pattern succeed in Young Adult fiction? What does an author gain by setting his or her story in the ‘nostalgia zone’ of potential readers?
... (read more)Pam Macintyre reviews 'Taj and the Great Camel Trek' by Rosanne Hawke
To make Ernest Giles’s trek across the scrub and desert of southern Australia interesting to younger readers, relate it through the eyes of a young protagonist. It was an inspired choice to invent Taj, twelve-year-old son of the historical figure Saleh Mohamed, Afghan cameleer, and an equally inspired choice to invent Taj’s beloved young camel, Mustara. The love and respect between camel and boy lie at the heart of the novel, and symbolise the expedition’s ultimate success.
... (read more)Damon Styles keeps a list of those who have crossed him. In a small, bully-rich town like Strathven, there are a lot of them. Damon has a plan, though, and getting his gun licence is only part of it. Next he needs to get a job with the Pigman. Nobody really knows the latter. He is foreign, shoots pigs, and keeps to himself, which is quite enough to fuel rumours in Strathven. Damon knows that th ...
Mike Shuttleworth reviews 'Slice: Juicy Moments from My Impossible Life' by Steven Herrick
Jewel Valentine saves Sacha Thomas when she pulls him, unconscious, from a lake. Girl resuscitates boy, and, for better or worse, their fates are sealed. Jewel and Sacha’s voices intertwine throughout this beguiling début novel from Steph Bowe. Written when she was just thirteen, Bowe takes the teen romance genre and gives it an edge. Here is a journey to first love between an enigmatic girl ...
When Tessa wakes up in hospital, she has no idea who she is or how she came to be there. The only clues are the ‘long, thin, striping slashes’ scarring her back. With no way of knowing who or where her family is, Tessa is sent to Cascade Falls College, an exclusive girls’ boarding school on the outskirts of Hobart. She befriends the ‘untouchables’, a group of quirky scholarship studen ...