Aurora Rising

In recent years, science fiction hasn’t been a genre I’ve read a lot – though many many years ago authors like Stephen Donaldson and Douglas Adams were favourites. ‘The Martian’ by Andy Weir would have been the most recent sci-fi I have read. Thus, re-entering the genre was interesting.

‘Aurora Rising’ was a great re-introduction. It begins with A-grade student, Tyler Jones, missing his opportunity to hand-select the best of the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy for his team. Distracted by a girl he’s just rescued from interdimensional space, his team is thus composed of the leftovers – supposed misfits. Then, their first assigned ‘mission’ as graduates becomes complicated by Aurora’s presence.

Set in 2380, it mixes 7 different characters together in a venture to find a prohibited colony/planet with the purpose behind Auri’s rescue. The mix is both clever and fun, as each one reveals differing skills and personalities.

Tyler is the Goldenboy, the leader. His twin sister, Scarlett, is both clever and charming at the right times. Alien, Cal, provides valuable universal insights and protections for the group, while Finian’s technological talents get the group in and out of many hairy situations. With support also from ace pilot Cat, and silent but strong Zila, a careful observer, the chosen team is rounded out.

Rescued Irish/Chinese, Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley (Auri for short) becomes the focus of much of their journey when it becomes clear that she is more than a 200-year-old teenager awoken from cryogenic sleep. Her extreme psychokinetic powers are gradually revealed, as the team seek the real purpose of the journey they were first assigned out of the Academy. Just as well, as it seems there are others in the galaxy who have dire plans for them all – destruction, obliteration!

Screengrab of Tyler from: http://amiekaufman.com/extras/

As well as having sci-fi elements, ‘Aurora Rising’ has great connections between the misfit team, wisecracking interactions among them, and some intriguing love/hate interests along the way. Almost like a sci-fi rom-com!

After reading ‘Aurora Rising’, those who are fans of co-authors Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (also through the Illuminae Files) will be ready for the next book in the Aurora series (Aurora Burning) due for release in May 2020. There was also news on Jay Kristoff’s website that Aurora Rising going to be adapted for television. Amie Kaufman also has a website where you can download some great images of the team, along with lots of other information on writing the Aurora series.

Are you ready to see how MGM will portray each of the team? Make sure you read the book(s) first!

# Already recognised as a New York Times bestseller, Aurora Rising is nominated for the 2020 Indie YA awards shortlist.

## Available as an ebook.

It Sounded Better in my Head

It’s Easy Being Teen. Right? Not always…

Natalie has never been one of the beautiful girls at school, and for much of her teen years has suffered with chronic acne – which has caused her to be very withdrawn. Fortunately, she does have 2 close friends (Zac and Lucy) and so she looks ahead to sharing her post-school future with them.

As they await their Year 12 results, all things seem to unravel when Natalie (who tells her story) is faced with the news of her parents impending divorce. At the same time, she begins to feel like the third wheel when Zac and Lucy ‘hook up’, adding another layer of angst for Natalie.

Natalie voices a lot of her problems – but in her head – she doesn’t say them out loud. We know how she’s feeling and what she would like to say, but she lacks the confidence to follow through. This, of course, leads her to some places and situations where she would rather not be.

There are other relationships for Natalie to negotiate in this, the last summer before university, when she experiences a number of firsts. She tries to rise above her personal insecurities, while her safe world crumbles around her…

Filled with authentic characterisation, this is a great debut novel from Nina Kenwood, and has already won the 2018 Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing. It is also one of the nominees for the 2020 Young Adult Indy Awards.

* Do any of Natalie’s thoughts echo what you have sometimes thought or experienced?

** Can reading help us to empathise with others who may live different lives to our own?

*** Here’s Nina’s website – all very new.

**** Available as an ebook.

Indie awards 2020 – YA shortlist

It’s that time of year again, when Australian independent booksellers will vote on a shortlist of new books in six categories – Fiction, Debut Fiction, Non-Fiction, Illustrated Non-Fiction, Children’s books (up to 12yo) and Young Adult (12+). The shortlist has been chosen by a panel of independent booksellers, and soon all other independent booksellers will vote to determine the ultimate winner in each category.

2020 Shortlist for YA books

This year’s list for Young Adult fiction includes:

  • The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling by Wai Chim
  • Aurora Rising: The Aurora Cycle 1 by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
  • It Sounded Better in My Head by Nina Kenwood
  • Monuments by Will Kostakis

Since these titles represent a range of genre and themes (Australian stories, family stories, friendship, mental illness, fantasy, science fiction), there is something to appeal to a range of readers. Which one appeals to you? Can you guess which book is which genre from the title or cover?

It would be a good time to get along to your local bookshop for copies of any of these (or suggest these titles to your local and school libraries). Will you read any of them before the announcement of the winners on Monday 23 March 2020 to make your choice?

Check out all the shortlisted titles for other readers, as you may like to make recommendations for your younger siblings, your parents and their friends:

Indie Awards Shortlist 2020 (‘Wearing Paper Dresses’ has my vote in the Fiction category)

Indie Awards Longlist 2020 – first announced in December

Indie awards – 2019

Each year, Australian Independent Booksellers (aka your local bookshop) select what they consider to be the best new books. With quite a few categories, this also includes a section for Children and Young Adult. Here is the shortlist for these sections:

1. Children’s Category

2. Young Adult Category

You can help guide their choices by entering the competition to win all 24 nominated books at www.indies.com.au/shortlistcomp before March 17. Imagine that! Better check out your library (school or local) to get your hands on these titles.

Will it be another win for Jessica Townsend (author of Nevermoor)? Which of the YA books do you prefer? Winners are announced on March 18.

You can view other nominated titles, like ‘Boy Swallows the Universe’ (perhaps a popular choice?) at the Indies website. Have a look at the titles you missed from last year – or have they already caught your eye? (like 2018 NF winner ‘Saga Land’).

Indie Awards 2016

Each year, the Independent Booksellers select an array of Australian books for recognition. Often these books receive applause further afield, and so the shortlist proves to be a great point, for readers young and old, to select from. Previous winners include Anh Doh, Tim Winton, Richard Flanagan and Craig Silvey (with ‘Jasper Jones’ soon to be released as a movie).

This year’s shortlists (released last week) include:

LEB Indie Shortlist 2016 tiled web banner_1.indd

CHILDREN’S SHORTLIST
Olive of Groves by Katrina Nannestad & Lucia Masciullo, Illus (ABC Books, HarperCollins Australia)
The 65-Storey Treehouse by Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton, Illus (Pan Macmillan Australia)
The Bad Guys, Episode 1 by Aaron Blabey (Scholastic Australia)
*The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan (Allen & Unwin)

YOUNG ADULT SHORTLIST
*Cloudwish by Fiona Wood (Macmillan Australia)
Prince of Afghanistan by Louis Nowra (Allen & Unwin)
*Ranger’s Apprentice: The Early Years 1: The Tournament at Gorlan by John Flanagan (Random House Australia)
*Soon by Morris Gleitzman (Penguin Australia)

Source: http://www.indiebookawards.com.au/#!Shortlist-Announced-for-the-2016-Indie-Book-Awards/cmbz/569c69ff0cf28074ac9d3348

Many of the authors mentioned above would be well recognised by most readers, and our library has those marked *.

I wonder which of these titles will be awarded the top honour? Which one would you choose? 

Other categories also exist at the Indie site –  for debut novels adult reads and non-fiction titles – which are also worth looking into. The Indie Book Awards category winners and the Book of the Year 2016 will be announced at an event in the Sydney CBD on Wednesday 23 March.

Have you been to see your independent bookseller to chat about these titles? Will you have read some of these titles before then? which one will you vote for?

*** Shaun Tan is always hard to beat – so different from the others in the Children’s Shortlist – maybe he’s really in a class of his own?

# Some of the local independent booksellers we rely on include:

the Turning Page, Springwood

Megalong Books, Leura

Wisemans Books, Richmond

Harvard Books, Blaxland

and further afield, the Children’s Bookshop, Beecroft

Indie Awards 2015 – shortlist

Each year, independent book sellers from around Australia nominate the best Australian books for a calendar year. The shortlists include choices for Fiction, Non-Fiction, Debut and Children’s literature.

As the people on the ground, and those with whom you can discuss your likes and dislikes in reading, their recommendations are valuable and inspiring to their customers. Thus, it is worth looking at this year’s list (announced January 29) and checking off some of the books they have considered for this year’s awards:

indie

Fiction

  • When the Night Comes (Favel Parrett, Hachette)
  • Amnesia (Peter Carey, Hamish Hamilton)
  • Golden Boys (Sonya Hartnett, Hamish Hamilton)
  • The Rosie Effect (Graeme Simsion, Text)

Nonfiction

  • This House of Grief (Helen Garner, Text)
  • The Bush (Don Watson, Hamish Hamilton)
  • Where Song Began (Tim Low, Viking)
  • Cadence (Emma Ayres, ABC Books)

Debut fiction

  • Lost & Found (Brooke Davis, Hachette)
  • Foreign Soil (Maxine Beneba Clark, Hachette)
  • The Strays (Emily Bitto, Affirm Press)
  • After Darkness (Christine Piper, A&U)

Children’s

  • The 52-Storey Treehouse (Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton, Pan Macmillan)
  • Pig the Pug (Aaron Blabey, Scholastic)
  • Withering by Sea (Judith Rossell, ABC Books)
  • Laurinda (Alice Pung, Black Inc.).

[List from: Books and Publishing ]

While obviously many of these books are not Young Adult literature, some could be suitable for a mature reader, and they certainly offer some interesting titles for teachers to consider.

The Children’s category is rather broad, and I am sure that there could be an argument for at least 2 sub-categories of this – especially when you compare Pig the Pug (picture book) with Laurinda (352p.).

The awards will be announced on March 25 – how many of these will you read before then?

For more about the awards, visit Indie Awards 2015.

Indie Award Shortlist 2014

The Australian Independent Booksellers recently announced The Shortlist for The Indie Awards for 2014:

awards

Source: Australian Independent Booksellers http://www.indies.com.au/BookAwards.aspx

FICTION SHORTLIST:
Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin)
Coal Creek by Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)
Eyrie by Tim Winton (Penguin)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Random House)

NON-FICTION SHORTLIST:
Girt by David Hunt (Black Inc)
Murder in Mississippi by John Safran (Penguin)
The Stalking of Julia Gillard by Kerry-Anne Walsh (Allen & Unwin)
The Good Life by Hugh Mackay (Macmillan)

DEBUT FICTION SHORTLIST:
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (Macmillan)
Mr Wigg by Inga Simpson (Hachette Hodder)
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion (Text)
The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane (Penguin)

CHILDREN’S SHORTLIST:
Alphabetical Sydney by Hilary Bell, Antonia Pesenti (NewSouth Books)
Kissed by the Moon by Alison Lester (Penguin)
The 39-Storey Treehouse by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton (Macmillan)
Weirdo by Anh Do (Scholastic)

A limited number of these books are available from the High School Library, so you can see which one you might vote for – if you had the chance. Of course, local bookstores will have most in plentiful supply, for keen readers.

Winners will be announced on March 26, 2014.

Mothers’ Love? – the Light between Oceans

What would you do if a baby washed up in a boat, accompanied only by her dead father? Would you wonder what had happened to her mother? And if you lived on a remote island housing a vital lighthouse, how would you go about reporting the lost (and found) baby?

Add another complication – you are a young couple who have faced the loss of several babies before they had time to even be; the last being stillborn just a few weeks previously. Is the baby perhaps a gift from God? Why was she alone in the boat with a dead father? Perhaps her mother had also perished?

Tom and Isabel live a solitary life as lighthouse keepers. Together they decide on a path which is always destined for sorrow and trouble. By the time they have their regular visits to and from the mainland, Lucy has well and truly become part of their life. Isabel’s parents, who live in on the mainland welcome their only grand-daughter with open arms, convinced of course that she really is their flesh and blood. And Lucy delights all who see her. How can they change the course of action they have slipped into by caring for baby Lucy?

This is an amazing debut novel for M.L. Stedman – told with gentleness and mystery. It succeeds in getting you to change your point of view, depending on whose story you are reading at the tim, without making you feel you have deserted one of the other characters. There are many different perspectives from which they can all be judged, as Stedman reveals the inner workings of each person in the tragic turn of events.

And as a reader you can sympathise with each one: Tom the solitary returned soldier; his wife, Isabel grieving several miscarriages; Isabel’s parents who have lost their sons to war; and of course, Hannah, who has lost both a husband and a child.

Though set in a fictional coastal community, the Light Between Oceans represents what life might have been like for those performing essential duties along our coastlines in times gone by.

As the author states: “The plot of THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS isn’t based on personal experience, other than to the extent that it’s set in Western Australia, where I’m from, so the landscape and weather hopefully have an authentic feel” ( comments from a GoodReads forum about her book). The setting describes the isolation of this part of Australia (and the lighthouse even more so), heightened even further by its post war time period. The tale reflects things which might occur in relationships when life doesn’t always give people what they want.

The impacts of war, isolation and loss are some of the key issues Stedman weaves into this tale of several tales, and the reader is left guessing, never quite sure of the final outcome. While the pace of the story has been criticised by some, it really just echoes the way things would have been before communications were so instant, and gives the reader time to consider how different things might have been in the past.

Movie options have been discussed, and the book has recently won the Indie Awards for a Debut novel. For more about M.L.Stedman see: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/interview-ml-stedman-20120322-1vkty.html

What did you think of the book?

Indie Awards 2013 announced…

And the winner is:

The Light Between Oceans*, by M.L.Stedman -a debut novel which is…

…primarily set in the 1920s, far off Western Australia’s south-west coast, as well as in a small mainland port, The Light Between Oceans is an evocative tale with an irresistible ethical and emotional conundrum at its heart.
The book riffs heavily on the theme of duality, starting with the tiny, fictitious island where the story unfolds. Janus Rock, named after ancient Rome’s two-faced god of beginnings and endings, is at the confluence of two oceans. SMH review April 15, 2012

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-light-between-oceans-20120414-1x05y.html#ixzz2OXtSIM3s

And you will find the book trailer below intriguing – especially given the renowned ‘book’ people who comment on this debut novel.

 
What is it about this novel which has intrigued the judges (independent booksellers – probably as varied as you and I) to give it this honour – ahead of well-known authors like Margot Lanagan*, Maureen McCarthy* ,and Drusilla Modjeska; as well as other tales like Secrets of the Tides by Hannah Richell (my favourite), and challenging thought-provoking texts like Tohby Riddle’s Unforgotten*?

 

Other award winners include:

Sea Hearts* by Margot Lanagan (Children’s & YA winner)
QF32 by Richard de Crespigny (Non-fiction)

For more details about the awards see:

http://www.readings.com.au/news/the-2013-indie-award-winners

* We have copies of these in the library waiting for you – would you like to review them? Or are others on the list (mentioned in a previous post) more to your liking? 

Andy and Terry’s treehouse grows…

 

Every kid in the world would love to live in the places Andy Griffiths creates. Especially in his multi-storey treehouse! And especially as it has grown from 13 to 26 storeys since his last book, the 13-Storey Treehouse.

Not only does it have its own dodgem car rink, a skate ramp and an anti-gravity chamber, but you can choose from 78 different flavours of icecream and have them served to you by Edward Scooperhand! You just need to be careful when you do it, and in whose company.

Andy lives in the treehouse, we are told, with Terry. Cleverly, the story of how they met is interwoven in the tale – just be sure you look carefully at all the illustrations, so you get Terry’s point of view also.

When it comes to dealing with sick sharks (because they ate Terry’s underpants), they have to rely on Jill who seems to love all animals – well, almost all of them. Using her charms, and the help of Andy and Terry, she is able to conduct ‘open shark’ surgery. As they do this, they empty all sorts of things out of the shark, and the complications of the tale develop further.

There are lots of fun characters and events in the 26-Storey Treehouse; starting with Andy and Terry, the main characters from the The 13-Storey Treehouse. You will love all the improbable things that happen, and laugh out loud as Andy plays with words, and Terry adds punch with his drawings. You have to take the time to view both carefully together – and then go back again to see what you missed.

For more value, you can watch as Andy reads the first chapter of the 26-Storey Treehouse to a couple of children. See if you can catch things he adds along the way:

For lots more information about the series, and advice from Andy about the way he writes, go to: http://www.andygriffiths.com.au/.

Keep an eye out for the next instalment, the 39 Storey Treehouse, and Once Upon a Slime, which is “designed for teachers, students and young aspiring writers; it contains 52 fun writing and storytelling activities, such as lists, instructions, cartoons, letters, personal stories, poems and pocket books”.