Life is precarious for many girls around the world – and education is not always freely available. For Pakistani girl Amal, school has been a wonderful privilege which she was lapping up, until things go frightfully wrong – her plans study to be a teacher in ruins. Amal Unbound echoes some of the realities for […]
Subtitle: Outstanding Australians share the advice they wish they’d been given growing up. (2016) This book was pulled together (i.e. edited and published) by Grace Halpen when she was 15 and in year 10 at a school in Melbourne. Having written her own ‘Letter to my Teenage Self’, she was then inspired to gather letters […]
What do you know about dead things? How do they make you feel? Charlotte (Lottie) seems oddly fixated on dead creatures – collecting them from her local neighbourhood in the hope of preserving them. Her interest extends to anything at school which alludes to preserving life, such as the embalming rituals of the Egyptian culture. […]
When we first meet Rob in ‘A Song Only I Can Hear’, he is shy, uncertain of himself, and in the throes of first love. He has a few significant people in his life, but not many friends. And a bully lingers at school. Fortunately, he has a fun, if quirky, family – one which many […]
Can you remember a time without Google? Older readers will remember when research could only be done using books and/or accessing a library. Times before you could easily find out the answer to a puzzling trivia question or idea, by tapping it into your smartphone or tablet… Times when information wasn’t so instantaneously* available (though […]
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: You can help guide their choices by entering the competition to win all 24 […]
If you lost your bag – handbag, schoolbag or backpack, what would it tell others about you? Without your ID (driver’s licence, school ID, etc.), could you be traced? identified? found? If you found a bag (mentioned above), what would you do? In ‘the Red Notebook’, bookseller Laurent Letellier feels compelled, when he comes across […]
Writers watch and observe and create. Scratchy notes scribbled on a serviette or in a tattered notebook become a story through their crafting. This week, Steven Herrick shared his observations, transformed into poems, with students at school – in a time of performance art and great merriment. He explained the ways in which his ideas come […]
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 […]
Zac is condemned – to spend an insufferable number of days, confined to a room, in the cheerful company of his mother. Not that he hates his mother’s presence – he just hates that she feels she has to be here. Or that he has to be here. But that’s what the medical system recommends. […]