Morris Gleitzman

Now eighty, Felix, whom we met in two previous novels by Morris Gleitzman, is living in hot dry country Australia. In Once (2005), little Felix escaped from a convent, desperate to find his parents, not understanding that they had left him there in an effort to protect him. In Then (2005), he was ten. After jumping from a train bound for a concentration camp, he struggled to hide himself and six-year-old Zelda, who was not even Jewish, from the Nazis in Poland.

In eleven-year-old Grace’s world, the ‘saved’ number 11,423 people. Four of those are part of her immediate family; her twin brothers, her mother, and her father, who encourages his daughter’s inquisitive nature and who ‘probably has more interesting thoughts than any other home lighting warehouse manager in Australia’.

Young children often use the word ‘sad’ to describe negative or confusing emotions. ‘What you did made me sad,’ they will say. But children, as they get older, learn to offer richer explanations of interior states: grief, exasperation, shock, bewilderment, hurt, ecstasy and joy. It is language that gives us this flexibility of response. The best books offer us language that matches and sometimes even exceeds the richness of our experiences.

Stories of children in the maelstrom: the horror of mandatory detention; the appalling cruelty of how some orphans are treated by those responsible for them; and youngsters caught in the heartbreak and dislocation of family breakdown – such is the stuff of these three important novels for young people. No coy sensibilities are spared in these reflections of modem life. Here are ordinary adults and children caught up in extraordinary events. All three books show how life can be hard, but that one must meet its sorrows and afflictions with courage, good humour and good friends. Each story is about what happens when a child becomes a victim to events beyond his or her control, be they personal or political, dramatic or mundane.

With Gift of the Gab, Gleitzman continues the saga of Rowena Batts, the feisty twelve-year-old who previously appeared in Blabber Mouth (1992) and Sticky Beak (1993). Ro is the daughter of an apple farmer, a child with character, immense energy, and several problems: chiefly her inability to speak (she was born with 'some bits missing' from her throat) and her loving and much loved Dad. She copes with her vocal handicap through fluent sign language and a notebook at the ready, but Dad – an ardent country-and­western enthusiast, given to cowboy boots, loud satin shirts and a penchant for off-key renderings of his favourite ballads at every opportunity – is harder to handle.