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Children's and Young Adult Books

Six by Karen Tayleur

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March 2011, no. 329

Six people. Five seatbelts. Six teenagers involved in a horrific car crash. But who has died?

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The latest crop of children’s picture books highlights the ability of this versatile genre to cover everything from the ever-popular animal tale, to sparkling stories about fairies, to introspective contemplations on the meaning of life.

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S.D. Gentill’s Chasing Odysseus provides a fresh perspective on Homer’s The Odyssey for young readers. It focuses on the adventures of Hero and her three brothers – Machaon, Lycon, and Cadmus – during the fall of Troy and on their subsequent pursuit of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, throughout his legendary voyages. The siblings are raised among the Herdsmen of Ida, who are ...

Darkwater by Georgia Blain & This is Shyness by Leanne Hall

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April 2011, no. 330

Darkness, both literal and symbolic, pervadesthese two recent books. Darkwater, the first Young Adult title by established writer Georgia Blain...

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Grimsdon by Deborah Abela & Quillblade: Voyages of the Flying Dragon, Book One by Ben Chandler

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October 2010, no. 325

Twelve-year-old Isabella and her best friend, Griffin, have been keeping themselves and three younger children alive in Grimsdon since a massive wave flooded the city three years ago

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Prepare to be affronted, or perhaps just a bit miffed. Although it does not confine itself to works by British writers, you will look in vain for Australian authors in the new Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature. Among many titles from the United States, Little Women gets its due, as does Little House on the Prairie. Canada’s Anne of Green Gables is there, and so is Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Scan the index and you will find works of European origin, such as The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. The latter two, of course, could be given honorary citizenship because of their immense popularity in English translation.

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Many adults who grew up the 1980s doubtless remember a hairy, conical-shaped creature with very big feet that lived in the Australian bush, as well as a large hippopotamus that lived on a little girl’s roof and ate cake. The conical creature was, of course, Grug. Ted Prior’s Grug books were small, affordable paperbacks featuring simple but entertaining stories about this unflappable creature. The series is now being republished, and it includes new titles such as Grug and the Circus and Grug Learns to Read (Simon & Schuster, $4.99 pb, 32 pp).

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Now by Morris Gleitzman & Where There’s Smoke by John Heffernan

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June 2010, issue no. 322

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.

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Those familiar with the previous titles in Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series will be expecting another carefully structured, action-filled adventure. They would be half right. In the seventh and final instalment, Lord Sunday, Nix has abandoned his familiar formula. The elements are all there – the seventh key, the seventh Trustee, the seventh fragment of the Will – but the meticulous structure that has been the benchmark of the series is replaced with a mad dash to the ultimate conclusion. As a result, this book reads like a finale to the interrupted climax of book six, Superior Saturday (2008). This lends the narrative a frenetic energy that mirrors the plot, as the ever-encroaching Nothing grows closer to overwhelming the House, the Universe and Everything, while the ‘real world’ (which fans will understand isn’t really the ‘real’ world but only Arthur and Leaf’s version of it) descends into further chaos as a result.

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With series titles dominating the new releases, it would seem that every author’s (and illustrator’s) ambition is to find a character and a conceit that will have sufficient appeal to carry them successfully through multiple volumes. This is a particularly achievable ambition in children’s literature, where the target readership has a high tolerance for repetition, a loyalty towards favourite characters and a seemingly insatiable appetite for more of the same.

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