CYA

Judith Clarke’s new novel for young adults, The Winds of Heaven, is a moving story about the strength and difficulty of friendship, and how accidents of birth, family and situation can combine to overwhelm the brightest spirit.

On her first trip to Lake Conapaira in 1952, ten-year-old Clementine meets her cousin Fan for the first time. Fan is a whirlwind: beautiful, impulsive and imaginative. Clementine is entranced by Fan’s strength and liveliness, and the two girls quickly become friends. But Fan’s childhood is a world away from Clementine’s cautious but loving family home. Stranded with her violent mother amid the prejudices of a country town, the beautiful Fan is labelled ‘stupid’ at school, and regularly beaten and emotionally abused by her depressive mother. Her sister has left home, and her father disappeared long ago. Fan fights for happiness, and fights hard. She has her miyan, or spiritual guardian, an elderly Aborigine who lives in the bush and tells her stories. He calls her Yirigaa, ‘Morning Star’, and is the only positive adult influence in her life. Clementine wants to stay with Fan, but the holiday draws to an end and she must return home, leaving Fan with her mother in the house that smelled of ‘anger and hatred and disappointment and jagged little fears’.

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.

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.

Food is always a winning ingredient in books for children. Mini-chocoholics will devour I Like Chocolate (Wilkins Farago, $24.99 hb, 28 pp), a delicious book that celebrates the delights of chocolate consumption. Davide Cali has produced an enthusiastic and humorous book with gentle messages about sharing and caring, and eating in moderation. Shaped like a large block of chocolate, I Like Chocolate is ‘sugar-free, won’t melt in your pocket and contains no traces of nuts!’ It is almost as satisfying as a really good truffle.

The story features a young boy who details all the reasons why he likes chocolate, and some of the many ways in which it can be eaten. He also describes how it can be used as a comfort food in a range of situations and as a perfect gift for any occasion. Evelyn Daviddi uses a soft green, red, yellow and, of course, brown palette in her cartoon-style illustrations, which feature a wonderfully expressive cast of characters. This ode to chocolate is sure to entice anyone with a sweet tooth.

It is no easy task to write a good crime novel that features a youthful sleuth. Too young to drink, to drive, to wander the mean streets or to have a wasted past, young sleuths also have parents lurking in the background, ever ready to assert their authority about meals and bedtimes. Full credit, then, to Beth Montgomery for overcoming these obstacles and writing a gripping mystery. In Murderer’s Thumb, fourteen-year-old Adam Statkus and his mother have relocated from the city to the country in yet another effort to escape an abusive husband and father. Rosemary Statkus, jittery and terrified, is in no state to assert any authority over her son, beyond instilling in him the necessity of keeping a low profile. That becomes harder to maintain when Adam finds the decomposed body of a teenage girl buried in a silage pit. Then he stumbles upon a hidden diary that contains clues to the murder. Others would also like to get their hands on it. The diary is a McGuffin, and the climactic exposure of the murderer a bit hammy, but Adam is a tough, credible and appealing protagonist, and the evocation of a close-knit farming community and the build-up of tension are terrific.

Childhood is full of revelatory moments; sometimes shocking instants of understanding that people, events and relationships are not as they seem. They can happen in adulthood too, but those in childhood can have an intensity that makes them deeply formative. They might be subtle eye-openers or life-changing epiphanies, but they all cause a shift in perspective that changes one’s perception of the world. These six new books contain transformative moments for their protagonists, from the realism of family secrets to the fantasy of high-adventure mysteries.

Does any male under thirty not employed in the English department of a university really like Jane Austen? At least Shakespeare wakes you up now and then with a spot of violence and bloody murders.

This literary gender divide is at the heart of Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight (Penguin, $19.95 pb, 244 pp), Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow’s funny story about a male and female student writing a story together, inspired, as an author’s note informs us, by an Internet story about a male and female student writing a story together. Very metafictional.