Children's & YA Books Highlights for April

Let’s all take a minute to consider what it would feel like for our 8th-grade diaries to land us a book deal. Correction: most of us don’t need an entire minute to appreciate the full horror of that. However, for Maya Van Wagenen, the teenage author of Popular, it is turning out extremely well. Her efforts to radically change her high school experience and document it is being met with rapturous applause. Dreamworks have picked it up and Maya is all over US television talking about how she adapted a 1950s popularity guide to help her escape her social outcast tag.

Our reviewer, Kathy Kozlowski, gave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up: “With amazing tenacity and courage, Maya reconstructs herself, buying vintage clothes from the 1950s, embracing Vaseline for shining eyes, adopting a girdle and gloves for special occasions as well as cultivating good grooming and hygiene…Her learning experience is hilarious; totally kooky, unexpected, and at times profound…a real ‘one off’ and a deliciously entertaining read for any age.”

Well then, it must be the month for one-offs because The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton is also wonderfully unique. It lurches from the whimsical to the horrifying and you’re able to invest in each of the three generations of women whose stories are being told.

If quirky isn’t your thing then let me point you in the direction of Machine Wars which is another book that straddles Middle Fiction and Young Adult (we are studiously avoiding a new term for this!). Melbourne author Michael Pryor indulges his fascination with A.I. and his love of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot for this story about a boy on a mission to rescue his computer scientist parents after they disappear in a world where machines are ruthless predators.

Two more books that have caught my eye are The Tiffin by Mahtah Narsimhan and The Ratcatcher’s Daughter by Pamela Rushby, which both promise to take 9-12 year olds to another time and place.

A tiffin is of course a lunchbox commonly used in India to deliver food. In Narsimhan’s story, set in the early 1980s and 90s, a secret note placed in a tiffin goes astray and a young boy becomes separated from his family as a result. Meanwhile we’re back in Australia for The Ratcatcher’s Daughter but it’s 1900 and a young teenage girl has a particularly gruesome job when the Black Death rears its head.

With two of my own personal rat-catchers at home - and veering into Mad Cat Lady territory - I can’t help but love Squishy McFluff by Pip Jones (pictured here). Squishy is Ava’s imaginary pet and together they get up to all sorts of mischief. 5’s and over will love it. Young cat lovers should also check out Kitten Kaboodle, about a feline secret agent, which I’ve just finished reading as a bedtime story to my 7-year-old. He loved it and has come away with a brand new literary term which he’s using at every available opportunity: ‘cliff-hanger’.

I wander now into less familiar territory as I recommend to you a new series called Kick it to Nick by Shane Crawford and Adrian Beck (which includes The Cursed Cup and Forward Line Freak). There’s no shortage of dads enthusiastically taking their kids to Auskick on a Saturday morning, and this series seems like a great opportunity for dads to extend that by reading with their kids afterwards - a kind of cool-down, if you will. There have been various articles recently addressing the fact that children’s publishing is largely populated by women, which it’s suggested is the direct cause of a gender gap in literacy. Certain newspaper articles would have us female publishing types blame ourselves, but the originator of this theory, Jonathan Emmett, points his finger elsewhere - at men who show a lack of interest in children’s books. Maybe Shane Crawford (he is famous, so they tell me) will get more dads reading with their kids.

New to the non-fiction shelf is a very attractive book called The Story of Buildings, which contains lots of technical information about iconic buildings all around the world. Architecture seems to be a topic that many children are interested in. I never drew anything that wasn’t a square with four windows, a door and a triangular roof, so I find this enthusiasm fascinating and love the way it marries art and structural engineering.

And finally, a non-fiction picture book about microbes. Tiny: The Invisible World of Microbes is by Nicola Davies (A First Book Of Nature) and illustrated by Emily Sutton (Clara Button and the Magical Hat Day) introduces young children to microbiology, and it’s a feast for the eyes.


Emily Gale

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Cover image for Tiny: The Invisible World of Microbes

Tiny: The Invisible World of Microbes

Nicola Davies

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