It’s 105 days until You-Know-What and the Children’s & YA Specialists are all raving about their picks this month, from a home-grown debut with a familiar setting to a two-time Carnegie winner asking ‘is there more to life than this?’

Our St Kilda kids’ specialist, Angela Crocombe, has been on a reading frenzy. The longed-for

new novel by Patrick Ness

, who made a recent visit to Melbourne to much fanfare, is finally here and looks so striking in hardback. Angela concludes:

“Beautifully written…this is a novel that imaginatively gives voice to the thought that every teenager has had: ‘There must be more to life than this.’ The only downside of reading this novel was my devastation once it was over. I wait with bated breath for a sequel.”

This is definitely one of those YA novels that adults will also be clamouring for, but is no less perfectly pitched for teens.

Angela begins her next review with, “Only occasionally does a book come along that I can recommend to everyone I meet.” She’s talking about The Boy On The Wooden Box, the story of the youngest Holocaust survivor on Schindler’s List, Leon Leyson, who died earlier this year.

Leon was only 9 when the Nazis invaded Poland. His father got a job in Schindler’s factory, which was the sole reason that Leon, his parents and his older brother and sister survived the war. Leon worked in the factory, too, but was so small that he had to stand on a box to operate the machinery. This is a memoir, similar to Anne Frank’s diaries in that it’s a book for everyone from upper-primary school children to adults to read and share and discuss.

At the Hawthorn store, Alexa Dretzke fell in love with David Levithan’s new novel, Two Boys Kissing.

I remember Levithan’s 2003 novel,

Boy Meets Boy

, set in a pro-gay high school, which was such a positive, funny and hopeful story. Ten years on, Levithan was inspired to write

Two Boys Kissing

by the true story of teenage boys who took part in a kissing marathon to set a new world record.

In the book these boys become the focus for other gay men dealing with aspects of their sexuality in the context of the way things are now and the way things have been in the recent past. Alexa says it is “…wise, respectful and honest … I wholeheartedly recommend this extraordinary book.”

Athina Clarke at the Malvern store went for Margaret Wild’s YA novel, The Vanishing Moment, as her pick of the month. Two girls who have each experienced major traumas meet at the point when they are trying to escape their past, but inevitably start to try to make sense of their separate stories together. Apparently there is a great twist in this one.

Our reviewer Kim Gruschow called in “an eerie, mysterious novel … richly textured with vivid, memorable scenes.”

And my own YA recommendation this month is by Ellie Marney, a Melbourne writer who has chosen a Melbourne setting for her teen-pitched take on Sherlock Holmes, Every Breath. You can read about Ellie’s writing process in her blog post The Story Of My Book.

Fans of ongoing series are in heaven this month with the following: a new Skulduggery Pleasant, the latest in the Cherub , a brand new level of Sally Rippin’s much-loved Billie B Brown series (for slightly older readers), Spooky House, and of course our bestseller for this week and many weeks more I’m sure: The 39-Storey Treehouse!

And for the little ones who are looking forward to (or feeling nervous about) starting school next year, one of our favourite Australian picture book teams - Jane Godwin and Anna Walker - have created the ideal manual in Starting School. It’s soothing, funny and something lots of children will identify with. Parents, the detail will touch your heart.

Emily Gale