Brotherband: The Outcasts

Author: John Flanagan:
Short-listed for the Children's Book Council of Australia 2012 Book of the Year

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Following the successful international best-seller Ranger’s Apprentice, John Flanagan’s new series Brotherband will be appreciated by younger and older readers.

Flanagan deals with issues such as bullying and being ostracised. Brotherband is about boys who are seen as losers but battle on to achieve their goals.

When I was twelve years old we moved to a small country town. It has been many years but I still remember the pain when the most popular students chose their teams for softball from the most popular kids to the least popular and no one wanted me! Being thought of as worthless does enormous damage to children. In Brotherband eight boys face the same pain.

John Flanagan creates a world of seafaring adventures, treacherous pirates and epic battles. In Skandia, there is only one way to become a warrior. When boys turn sixteen they are grouped together and chosen for teams called brotherbands. They must endure three months of gruelling training in seamanship, weapons and battle tactics. When Hal Mikkelson finds himself the unwilling leader of a brotherband made up of misfits and outcasts, he must step up to the challenge. His team consists of such boys as the thief, the huge blind boy and the boy who mimics animals. Hal himself is an outcast as his mother is not Scandian. The "Heron" brotherband might not have the strength and numbers of the other teams, but use their strange skills, inventiveness, ingenuity and courage to succeed.

Flanagan will get readers thinking about bullying issues while enjoying a great story. The boys may have fewer in their team and they may be picked on by the other teams but they go about winning points with good humour and against the odds. The story also tells young readers not to give up when things are tough. This is certainly the case when we see the boys sailing away from Scandia ready for the adventures and challenges of the second book The Invaders.

Anne Montgomery
Odell Learning Resources Centre

Wonderstruck

Author: Brian Selznick

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This is a “novel in words and pictures” even more so than the author’s celebrated The Invention of Hugo Cabret. By this I mean that the story is told by means of two threads. One, told mainly in words but with some haunting pictures (especially of dreams) is of young Ben Wilson. The other told entirely in pictures for the first two thirds of this hefty book is of a young girl in an earlier age. One of the joys of this complex literary device is the ability to hint at links between the two stories… and there is a delight in doing this while swapping medium (words to pictures and back). Initially the links are reflections or echoes, but gradually the two stories converge and as you might expect a moment comes when they become one story.

As with Hugo there is considerable drama surrounding the main protagonist, Ben. His mum has died, and though he is cared for by a kindly Aunt and Uncle, he is slowly starting to realise the depth and consequences of his loss. His nights are disturbed by terrifying dreams of wolves, and shows strange obsessions in wanting to collect tiny objects that are meaningless to others. All these disturbances crystallize when his one good ear is damaged and he decides to plunge into a search for someone or something he has lost.

I enjoyed reading Wonderstruck. It is, in appearance, a solid tome, but due to the heavy paper weight and many, many double spread illustrations the reading time is not that long. It is a satisfactory story with drama, tension and completion, but I enjoyed the medium and process a bit more than the actual story. There was a sense to me that the story telling was a bit disjointed in parts, and the ending perhaps too comfortable.

This would suit most ages though some of the images could be uncomfortable for young children, who would also struggle with some of the descriptive and explanatory print passages. There are important themes of dealing with grief, struggles with memory, friendship, family and disability. Just as Hugo celebrates the history of the theatre so Wonderstruck has a good deal about museums in it.

Andrew Lack
Head of the Odell Learning Resources Centre

American Born Chinese

Author: Gene Luen Yang

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This is a cross between a graphical novel and a manga style comic with simple, firm illustrations and a complex layered story. It is a relatively quick read but is certainly not a light weight with over 230 pages and a larger format. Jin Wang is a young teenager whose parents are Chinese immigrants. He quickly discovers that Asian looking boys face a number of challenges at school. An older lady tells him “It is easy to become anything you wish…so long as you’re willing to forfeit your soul”. He betrays his heritage and decides to simply try to blend in, with unfortunate results.

This could have been a somewhat didactic tale with little chance of engaging its readers… instead it is told in a fascinating and initially bewildering way. We end up with three alternating threads of a story. First there is the story from Chinese mythology about the Monkey King and his aspirations to be accepted as a god like other gods. Then we see various events in the life of Jin Wang as a younger teen… and this is interspersed with stories from his life as an older, now very Caucasian teenager. Bizarrely he is visited for one month in each year by a “cousin from China” who is an outrageous caricature with a pigtail, round glasses, huge round face, amorous intent and boundless cleverness.

It is not clear till the end of the story what is really going on… and I shan’t be giving away any secrets here! The tale is poignant and thought provoking. It contains a real challenge to respect one's own heritage and maintain personal integrity.

 I was also rather astonished to find a whole slab of Psalm 139 quoted in the mouth of one of the Chinese gods, and a visit by a Chinese sage to the baby Jesus. At the very least I would have to put this down to 21st Century intertextuality, but others may see a deeper meaning.

Despite the disarming pictures of monkeys, this is a complex story that requires thought and interpretation… perhaps best for Year Eight and up.


Andrew Lack