When We Were Two

Author: Robert Newton  

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It is 1914. Brothers Dan and Eddie can no longer cope with home life in a country town in New South Wales.  Even their dog, Bess, has suffered since their mother left home and headed for the coast. Dan decides to leave and Eddie follows: dog and all, they start to walk over the mountains to Port Macquarie. Dan will have to be responsible for their journey into the unknown.

There are no streetlights in the small towns they will pass through. The roads are dirt tracks. There are no cars, only horses and carts.  The characters they meet on the roads have their own reasons for travelling: not all are reputable. One group have a single ambition – to join up to fight in The Great War. These would-be soldiers protect the lads.  The brothers left home as boys wanting  to change their difficult circumstances. They arrive having matured through their experiences and comradeship.

This story will touch your heart... suitable for Year 5 and up.

Reviewed by Gayle Davidson  
Odell Learning Resources Centre

Past the Shallows

Author: Favel Parrett

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Beyond the shallows, as we all know, you get into deep water. A family ekes out an existence diving for abalone in the south of Tasmania. Harry, the smallest boy of the family is protected… he has not been forced to go on the boat because of his sea-sickness, and his older brother Miles protects him from their sometimes violent father. The sea is everywhere, but it seems the land is not necessarily safer.

This first novel has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award this year, and it is a sad but familiar story. We slowly discover through emerging memories the events of the past that have shaped the unhappy present. There are many glimpses of the familiar for Australian readers: familiar show bags, familiar rural scenes, familiar guarded comments  from the adults who surround the family.

The narrator’s role is passed deftly but abruptly between three boys, so the twin narratives of history and the present are formed from fragments. As the book progresses these start to make a complete story but it is still up to the reader to assemble the whole. The author does an excellent job of conveying the different degrees of innocence and perspective of the two boys.

There is little graphical “adult” material apart from some swearing. The issues and themes, however, and tragedies that befall the characters, means this is more of an older teens or adult read.

Andrew Lack
Head of the Odell Learning Resources Centre

Beyond the Knock Knock Door

Author: Scott Monk

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This is a cheerful fantasy romp that starts and ends in an Australian suburb, and spends most of its time in a playfully imagined land…beyond the Knock Knock door. The children involved are triplets, though of three different characters, and are not entirely sure that they like each other or want to work together despite being catapulted into hair raising adventures.

This is not classical fantasy. Monk sets up a mechanism in which one triplet is a pirate, one is a knight and one is a space ranger. A little like the old “Vikings” game that started Blizzard on its journey, each has to use the power of their costumes to solve different challenges along the way. They travel to a land where fish swim in the air and islands float as well… but it turns out the people are not what they seem either. Much more would be a spoiler.

I did not find myself really warming to this yarn. There is no real effort to justify the strange sights or physics of the land, so it is a “what if” land rather than a carefully created world. It is a story where the children have to look beyond appearances to work out what is right and wrong. Though the children are described in an enthusiastic and animated style, there was little subtlety or development.

I am more than happy to have the book on the shelves… it will make a thrilling if quirky read for a middle school student.

Andrew Lack
Head of the 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

The Dead I Know

Author: Scot Gardner

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This book is simultaneously satisfying and disturbing. It touches on death, physical abuse, loneliness, alcoholism and self-doubt, and yet all of these grim themes are set against a sometimes mundane world where at least one family cares for the increasingly desperate Aaron.

Aaron is a teenager who has left school before Year Twelve. He has opted to take a job in a local funeral parlour, and it is here that he must confront death and the discomforting challenges of the trade. Compared to other parts of his life, the small family run business is actually a haven. Aaron struggles with inner and external torment. He has shocking dreams that start to push a door open to something he does not want to remember. He lives with his carer in a caravan park and there attracts the hostility of teenage thugs and a vindictive supervisor.

The story unfolds with a series of ever more intense confrontations and challenges for Aaron. Some of the detail is, I feel, far too gritty for younger readers, but John Barton, the owner of the funeral home, is doing his best to understand Aaron’s defensive secrets and silence, knows things are not going well, and is determined to help if he can.

Aaron is an engaging character, and the reader is likely to be barracking for him right through to the last page. My personal unease was that for the purpose of the story Aaron faces a perfect storm of emotional and physical struggle, so the events are well beyond the sort of thing a normal teen reader may have ever experienced. We accept this in an action story or a sci fi space opera, but this book is seemingly about an ordinary boy in an ordinary suburb.

Emotionally intense and including scenes of murder, physical violence and death. Short listed for this year's CBCA awards.

Andrew Lack
Head of the Odell Learning Resources Centre

The Golden Day

Author Ursula Dubosarsky

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This is a charming book, though I am puzzled about it. What genre is it? Who would read and enjoy it? Does it tell a story or is it more like a painting that captures a moment and into which we read unspoken stories?

Eleven little girls make up a class in an unnamed private girls school in Sydney… they and their idiosyncratic teacher, Miss Renshaw. The girls giggle together as they walk hand in hand to the nearby botanical gardens by the edge of the harbour. They know the reason for the regular visits: Miss Renshaw likes to talk to one of the gardeners, Morgan.

One particular day Morgan offers to show Miss Renshaw and the girls a secret cave he knows of, and that is the start of… well, in another author’s hands the start of a magical journey into another country, or detective story. In this book there is a single startling event (no spoilers here) and one finds that one is close to the end of the book.

My hint about a painting is not accidental: there is much reference in the authors notes to various Australian paintings. I did enjoy the descriptions and writing style that mixes action, observation and scattered and somewhat disconnected allusions to hymns, poems and phrase motifs. It is a modern palette that chooses broad brush strokes over smooth representation. Still, unlike serious modern writers the book is short and not especially complicated (I am not actually making a criticism there).

This book has been shortlisted for the 2012 Children's Book Council Awards (Older Readers) but I can’t quite pick the reading audience: perhaps Middle School girls with an interest in unusual stories.

Andrew Lack
Head of the Odell Learning Resources Centre

Tanglewood

Author Margaret Wild
 Illustrator Vivienne Goodman

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Do you glance at the picture books that some Junior School children bring home from the OLRC and dismiss them as “just for the little ones”? Yes, I know that there are trivial and repetitious stories, poor or unimaginative illustrations, and endless repetition of the same plot outline. However one of my favourite episodes of Black Books was the one where Bernard and Manny decide to write a children’s book, for after all “how hard can it be?” A night of soul searching and a stack of jotter pads later and they were no closer to a good idea than at the start. 

Tanglewood is a complex, thought provoking story told mainly in pictures. A twisted, gnarled tree stands alone on a small atoll, asking passing seals and birds for company. Without understanding why, it feels its grip on life slipping away, until one day during a violent storm a gull is battered unconscious and drops into the middle of the tree. 

This beautifully illustrated story does indeed discuss living and dying, loneliness, time and family, bravery and commitment, hope and determination… and by now in the review I have used more words than are in the book. Rather than a single approach to page layout the illustrator uses aspects of layout to convey aspects of meaning. As an example a page talking about the passing of much time has a double spread full of small “days” with all sorts of weather and events. 

The pictures that held me most, however, are the pictures of the roots of the tree. These are possibly metaphors for what holds us embedded in life, but even without that they are beautifully complex and I can imagine some children (and adults) following individual roots as they wrap around each other and twist into the ground. 

Suitable for young children but full of reverberations for adults. I would make reading this a parent/child activity given the sombre notes at times, though there is a joyfull outcome. Teachers may be glad of this book as it allows much discussion of visual literacy matters such as framing, colour, texture, naturalism and aspect ratio. Given its reliance on the visual, there is much in the book that must be intuited or figured out. 

Andrew Lack
Head of the Odell Learning Resources Centre