Author: Admin

Amy Zhang,  This is Where the World Ends. Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins,  1 April 2016. 287pp.,  $19.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780062417879 What an intriguing and moving book this is. Janie and Micah are best friends but no-one knows. They are almost each other’s alter ego. This is far from a linear narrative structure; it is quite complex moving backwards and forwards in time and between the first-person narrative of both Jane and Micah, interspersed with selections from Janie’s diary and her versions of well-known fairy tales. Micah is deeply in love with Janie but is reluctant to tell Janie as she is the…

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Cecelia Ahern, Flawed. HarperCollins,  1 April 2016. 400pp., $19.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780008126360 Celestine lives in a totalitarian society, not that she recognises it as such.  In her view, she lives an ideal life. She’s doing well at school, she has the perfect boyfriend and she has plenty of friends.  But in her culture, there is no room for anyone who breaks a rule as they can be deemed flawed. If they are labelled as such by a court, they are literally labelled, branded with a letter F to mark them out from those around them.  This is not the end…

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The Children’s Book Council of Australia heartily congratulates the Rev Dr John Cohen on his recent Order of Australia Award and thanks him for his many years of dedicated service to the organisation, to Reading Time and to children’s literature. John became editor of the Reading Time print journal over thirty years ago.  His work over the years has had a positive and far-reaching influence on the development of Australian children’s books and publishing and has given encouragement, advice and even practical assistance to countless authors and illustrators of children’s books.

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Emily Rodda,  The Towers of Illica (Star of Deltora #3),  Omnibus/Scholastic Australia,  1 April 2016,  176pp., $15.99 (pbk),  ISBN: 9781742990644 Emily Rodda (aka Jennifer Rowe) can do no wrong in my opinion!  Books for all ages that encompass many themes to suit any taste. In this third book of the Star of Deltora series, Britta’s most important trade is ahead of her; if successful she may gain the much coveted position of Apprentice Trader of the Rosalyn fleet. Faced with many challenges, the main protagonist, Britta, is portrayed as a strong and adventurous female to which many girls of today will be…

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Em Bailey, The Special Ones, Hardie Grant Egmont, 1 April 2016, 320pp., $19.99 (pbk), ISBN: 9781742976280 Four young people are being held captive on a remote farm with no modern luxuries like electricity or packaged food. Forced by a strict set of rules, and knowing that they are being watched, they must pretend to be the people from a 100 year old photograph. Their captor has developed a website so that their ‘immortal’ lives are broadcast to eager followers and every evening the captives must access an online chat room to impart their wisdom and share their knowledge of living safely away…

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James Lee, The Graves of Gasper Weavell & The Haunted Hoarder (Ghostworks #1), Xoum/New South Books,  May 2016,  160pp.,  $9.99 (pbk),  ISBN: 9781921134760 Personally, I think these stories deserve to be published separately! I moved from one story to the next and was discombobulated to find they are about different people having different ghostly experiences; separate stories with no connection other than being scary. In The Graves of Gasper Weavell, Zoe has a ghoulish hobby; she likes to take grave rubbings. When she invites her friends, Noah and James, to join her they stumble across two graves with the same name and unwittingly…

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Johanna Bell (text), Dion Beasley (illus), Go Home, Cheeky Animals!, Allen & Unwin, May 2016,  32pp., $24.99 (hbk),  ISBN: 9781760291655 ‘At Canteen Creek, where we live’, there are many cheeky dogs. No one does anything about the dogs because they are supposed to keep the wild goats, donkeys, horses, buffaloes and camels away. Of course they don’t. And this provides Dion Beasley and Johana Bell with opportunities to make madly inspired funny colour pencil drawings of these pestiferous creatures invading Canteen Creek in droves between wet seasons. The text is large and bright, embedded in the sweep of the drawings that…

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Gregg Dreise, Mad Magpie Magabala Books,  May 2016,  26pp.,  $24.95 (pbk),  ISBN: 9781925360066 This is another beautiful, lavishly and professionally produced book from Magabala. Greg Driesse is a descendant of the Kamilaroi and Yuwalayaay peoples of New South Wales. The story is inspired by a dreamtime tale, but it is also a modern parable. Guluu was a mad magpie, who swooped other creatures. Soon the elders (an emu and a pelican) told the magpie that his anger and aggression would never solve his troubles. Guluu decides to take on some of the advice from his elders, and the book follows the effects…

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Darrell Pitt, A Toaster on Mars, Text Publishing,  30 May 2016, 288pp.,  $19.99 (pbk),  ISBN: 9781922182869 The year is 2509 and Blake Carter is still drinking too much. Even though he is the best detective working for the Planetary Bureau of Investigation (the PBI), his refusal to work with a partner has finally caught up with him. Divorced, taken off the most pressing criminal case earth has ever confronted, refused the right to chase master criminal Bartholomew Badde, informed that his twelve year old daughter, Lisa, is possibly missing, and now forced to accept the shapely cyborg Nicki Steel as…

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Cheree Peters, Time Catcher (The Variants #1), Ford Street Publishing,  10 May 2016, 320pp.,  $19.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9781925272215 This novel is the first of a planned trilogy with the overall title of The Variants. It is another dystopic, post-apocolyptic fantasy novel, and as with much Young Adult fiction, it is written in the first person voice, in the present tense. The novel is set at a time in the far future when cities and technology have been laid waste by a cataclysmic nuclear event hundreds of years ago. The world, or at least this part of the world, has reverted…

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