Right book right time, p.19
Right Book, Right Time, page 19
No wonder Haddon scooped international prizes and was besieged with invitations to festivals and conferences. We all want to know how he did it and let him know how much we enjoyed his very special book.
The Harry Potter series JK ROWLING
Y/YA/A UK 1997–2007
‘I’m a what?’ gasped Harry.
‘A wizard, o’ course,’ said Hagrid, sitting back down on the sofa, which groaned and sank even lower, ‘an’ a thumpin’ good’un, I’d say, once yeh’ve been trained up a bit.’
HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE 1997
HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS 1998
HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN 1999
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE 2000
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX 2003
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE 2005
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS 2007
What can you say about Harry Potter that hasn’t already been said? In some ways, it doesn’t really fit in ‘Outside the Square’, because it’s about as inside the square as a fantasy book can be. Harry Potter covers all the bases – witches, wizards, dragons, elves, owls, broomsticks, potions, werewolves, unicorns; the list goes on. And perhaps its familiarity is part of the appeal: reading Harry Potter is like slipping into a comfortable old pair of pyjamas. They are a mix of old-school fantasy stories, boarding school tales, with a dash of Roald Dahl’s humour and ickiness thrown in for good measure. Perhaps these qualities are what attract so many adult readers, a topic that is much debated. But Harry Potter is outside the square, and this is why: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix sold 1.8 million copies in the first twenty-four hours of its release in the UK. That’s one copy for every sixty people in the country – just in the first day. The series as a whole has sold well over 300 million copies in 200 countries in fifty-five languages – figures matched only by the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Harry Potter books are the seventh most challenged books in US libraries, and the Pope has declared that Harry bears ‘the signature of the king of darkness, the devil’. But the news isn’t all bad. The John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford reported that on Harry Potter release weekends, an average of thirty-six children needed emergency medical care, as opposed to sixty-seven on other weekends. A 2006 US study found that 51 per cent of teenagers said they hadn’t read for pleasure before Harry, and 65 per cent reported improved academic performance after reading about the boy wizard. It will be interesting to see what happens after the hype surrounding the final book dies down – will Harry Potter be ushered into the exclusive world of Children’s Classics? Or will it just steadily fade from notice until it is nothing more than a nostalgic early 21st century fad?
CONTRIBUTED BY LILI WILKINSON
books on the big screen
‘outside the square’ books make fabulous movies
HARRY POTTER series JK Rowling
THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy JRR Tolkien
GONE WITH THE WIND Margaret Mitchell
LOOKING FOR ALIBRANDI Melina Marchetta
SCHINDLER’S ARK Thomas Keneally
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD Harper Lee
Holes LOUIS SACHAR
Y/YA USA 1998
Stanley Yelnats was given a choice. The judge said, ‘You may go to jail, or you may go to Camp Green Lake.’ Stanley was from a poor family.
He had never been to camp before.
The palindrome that is Stanley’s name should alert the reader that this story is not one to move straight ahead. Nothing in Stanley’s life is straightforward either. Stanley knows this and knows that his family is cursed. He is resigned, but that doesn’t stop his brain from busily ticking over. Of course, when Stanley arrives at his ‘camp’ he discovers it is neither a camp nor green nor anywhere near a lake. Stanley has been sent to a ‘correction facility’ for a minor crime he did not commit. He finds himself in a scorching desert in a bizarre situation among a bizarre collection of people, some with wonderful names such as Kissing Kate Barlow and Madame Zeroni. All have secrets and great stories to tell. Most outrageous is the punishment devised for the inmates. Along with others, Stanley must dig a hole five feet wide by five feet deep every day. But Stanley’s busy brain soon tells him that the aim of the digging is not merely to build character. The sadistic warden, ‘Mr Sir’, is looking for something. Against all odds in this parched, barren landscape, Stanley decides to escape and find the truth. His journey and courage are revelatory and gradually all is understood about Stanley and the others.
Sachar was not a new writer but hit the big-time with this surreal tale that is hugely inventive, deeply sad, profoundly wise and very funny all at once. Sadly, we have not had another book from Sachar to match Holes.
How I Live Now MEG ROSOFF
YA UK 2004
But the summer I went to England to stay with my cousins everything changed. Part of that was because of the war . . .
Mostly everything changed because of Edmond.
And so here’s what happened.
To escape ‘Davina the Diabolical’ (stepmother) and ‘Damien the Devil’s spawn’ (baby half-brother), Daisy (actually Elizabeth), is sent from New York to live with cousins in a ramshackle house in country England. Daisy is not happy and she doesn’t like eating. She is picked up and driven to the farm by cigarette-puffing fourteen-year-old Edmond. This is an eccentric but socially engaged family. Soon Aunt Penn is off to Oslo to lecture on the ‘Imminent Threat of War’, and the five children are mostly left to fend for themselves. A bomb goes off in a London station, huge numbers are killed and, yes, England has been invaded. Little fighting is evident but the children’s lives become tougher and bleaker as supplies and services run out. When the army requisitions the farmhouse, the children are separated. Daisy and Piper, the youngest, are taken to a far-off farmhouse.
The real heart of this story and what gives it its enormous force is Daisy’s desperate and determined efforts to find Edmond, with whom she has started a loving sexual relationship. Rosoff perfectly captures Daisy’s snappy, knowing, increasingly despairing voice. She also captures the concerns and anxieties of our times (this was written well before the London bombings of 2005). The ending is wrenching and terrible but the experience of reading this beautiful book is the consolation. The accolades that How I Live Now has gained worldwide are well deserved. It is a very special book. It’s interesting to compare the tone, style and authorial intention with John Marsden’s Tomorrow series, also about a nation invaded by an unnamed enemy. Rosoff hit the ground running as a young adult writer, so her second book, JUST IN CASE (2006), was eagerly awaited. It won the 2007 Carnegie Medal.
How to Make a Bird MARTINE MURRAY
YA AUSTRALIA 2003
‘Well, what are you doing, Mannie? Where the hell are you going at this time? It’s five o’clock in the morning. And why are you wearing that dress?’
I looked down at the dress, in a purposefully weary and innocent way, as if to ascertain what dress I was wearing.
It was the red one. We both knew it was.
‘It’s my mother’s dress.’
Words such as ‘whimsical’, ‘fey’ and ‘sensitive’ are frequently used about Martine Murray’s books. The characters and their worldview may be odd, but Murray is absolutely sure-footed in her writing – after all, she used to be a circus performer! Her prose is lyrical and luminous as it unhurriedly teases out her characters’ feelings and their search for meaning. Mannie says about herself, ‘I’ve simply come out of left field. I’m a stray . . .’
On her bicycle in her red dress, Mannie is heading for the train and escaping to the city. She’s looking for someone, something, but the only clue she has is an address. She also thinks she needs to get away from small-town life and the pain of loss. It is her mother’s ballgown she is wearing and this keeps her connected to the mother who has returned to France following a breakdown. There have also been tragic deaths in her family, and her grandmother is ageing and fading. Yet despite Mannie’s apparent feyness, she is strong and resilient and purposeful, even if she may not be conscious of what her purpose and direction are. Over a period of two days Mannie finds out many unexpected things about her family and herself and this helps her decide how she feels about her father and the young man in her life.
One reviewer described this book as ‘a truly breathtaking read’. Others found it slow and meandering. There are rich rewards if you allow yourself to be pulled into Martine Murray’s unique way of seeing and constructing the world, and her fresh and special way of putting words together.
Nightjohn GARY PAULSEN
Y/YA USA 1993
‘To know things, for us to know things, is bad for them. We get to wanting and when we get to wanting it’s bad for them. They thinks we want what they got . . . That’s why they don’t want us reading.’ (Nightjohn)
’I didn’t know what letters was, not what they meant, but I thought it might be something I wanted to know. To learn.’ (Sarny)
In the South of the USA in the 1850s, the penalty for a slave caught reading was dismemberment. Even so, the huge, badly scarred slave Nightjohn, who has managed to escape north, returns to teach the black children on the plantation to read. He knows it is their only hope for another life. Twelve-year-old Sarny is prepared to take the risk. In a tiny book of less than seventy pages, Paulsen creates a riveting story of unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity, but also of exceptional courage and beauty. This timeless, meticulously researched classic is clearly written from deep anger and the desire to immerse young readers in the realities of a grim period in America’s past.
SARNY (1997), the sequel to Nightjohn, was apparently written because so many readers wanted to know about the future of this clever, brave little girl. Sarny’s story has some resonances for Australia and its ‘stolen generation’ of Aboriginal children. A free woman after the Civil War, Sarny goes searching for her ‘sold-away’ children. Her story takes in the sweep of American history until her death in the 1930s. The prolific Paulsen is best known for his action adventure stories, mostly notably the Hatchet series. But Paulsen is also a master storyteller and passionate about American history, injustice – and dog-sledding.
Northern Lights PHILIP PULLMAN
YA/A UK 1995
‘What do you know about Dust, Lyra?’
‘Oh, that it comes out of space, and it lights people up, if you have a special sort of camera to see it by. Except not children. It doesn’t affect children.’
I have a theory that if the His Dark Materials trilogy had been released as adult fantasy, it wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as it has been. It’s less of a stigma to be seen reading a children’s book than a fantasy book. But this series isn’t really a series for young people. Pullman insists he does not write fantasy, and the series is, in fact, almost impossible to define, other than to say that it is possibly one of the most profound, terrifying and moving pieces of commentary on religion and the church that I have ever read.
Lyra Silvertongue lives in Oxford (not our Oxford, a different one). She overhears something she should not, and is catapulted into a strange series of adventures that take her to the icy lands to the north, and then out of her world entirely – to our world, to a strange world where creatures have wheels instead of legs, and then all the way to the Underworld. Lyra is accompanied by Pantalaimon, her dæmon. In Lyra’s world, every human has a dæmon – an animal that is a sort of external representation of a person’s soul. In childhood, the dæmon can change shape, being a moth one moment, a tiger the next. When a child hits puberty, the dæmon settles on a single form, and does not change again. The relationships between people and their dæmons are beautiful, perfectly captured and, at times, heartbreakingly poignant.
This is a change-your-life sort of series, and it must be read from Northern Lights, through THE SUBTLE KNIFE (1997) all the way to the stunning conclusion in THE AMBER SPYGLASS (2000). ‘Historic first for author as judges shelve doubts’, shouted The Guardian, as this final book in Pullman’s epic trilogy was the first so-called children’s book ever to win the overall Prize in the Whitbread (now Costa) Awards. In January 2007, Pullman was awarded the ‘Keys to the City’ of Oxford, where he lives. The Lord Mayor declared, ‘His Dark Materials is one of the finest imaginative works in English. While it creates and explores new worlds and new systems, its roots are in Oxford and we are pleased to be able to confer the freedom of the city on someone who has given so much enjoyment to children, and adults, all over the world.’
In 2007, Northern Lights won the ‘Carnegie of Carnegies’ when it topped a poll to choose the favourite from seventy years of Carnegie Medal winners. The film adaptation of Northern Lights is due to be released in December 2007. It’s called The Golden Compass, the title under which the book was published in the USA.
CONTRIBUTED BY LILI WILKINSON
Of a Boy SONYA HARTNETT
A/YA AUSTRALIA 2002
Three children bought no ice-cream, did not return home.
. . .
He doesn’t like or hate school: his nine years have been lived doing what older people have told him to do . . . This isn’t his first school – he’d been coming here only as long as he’d been living with his grandma and uncle, which is almost a year. Before then, while he’d lived with his mother, he’d gone to a school so close to home that he’d walked there and back alone every day; living with his father, he’d caught the school’s trundly bus.
Sonya Hartnett often writes about children or young people lost in various ways. Adrian feels lost, lonely and abandoned. At school he is aware of his tenuous social situation, having only one friend. He also observes without any real understanding another lost soul, ‘horsegirl’, losing her grip, and the horrific way children become a mob and exploit her fragility – he takes part too. Adrian knows he doesn’t belong anywhere or to anyone. He knows Grandma will care for him but that he is a burden. So when he hears about three children going missing, he empathises and is curious. (It was 1977, when the three Beaumont children disappeared in South Australia). Might these be the three children who move in across the road? Hartnett takes this desperately sad boy and sad story to one horrific, but logical, conclusion. Published as an adult book here, Of A Boy won major awards confirming Hartnett as one of Australia’s most significant writers. Some critics, most notably Peter Craven, insist that Hartnett is ‘too good’ to be a writer for young people. Others feel her books are ‘too dark’. These views seem to imply that young people don’t deserve the best or are not ‘up to’ such fine literature. The comment below from a teenager seems to challenge this view:
‘The style of writing in this book is so exquisitely exact, with every sentence, phrase and paragraph formed so perfectly as to form a true page-turner.’ (Jesse, Year 10) « www.goldcreek.act.edu.au/yara »
australian ‘outside the square’ books
SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS Ethel Turner Y/YA 1894
The story of these seven ‘select spirits’ has now been enjoyed for a hundred years and has also been made into a successful ABC miniseries.
THE HARP IN THE SOUTH Ruth Park A/YA 1948
Set in an inner-city Sydney slum in the aftermath of World War II, this saga chronicles the life of the Irish Australian Darcy family. The book was republished for young people by Penguin Books in 1988. A classic storyteller, Ruth Park wrote over forty books for adults and children, including PLAYING BEATIE BOW (1980) and the adventures that became the much-loved Muddleheaded Wombat radio series.
MY BROTHER JACK George Johnston A/YA 1964
The first in a trilogy about two brothers who grew up in a patriotic, suburban Melbourne household during World War I and then went in very different directions, it won the Miles Franklin Award and is acknowledged as one of the true Australian classics.
JOSH Ivan Southall YA 1971
Southall, arguably Australia’s greatest writer and innovator for teenagers, challenged accepted notions about books for young people – what they might be like and what they could be about. Josh is a classic Southall male protagonist: introspective and sensitive. An outsider in a hostile country environment, he feels lost and unappreciated, especially by his stern Aunt Clara, so he decides to walk home to Melbourne. Recently reprinted by UQP in their Children’s Classics series, Josh is still the only Australian book to have won the prestigious UK Carnegie Medal. Perhaps Southall’s finest, most intense book is THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD OF MARCUS LEADBEATER (1990), also one of his last. Sadly, as is often the case in Australia, Southall has not been duly recognised or celebrated at home.
STRANGE OBJECTS Gary Crew YA 1991
Teenager Steven Messenger discovers gruesome relics from the 15th-century shipwreck, Batavia, and his life changes dramatically. A brilliant mélange of actual and invented clues and texts, this book startled many readers and won many major awards. Crew’s abiding interest is to research historical events and then transpose them into challenging fiction.
