#AtoZ Challenge: C Is For Isobelle Carmody

My theme for this year’s A to Z is SF and fantasy, authors and their worlds. Today’s post is about Australian fantasy writer Isobelle Carmody. 

Isobelle wrote her first novel, Obernewtyn, when she was fourteen. It was published some years later and the last novel in the series, Red Queen, was published only in 2015. The series has been extraordinarily popular and successful and the author has won many awards. She lives part of the year in Australia, in the seaside town of Apollo Bay, and part in Prague. I have seen her books proudly displayed in the Apollo Bay bookshop. She is a local heroine! 

Isobelle Carmody is a prolific writer, mostly for children and teens, although she has had plenty of short fantasy fiction in a number of anthologies. Some of her novels which went out of print have been republished in recent years by Ford Street Publishing. (If you are a fan of the Obernewtyn series, there is an Obernewtyn novelette in the Ford Street anthology Trust Me Too! in which I also have a story). 

She has written so many books that I haven’t had the chance to read more than a few over the years. 

The bestselling Obernewtyn series is set in a world not unlike that of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, in which, after a nuclear disaster, some people develop powers, and have to flee to safety from a school Cletus that doesn’t accept them. I’ve only read the first two in that series, but well worth catching up - one of those days I’ll get to the rest of them! 

I have also read The Gathering, a scary YA novel about a boy in a battle between good and evil in a small town. I read it years ago, so have forgotten the details, but it won a number of awards, including the CBCA Award for older readers in 1994, and many schools bought class sets. 

I discovered some of her other books later, when they were reprinted by Ford Street. One was Greylands, a rather sad novel on the theme of depression, using fantasy elements. I’ve reviewed it here. Sad, yes, but well worth a read. 

Scatterlings was another Ford Street reprint, which I bought at a launch with its great new cover. It’s a post-apocalyptic children’s book with a heroine who wakes up after a helicopter crash and no real memory of who she is or what she is doing there. 

The most recent reprint I’ve read was the wonderful Alyzon Whitestarr, reviewed here. 

 I didn’t discover this till it was reprinted only the other year. It is a YA novel about a girl who, after a nasty knock on the head, wakes up from a coma to find herself with extended senses which tell her perhaps more than she wanted to know about people. I loved the characters, about whom I found myself caring deeply. 

Alas, a trilogy she started many years ago, Legendsong, has never been finished. The first two, Darkfall and Darksong, are about two young Australian sisters travelling in Greece who find themselves in a parallel universe, and a wonderful pair of novels they are, but the third  has never been published, though a generation of kids have grown up and left school since the second book ended on a cliffhanger. I had them in my shelves in the school library and had to explain gently to the fans that there were no more books in that series! The author told me last time I asked that she was 400 pages into the final novel and I believe her, but that was around seven years ago. Is it worth reading them anyway? Yes, but be warned!

If you want some of her books, they should be easily available in ebook, and several are also available in audiobook read by the author. A visit to the Ford Street website is worth paying to see what is available in the reprints. 

Check them out!