Bookmark Days By Scot Gardner. (Girlfriend Fiction 9) Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2009

Avril lives with her farming family in rural Victoria, Australia. She loves her life, although her family has had a feud going with their neighbours, the Carringtons, for about half a century. Actually, the feud is between the two grandfathers, Hoppy and Les, and they’re not sharing their reasons for the quarrel with their children or grandchildren, who are expected to go along with it. Their wives know, but they’ve continued their own friendship.

But a chance encounter with the Carringtons’ gorgeous teenage son, Nathaniel, and a late-night rescue on the road after a local agricultural show, begins to bring the families back together. the grandfathers don’t agree, of course, and work hard to stop the reconciliation.

As a teen romance, this sort of succeeds. It takes only about a week for the girl and boy to declare their love for each other - probably lucky they met, because there’s no local school where they can meet other teenagers; they study by correspondence. It takes a little longer for the families to bury the hatchet(literally in the grandfathers’ case). And no, Avril doesn’t, as the cover blurb indicates, have to stand up to her family. They quite approve of the blossoming romance, apart from Hoppy. She doesn’t even have to work to find out what the problem is: the two grandmothers finally tell her.

The chronology is kind of weird, if you’re reading carefully. Both old men are in their eighties, but while it’s implied that they fought in World War II, they wouldn’t be quite old enough for that. You only have to add up what you’re told of their history to work out that they would probably have been about fifteen at most by the end of the war. And then it takes another twenty-three years or so for them to start the quarrel. None of it is impossible, just - strange.

It doesn’t matter, really. Young readers are unlikely to notice or care. It does a nice job of depicting life in rural Australia, too.

An entertaining first try at teen romance by a writer better known for his boys’ books.

Trust Me! Published by Ford Street Publishing

Okay, I can't review this book, because I have a story in it. Still, I can't resist giving it a plug. It started life as an anthology of historical fiction, commissioned by an education publisher. The publisher and Paul Collins, who was editing, disagreed about enough things that he withdrew and decided to publish it himself, through his new company. Oddly, there are only three pieces left under "historical" - mine being one of them - but the theme of this anthology is "genre". That gives a wide variety of choices and there are stories under romance, crime, horror, fantasy, SF, humour, adventure, etc. It's a big, fat book, with about fifty contributors, mostly big-name Australian writers and artists, and as a teacher-librarian I think it will come in handy in classrooms, because you can choose a genre for whatever work you are doing with the kids. I've been reading the stories and enjoying so far.

Isobelle Carmody wrote the introduction, in which she gave my story a whole paragraph - nice!

My story, Countdown to Apollo 11, was one of the historicals. I had a lot of fun researching it; I went to the State Library and browsed through the newspapers of July 1969, to find out what people were concerned about, what things cost, what was on at the movies and the theatre, even what Star Trek episode was on just before the moon landing, because my hero was a Trek fan. The episode was "The Enterprise Incident", by the way. Most of it had to be left out, because I only had about 2000 words, but the story was better for it, and I know all that information, anyway. 1969 was a different world, wasn't it? No Internet, no mobile phones, no personal computers, in Australia TV was still black and white, not even answering machines on phones. I found an article about an anti-Vietnam rally outside the US consulate on July 4th and used one of the individual stories as the background for this one. One of my friends from work told me he remembered that rally and had been there.

So now I know I can do historical fiction if I want. Good to know for the future.

Anyway, conflict of interest or not, I do think this book is worth getting.

Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony By Eoin Colfer. Published by Penguin Books.

ARTEMIS FOWL AND THE LOST COLONY By Eoin Colfer

When Artemis Fowl first came out, it was, as usual for children’s books at the time, acclaimed as being just like Harry Potter. Come to think of it, that’s still happening today - if it’s a fantasy story and the main character is a boy, it’s Harry Potter, please buy it. Which is a pity, because I think the Artemis Fowl books, at least, will become classics in their own right and attract their own audiences, without any need of support from J.K. Rowling.

Of course, this series isn’t remotely like the Potter books. About all the protagonists have in common is that they’re both eleven year old boys in the first book and grow up in the course of the series. The same can be said of The Dark Is Rising, which was written long before either the Potter or the Fowl books and even has a wizardly mentor (Merlin, actually, still around in modern Britain) - so what?

Harry was a good boy, having adventures with his friends. Artemis was a young criminal genius. He didn’t, at the time, have any friends except his bodyguard, Butler, who genuinely cared about him. While Harry was trying to save the world by finding and destroying the philosopher’s stone, which confers immortality and turns base metal into gold, Artemis was busy kidnapping a fairy, in order to steal gold from her people. Just like Harry Potter? Hardly!

Now we’ve got that out of the way, on to the review.

Fairies in this universe are technologically advanced centuries beyond humans, though they’re magical beings who need contact with the earth to keep themselves going, but have been driven underground long ago. Still, these fairies kick ass, especially their police force, the LEPrecon (get it?). The fairy races are many things, but cute and sweet are not among them. Take the dwarfs, for example. They tunnel by unhinging their jaws and eating their way through the soil - and of course, the gas has to come out somewhere, to help propel them along, hence the “bumflap” in the dwarf’s garment... Ouch!

I haven’t read an Artemis Fowl novel for some time - the last one was the second, in fact. This novel is the fifth and it makes me want to go back and fill in the gaps. I found myself falling comfortably back into the universe. One character, alas, has died since the last time I read a Fowl novel. Artemis is now fourteen and has matured. He’s made friends among the fairies, including the one he kidnapped in Book 1, and is starting, shock horror, to act like a good guy! Oh, yes, and trying to handle puberty.

Just as well, then, that there’s another junior criminal genius to attract him, a sort of female Artemis called Minerva. To be fair, Minerva doesn’t want to harm anybody or steal anything, she just wants to be the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for physics and has no problem with grabbing a magical being to do it. The trouble is, her ambitions might, unintentionally, destroy an entire lost fairy race, the demons. Time is running out to save them, and Artemis and his friends are relying on a small imp who’s the last demon warlock alive...

A series like this could quite easily have gone downhill by Book 5, but it hasn’t. You really want to know what happens next and this one has an ending that lets you know, quite clearly, that there’s more to come and that the author has been thinking quite carefully about Artemis’s future. After all, he is a teenager now, one who is starting to notice girls, but he needs a girl with his own intelligence. It would have worked better if Minerva had played a larger role in the events at the novel’s climax, but I’d be very surprised if she wasn’t back in the next book.

There’s a “gnommish" alphabet at the end of the book, with a long message throughout the book, disguised as a pretty border. Anna Ciddor’s Viking trilogy had rune messages in it, but at least she put them at the end of each chapter. Runes might have worked better in this one than the picture-based letters, because children can actually copy runes and write their own messages. Oh, well.

Excuse me, I’m off to make my way through the book again, to see what the message says...

New Kate Constable and Catherine Jinks books - rejoice!

As it will be a while before these appear on January Magazine, I am going to park them here for the time being. Kate Constable and Catherine Jinks are top Australian writers who deserve wide exposure. Both of them are getting it, with overseas editions of their books, but hey, another review won't hurt!

THE TASTE OF LIGHTNING By Kate Constable. Published by Allen and Unwin, 2007.

Kate Constable’s “Chanters of Tremaris” trilogy presented a well-realised universe in which magic was divided into individual types - fire, ice, earth, animals and such, all of which was sung, or, rather, chanted, and only the heroine, Calwyn, the “Singer of All Songs”, could practise more than one kind. There were a lot of countries which she didn’t actually visit in the course of the series, but which the reader might well have wished to see.

In The Taste of Lightning, we get our wish. We are back in the world of Tremaris, about twenty years after the events of The Tenth Power, the last story in the original trilogy, and in a different part of the world. Here, magic - or chantment, as it is known on Tremaris - is not actually practised, although a woman called Wanion, known as the Witch-Woman is terrifying everyone by making them believe she can practise sympathetic magic. She can’t, but she knows something which will enable her to control those who can do magic if allowed to continue. She has her own, very good, reasons for wanting to have control over Skir, the young Priest-King of Cragonlands.

Skir, a laundry-maid called Tansy and Perrin, a soldier, flee together, with a number of pursuers after them. Skir is a sort of lama, of the kind who’s been recognised as someone’s reincarnation and taken to a temple to rule the faithful of that particular religion. The trouble is, the Priest-King is supposed to be able to practise ironcraft magic and he just can’t. He has been held as a hostage by Baltimar, the country at war with his own, but now his life is in danger, not only from the country holding him hostage but from a country called Rengan, which has its own agenda and reasons for wanting him dead. As a baby, Skir was hit by lightning and survived. This is significant, but we don’t find out why until nearly the end, when Skir learns who he actually is. When he gets home to the temple, he is not as welcome as he might have thought he would be, and he also discovers - eventually - why he can’t practise ironcraft in spite of all his efforts, and it isn’t only to do with himself.

As in the original trilogy, the main characters are likeable, the females are strong and Tremaris is still a believable world. There are ordinary soldiers rather than fantasy-universe warriors, and like soldiers everywhere they swear, though Constable has created her own swear-word, frug; she allows her readers to work out what that probably means, as in Red Dwarf’s swear-word smeg. If you have read the “Chanters of Tremaris” series you will be pleased to realise that one of the characters in this one was a main character in the original trilogy, though now an adult, many years older. You also find out what happened after Calwyn’s success, and it’s something that might have been predicted if the reader had thought about it, and not necessarily “happily ever after”.

There is plenty more that can happen in this world. The story doesn’t end on a clffhanger, but there are still plenty of things we don’t know at the end of it, and there is a strong possibility that there will be more novels to answer the questions raised at the end of this one.

Those who have read the orignal trilogy will fall comfortably back into this universe. If you haven’t read it, you should still enjoy this but why not go back and find out how it all started?

As with “Chanters of Tremaris”, The Taste Of Lightning should appeal to fans of Tamora Pierce.

ELYSIUM By Catherine Jinks. Published by Allen and Unwin, 2007

This is part of the “Allie’s Ghost Hunters” series, one of which, Eglantine, I have read and reviewed. Eglantine was an enjoyable children’s ghost story, in which the heroine and her friends played detectives, using their research skills and the school library to work out why a child ghost was haunting a room and how to lay it to rest.

In this story, Allie Gebhardt, President of the Exorcists’ Club, travels with her mother and brother and her mother’s boyfriend to stay at a hotel near the famous Jenolan Caves in New South Wales’ Blue Mountains, where she is going on a Ghost Tour at Caves House, a haunted hotel. The novel is written as a report to those other members of the club who can’t make it on the tour.

While there, she offers advice on someone’s dreams about a dead grandmother and encounters - sort of - a creature from local Aboriginal myth which is supposed to capture its prey by making it faint from the awful smell. Without question, there is something very smelly around the place, and somebody is going to end up covered in disgusting goo!

At the same time, she has to deal with family issues, such as her father’s utterly ridiculous New Age girlfriend, her friend Michelle’s family troubles and others.

There’s a lot of humour in this story and it’s written in Catherine Jinks’s usual entertaining style. What is doesn’t actually seem to be is a ghost story, or even a monster tale, or the “Paranormal Adventure” on the cover. If it was a stand-alone story, or promoted as just a light-hearted tale about family issues with a little monster and ghost stuff in the background, this would be fine.

In fact, it can be read more or less stand-alone, though the cover and internal references make it clear that this is one of four novels so far.

But a child who has read the other three, or even the cover blurb on the back of this one, would assume they were going to read something at least a little scary, and it’s not remotely scary. No ghosts appear, nobody is ever in any real danger from the Otherworld and while Allie gives advice about laying to rest the ghost of the grandmother of one of the characters, the ghost doesn’t actually appear on stage. No ghost appears, actually. One supposed haunting turns out to be a joke played by one of the less-sympathetic characters. The Mumuga - the dung-smelling creature - does nothing worse than make the ridiculous girlfriend smell awful. That’s assuming it is the creature that is responsible. The author never commits herself about this.

I quite enjoyed it, myself, but I suspect children expecting a ghost story will be disappointed.

It’s a pity. Catherine Jinks is a fine, versatile writer who has created everything from historical fiction in the Pagan series to science fiction, from children’s fiction such as the “Allie’s Ghost Hunters” series to adult fiction. This one is entertaining as always, but just doesn’t quite work as the kind of story it is supposed to be.

New Kate Constable and Catherine Jinks books - rejoice!

As it will be a while before these appear on January Magazine, I am going to park them here for the time being. Kate Constable and Catherine Jinks are top Australian writers who deserve wide exposure. Both of them are getting it, with overseas editions of their books, but hey, another review won't hurt!

THE TASTE OF LIGHTNING By Kate Constable. Published by Allen and Unwin, 2007. *This review has now been published at January Magazine, sooner than I expected, so go and have a look at it there. I will be removing this one from here shortly, as soon as i have sorted out a couple of things. I'll leave the Catherine Jinks review for the present.*

Kate Constable’s “Chanters of Tremaris” trilogy presented a well-realised universe in which magic was divided into individual types - fire, ice, earth, animals and such, all of which was sung, or, rather, chanted, and only the heroine, Calwyn, the “Singer of All Songs”, could practise more than one kind. There were a lot of countries which she didn’t actually visit in the course of the series, but which the reader might well have wished to see.

In The Taste of Lightning, we get our wish. We are back in the world of Tremaris, about twenty years after the events of The Tenth Power, the last story in the original trilogy, and in a different part of the world. Here, magic - or chantment, as it is known on Tremaris - is not actually practised, although a woman called Wanion, known as the Witch-Woman is terrifying everyone by making them believe she can practise sympathetic magic. She can’t, but she knows something which will enable her to control those who can do magic if allowed to continue. She has her own, very good, reasons for wanting to have control over Skir, the young Priest-King of Cragonlands.

Skir, a laundry-maid called Tansy and Perrin, a soldier, flee together, with a number of pursuers after them. Skir is a sort of lama, of the kind who’s been recognised as someone’s reincarnation and taken to a temple to rule the faithful of that particular religion. The trouble is, the Priest-King is supposed to be able to practise ironcraft magic and he just can’t. He has been held as a hostage by Baltimar, the country at war with his own, but now his life is in danger, not only from the country holding him hostage but from a country called Rengan, which has its own agenda and reasons for wanting him dead. As a baby, Skir was hit by lightning and survived. This is significant, but we don’t find out why until nearly the end, when Skir learns who he actually is. When he gets home to the temple, he is not as welcome as he might have thought he would be, and he also discovers - eventually - why he can’t practise ironcraft in spite of all his efforts, and it isn’t only to do with himself.

As in the original trilogy, the main characters are likeable, the females are strong and Tremaris is still a believable world. There are ordinary soldiers rather than fantasy-universe warriors, and like soldiers everywhere they swear, though Constable has created her own swear-word, frug; she allows her readers to work out what that probably means, as in Red Dwarf’s swear-word smeg. If you have read the “Chanters of Tremaris” series you will be pleased to realise that one of the characters in this one was a main character in the original trilogy, though now an adult, many years older. You also find out what happened after Calwyn’s success, and it’s something that might have been predicted if the reader had thought about it, and not necessarily “happily ever after”.

There is plenty more that can happen in this world. The story doesn’t end on a clffhanger, but there are still plenty of things we don’t know at the end of it, and there is a strong possibility that there will be more novels to answer the questions raised at the end of this one.

Those who have read the orignal trilogy will fall comfortably back into this universe. If you haven’t read it, you should still enjoy this but why not go back and find out how it all started?

As with “Chanters of Tremaris”, The Taste Of Lightning should appeal to fans of Tamora Pierce.

ELYSIUM By Catherine Jinks. Published by Allen and Unwin, 2007

This is part of the “Allie’s Ghost Hunters” series, one of which, Eglantine, I have read and reviewed. Eglantine was an enjoyable children’s ghost story, in which the heroine and her friends played detectives, using their research skills and the school library to work out why a child ghost was haunting a room and how to lay it to rest.

In this story, Allie Gebhardt, President of the Exorcists’ Club, travels with her mother and brother and her mother’s boyfriend to stay at a hotel near the famous Jenolan Caves in New South Wales’ Blue Mountains, where she is going on a Ghost Tour at Caves House, a haunted hotel. The novel is written as a report to those other members of the club who can’t make it on the tour.

While there, she offers advice on someone’s dreams about a dead grandmother and encounters - sort of - a creature from local Aboriginal myth which is supposed to capture its prey by making it faint from the awful smell. Without question, there is something very smelly around the place, and somebody is going to end up covered in disgusting goo!

At the same time, she has to deal with family issues, such as her father’s utterly ridiculous New Age girlfriend, her friend Michelle’s family troubles and others.

There’s a lot of humour in this story and it’s written in Catherine Jinks’s usual entertaining style. What is doesn’t actually seem to be is a ghost story, or even a monster tale, or the “Paranormal Adventure” on the cover. If it was a stand-alone story, or promoted as just a light-hearted tale about family issues with a little monster and ghost stuff in the background, this would be fine.

In fact, it can be read more or less stand-alone, though the cover and internal references make it clear that this is one of four novels so far.

But a child who has read the other three, or even the cover blurb on the back of this one, would assume they were going to read something at least a little scary, and it’s not remotely scary. No ghosts appear, nobody is ever in any real danger from the Otherworld and while Allie gives advice about laying to rest the ghost of the grandmother of one of the characters, the ghost doesn’t actually appear on stage. No ghost appears, actually. One supposed haunting turns out to be a joke played by one of the less-sympathetic characters. The Mumuga - the dung-smelling creature - does nothing worse than make the ridiculous girlfriend smell awful. That’s assuming it is the creature that is responsible. The author never commits herself about this.

I quite enjoyed it, myself, but I suspect children expecting a ghost story will be disappointed.

It’s a pity. Catherine Jinks is a fine, versatile writer who has created everything from historical fiction in the Pagan series to science fiction, from children’s fiction such as the “Allie’s Ghost Hunters” series to adult fiction. This one is entertaining as always, but just doesn’t quite work as the kind of story it is supposed to be.