GAMERS’ QUEST By George Ivanoff. Melbourne: Ford Street Publishing, 2009.

In recent years, computer games have gone way beyond the likes of Pacman, Space Invaders and such. These days you can take on an avatar and “live” in Second Life, for example. When I was much younger, you could play Dungeons and Dragons around a table, with other fans. It was very sociable and you collected gold, treasure, skills and weapons at the roll of a pair of dice, going up to higher levels as you went. Now, you can go on-line to do the same thing.

What would happen if the avatars wanted the same thing, only in our world?

Anyone who has read the original short story on which this is based, in the Ford Street anthology Trust Me! will know immediately what’s going on in this novel, so I’m not giving much away. Even if you haven’t read the original, you pick it up fairly speedily.

Teenage thieves Tark and Zyra live in a world in which magic is mixed with technology. You can be using a sword o’light to kill a dragon one moment and battling a cyborg the next. The reasons for this become clear fairly soon. The young thieves use their ill-gotten gains to give them time in Designers’ Paradise, where they can do exotic things such as go to school, then home to do homework and watch television. But they have gotten in trouble with a character known as the Fat Man, who will not give up the chase, even when they are making their way to Designers’ Paradise. And Designers’ Paradise, when they get there, is also in danger…

A good introduction to speculative fiction for younger readers, this one is non-stop action with a light touch. There is a lot of delightful over-the-top silliness – you wouldn’t for example, want to be a mage in this world, where you can end up a toad if your spell bounces back at you. The story is a cross between a computer game and Dungeons and Dragons, with a touch of Westworld. The cover art is by wonderful book illustrator Les Petersen, who did the covers for Simon Haynes’ Hal Spacejock novels and several for Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. The images of Tark and Zyra look like computer game avatars, giving a strong hint of what the novel is about.

The author has set up a web site, http://www.gamersquestbook.com ,for readers who would like more stories about his characters.

What I'm re-reading #1: Brother Cadfael

I do an awful lot of reading and reviewing of new books, both for this blog and January Magazine. For all of that, I have some comfort re-reading - Kerry Greenwood, Terry Pratchett, Tolkien. I have decided that every now and then I am going to post something to this site about what I'm re-reading at the time.

Right now, I'm making my way back through the Brother Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters, AKA Edith Pargeter.

I had known her as Edith Pargeter long before I started reading her history mysteries. She wrote mediaeval historical novels, usually centred around the Welsh border country. There was the Heaven Tree trilogy, the Brothers of Gwynedd, her Hotspur novel, A Bloody Field By Shrewsbury. She was also writing crime fiction as Ellis Peters. What more natural than that she should put the two skills together?

I remember discovering Brother Cadfael, her Welsh monk living in Shrewsbury during the fight between Stephen and Maud for the English throne. Cadfael had gone off to the First Crusade as a man-at-arms and, on his return, had decided to retire into a monastery, where he became the monastery's herbalist. He is very shrewd and observant and has skills the average forensic investigator would value. He had a son from his adventures in the East, who turned up in one of the early novels, The Virgin In The Ice, and then again in the final book in the twenty-novel series. His best friend was the local law enforcer, Hugh Beringar, who started off as a potential villain, but by the end of the first book had become Cadfael's friend, in a classic combination of the amateur sleuth and his buddy the cop. Hugh was assistant Sheriff of Shropshire, then became Sheriff after his boss's death. And, of course, you wouldn't want to be living in Shrewsbury around then, any more than you'd like to live in the county of Midsomer now! Not with all those murders.

I became hooked on the series - while each story had its own mystery to solve, there was the history, the characters and the fact that you cared about them. I gave my mother one of the books to read and at the time, she wasn't interested. Then, on a trip to England in 1988, I took her to Shrewsbury, where I found the description had been so accurate, I actually recognised the streets and layout of the town.

Brother Cadfael had brought plenty of tourists to the quiet, pretty town of Shrewsbury - a place so small you could get around all the tourist sections in an afternoon! Mum and I visited the church of St Peter and St Paul, which had a leaky roof at the time and we were told by one of the parishioners that in winter the heating had to be turned off an hour into the service to save electricity. I have not been back, but I hope things have improved since then and am fully expecting at least one comment on this post to let me know!

When this gentleman saw Mum taking my photo on the steps, he said, "Dare I ask if you're a Brother Cadfael fan?" I smiled and said, "Need you ask?"

After that, he stood with us and pointed out several places mentioned in the novels. It was a delightful trip all round. When we got back, Mum finally decided to read the books to see what all the fuss was about and then bewailed the fact that she had been in Shrewsbury and had not been able to appreciate the Cadfael connection, though she had loved the beauty of the place.

Recently, she told me that she is too stressed at the moment, with family health troubles, to be able to concentrate on any of the new books I had been borrowing for her from the library. I suggested a re-read, which always makes me feel better. I gave her the Cadfael books, which she is presently re-reading with great delight, and now I have started doing it too. It has been so long, I have actually forgotten whodunnit, though not Brother Cadfael, Hugh, Abbot Radulfus, Prior Robert or any of the regulars. It is giving me a lot of pleasure, freeing me from work-related stress for a time, as I join this calm, mild-mannered monk in the mid-eleventh century...

Feedback on a book I reviewed

Some time ago, I reviewed Paul Jennings' new book, The Nest. At the time, while I thought it a perfectly good YA novel, I was not sure how the fans of one of Australia's funniest writers would feel about a book that wasn't funny. As a teacher-librarian, I have recently spoken to two young men about the book. I lent it out to a student who was told it was not going to be funny and said fair enough. But two days later, he returned it, syaing apologetically that in his heart he had expected it to be funny and simply couldn't finish it.

But yesterday I spoke with another student, who asked me if I had read the book, which he wanted to discuss. He had no problems with the fact that it wasn't funny and was enjoying it, he said, although he found the "short chapters" confusing. When I had explained that those short chapters were meant to be stories written by the hero, which told you something about his feelings, the student's face brightened: he got it! Now he will enjoy it more.

The jury is still out on this book, for me, at least, but it is interesting to have had two types of feedback. It would be a shame if Mr Jennings couldn't interest his fans in a new kind of writing.

WOUNDED (The Wereling Trilogy 1) By Stephen Cole. London: Bloomsbury,, 2009

I haven’t come across any of the books in this trilogy before. They were originally published in 2003, but this edition has only come out recently. The cover features a pair of sinister-looking eyes and a silhouette of a wolf, howling in a dark green landscape.

Kate and Tom are thrown together when her family kidnaps him from his camping family and turns him into a werewolf. In this world, werewolves can both be born and made. Kate’s family are born ones. Her mother is the worst of them, a killing junkie who is addicted to turning wolf and killing humans. Kate is not a werewolf yet, She won’t become one until she has been mated with a male werewolf. Werewolf women are usually raped to turn them. Or, as Kate puts it, the girl is locked into a room with a crazed male werewolf and if her parents feel romantic, they might even put a bed in the room.

Kate’s mother, Marcie, has plans for Tom. There’s a prophecy to do with a human-turned-were which will usher in an age of werewolf dominance. After Kate rescues Tom from her brother, the two of them go on the run, hoping to find a Native American shaman, last heard of in New Orleans, who can cure him. But Marcie is powerful in the werewolf community. They find they can’t trust anybody...

It will be interesting to see how this one goes with the girls who come to my library. Right now, the fashion is for darkly brooding, Byronic vampires. Whether a not-especially-Byronic werewolf will be of interest, I don’t know, but I suspect that, like the recent spate of vampire novels, this book will appeal more to girls than boys. It’s a good enough road story and ends with the quest unfinished, so the reader needs to wait for the next volume. It’s not very long and I think it might work best in an omnibus edition.

NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST By Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. Movie tie-in edition, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009

I was at Reading Matters conference when this book was launched in Australia in 2007. David Levithan was one of the guest speakers and spoke about how he and Rachel Cohn had written it as a sort of screwball comedy. I have the original Australian cover, but this one, with the young movie actors, should attract plenty of teen readers.

It is certainly very funny, full of music and teen angst and over-the-top happenings. I haven't seen the movie, but I suspect it will make an enjoyable one, hopefully with plenty of music in it.

The entire novel takes place over a single night. Nick, who is playing at a dance, sees the girlfriend who dumped him enter with her new man. Desperate not to seem concerned, he asks Norah, the nearest girl, “I know this is going to sound strange, but would you mind being my girlfriend for the next five minutes?”

Her response is to kiss him, making sure the ex can see her doing it, and this is the beginning of an all-night music gig crawl, sponsored by his friends in the band, who feel he needs the morale boost and trust her to be kind and helpful. Romance is in the air.

There’s a lot more to it than this, of course. Norah actually knows Nick’s ex and doesn’t particularly like her. She has her own troubles. The chapters alternate between the boy and girl and all the ends are drawn together at the end.

Easy reading and an enjoyable piece of fluff.

ROBOT RIOT (Schooling Around) By Andy Griffiths. Sydney, Pan Macmillan,2009

This is the fourth of the “Schooling Around” series featuring the students of Grade 5B at Northwest Southeast Central School, but like the others, it pretty much stands alone.

The stories are all over-the-top humorous and the characters mostly have names that suit their personalities - Gretel Armstrong, for example, is strong, Jenny Friendly is the nice one, Grant Gadget is the son of an inventor and invents plenty himself.

The stories are seen from the viewpoint of Henry McThrottle. In this latest adventure, Henry is convinced that logical, unemotional new girl Roberta Flywheel is a robot from the future, planning to wipe out the population of Earth, starting with the students of 5B...

As always, it’s delightfully silly and still makes good points about friendship. And wouldn’t we all like to have been in Mr Brainfright’s class, with a teacher who loves bananas enough to dress up as one and teaches that the world would be a better place if we would all just look at it through coloured cellophane once a day?

Andy Griffiths is one of the most popular children’s writers in Australia, for good reason. He knows kids love to laugh and they love over-the-top laughs.

This series is going well at my school right now. I’d better get this book processed; there is a waiting list for it...

Andy Griffiths Meets 8A

I'd been planning this excursion for ages. There was a choice between Andy Griffiths - the author of various books about bums and kids doing bizarre, over-the-top stuff - and Morris Gleitzman, both of whom have fans in my homeroom class. We could only manage one of them. Kayla would have liked to hear Morris Gleitzman talk about his serious novels, Once and Then, both of which she loves, but the vote went to Andy Griffiths, who was doing a panel with Danny Katz, the comic journalist who has also written a number of children's books. I sort of know Danny, whom I keep meeting at Allen and Unwin parties, and his wife, Mitch Vane, illustrated my spies book. I met her at a book signing for the Ford Street publication Trust Me!, when we sat next to each other. Mitch's art was not just decoration - it commented on the text, formed a part of it and was very, very funny.

Anyway, I set about booking the tickets. Once the excursion was approved, I did a lot of running around, collecting money and permission forms. Students in the class left. Students came back after months. Some students who had been absent a lot started to turn up for classes and had to be factored in to the numbers.

There wasn't much time to book, either. The holidays were upon us. I had to book on my card. We nearly missed out - Andy Griffiths is very, very popular. The gentleman at the Melbourne Writers' Festival booking office told me that session was booked out and I had to think of another one. But soon after, he rang back to tell me of a cancellation and the plan was back on.

Coming back, I had to finish collecting. The campus mini-bus might not be big enough for the full class, which was now slightly larger. We booked the one belonging to the nearby Australian Technical College. Bill, the teacher who had a mini-bus licence, was going to drive us.

Two weeks before the Event, Bill was told he had to go on a school camp and was replaced by Sharon, the sports teacher. Sharon had been going to the regional athletics on that day, but all the other mini-bus drivers were on camp.

On the day, two students I had thought were going to the athletics came to say the sports had been cancelled, but two more were absent, so the numbers were just right for the campus mini-bus after all.

Somehow, we managed to cram into the bus and reach Federation Square after being caught in traffic, behind a huge truck, with all the red lights against us, and back-seat-driver students telling Sharon where she should have gone instead. We had to hurry through the gardens to get from our parking spot, and we were a few minutes late, but so were other schools and the session started late, giving us time to get in and settle into the back row.

The BMW Edge is a very beautiful theatre with a view of the Yarra River through the window behind the stage.

The speakers sat there, throwing jokes back and forth. We learned a lot about how they had started out in writing and their feelings about what is funny. Andy admitted that his character Lisa was based on a real girl he'd had a crush on in fourth grade. A few years ago she had contacted him to ask if that was her in the book. They met after that, and he was relieved that both of them were happily married and the romance wasn't going to flare up again.

He never did explain - why the bum stories? - but no one asked.

Afterwards, two of the students, Michael and Stephanie, had books to get signed. I took them towards the signing tables while Sharon led the rest of the class to hear poetry read. (The poetry was pretty awful, I thought, but the students didn't complain).

The queue was a mile long, but Michael and his friend Mehmed simply pushed in while I had my back turned and no one complained, so I stood near them with Stephanie and her book and the books were soon signed. I also got to meet Sue Bobbermein, the publicity lady who sends me review copies, and put a face to a name.

We had lunch at Hungry Jack's in Swanston Street. Many of the students had huge appetites; I've never seen anything like it! Mehmed and Jessica were fasting for Ramadan, but everyone else enjoyed burgers, wraps, chips, ice cream and more ice cream and then, just for a change, ice cream...

The afternoon had turned chilly, with winds coming up and a storm on the way, but we got back to the bus and finally returned to school, not quite as slowly as on the way.

I dismissed the students and returned to the library. The trip was worth the bother, but I heaved a sigh of relief it was all over.

PINK By Lili Wilkinson. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009

Ava is the child of two university lecturers who were absolutely thrilled when she “came out” and started a relationship with intellectual, chain-smoking Chloe, a girl at her state secondary school.

But Ava has a Deep Dark Secret. She has a pink cashmere jumper hidden in her bedroom cupboard. Much as she loves Chloe, she wants to wear girly clothes – pink if possible – and, dear me, go out with boys, just to see if perhaps it’s her thing. So she has secretly sat for a scholarship to a co-educational private school. When she is accepted, she has to lie, to avoid hurting Chloe’s feelings.

At the Billy Hughes School For Academic Excellence, she soon makes friends with two different groups – the Pastels, who speak several languages, are brilliant in their studies and get the lead roles in the school musical, and the Screws, who are more or less the school outcasts, spending all their time together, doing the set-building, props and lighting.

In the Screws are Jen, the science fiction nerd, Jacob, who is fat, gay boy Jules who hates the other school gays, Kobe the Asian who hates being Asian and Sam, who only feels at home in the undercroft of the school auditorium. Sam has contempt for the actors, in particular the Pastels.

Alexis, the head Pastel, is determined to help Ava get a boyfriend, the dazzling, athletic Ethan, who volunteers with children and is involved with Medecins Sans Frontieres.

But Alexis also has a Deep Dark Secret. And Chloe is starting to worry about what Ava is getting up to.

How can Ava sort out the problems she has caused by her well-meaning actions? What is her actual sexuality – does she even know?

This novel was written as a response to US gay YA novelist David Levithan’s plea for more teen novels with a mixture of sexualities in them. Ms Wilkinson’s argument, with which I agree, is that kids don’t necessarily know what they are and shouldn’t have to decide at sixteen.

There are some nice touches, such as several references to Jane Austen’s Emma, that story of a girl who makes a lot of mistakes while trying to match-make. With luck, young readers of this book might follow it up by reading the Austen novel. There are conversations between the characters which readers might also follow up – even a mention that the trivia mentioned is available on Wikipedia. There is some endearing silliness and a number of very funny scenes.

This book will be going into my school library and I will be interested to see the response I get from readers.

Vale David McDonnell - another fan gone!

For those readers who remember this fan, I'd just like to pass on the information that David died July 21 2009.

I first met David when he was Jan, a lady who hated to be considered female,even then, before she became he, but please forgive me - that's how I always thought of her. So I'm going to remember Jan, although I respect Jan's right to be David.

I first met Jan, as she then was, at my very first Austrek meeting. She didn't know me from a bar of soap, but immediately lent me some fanzines. I remember I somehow got a stain on one of them, so I sent away to the US for a replacement. Jan didn't mind, but I kept the stained one and gave her the replacement ... which she promptly lent to someone else and never got back! :-)

Because Austrek was my first experience of fandom, you might say that she was one of my first friends in fandom. I remember becoming a part of the group, long evenings playing Dungeons and Dragons, literary conventions as well as Trek ones.

I remember the Trek convention in Sydney back in the late 1970s - 1979, I think - where we all travelled there by train, overnight, and crammed into a hotel room in our sleeping bags ... yes, illegal, but that's how fans did it in those days. No wonder hotels didn't like SF cons.

It may have been Jan who managed to arrange for the con GoH, George Takei, to come to our room party. Jan had written some risque filk songs - my favourite to Advance Australia Fair, which began "Trekkers of the world rejoice, Spock's in pon farr again, The only question that remains is who and where and when..." . Another one went to the tune of "Donald Where's Your Troosers?" ("Scotty where's your troosers?"). But the cheekiest one went to the tune of "The Quartermaster's store". I wish I'd had a camera to record Jan's red face when we got to the Sulu verse of the song and she refused to sing it for George!


I only saw David occasionally after Jan became David - mostly at conventions - but remember this fan with great affection.

THE REFORMED VAMPIRE SUPPORT GROUP By Catherine Jinks. Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2009

Catherine Jinks has to be one of the most versatile writers I know of. Historical fiction, SF, fantasy, thriller, ghost stories, children’s, YA, adult - there are very genres she hasn’t set her pen to at one time or another.

In The Reformed Vampire Support Group, she visits the vampire story, although I suspect this is not the kind of novel that would be relished by all the girls at my school who are devouring the Twilight series. If anything, this sends up the vampire tale.

Catherine Jinks asks her readers to think -really think - about what being a vampire might involve, especially in modern Sydney. You can’t eat anything you used to enjoy. You’re unlikely to be able to drive, unless you got your licence before you were turned. If you were elderly, like Bridget, a former nun who was turned at the age of eighty, you ‘ll have arthritis and other aches and pains involved with being elderly forever. You still have to make a living, but you can’t do a normal job. Not if you turned in 1908, anyway. Nina, the narrator, who died in the 1970s, writes adventure novels with a feisty vampire heroine. But Nina was turned at fifteen, which means she will be a teenager forever, with all the problems this involves.

These vampires don’t live in crypts, though they do have weekly group therapy sessions at the local Catholic church. This means they have to find homes with blackout facilities. And they have nothing to do all night but watch dull TV shows.


Fortunately one of them has discovered a way to avoid fanging humans, which they really don’t want to do, as biting humans always turns them and the last thing they need is a planetful of vampires.

But someone has killed a vampire. They have to find out who it is and persuade them not to do it again. Trouble is, there’s more to it than vampire killers...

This novel has a lot of fun with the vampire genre, especially right now when everyone and his dog is publishing it. All I can say is that the authors of the Deadly Serious vampire tales deserve everything they get in this deliciously funny novel.

Catherine Jinks triumphs again!

SOMETHING MORE By Mo Johnson. Series: Girlfriend Fiction 11. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009

Girlfriend Fiction series is quite a mixture, from the hilarious (My Life and Other Catastrophes, The (Not Quite) Perfect Boyfriend) to the thoughtful (Cassie, which was about friendship and family and living with disability rather than boys) to the different, such as Being Mackenzie, which ends on a kiss but not with a new boyfriend. There was the girl caught up with Christian fundamentalism with a cute boy in Winter of Grace and the girl whose Greek background clashed in some ways with her other life (Step Up and Dance).

And then there are the simple romances, which girls often like best, because they reflect their own teen concerns - will the cute boy like me? Does he already have a girlfriend? Do I have a pimple breaking out just when he’s asked me on a date?

This is one of them and, like all the others in this series, it’s a lot better-written than the teen romances that came out in the 1980s when I first started working in school libraries. It has that -well, something more than they did.

True, there are the two attractive boys in the heroine’s life and you just KNOW she’s going to end up with the one she thinks she hates at the beginning. There’s the girl who’s a rival for the affections of the gorgeous one, who’s being horrible to the heroine. It’s formula, but that’s fine. Teenagers like formula. They’d be annoyed if the girl did end up with the first boy she liked in the book.

But unlike the abovementioned 1980s teen romances, the gorgeous boy is actually a nice person. He may not be right for the heroine, but he’s decent enough. The rival is not as bad as she seems. She has her own problems, some of them connected to what’s happening to the heroine’s sister. And unlike the witch-queens of the 80s, she’s actually good at her schoolwork.

Briefly, Isla McBay and her family have migrated to Australia. She has made friends, but misses Scotland, her wise grandmother whose pithy sayings head each chapter, her best friend and the boyfriend who might even now be finding a new girlfriend. She has not yet had the courage to contact him, but thinks she’s making a clean break.

Her sister, with whom she has never gotten along, might be pregnant and suddenly Isla’s worries about boyfriends and pimples don’t seem so important. But it might affect her own relationships...

This novel is never going to set the world of young adult fiction alight, but it’s not meant to. It’s just a nice, gentle story in which the heroine learns something and finds some courage while scoring her new boyfriend. It works.

I had to lend it out to a student following the Girlfriend series without processing it. That must say something about the quality of the series.

THE GIMLET EYE By James Roy. Quentaris: Quest of the Lost City #3. Melbourne, Ford Street Publishing, 2009.

In this third instalment of the spin-off of the popular Quentaris shared-world series, a character from the original series is actually killed off, something that doesn’t usually happen in shared universes. As it happens in the prologue, it’s no secret.

The Archon, ruler of Quentaris, is dying. His horrible nephew Florian is persuaded to finish him off rather than wait for his inevitable death. Florian’s “friend” Janus (as in the two-faced god?) reminds him of the prophecy that declares that anyone who kills the previous ruler will rule properly himself. Janus, of course, has his own agenda.

Meanwhile, the adult magicians have been banished to a very nasty part of the city (well, they can’t be exiled elsewhere, short of being thrown overboard, since Quentaris has been travelling from one vortex to another). The younger ones, such as Tab Vidler, former Dung Brigader and recently an apprentice magician, and her friend Amelia, have been spared the dungeons, but left to their own devices. Tab is back to shovelling dung, though on a farm rather than the streets, while Amelia is working at a pub. Torby, the boy rescued in the first novel, The Spell of Undoing, is lying in hospital in a catatonic state. Nobody knows how this happened, except, of course, the reader.

That conceited ac-tor, Fontagu Wizroth the Third, has been ordered to do a command performance of a play called The Gimlet Eye for the new Emperor’s birthday, and he’s thrilled. Tab, Amelia and their friend, the former pirate Verris, can’t persuade Fontagu that there’s something fishy going on…

In my opinion, this one is the best so far in the new series. We learn more about the characters and their feelings. The adventure is fast, but straightforward enough for the young readers for whom this is an introduction to fantasy. At the same time, there’s a murder in the first chapter; there’s no tiptoeing around the issue. What happens to the adult magicians is also scary.

But there’s still plenty of humour, maybe more than there's been since the end of the original series – and in the end, Fontagu is shown in a more positive light than before.

The only thing is, while you can probably get something out of this book without having read the others, you really do need to have read them to understand properly what’s going on. The series is no longer a lot of related but individual titles. There is still, however, a policy of using some of Australia’s top children’s writers to keep the quality up.

Recommended for children from mid-primary to early secondary school.

Schooling Around: Treasure Fever!, Pencil of Doom!, Mascot Madness! By Andy Griffiths. Sydney, Pan Macmillan, 2008, 2009.

Andy Griffiths is the author of a lot of over-the-top Australian children’s books. His stories are funny and bizarre without quite the grossout of some other popular children’s writers.

Then again, there are the Bum stories. The first, The Day My Bum Went Psycho, started as a short story in which a boy’s bum detaches itself and runs away, leaving him with a major problem keeping his trousers on. In that particular story, there are official bum-catchers, so it’s not all that unusual.

And kids love the absurdity of it all, the sheer silliness, and no surprise there.

The Schooling Around series so far has the usual silliness of Griffiths stories. It manages to slip in messages about self-belief, bullying and courage, without hitting the reader over the head with them. In fact, it’s likely children will absorb them without noticing.

Schooling Around is set in Grade 5B at Northwest Southeast Central School. The Principal, Mr Greenbeard, loves ships and sailing, so treats the school as a ship and speaks in maritime terms. Most characters have appropriate names - the sports teacher is Mr Grunt, the gardener is Mr Spade, the teacher next door, Mrs Cross is always cross.

The adventures of 5B are narrated by Henry McThrottle, who has several friends - Jenny Friendly(she is), Jack Japes, Grant Gadget, whose father is an inventor, horse-loving Gina and Penny Palomino, the brilliant Fiona McBrain, Newton Hooton, who’s scared of everything. Their teacher, who arrives in the first novel, is the loopy Mr Brainfright, whose enthusiasm in teaching everything from how to breathe to how to eat a banana leads him to keep falling out of the window, into Mr Spade’s flower beds.

Each adventure is more or less stand-alone, although it refers to previous stories. In Treasure Fever! the students go searching for a “pirate treasure” buried in the school grounds years ago by Mr Greenbeard, when he was a student.

In Pencil of Doom! Henry desperately tries to get rid of a magical pencil that grants wishes when you use it to draw what you want, but definitely not in the way you were expecting your wishes granted. This story gives a nod to “The Monkey’s Paw” and even has Mr Brainfright telling the story to his class, as if it had happened to one of his friends.

In the recently-released Mascot Madness! the school has to compete in athletics sports against Northwest West Academy, whose obnoxious students jeer and throw things at our heroes whenever their bus is going past. They have been defeating Northwest Southeast Central for the last forty-nine years. Can Henry and his friends win this time, with the help of their new mascot - Mr Brainfright in a banana costume? Especially when their likable teacher is becoming obsessed with bananas and has started to think he is a banana?

Silliness or not - and there is something very silly about a giant dancing banana - there is a message here about believing in yourself and being optimistic.

Recommended for children from mid-primary to early secondary school.

EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL By Simmone Howell. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2008

Riley Rose is stuck at Spirit Ranch Holiday Camp, just when she was about to get close and personal with that hunk Ben. It’s filled with Christian teenagers and camp counsellors who blow bugles at you and make you sing around camp fires, when you’re not memorising Bible quotes or having presentations on the domestic life of the mallee fowl.

Of course, there’s the very hunkish Craig, but he’s not all he seems. Besides, he’s with Riley’s room-mate Fleur and Fleur is not about to share. Then there’s Dylan, who used to be Craig’s friend and equally good-looking, before an accident left him in a wheelchair. He’s back at camp, but no one seems sure what the accident actually was, and he’s not saying.

And Riley has her own issues, centred party, at least, around her mother’s death from cancer, her father’s new partner and her own overweight state.

There’s an entire genre of fiction about a wilderness camp and a troubled teenager who finds answers there, despite being originally reluctant to go. I have reviewed one, Solo by Alyssa Brugman, in the last year. This one isn’t quite as grim as Solo, although it’s also readable and broken into easily-digestible short chapters.

Riley has issues to sort out, but she also has things to teach the other campers, even those who mock her weight and call her a slut. That is perhaps less common in summer camp fiction. Before the novel is over, she is also feeling sympathy even for the worst of them, which helps her. And the beautiful Ben, when he appears, is a comical character rather than the hunk she remembers.

I do have a nitpick or two. Dylan’s accident turns out to have been far less dramatic than was implied at the start and has no real bearing on the story. It would be okay if the issue was about how he handles his confinement to a wheelchair, but he seems to have sorted out most of that before the story begins. I can sort of see why the author plays around with the possible reasons for the accident, but for me, it didn’t quite work.

Still, Riley is a likeable, sympathetic character and the novel makes some serious points in a humorous context. Teenage girls will enjoy it, whether or not they follow it up by seeking out Thomas More’s Utopia, which is quoted throughout the book.

Hi Jenny G!

Thanks, Jenny! You're not the first one to say Phryne Fisher is too perfect and you won't be the last. I treat it as delightful fantasy, which is why I started reading the series in the first place - to get away! And I bet that's why Kerry writes them. She has too many real-life legal clients who have real problems. Escaping to 1928, with a heroine who is rich, beautiful, clever and in control, is absolutely fair enough. Not to mention that Phryne Fisher eats all sorts of yummy stuff without ever putting on weight and looks great in designer clothes - I'll be in that!

While I was waiting for my autographed copy, I chatted with an old man behind me in the queue who said the historical background was absolutely spot on.

Corinna Chapman is a lot more like Kerry in build and in personality - she loves to cook and to bake and is sensible, but has a sense of fun. At the same time, those are fantasy too; I'd move into Insula tomorrow if it existed, and who wouldn't want Corinna's yummy boyfriend who looks like Angel? And oh, that chocolate shop around the corner and the fascinating neighbours and the magic shop run by a real witch... Yeah, that's my kind of fantasy.

I think they have put some of Linda Short's (may she rest in peace) stuff on CD - better check the web site - but this one I did because it was a personal thing, not one of her official tapes, and I hated to see it get corrupt and disappear. I do still have a tape recorder, but I'd rather feel safe!

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.

Murder On A Midsummer Night by Kerry Greenwood

Crow's Nest, Allen and Unwin, 2008

We all thought it would never happen - Phryne Fisher in 1929? The author said it was always going to be 1928, because that was the year she knew about. But sooner or later the year had to end, didn’t it? Phryne had crammed so much into the months between May and December 1928 that it was going to be impossible to move on and the chronology was looking distinctly strange. Still, when Murder in the Dark ended on New Year’s Eve, many of Kerry Greenwood’s fans, myself included, wondered if this was the proverbial It.

Fortunately, it wasn’t. It should be possible to cram another 17 adventures into 1929, if the author doesn’t get sick of it, before then.

I discovered Phryne Fisher after reading an article in the Melbourne Age. The heroine was beautiful, rich, smart, independent and zoomed around Melbourne in her fast red car. And she lived in St Kilda, not far from where I spent my childhood and still within walking distance of where I live now. The combination of Melbourne, history and mystery was perfect for me. They were fun, unlike some grim thrillers I’ve read. I became hooked - and the novels have become comfort reading which I read and re-read. These are what I think of as “whodunnits”, rather than “cosies” - you really CAN’T describe as a cosy something that speeds along as these do.

While standing in the signing queue for this one, I chatted with an elderly gentleman who told me that he could remember the 1930s, which were not too different from the 20s, and that these novels got it absolutely right. Nice to know, though the flavour of 1928 Melbourne always felt right to me.

In January 1929, Phryne Fisher, that rich and elegant private detective, is planning her birthday celebration, not another job, but a young junkshop and antique dealer has been found dead on St Kilda beach and his mother is positive it was murder, not suicide as the coroner has concluded. Time for Miss Fisher to check it out. She is also busy on a case centred around a recently-deceased old lady’s illegitimate child who might have inherited money from her, but needs to be found.

Bright young things, ouija boards, actors, Williamstown, Australian soldiers in wartime Palestine, a missing treasure - it’s all there,and more. We learn about furniture trends in the Melbourne of the 20s and meet a relative of Phryne’s friend, the Communist taxi driver Cec Yates.

As usual, there’s plenty of food and gorgeous clothes and it ends with a party. Kerry Greenwood loves her designer clothes and delicious food. She writes about both with enormous enjoyment and brings this enjoyment across to her readers.

I didn’t work out the killer, but even if I had, the story is such fun that I wouldn’t have cared. If you can re-read a mystery, as I do these, it must be good. And I started re-reading this one as soon as I’d finished it.

That says it all. Buy it. You won’t be disappointed.

Look What I Did!

I've just had the first advance copy of my new children's book, Crime Time: Australians behaving badly, which is coming out from Ford Street Publishing in March. It's always exciting to get something published and the cover and illustrations that went with this one made it even more exciting.

I'd done an article on forensic science for the New South Wales School Magazine, on commission, but it would never have occurred to me to write a history of crime in Australia if I hadn't received an e-mail from Paul Collins of Ford Street Publishing, asking me to write a book about "fifty infamous Australians" as a sort of companion volume to Meredith Costain's book Fifty Famous Australians. I was thrilled to be asked, though I begged for a better title, as "Fifty Infamous Australians" would end up on the reference shelves as research material for school assignments. Paul kindly changed the title for me (I'm useless at titles) and while it probably can be used for assignments, what with the bushrangers and such, not to mention the index, that's not what it's for. Children love gross stuff and funny stuff and they love it even more when it's true. I was going to choose, as well as the ones you had to put in, such as Ned Kelly, the grossest ones I could find.

I had Term 2 off, on long service leave, and had been hoping to spend the time writing a book, but Paul Collins was the only publisher obliging enough to offer me that chance. Everyone else responded with, "We don't do non-fiction" or "we have your details in our database, so go away. We'll Let You Know." Even better, he approached me, just as I was beginning to despair.

I started with a book of Australian ripping yarns and went on to lots of journalist books about modern crime in Australia, web sites and newspapers, both on-line archives and current ones. The current ones were good, because the entire Underbelly business was going on, trials were happening and one day I was having a coffee in an Elsternwick cafe when I spotted the story of Tony Mokbel's escape from Australia in the newspaper I was reading and got the idea for another chapter.

Oh, yes, that business of writing in cafes! We hear about it (especially in the case of J.K. Rowling), but it doesn't usually happen. But I ran out of hours on my dialup Internet account and the Presse cafe down the road has a wifi hotspot, so I found myself going there regularly and working on my book with endless pots of tea, muffins and Presse cafe lunches and you know what? It was great! I must write my next book over coffee and cake, at least on weekends.

Speaking of books over food, I had an interesting experience while on holiday in Central Australia. I was having dinner at the pub in the King's Canyon resort area when I got into a conversation with a grey nomad couple. I mentioned the book I was writing and gave as an example Caroline Grills, the kindly grandmother who poisoned her relatives with thallium in the 1940s and 50s. The wife said, "I met her." It turns out she was working at the hospital in Long Bay Jail when Caroline Grills was imprisoned there. She described the poisoner as "a sweet woman." That helped me with a sentence in the book where I mentionedthat the lady was liked both by staff and inmates at the prison. But what a small world! How much chance would you think there would be of such an encounter?

I knew someone would complain in a review that there were very few women in it, but while I picked out those I could, I found that most of the big-name female crooks in Australia in the past were madams. Someone has since suggested to me that probably the majority of female crooks didn't get caught.

Meanwhile, I put in Lola Montez (naughty rather than a crook), Mary Ann Bugg, the bushranger's wife who kept him alive, Bridget Hurford and Jean Lee (women who were hanged) and some baby farmers. And some modern women who did crazy things like hijacking a helicopter to rescue a boyfriend or helping a boyfriend escape jail or carry out cons.

I found some bizarre and downright silly stories to put into the "Did You Know" snippets that are part of a book like this. I learned a whole lot of stuff about crime in Australia that I would never have expected, or that I would have learned if I'd never been commissioned to write this book. That's the nice thing about writing non-fiction for children. If you're writing for adults, you're often an expert in a particular area and you write about that, and spend five years researching it in incredible detail. if you write for children, you can write about many different things and learn new stuff all the time and acquire new interests. Nowadays I'm reading news articles that would have been good in my book and thinking, "What a pity this didn't happen when I was writing it!"

Of course, when you're writing this sort of stuff, you have to be careful, because you can get sued and most publishers put a clause in the contract saying that you have to guarantee nobody is going to be upset by the book and if you get into trouble you're on your own. Previous history books I'd written had been set a long time ago. King Tut isn't going to sue you or send the boys around. So I worded carefully and I think Paul made sure the finished product was unlikely to get me into any trouble by re-checking the wording.

It's going to be a while before I can find out how this book will do, but I'm thrilled.

Some More Girlfriend Fiction

STEP UP AND DANCE, by Thalia Kalkipsakis, THE SWEET LIFE by Rebecca Lim, CASSIE by Barry Jonsberg: Girlfriend Fiction 6, 7 and 8. St Leonards, Allen and Unwin, 2008

Girlfriend Fiction has been coming out at an amazing rate over the last few months and has varied from the kind of novels that could be straight YA fiction, with no need for the hearts on the cover, to those that read more or less like standard teen romance, but better written than most. I have to say that so far, they’re doing well in my secondary school library, especially among ESL students who want to try something a little harder and closer to their age level than the ultra-thin children’s books they have been reading. I’ve had especially enthusiastic comments about My Life and Other Catastrophes and The Not Quite Perfect Boyfriend, which were both very funny.

None of the three books I’m reviewing this time is completely funny, but we’ll see how they go over with the students.

Step Up And Dance is the closest to standard teen romance of all the books in this series so far. The heroine, Saph, is a cheerleader for a professional basketball team and the boy in her life is a basketball player for another team, who goes to her school. Annoyed with him for what she believes is a practical joke, she plots revenge and it goes on and on throughout the book till, of course, all is sorted out and it turns out she had misunderstood his motives.

I hadn’t realised we even had cheerleaders in Australia, to be honest, but am always happy to learn something new. It certainly isn’t part of school culture here, but in this book the team is professional and the girl is the youngest member of a team of dancers which includes two boys.

There’s enough about the headaches of being a girl with an ethnic background to make some readers nod in agreement. Saph loves her fairly strict Greek father, but gets just a bit frustrated by the rules he makes about not staying out late and not accepting lifts from friends after dance practice. I suspect there is something here that comes from the author’s own teenage years. These days the strict ethnic parents are more likely to be African or Middle Eastern, but kids can still identify. I remember teaching Looking For Alibrandi to my ESL students and hearing one of them remark, “These Italians are so like Sudanese!”

In The Sweet Life, recently-orphaned Janey finds she has an aunt, working at the Australian Embassy in Rome, living with her daughter Federica (Freddy). Aunt Celia invites her to stay for the school holidays, but someone using the name Fellini is stalking her, first through her MySpace page, then on the mobile phone her aunt has lent her. Janey hasn’t had any boys in her life, and finds herself attracted to the Embassy’s young driver as well as to one of Freddy’s friends.

As for Freddy herself, it soon becomes clear to the reader, if not to Janey, that she doesn’t like having her newly-discovered cousin around; trouble follows.

At times I felt I was getting a guided tour of Rome, but I must admit it made me wish I could visit some of the places Janey sees in Rome and if I did, so should the readers. Possibly, they’ll be disappointed when there’s no last-page kiss, but it isn’t that type of book.

Barry Jonsberg has written on a wide variety of themes since his first novel, The Whole Business With Kiffo and the Pitbull. His first two books, about intelligent but over-the-top teenager Calma, were laugh-out-loud funny, but had sudden serious twists at the end. Ironbark dealt with a teenage boy who had a mental problem causing him to lash out suddenly, then not remember what he’d done. Dreamrider was a thriller with a mental issue and another twist at the end. Cassie is also about a serious issue. The title character is a quadriplegic with serious cerebral palsy, neither of which has stopped her from working hard at school and producing first-class work.Inside her problem body she is a normal teenager with a sense of humour. The novel’s issue is how to get all this across to her cousin, who has the embarrassing name of Holly Holley.

Holly is a girl with only one friend, the nerdy Amy, who’s more interested in mathematics than boys and clothes. Holly wants desperately to be a member of the in crowd and attract the attention of the good-looking if dumb Raph McDonald. When a chance to do both comes up, she resents having to share a house with Cassie and her mother, who have travelled down from Darwin after a marriage breakup, resents even Amy’s common-sense comments about the people she wants so badly to hang out with. The novel is about working out what’s important and who really cares about you. It’s about surfaces and what’s underneath. And because it’s written by Barry Jonsberg, however serious the theme, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. Using humour, he manages to get across a serious issue.

There is an afterword which explains that Jonsberg, when he was teaching, had a quadriplegic student with cerebral palsy who is now studying Art at university and generally doing well.

It’s always interesting to read a book about young women by a man, but then, Barry Jonsberg was a teacher for many years and has his own children. This is my favourite of the three, but we’ll see which the kids at my school, at least, like best and I will enter a post about it when I know.

Loathing Lola comment

Whoops! The author has sent a comment that he has only a brother, not a sister. I can only plead that I'd been up since 6.00 a.m., at work all day and attending meetings before going to the State Library to hear him in Booktalkers. But my general comments on the book stand and I'm pleased William was happy with his review. It was well-deserved. He's gonna go far! :-)