Stephen Michael King, My Dad Is a Giraffe Scholastic, 1 August 2015, 24 pp., $16.99 (hbk), ISBN 978174362594-1 If your Dad was an animal, what would he be? In this gentle and whimsical book by multi award winning author and illustrator Stephen Michael King, the child’s father is a Giraffe, gentle and fun, tall and fast. Of course, the father is not really a giraffe, as the pictures on the first and last pages reveal, but the charming story explores the similarities. With only a few words on each page combined with King’s trademark fluid, colourful, expressive and often humorous…
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Tony Wilson (text) Laura Wood (illus). The Cow Tripped over the Moon. Scholastic. 1 June 2015. 32 pp. $24.99 (hbk), ISBN: 9781743623534. This hilarious picture book re-imagining of the old rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle will have kids and adults laughing out loud. We all know the rhyme, right? – “But what they don’t say in the songs from that day is the cow didn’t jump it first time It seems a moon clearance takes great perseverance, so back to the scene of the rhyme…” Seven hilarious failed attempts are then recorded before the eighth and successful attempt fulfils the nursery rhyme, and…
Jim Dewar (text) Anil Tortop (illus.) River Riddle Scholastic, 1 August 2015, 24 pp., $14.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781760150518 This is a fun, rhyming, illustrated story of the river riddle that I remember puzzling over as a child at school. A boy with a bale of hay, a sheep and a fox need to cross the river in a boat built for two. How they get to the market on the other side all in one piece, without something being sacrificed for lunch, is the focus of the story. Tortop’s bold and colourful digital illustrations magnify the humour of Dewar’s…
Bernard Beckett, Lullaby, Text Publishing, 27 May 2015, 208pp., $19.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781922182753 Lullaby is very eerie science fiction which, in the telling of the story, discusses the dilemmas that medicine could find itself in when the desire to break new frontiers clashes with ethical principles. So while, things that sound just great, like people being able to regrow limbs, (something that happens in the book), doctors have to deal with consequences such as people refusing to recognise their new limbs or preferring someone else’s. And this is not unlikely; the brain can get very confused. Neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks…
Jackie French, Ophelia: Queen of Denmark, Angus & Robertson/HarperCollins, 22 June 2015, 288pp., $16.99 (pbk), ISBN 978 0 7322 9852 4 French has followed I am Juliet with another interpretation of a Shakespearean play. Ophelia is a smart girl who sets herself up with Hamlet, then recognises he is not the brave new king she had hoped he would be, pretends to die, then re-asserts herself. In the process she sees her father, brother, queen and king die, but survives it all with only a few tears. Meanwhile she runs her father’s household, attends the queen and is part…
Gary Northfield, Rumble with the Romans! (Julius Zebra #1), Walker Books, 1 May 2015, 288pp., $17.99 (hbk), ISBN 978 1 4063 5492 8 Julius the Zebra is a naughty boy. He refuses to drink at the dirty waterhole in the Serengeti, and when he is running home he is captured by the Roman soldiers. With other African animals he is taken to the Colosseum, where he and his friends are trained to fight the gladiators. It’s touch and go for Julius, and he soon learns how unpleasant the whole business can be. Northfield has illustrated each page with comic drawings…
Ed Allen (text) Claire Richards (illus). 10 Cheeky Possums. Scholastic. 1 August 2015. 24 pp. $9.99 (pbk) ISBN: 9781742836409. Told in the tradition of 10 Green Bottles, this exuberant picture book describes the titular possums disappearing one by one, while the story counts-down from 10 to zero. The lively possums get up to wild mischief in such unlikely settings as the playground, the grocery store, the fun-fair, and the beach (where in true possum fashion, they are usually high off the ground). While the text includes some rather forced rhymes squeezed into the constrictions of the repetitive 4-line format, the illustrations are…
Tony Wilson (text) Laura Wood (illus). The Cow Tripped over the Moon. Scholastic. 1 June 2015. 32 pp. $24.99 (hbk), ISBN: 9781743623534. In the well-known nursery rhyme, it is all so simple, the cat played the fiddle and the cow jumped over the moon. Here, however, we see the true story of the determined cow and her multiple attempts to make that famous mighty leap for “it seems a moon clearance takes great perseverance”. After some rigorous training supported by her friends, during the hours of one moonlit night we see the various disastrous failed attempts until the last triumphant effort as…
Carol Ann Martin (text) Ben Wood (illus.). Underneath a Cow. Omnibus/Scholastic. 1 August 2015. 32pp., $24.99 (hbk) ISBN: 9781742990880. The plot of this story is quite succinct: Madge the cow is out in the paddock chewing her cud and a variety of animals are caught far from home when the Great Big, Terrible, Awful Storm hits… However, this masterly combination of slyly amusing text and lively, character-filled illustrations has resulted in a perfect demonstration of how to make a very slight “what if” idea into an utterly delightful picture book. Each animal is true to its nature – hassled hen and scatty chicks,…
Lizzie Wilcock, Thirst, Scholastic, 1 May 2015, 252pp, $16.99 (pbk), ISBN 97817428 39660 Thirst is an interesting book – well written, a touch implausible but, where it counts, frightening plausible. It is a story of two state wards, Karanda and Solomon, who, after being removed from numerous foster homes, end up in the outback after a car accident. The implausibility is that they survive so well; the plausibility is the characters of the two children – vulnerable, volatile and because of that volatility – dangerous. The characters are subtly drawn; so the reader only sees outlines of the children’s personalities.…