SPRATT, R. A. Friday Barnes Girl Detective Random House, 2014 250pp $15.99 pbk ISBN 9781742759623 SCIS 1666675 Friday Barnes is an 11-year-old girl, a late surprise in a family of four older siblings. Her academic parents have virtually left her to her own devices. This lonely bookworm works with her uncle to solve a large theft and with her reward decides to send herself to an exclusive boarding school where she is constantly surprised by her fellow pupils and continues to solve a variety of mysteries. There is some quite sophisticated humour in the descriptions of the school, its students…
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SHIRVINGTON, Jessica Disruption HarperCollins, 2014 400pp $19.99 pbk+e ISBN 9780732296285 SCIS 1655752 Imagine a world in which life was dictated by a microchip implanted at the tip of your spine, providing data to an ‘m-band’ bracelet worn around your wrist. Now envision a society where technology mapped your bodies’ pheromones that dictated your compatibility with others; how you should behave and whom you should love. In this society those that weren’t up to the mark, those whose m-bands rated badly were cast into the category of ‘neg’. And if you where a ‘neg’, you had no hope. Nine years ago…
SCOTT, Victoria Fire & Flood Scholastic, 2014 369pp $17.99 ISBN 9781909489622 SCIS 1652349 Fire & Flood is the first book in a series set in a near future where things are not happy and bright. A young woman has enjoyed a life of relative ease when she is forced to move with her family to a new home. As with many teenagers, she is kept in the dark about what is actually going on in the family, only to discover her brother has a life threatening condition. Right on cue, a mysterious package arrives with an offer to join the…
RIGBY, Robert The Eagle Trail Walker, 2014 287pp $16.95 pbk ISBN 9781406346664 SCIS 1665391 This historical novel explores two fascinating stories. One takes up the situation in Antwerp, Belgium, in the 1940s when it was under Nazi occupation. Paul Hansen, son of a senior manager on the waterfront, thought the war wasn’t so bad, until he witnessed his father machine-gunned by German soldiers. Paul soon finds himself on the perilous escape route through Europe for fugitives of this war in the 1940s. The novel is well researched, the characters are vivid and real, and sometimes the information we learn is…
PATRIGNANI, Leonardo Multiversum Scribe, 2014 327pp $19.99 pbk ISBN 9781925106084 Since the concept of multiple dimensions in a limitless universe was first postulated authors have been having a lot of fun with various manifestions of that concept. Many great and not so great stories have been written using the idea that variations of every possible universe exist and that one can move between them. This story is one of the better ones. It is being marketed as a love story in the young adult category. Whilst this is an acceptable marketing strategy it does not do justice to the novel…
Emma PASS, The Fearless Corgi, 2014 393pp $17.99 pbk ISBN 9780552566155 SCIS 1661356 The Fearless centres on a teenage girl in a dystopian future. Cass is ten years old when the invasion starts. The world’s soldiers have been given a drug to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder, but side effects include increased aggression, loss of empathy and a total lack of fear. The soldiers spread throughout Europe and the Middle East, forcing the drug on people, altering them so that they become Fearless too. Cass and her pregnant mother manage to escape to an island refuge set up by one of…
MURRELL, Belinda The Sequin Star Random House, 2014 272pp $16.99 pbk ISBN 9780857982056 SCIS 1657951 When present-day Claire is knocked over by a bicycle, she is carried back to Sydney in the 1930s, just as the Bridge is opened. She finds herself in the middle of Sterling Brothers Circus, and is befriended by the talented Rosina, a dancing horsewoman. Getting back to her real family involves another knock on the head, but not before she meets her own grandparents. Murrell has written other time-slip novels, creating various times in the past. In this one she provides a picture of tough…
MEDINA, Meg Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick your Ass Candlewick, 2013 260pp $24.95 ISBN 9780763658595 SCIS 1610418 The iridescent blue dust jacket of this book is arresting. The threatening words of the title, scrawled in black pen on a school locker, lead inside to black fly leaves. Each chapter heading is also scrawled in the careless lettering. Readers are immediately hooked by the narrative related in the entertaining, intelligent voice of Latina Piddy Sanchez. She has to move to Daniel Jones High School after ninth grade. Her hard working mother has found them a better apartment but it means that…
MAYO, Catherine The Bow Walker, 2014 368pp $17.95 pbk ISBN 9781925081015 SCIS 1662071 The Odyssey, the epic poem ascribed to Homer, written about the end of the 8th century BC is about Odysseus (or Ulysses in the Roman era) who at the end of the long Trojan War and the fall of Troy takes ten years and numerous dramatic adventures to reach his home on the island of Ithaca, off the west coast of Greece. In The Bow, Catherine Mayo imaginatively takes young readers back to the teenage years of Odysseus on Ithaca, heir to his father the king Laertes. …
LESTER, Marnie Ariel’s Charm JoJo Pub, 2014 304pp $18.99 pbk ISBN 9780987463586 SCIS 1662802 This is the story of 13 year old Ariel, who has spent her entire life in a Dickensian orphanage in a town in Illinois. One day on an outing to a nearby park, she meets an old man who knows her name and claims to have known her parents. He asks Ariel to meet him at his house across the road from the orphanage, where he will tell her more about her parents. Ariel manages to sneak out of the orphanage to meet him, and he…