Joanne Harris was one of the amazing authors who spoke at the Christchurch Writer’s Festival over the weekend. I’m a huge fan of her books, particularly her books for younger readers, Runemarks and Runelight.
I have a signed copy of Runelight, the sequel to Runemarks, to give away. All you have to do to get in the draw is enter your name and email address in the form below. Competition closes Friday 7 September (NZ only).
Thanks to everyone who entered. This competition is now closed.
I love a story with a great villain. Some of them, like Patrick Ness’ Mayor Prentice and Chris Morphew’s Noah Shackleton, you hate so much because they’re incredibly evil men (and you really want to punch them in the face!). Other villains are quite likeable because, no matter how hard they try, things really don’t work out for them. Lester Smythe, in Glenn Wood’s fantastic debut children’s book, The Brain Sucker, is one such villain.
How would you act if part of your personality was stolen with a brain-sucking machine?
Lester Smythe has a black heart. He s invented a dangerous brain-sucking machine that removes the goodness from its victims, and he intends to use it to rid the world of all human kindness. But Lester didn t count on thirteen-year-old Callum McCullock and his two best friends, Sophie and Jinx. The trio vow to destroy the brain sucker. And nothing will stop them.
The Brain Sucker is one of the coolest junior fiction (middle grade) books I’ve read in ages! The idea is original, the story is action-packed, the heroes are unlike any you’ve met before and the villain is sinister. From the very first page, when the villain slinks onto the page, I knew I was going to love the story, and I greedily turned the pages wanting to know how it would end.
Lester Smythe is a sinister villain, but there’s also something awkward about him. He reminded me of a cross between Gru (from Despicable Me) and Professor Doofenshmirtz (from Phineas and Ferb) and I almost expected him to announce that his brain sucking machine was the ‘Brain-suckinator.’ I think Craig Phillips has perfectly captured Lester in his front cover illustration (I especially like the way that Lester’s eyes catch the light). Lester’s plan is to rid the world of goodness because anyone acting good makes him physically sick, due to a horrible experience when he was younger. The machine that will help him with his task is the Brain Sucker, which sucks the goodness right out of people’s heads. It’s up to the heroes of the story to save the day (and the world from becoming a miserable place).
The heroes of the story, Callum, Sophie and Jinx are unlike any heroes I’ve met before. They all have flaws but they manage to overcome these to help save the day. Callum is paralysed from the waist down so he’s wheelchair bound, but he’s really determined and doesn’t let his disability get in his way. He’s also got one of the coolest wheelchairs around! Sophie is Callum’s best friend and she’s incredibly talented and intelligent. She has a mechanical mind, so she can make improvements to her toys or invent new gadgets to help her friend. Her only problem is that she gets claustrophobic. Jinx is the funniest character in the book, because he has really bad luck. He’s always in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether it’s a gas main exploding under his school desk or bird dive-bombing him. You always know something bad is going to happen when he’s around, especially when his thumb starts to dance.
If you’re after a fun story, full of adventure, mystery, magic, exciting gadgets, and great characters, The Brain Sucker is the book for you. I’d recommend it for 9+ and it would be a great read-aloud for Year 5-8.
4 out of 5 stars
John Boyne is touring New Zealand this week, including attending the Christchurch Writer’s Festival. I had the pleasure of interviewing him this morning, and I’ll be posting this soon. As well as signing my copies of Noah Barleywater Runs Away and The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket, John kindly signed two extra copies of Barnaby Brocket.
If you would like to win one of 2 signed copies of The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket all you have to do is enter your details in the form below. Competition closes Friday 7 September (NZ only).
Thanks to everyone who entered. This competition is now closed.
I can only think of a handful of books, among all the books I’ve ever read, that I’ll carry around in my head and my heart for the rest of my life. Sometimes it’s the characters, the setting, or the feel of the book, and sometimes it’s the combination of all those things at exactly the right time. When I first read the synopsis of Vikki Wakefield’s latest book, Friday Brown, I had a feeling that it was going to be one of those books. As soon as I started reading it, I knew I wouldn’t be the same when I’d finished it.
I am Friday Brown. I buried my mother. My grandfather buried a swimming pool. A boy who can’t speak has adopted me. A girl kissed me. I broke and entered. Now I’m fantasising about a guy who’s a victim of crime and I am the criminal. I’m going nowhere and every minute I’m not moving, I’m being tailgated by a curse that may or may not be real. They call me Friday. It has been foretold that on a Saturday I will drown…
Seventeen-year-old Friday Brown is on the run—running to escape memories of her mother and of the family curse. And of a grandfather who’d like her to stay. She’s lost, alone and afraid.
Silence, a street kid, finds Friday and she joins him in a gang led by beautiful, charismatic Arden. When Silence is involved in a crime, the gang escapes to a ghost town in the outback. In Murungal Creek, the town of never leaving, Friday must face the ghosts of her past. She will learn that sometimes you have to stay to finish what you started—and often, before you can find out who you are, you have to become someone you were never meant to be.
Friday Brown is simply one of the most powerful, beautifully written stories I’ve ever read. It’s one of those stories that you really lose yourself in and emerge several hours later, with your heart aching and a sense of loss. You know that you’ll never forget the story, the characters, and the way they made you feel.
Vikki’s characters are always extraordinary and she introduces us to a menagerie of different characters in Friday Brown. There is a sense of mystery about each of the characters in the book, as they all seem to have something they’re hiding or trying to forget. I like the way that Vikki peels back the layers of her characters throughout the story and, even at the end, you still feel like you don’t know everything about them. Although we don’t see much of Friday’s mum, her and her family curse are quite an imposing figure throughout the book. Friday is forever running to escape the memories of her mother and the family curse that killed her. If there is one character that I wish I could meet in real life it would be Silence. He’s one of the most mysterious characters, but also the most loveable. He’d had such a tough life and I just wanted to give him a hug and tell him everything would be alright.
Apart from Vikki’s characters, I think the thing I liked most about Friday Brown was the mood of the story. From the first chapter, you get the sense that things aren’t going to end well. You know that the family curse is hanging over Friday’s head, and this adds a darkness to the story. You wonder if the curse will catch up to her or will she be able to break it.
Vikki Wakefield’s first book, All I Ever Wanted, was a stunning debut, but Friday Brown has really highlighted her incredible talent. I would rate her as one of my favourite authors, especially of contemporary YA fiction, and I can’t wait to read what she writes next. Whatever she does write, I know it will be incredible!
Friday Brown is a book that everyone should read, both teens and adults alike. You will fall in love with Vikki’s amazing story and make some extraordinary friends along the way.
5 out of 5 stars
The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell is the debut novel from Chris Colfer (Kurt from Glee). It’s a beautiful book and I’m loving the story. If you like books about books, like Inkheart, or fairy tales it’s the perfect book for you. Available now in NZ.
To celebrate the release of Scholastic’s new interactive series, The Infinity Ring, I’m giving away 2 copies of the first book, A Mutiny in Time by James Dashner. It’s a very cool new time travel adventure series, perfect for fans of The 39 Clues. To learn more about the series you can read my post here on the blog.
Thanks to everyone who entered. This competition is now closed.
Scholastic NZ are also running a really cool competition on their website to celebrate the release of the series. All you have to do is register and play the Infinity Ring game on http://www.scholastic.co.nz/assets/pdf/tileE.pdf and you go in the draw to win iPods and iPads.
A Mutiny in Time, the first book in Scholastic’s new interactive series, The Infinity Ring is released today. Like the hugely popular 39 Clues series, the story doesn’t stop when you close the book. It’s one of those books that comes with extra bits and pieces so that you can find out more about the story and the characters. The Infinity Ring series is all about time travel so you follow the characters through different time periods. Each book comes with a Hystorian’s Guide, a collectible map that includes a special code to unlock exclusive content on the Infinity Ring online game. The multi-dimensional game on http://www.infinityring.com allows readers to play as the main characters from the books, as they travel back in history to fix the “Great Breaks,” key events that have gone wrong, altering history as we know it. Players can interact with characters and explore key events in history alongside Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, and other figures featured in the books.
Book 1 is called A Mutiny in Time and it’s written by one of my favourite authors, James Dashner (author of The Maze Runner series).
When best friends Dak Smyth and Sera Froste stumble upon the secret of time travel — a hand-held device known as the Infinity Ring — they’re swept up in a centuries-long secret war for the fate of mankind. Recruited by the Hystorians, a secret society that dates back to Aristotle, the kids learn that history has gone disastrously off course.
Now it’s up to Dak, Sera, and teenage Hystorian-in-training Riq to travel back in time to fix the Great Breaks . . . and to save Dak’s missing parents while they’re at it. First stop: Spain, 1492, where a sailor named Christopher Columbus is about to be thrown overboard in a deadly mutiny!
Reserve your copy of The Infinity Ring: A Mutiny in Time at your library now or grab a copy from your bookshop.
Enter my competition to win one of two copies of The Infinity Ring: A Mutiny in Time.
Scholastic NZ are also running a really cool competition to celebrate the release of the series. All you have to do is register and play the Infinity Ring game on http://www.scholastic.co.nz/assets/pdf/tileE.pdf and you go in the draw to win iPods and iPads.
Four Children and It is Jacqueline Wilson’s brand new book. It’s due out this month and you can reserve your copy at your library now. I haven’t read a Jacqueline Wilson book before but I’ll definitely be reading this one. I remember watching the BBC adaptation of Five Children and It as a kid and loved it. I’m sure Four Children and It will be just as popular as her previous books.
‘In the city there’s a zoo. In the zoo there’s a lion. And in the lion there’s…’ Richard and his family are visiting the zoo one day when they witness the lion swallowing the zoo dentist whole! This is only the first of many things that end up ‘in the lion.’ Will anybody be able to stop the lion?
In the Lion is a hilarious picture book about a very hungry lion and the havoc that he causes. The story gets sillier and sillier at more and more things end up in the lion. Children will be laughing out loud because they’ll figure out very quickly what is going to happen next. Just when you think you know what is going to happen on the next page, James Foley surprises us and brings in the hero of the story. I love James’ illustrations because there are lots of extra details that you might not notice the first time (look at the shadows and reflections on each page). The expressions of the characters in the story (both people and animals) are hilarious, especially at the end of the book. Every page in the book is illustrated and full of colour, including the very cool end papers. If there was an award for the best picture book cover it would have to go to In the Lion because it’s absolutely fantastic and will really appeal to children.
The story works well as a read-aloud, but is even better for one-on-one sharing so that you can make the most of the illustrations. James Foley is a very talented author and illustrator and I’ll look forward to reading more of his picture books.
Today I’m joined by Ambelin Kwaymullina, author of the fantastic new futuristic Young Adult series, The Tribe. The first book in the series, The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf was released last month and if you haven’t heard all the hype about it you can read my review here on the blog. I caught up with Ambelin to ask her a few questions about her hot new series.
Wow, it’s really hard to describe your own work! I guess I can describe what I wanted the story to be…although I think it’s really up to my readers to judge. Here goes:
Mysterious. Dramatic. Thrilling. Smart. Hopeful.
Mostly, it was Ashala herself. She is such a strong character, that it would have been impossible for me not to tell her story. From the beginning, the first line of the book has always been the same – ‘He was taking me to the machine.’ Those words followed me around for a few days before I began writing, lurking in my consciousness and demanding that I write more. Then, once I started writing, I had to keep going until I reached the end – I certainly couldn’t leave Ashala trapped in the detention centre!
Yes, it is. Aboriginal people, and Indigenous people from all over the world, have strong connections to our homelands and the ancient spirits of our peoples. Ashala’s world is very different to the one we live in now, of course – the tectonic plates have shifted, creating a single continent, and people no longer make divisions on the basis of race. But Ashala’s ancestors were Aboriginal, so I knew she’d have a deep love for the forest that she lives in. And I knew that her connection to country would be a source of strength and courage for her, the same as it is for Indigenous peoples now.
No, I know how it ends. Many of the small details are mysterious to me, but I know where all of the Tribe will be, at the end of the story. And, for this particular story, I think that’s important. I don’t think I could tell it the way that it deserves to be told otherwise.
Oh yes. I didn’t have a lot of narrative space to explore this in the first book, but as the series goes on, readers will find out much more about how all the different abilities function, and what their strengths and limitations are. There’s some tough times coming for the Tribe, too – so they’re all going to have to push themselves, and be able to control their abilities a lot better than most of them can now.
Harder! Much, much harder…also, with picture books, I’d gotten used to being able to pore over every single word until I was satisfied the text was completely perfect. It takes much longer to do that with a novel, which was something I hadn’t realised until I was hopelessly overdue on a deadline. I think, though, that writing picture books, where you have to tell a complete story in not a lot of text, did teach me to be more disciplined with words than I would have been otherwise. That was helpful. On the other hand, I am going to have to learn to restrain my perfectionist tendencies, or I’ll never get the second book done.
There’s so much great dystopian fiction, and sci fi/fantasy fiction, for young adults – here’s some I’ve particularly enjoyed: Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn series, Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, and Moira Young’s Dustlands series.
The next stop on Ambelin’s blog tour is with Celine at http://forget8me8not.blogspot.com.au/.
My Best Friends Are Books 