Michael Grant’s GONE series continues…

01.04.2011

PLAGUE - VIEWPOINT cover.indd 1 8/2/11 3:51:11 PM

viewpointvol 19 no 1 autumn 2011

viewpointon books for young adults

� V

iew

poin

t �9

(�) A

utum

n 20

��

Viewpointon books for young adults

Editorial Committee: Pam Macintyre, Editor, Stella Lees, Bernadette Welch, Susan La Marca, Pam Horsey, Pauline Meaney, Associate Editors. Subscriptions Officer: Rosemary NairnEnquiries: Viewpoint: on books for young adults PO Box 4286 The University of Melbourne Parkville 3052Telephone (03) 8344 86�7 Facsimile (03) 8344 0025 email: education-viewpoint@unimelb.edu.au; Website: http://extranet.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/LLAE/viewpoint/Subscriptions: (four issues per year) Australia $48.00 (includes GST and postage within Australia) $AUD54 NZ and PNG only (includes postage) Other overseas destinations $AUD62 (includes postage) ABN 84 002 705 224Contributions: Viewpoint: on books for young adults pays $AUD�00 - �50 for featured reviews and articles. No responsibility can be taken for the loss or damage of any contribution, although every care is taken.Copyright The University of Melbourne ISSN �039-2858 Printpost PP337834/00005 Published by Melbourne Graduate School of Education The University of Melbourne.Views expressed in Viewpoint by contributors are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Letters to the editor are welcomed.Illustrations:Inside illustrations by Tim Metherall Printed by DORAN PRINTING PTY LTD

volume 19 number 1 Autumn 2011

in this issue...Feature ReviewsOf Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters by Barack Obama Mike Shuttleworth 2Luke and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie Stella Lees 3Poetry and Childhood edited by Morag Styles, Louise Joy & David Whitley Sarah Mayor Cox 4 The Maze Runner by James Dashner Bill Wootton 5iBoy by Kevin Brooks Bill Wootton 6All Along the Watchtower by Michael Hyde Margaret Kett 7Haunted by Barbara Haworth-Attard & Virals by Kathy Reichs Liz Derouet 8For the Win by Cory Doctorow Bec Kavanagh 9Fear: 13 stories of horror and suspense by RL Stine & Zombies vs Unicornsedited by Justine Larbalestier & Holly Black Susan La Marca �0

Writers on WritingChristina’s Matilda: A waltz of discovery Edel Wignell ��Other times, Other places: Fictionalising History Goldie Alexander �2

Feature Articles‘Unless Someone Like You Cares a Whole Awful Lot’: Environmental Picture Books Virginia Lowe �4Humour, Life, Love, Sadness and Joy: Four novels by JennyValentine Pamela Horsey �6Angela Savage: The Half-Child Clare Kennedy �7 Pinerolo: The Children’s Book Cottage, NSW Jeff Prentice �8Islands of Discontent Beth Montgomery �9

ValeRuth Park, �9�7-20�0 Stella Lees 20Eva Ibbotson, �925-20�0 Ruth Starke 2� Feature ArticlesInteracting Between Scenes: Nicki Greenberg’s Hamlet Bernard Caleo 22Misunderstandings & Miscommunications Rae Mariz 23The Unidentified by Rae Mariz Malcolm Tattersall 24

Feature ReviewsReckless written and illustrated by Cornelia Funke Pam Macintyre 25Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly Ruth Starke 26Factotum by DM Cornish Fran Knight 27Forge by Laurie Halse Anderson Jenny Zimmerman 28Careful What You Wish For by Maureen McCarthy Michelle Prawer 29My Name is Mina by David Almond Pamela Horsey 30No Safe Place by Deborah Ellis Anna Ryan-Punch 3�Drawn From the Heart by Ron Brooks Stella Lees 32Noah’s Law by Randa Abdel-Fattah Sam Franzway 33Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi Stella Lees 34The Rosie Black Chronicles: Genesis by Lara Morgan & Low Red Moonby Ivy Devlin Bec Kavanagh 35Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult Robyn Kemp 36Takeshita Demons by Cristy Burne Suzanne Rofe 37You Against Me by Jenny Downham Kerry Neary 37Wolfborn by Sue Bursztynski Clare Kennedy 38The Dead by Charlie Higson Elizabeth Braithwaite 39Before We Say Goodby by Gabriella Ambrosio Judy Blyton 40

Young Readers’ Viewpoint 4�

Book and Audio Notes 43

26 A

utum

n 20

11

Revolutionby Jennifer Donnelly

Bloomsbury, 20119781408810453 $15.99pb

Producing a worthy successor to the Carnegie Medal-winner A Gathering Light (2003) was never going to be easy, but with her second

novel for young adults, Jennifer Donnelly cements her reputation as one of the best writers in the genre. Revolution is a big, gutsy, emotional ride that sweeps the reader through place and time, from present day New York and Paris to eighteenth century Versailles and the revolutionary streets of the French capital.

In the privileged surrounds of Brooklyn Heights, where the high school seniors at St Anselm’s are familiar types for anyone who has watched TV’s Gossip Girl, all that is keeping Andi Alpers from jumping off the roof (and later, into the Seine) is music. Deeply depressed over the death of her younger brother, constantly sedated, supported only by her boyfriend Vijay, and trying to cope with a mother on the verge of a mental breakdown, Andi eases the ache in her heart by literally playing her guitar until her fingers bleed. Failing all her classes except music, she can’t bring herself to submit any college applications and she hasn’t got around to writing, or even planning, her senior thesis on an eighteenth-century French composer. The headmistress offers some encouragement:

‘“I like the title … ‘Who’s Your Daddy? Tracing the Musical DNA of Amadé Malherbeau to Johnny Greenwood’.”

“Thanks. Vijay came up with it. He said my old title – ‘Amadé Malherbeau’s Musical Legacy’ – was nowhere near pretentious enough.”’

As a narrator, Andi is sharp, edgy and sarcastic, but always engaging and often very funny. In a long novel – over 460 pages – it is Donnelly’s major achievement to maintain the reader’s empathy and emotional bond with a damaged, self-absorbed girl who is sometimes her own worst enemy. A chance to investigate that musical DNA comes about when her estranged father, a Nobel-winning scientist, insists she accompany him to Paris where he will be genetically testing a heart thought to belong to Louis-Charles, the young son of the doomed Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Andi is a reluctant traveller, bitter and rebellious because of her father’s emphasis on scholastic success and because, before they leave, he commits her troubled mother to a psychiatric hospital.

Once in Paris, Andi’s attitude doesn’t improve. Her relationship with her father continues to be strained and her mood varies according to how many antidepressants she takes. Eventually, she gets her father to agree that if, in four days’ time, she completes an outline of her thesis, she can fly home. But then two things happen to make life a bit more interesting: she meets the charismatic Virgil Boukadida, a taxi driver and self-styled hip-hop master, who lives in the banlieue, or immigrant outer suburbs of Paris, and sings for his supper at an artists’ cafe; and in an ancient guitar case she finds the secret diary of Alexandrine Paradis, an ambitious young street performer in revolutionary

Paris who became the companion to the dauphin, Louis-Charles. Powerless to help him once his parents are guillotined and he is incarcerated and abused in prison, Alex sends messages of support to the little boy by an original but highly dangerous method. The diary ends enigmatically, perhaps with Alex’s death. As for Louis-Charles – did he perish in prison, as history records, or was he rescued? The DNA tests on the heart may settle the matter.

The narrative alternates between the two stories of these young women who are linked by the diary and by the pain and guilt they suffer because of the fate of two beloved little boys. Music figures heavily, as Andi takes to street busking and pursues her thesis on the links between past and contemporary composers. Not entirely original: anyone who has read Alex Ross’s monumental The Rest is Noise (2007) will be familiar with what he calls ‘the long-running conversation’ between classical and popular music. But while Andi is well versed in what the harmonic designs of Radiohead owe to the Baroque, it comes as a shock when she witnesses the reverse: via her iPod and a slippery sort of time-slip, she is able to introduce her eighteenth-century composer Malherbeau to the joys of Led Zeppelin’s electric guitar. ‘This is a wondrous thing’, he exclaims, rushing back to his own composition.

I was worried that, once Andi found the diary, the plot of Revolution would inevitably take the well-trodden time-slip route, but Donnelly resists it as long as possible. Only in the last part of the book, when Andi and Virgil are attending a party in the catacombs (the site of Alex’s last diary entry) and she stupidly combines her medications and alcohol, does the plot begin to wobble a little as it plays around with time. But this is a plot so cleverly and tightly constructed it can well withstand a tremor or two, although as layers build, coincidences multiply and threads are woven, some might conclude it is a little too clever. The novel’s three-part structure (Hell, Purgatory, Paradise) takes its inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and of course Andi has her own Virgil to guide her. There are many, many other parallels.

Nothing changes, a character tells Alexandrine after all the bloodshed: “The world goes on, as stupid and brutal tomorrow as it was today”. Both she and Andi discover that is not the whole truth and not the end of the story; a revolution can also be internal. Teenagers who read this novel will weep and cheer for Andi and learn a lot about music and history in the process. As for me, I could barely put it down; I was gripped until the final word.

Ruth Starke teaches creative writing at Flinders University. Her latest book is Captain Stella (Puffin,

2010)

2000 AD 37Abdel-Fattah, Randa 33Alexander, Goldie 13Alex Rider 9All Along the Watchtower 7Almond, David 30Ambrosio, Gabriella 40Anderson, Laurie Halse 28Annie’s Rainbow 32Ant Colony, The 16Australasian Students’ Song Book, The 11Bacigalupi, Paolo 34Baker, Jeannie 14, 15Barbapapa’s Ark 14Base, Graeme 15Beale, Fleur 19Beautiful Creatures 41Beautiful Darkness 41Beautiful Lie, A 48Bedazzled 6Before We Say Goodbye 40Behemoth 51, 52Belonging 15Between Shades of Gray 50Birdman 14Black, Holly 10, 47Blood of the Lamb 19Bloody Valentine 44Blue Bloods 44Bluey of Swaggies, A 11Blyton, Enid 51Body and Soul 12Boggle of Bunyips, A 11Bones of Faerie 50Booms, Busts & Bushfires 44Boy and the Toy, The 14Bray, Libba 10Breadwinner Trilogy 31Broken Soup 16Brooks, Kevin 6Brooks, Ron 32Browne, Anthony 32Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek, The 32Burne, Cristy 37Burningham, John 14Bursztynski, Sue 38Caleo, Bernard 22Callie’s Castle 20Callie’s Family 20Careful What You Wish For 29Carnavas, Peter 15Cat on the Island, The 14Chains 28Cheng, Christopher 14Cherub 9Christina’s Matilda 11Come Danger, Come Darkness 20Condon, Bill 13Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God 13Conspiracy 365 October 46Cook, Peter 6Coraline 44Cornish, DM 27Crew, Gary 14Crossing, The 19Dashner, James 5Dead, The 39Dead of Winter, The 48Declaration 47DeGennero, Sue 14, 15Delacourt, Marianne 44De La Cruz, Melissa 44Deltora Quest 42Devlin, Ivy 35Dickens, Charles 48Dinosaurs and All that Rubbish 14Divine Comedy 26Doctorow, Corey 9Does My Head Look Big in This? 33Donnelly, Jennifer 26Double Life of Cassiel Roadknight, The 16Downham, Jenny 37

Dragonfly Pool 21Drawn From the Heart 32Dreams from My Father 2, 3Drums Go Bang!, The 20Dubosarsky, Ursula 32Ebony Hill 19Elliot Allagash 49Elliott, Kate 39Ellis, Deborah 31Emperor of Nihon Ja, The 41Enemy, The 39Evernight 35Eyre, Frank 32Factotum 27Falkner, Brian 41Fallen 35Famous Five 51Fear 10Fence Around the Cuckoo, A 20Fierce September 20Filth Licker, The 37Finding Violet Park 16Fishing in the Styx 20Flanagan, John 41Foreman, Michael 14Forge 28For the Win 9Foundling 27French, Jackie 15, 44Gaiman, Neil 44Gallipoli Medals 12Garcia, Kami 41Gathering Light, A 26Genesis 35Ghosts of Kerfol,The 48Gigantic Balloon, The 20Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The 6Gleeson, Libby 18Gone 42Good bye Lenin 48Goosebumps 10Gossip Girl 26Grant, Michael 42Grasping Goblin, The 42Graveyard Book, The 44Great Expectations 48Great Ghost Rescue, The 21Greenberg, Nikki 22Grim and Grimmer 42Habibi 40Hager, Mandy 19Half-Child, The 17Hall, Lincoln 18Hamilton, Margaret 18Hamilton, Max 18Hamlet 22Haroun and the Sea of Stories 3Harp in the South, The 20Hartnett, Sonya 14Harvey, Alyxandra 46Haunted 8Haworth-Attard, Barbara 8Hergé 22Higson, Charlie 39Hole in the Hill, The 20Horowitz, Anthony 9Hunger 42Hunger Games, The 35Hunt, Peter 4Huxley, Dee 18Hyde, Michael 7I am Number Four 46Ibbotson, Eva 21iBoy 6Ink Exchange 47Into the Wilderness 19Iron Witch, The 47Irvine, Ian 42I Saw Nothing 14John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat 32Journey to the River Sea 21Joy, Louise 4Judge Dredd 37Juno of Taris 19Just a Dream 14

Kane, Kim 14King, Stephen Michael 18Lamplighter: Book Two 27Lanagan, Margo 10Larbalestier, Justine 10Larsson, Stig 6Last Hero, The 49Last Tree in the City 15Legacy, The 47Lies 42Little Brother 9Long, Loren 2Lorax, The 14Lord, Gabrielle 46Lore, Pittacus 46Lowe, Virginia 4Low Red Moon 35Luka and the Fire of Life 3Mackenzie, Anna 19Magic Flutes 21Magoffin, Richard 11Mahoney, Karen 47Malley, Gemma 47Mariz, Rae 24Marr, Melissa 47Masciullo, Lucia 14Masson, Sophie 47Master, Irfan 48Mavis Road Medley 12Maze Runner, The 5McCarthy, Maureen 29Misguided Angel 44Modern tale of Faerie 47Mogworld 2, 38, 40Monster Blood Tattoo 27Monster Mission 21Muchamore, Robert 9Muddleheaded Wombat, The 20Mullins, Patricia 14, 18My Australian Story 47My Australian Story: Surviving Sydney Cove 12My Name is Mina 30My Sister Sif 20Niland, Deborah 20Niland, Kilmeny 20Nix, Garth 10Noah’s Law 33Norman, Lilith 15No Safe Place 31Novak, Jiri Tibor 14Noyes, Deborah 48Nye, Naomi Shihab 40O’Leary, JI Terrorist Hunter 51Obama, Barack 2, 3Odd and the Frost Giants 44Of Thee I Sing 2, 3Ogre of Oglefort, The 21Oi! Get off our Train! 14Old Pig 32Oliver, Tony 18Oliver Twist 48Once in a Full Moon 50One Child 14One Dog and His Boy 21Out for Blood 46Paddock, The 15Park, Ruth 20Paterson, Banjo 11Peet, Bill 14Phar Lap Mystery, The 47Philip, Neil 4Picoult, Jodi 36Plague 42Plain Truth 36Playing Beatie Bow 20Poetry and Childhood 4Poor Man’s Orange 20Priestly, Chris 48Project, The 41Raeburn, Tricia 49Ranger’s Apprentice, The 41Rawlins, Donna 18Reichs, Kathy 8Resistance, The 47Rest is Noise, The 26

Revolution 26Rich, Simon 49Riordan, Rick 49Roennfeldt, Robert 15Romeo and Juliet 37Rosen, Michael 4Rosie Black Chronicles, The 35Roy, James 18Rushdie, Salman 3Saint-Exupery, Antoine de 6Savage, Angela 17Scarrow, Alex 49Schreiber, Ellen 50Sea-wreck Stranger, The 19Secret of the Lonely Isles, The 51Sendak, Maurice 32Sepetys, Ruta 50Seuss, Dr 14Sharp Turn 44Sheehan, Peter 44Ship’s Cat, The 20Ship Breaker 34Shiver 35Simner, Jamie Lee 50Siren 49Skellig 30Skovron, Alex 29Song for Summer, A 21Starke, Ruth 26Star of Kazan, The 21Stine, RL 10Stohl, Margaret 41Stories, Pictures and Reality 4Story of Rosy Dock, The 14Styles, Morag 4Swords and Crowns and Rings 20Takeshita Demons 37Taylor, Annette 14The Secret of Platform 13 21Time Riders: Day of the Predator 49Timothy and Gramps 32Tison, Talus 14Tolbert, Steve 51Tomorrow Book, The 15Tucker, Alan 4Twilight 35Uncle Matt’s Mountain 20Unidentified, The 23Uno’s Garden 15Valentine, Jenny 16Vampire Kisses 50Van Allsburg, Chris 14Van Os, Joanne 51Vegetable Ark, The 14Virals 8V is for Vanishing 14Vivas, Julie 18Wagner, Jenny 32Waltzing Matilda: Song of Australia 11Warden, Gillian 14Westerfeld, Scott 10, 51When I was a soldier 40When the Wind Changed 20Where the Wild Things Are 32Which Witch? 21Whitley, David 4Wicked Lovely 47Wignell, Edel 11Wild, Margaret 32Willy the Wimp 32Wilson, Mark 14Winch, John 18Window 14 15Wolfborn 38Woolman, Steven 14Wump World 14You Against Me 37Young, Noela 18Youngest Cameleer, The 12Zenatti, Valerie 40Zombies vs Unicorns 10

index to authors and titles