CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Yes, we thought we’d done this because, when the list was announced last week, all the titles were so familiar. And that’s because they have (nearly) all been reviewed in Fiction Focus. Been there, done that we thought … but no. So here is the 2008 shortlist for the prestigious Carnegie Medal, won last year by Meg Rosoff for Just in Case.

2008 Carnegie Medal shortlisted books

• Kevin Crossley-Holland - Gatty’s Tale
• Linzi Glass - Ruby Red (not yet reviewed, but we loved The Year the Gypsies Came, her 2006 title)
• Elizabeth Laird - Crusade
• Tanya Landman - Apache
• Philip Reeve - Here Lies Arthur
• Meg Rosoff - What I Was
• Jenny Valentine - Finding Violet Park

Also announced were the Kate Greenaway Medal shortlisted titles, which are also reviewed in our Resource Bank. Go to the Primary Focus blog to read more about these.

How authors find the time to blog as well as create highly readable YA fiction is a bit of a mystery, but writing is writing, and a few of our favourites have great blogs out there to keep readers up to date with their latest news.

Susan Beth Pfeffer (Life as We Knew It) has a self-deprecating wit that is always a delight to read. Yes, her posts can be a tad long, but invariably contain several gems. Over the past few months we have shared in the gestation of LAWKI’s sequel, the dead & the gone, due here in a few weeks.

Other author blogs worth a look include cynsations, the informative blog of Cynthia Leititch Smith (Tantalize); Justine Larbalestier (Magic’s Child) , while Scott Westerfeld (Peeps) keeps us up to date with his travels, new writing and particularly the many and varied covers of the international editions of his work.

Most YA writers, however, are where their audience is - in social networking sites such as MySpace. John Green (Looking for Alaska), David Levithan (Are We There Yet?) and Ned Vizzini (It’s a Kind of Funny Story) all have their MySpace presence where they connect with their readers.

And LiveJournal has an online community called yawriterblogs, where you will find Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), Sarah Dessen (Just Listen) and Alex Flinn (Breathing Underwater) amongst a number of other North American names.

But apart from Justine and honorary Australian Scott, there doesn’t seem to be a huge blog presence amongst local YA authors. If you know of any good ones, please tell us about them.

The shortlists for the various categories of the NSW Premier’s Awards have been announced.

The Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature is worth $15 000 to the eventual winner, who will be selected from:

• Lollie Barr for The Mag Hags
• David Metzenthen for Black Water
• Robert Newton for The Black Dog Gang (review coming soon)
• James Roy for Town
• David Spillman & Lisa Wilyuka for Us Mob Walawurru and
• Lizzie Wilcock for GriEVE

Scroll down to the judges’ comments on the announcement to see just why they have selected these particular titles.

The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were instigated by Neville Wran in 1979.

For many of us, Web 2.0 is radically changing how we live and work. It’s all about collaboration, the teacher-librarian’s mantra. Web 2.0 underpins blogs, wikis and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, allowing us to share as never before.

And now a publisher has joined the Web 2.0 party. Yesterday at the London Book Fair, Random House unveiled a widget that will allow readers to browse the complete works of 500 authors online. By the end of the year this number will have expanded tenfold. Young adult authors have not been forgotten, with Jacqueline Wilson and Christopher Paolini at least two that have been included in the initial roll-out.

How does it work? Random House’s UK site explains it all.

Yesterday we posted details of two sites where students can engage with others about reading. Overnight, news has come through about the latest OzProjects initiative, Beware of Books, an online reading group. Teachers and teacher librarians can now do some cherry-picking in order to match their readers with a site that will really work for them.

Beware of Books is pitched at the 15-19 age group. Although it is possible to browse as a guest, why not register yourself and some students and actively participate in the project? Make a start by posting some reviews or reading recommendations and become a Beware of Books pioneer.

The OzProjects Middle Years Book Club, for students aged between 10 and 14, has been running for just over a month and already has a number of registered teams, including one from Singapore.

Have you checked out Penguin’s relatively new online community for teenage readers, Between the Lines? We alerted Fiction Focus subscribers to the site in the last issue of 2007, but in the end of year busy-ness it’s easy to overlook such things.

Launched last September, the site is targeting readers aged between 14 and 18, and there’s plenty for them to get their teeth into. Interaction is encouraged through blogs, author chats, book discussions and competitions.

Book of the Month for April is Sarah Dessen’s Just Listen, and being discussed on the blog is Peeps, by Scott Westerfeld who will be joining the discussion at the end of the month.

Australian author James Moloney has a new title coming out soon. We will be reviewing Kill the Possum in Fiction Focus of course, but he will be chatting online about the book on 24 April. Schools need to register in order to participate.

It’s early days for this site but it is rich with possibilities to get your students engaged in reading, as is the wonderful, and more established, Inside a Dog, from Melbourne’s Centre for Youth Literature. Both of these sites are on the Fiction Focus blog roll. It’s worth taking some time to explore them.

The finalists have been announced for New Zealand’s premier awards - The New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

Fiction Focus has reviewed all finalists in the Young Adult section:

• Salt, by Maurice Gee
• The sea-wreck stranger, by Anna Mackenzie
• Tomorrow, all will be beautiful, by Brigid Lowry (also a Notable Book in the CBCA Awards)
• The transformation of Minna Hargreaves, by Fleur Beale
• Zillah, by Penelope Todd (Issue 1, 2008)

The awards ceremony will be held in Wellington on 21 May.

The clever people at UK charity Autism Speaks have come up with a great fund raising idea. Seventeen authors, including Louis de Bernieres, Jodi Picoult and Darren Shan, have agreed to participate in an EBay auction, with the winning bidder for each author guaranteed to become a character in their next novel. Hot bidding for Darren Shan saw 27 bids raise ₤1020. Somebody called Caroline is about to meet a grisly end in his next Demonata title, due to be published in October.

World Autism Awareness Day was marked on April 2.

The countdown to Book Week has begun, with the announcement this morning of the Notable Books in all categories of the Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards. Short lists drawn from these notable titles contain the eventual winners, to be announced during August Book Week celebrations.

The Notable Books are in effect a long list of the very best titles presented to the judges from all the books published in 2007, so are definitely worth considering for your library collections. Reviews of most titles on the Notables list can be found on the CMIS Resource Bank.

Book Week 2008 runs from 15-22 August, with this year’s theme ‘Fuel Your Mind’.

The short list for each category usually produces disappointment, with titles missing out that many consider worthy. The judges can’t please everyone, even with their final notables lists, so comment here about titles that made it and those that didn’t is certainly encouraged.

Older Readers Shortlist 2008

• Jackie French - Pharaoh : the boy who conquered the Nile
• Sonya Hartnett - The ghost’s child
• John Heffernan - Marty’s shadow
• Meme McDonald - Love like water
• David Metzenthen - Black water
• Leonie Norrington - Leaving Barrumbi

We are delighted that Matt Ottley’s Requiem for a Beast, our cover book for Issue 3, 2007, has been short listed in the Picture Book of the Year category.