CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

There’s a great post today on Guys Lit Wire, a blog about books for boys. Do teenage boys need books with weak female characters? links to a YouTube discussion where two older males bemoan that boys can’t be heroes any more. In praising a new title, Nick of Time by Ted Bell, the speakers make a point of saying how great it is that the female characters are passive so that the boys can rescue them.

This discussion is rebutted confidently by ‘Colleen’:

‘There are a couple of things that bother me about this discussion (between two adult men without a teenager in sight by the way). First it is that for a boy to feel heroic he must rescue a girl - and the girl also needs to be rescued. I’m sure the sociologists would have a field day over all this but I can’t believe that anyone in the 21st century would believe that such antiquated notions of what it means to be a hero have any place in a worthwhile discussion. Save the world - yes! Save the animals, save the environment, save whatever needs saving in your books. But the girl MUST be saved by the boy for the boy to feel powerful? How do these gentlemen think it makes the girl feel to have to wait to be saved? Have they ever thought about that at all?’

Colleen also provides a ‘top of the head’ list of titles where boys are both strong and heroic.

It’s a terrific discussion for a boys’ lit blog, with plenty of comments coming in.

Book Week 2008 draws ever closer. CMIS will be interpreting the slogan ‘Fuel Your Mind’ by suggesting that we challenge students to read and respond to literature that might be unusual or a little out of their comfort zone.

The Book Week 2008 pages are still a work in progress, but we have made a start on the lists for Older Readers and the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books.

Logo © CBCA. Used by CBCA Member

A Bentley-driving living skeleton named Skulduggery Pleasant is the unlikely protagonist of the latest book award winner from the UK.

The Red House Children’s Book Awards were announced at the Hay Festival this weekend, and Irish writer Derek Landy’s witty, gothic-horror title was declared overall winner. These children’s choice awards have been running an astonishing 28 years.

Skulduggery seems just as popular in Australia as in the rest of the English-reading world. The sequel, Playing with Fire, has recently become available.

Centre for Youth Literature Professional Learning, Part 2

After Dr Pam Macintyre and Dr Susan La Marca spoke about books for Years 5 and 6, the Fiction Focus team sprang into action to let the 150 participants know about some new titles for Years 7 and 8 that would work well in the classroom as well as for wide reading. Some are so new that there are no Fiction Focus reviews yet, but we will link to our reviews in the Resource Bank when they are available.

We had prepared an extensive list to hand out, and we will put this up on the CMIS website as soon as we can make it happen.

It was a frenzied book promotion session - just like being back in the classroom really. Some of the new titles we spoke about were:

• Trust Me (compiled by Paul Collins, Ford Street Publishing) and Short (compiled by Lili Wilkinson, Black Dog Books) - two anthologies that offer a rich selection of writing styles and text types with myriad classroom uses. Both come with teachers’ notes.
• Verse novels, including Hugging the Rock, Susan Taylor Brown’s moving story about father-daughter relationships, mother loss and mental illness.
• Click, a great multi-author work that weaves a narrative from the contributions of many well-known writers, including David Almond, Roddy Doyle and Eoin Colfer.
• Graphic novels, such as Sophie Masson’s The Secret Army, which has so much to unravel including the 1936 Berlin Olympics, British Nazi sympathisers (the Mitford sisters spring to mind), Norse mythology and mystic mediaeval figures such as Nicholas Flamel.
• A brief look at dystopia with The Declaration and Fearless.
• Libby Gleeson’s new title, Mahtab’s Story, which would complement Parvana very nicely.
• Some historical novels, including the Newbery-award winning Good Masters! Sweet Ladies : Voices from a Medieval Village.
• New picture books including Colin Thompson’s ’shaggy lost dog with a lost leg’ tale, The Big Little Book of Happy Sadness.

The afternoon sessions saw Lili and Mike talk on Books for Years 9 and 10, and we forgot that it was late on a Friday afternoon as Maria Boyd talked so inspiringly about her classroom practice and using texts with boys, including her own first novel, Will.

Throughout the day, there was much talk about responding to texts, but that’s for another blog, another day.

For the second time this month, the Fiction Focus team is heading off to Melbourne. It seems no time since we returned from All the Wild Wonders, the CBCA conference. On Friday we will be taking part in the Novel Ideas seminar organised by the wonderful Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria.

Our brief is to talk about some of the best new titles for Years 7 and 8. We will be sharing our ideas with about 150 teachers and teacher-librarians, and if that isn’t nerve-wracking enough, other speakers (each with their own topic, fortunately) include Morris Gleitzman, Maria Boyd and Dr Susan La Marca and Pam Macintyre of Viewpoint magazine. Mike Shuttleworth (CYL Program Coordinator) and Lili Wilkinson (manager of the inside a dog website) are also presenting.

We’re a bit worried that we are going to ‘do an Ishmael‘ and faint as soon as we stand up to speak. We’ll let you know how it goes.

We apologise that the first print edition of Fiction Focus for 2008 has taken so long to reach our subscribers. All sorts of unexpected delays have occurred, but at last it is being distributed and should be in your mailboxes soon.

Regular readers will notice some changes that reflect ideas from last year’s survey. Please use this blog to comment about these.

Fiction Focus is distributed free of charge to all public secondary and district high schools in Western Australia and is available on subscription to Australian and overseas readers.

The SciFi site SF Signal runs a weekly Mind Meld, where a panel of writers and readers brainstorms on a SciFi literature topic. This week they take a look at the best SciFi titles for young adults that will also appeal to older readers of the genre. It’s certainly worth a look to see what suggestions have been made. The panel includes our very own Simon Haynes - the creator of Hal Spacejock.

On a similar note, this post on the BoingBoing site from Cory Doctorow, author of the already highly acclaimed (but not yet available in Australia) Little Brother,  is worth reading.

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.

Michael Morpurgo has compiled a list of 100 books ‘every child should read’. Being a list, and a British one at that, it is obviously subjective, but sadly, not one Australian author features in any of the titles he recommends, including those for early teens. Australian YA authors have proven that they can take on the world. Shaun Tan, Sonya Hartnett, Markus Zusak (watch the interview with Markus on American School Library Journal) and Garth Nix are just a few who are very popular overseas. Judith Clarke was noticed at the recent ALA awards, so it’s a pity that such talent has been overlooked. Morpurgo’s list includes a few recent titles, but the classics predominate. What do you think of his choices?

CMIS has developed a list of ‘books not to be missed‘ which features Australian and international authors and titles for all phases of development. Take a look.

So what Australian books do you think every early teen should read? What would be on your list? Let us know.