CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

• Melina Marchetta is guest author on the OzProjects Beware of Books site next week. Students are invited to submit questions to Melina on the forum.
• House of Many Ways, Diana Wynne Jones’s newest title set not long after the events in Howl’s Moving Castle, is due here in August. This interview with the author sets the scene.
• A discussion guide has been released for Life as We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer’s grim and scary tale of the consequences of a meteor hitting the moon. The sequel, the dead and the gone (the author’s preferred punctuation) has just arrived on our desk and will be reviewed shortly. It has been published here in paperback as The Dead and the Gone and the cover is not nearly as attractive as the American hardback. Pity.
• Literature teachers might like to follow this link from the Teaching Literature to Adolescents blog. Peter Smagorinsky, from the University of Georgia, is creating a growing list of titles to support conceptual themes such as Utopias and Dystopias, Conflict and  Justice. It’s a long list, and yes, the bias is American, but Smagorinsky is accepting suggestions for additions to the links, novels, poetry, drama, short stories, non-fiction titles, songs and films he is compiling for each theme.

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

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.

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.

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.