After thirteen years of lurking in the darkness backstage in theatres across Australia, Mandy emerged into the sunshine of the Kids Department of BRTD in 1996. She has been playing encore performances there ever since, keeping her inner child alive and happy.
Mandy has achieved a cult-like following among a local tribe of wide-eyed under-fives for her exhaustive knowledge of picture books and her savvy Staff Picks.
Crazy Hair
by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean (illustrator)
2009
HB $27.99
A picture book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean is a meeting of two wildly creative minds, and I reckon this is one of their best. Not as dark as The Wolves in the Walls and not as muted as The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, Crazy Hair is a poetic, riotous explosion of absurdity. Not recommended as bedtime reading!
Neil Gaiman's love of language is delightfully obvious in all his many and varied exploits - picture books, graphic novels, screenplays and novels for both children and adults of all ages. Dave McKean plays with illustration, painting, photography, sculpture and digital art, offering up a visual feast with a mildly disurbing flavour. Together, they make me feel like Little Red Riding Hood, skipping gaily through the dark, dark woods...
If you Google "Neil Gaiman crazy hair" you can also watch a YouTube of the man himself reading his short poem 'Crazy Hair' at the Icon Convention in Israel in 2006.
How to Ditch Your Fairy
by Justine Larbalestier
2009
PB $17.95
In new Avalon, almost everyone has a personal fairy and in the highly competitive atmosphere of New Avalon Sports High, the fairy you have can make you or break you. Charlie has a Parking Fairy, which makes her quite popular with the adults in her life and with the monosyllabic senior school bully Danders Anders. She's forever being dragged off to places she has no desire to go and is accompanied by the faint smell of gasoline. All very uncool if you're a 14 year old girl. She'd much rather have her friend Rochelle's Clothes Shopping Fairy, or the gorgeous new boy Stefan's Getting Out of Trouble Fairy.
Fed up, Charlie sets out to ditch her doxy fairy. After walking absolutely everywhere for 69 days, racking up demerits for being late and racking up public service hours to wipe out her demerits, she swears she can feel her fairy fading. Then Danders Anders 'kidnaps' her and she's back to square one.
That's when she discovers her arch enemy Fiorenze is desperate to get rid of her All Boys Will Like You Fairy, so they put their differences aside and hatch a plan to swap fairies, with hilarious and predictably disastrous results.
This is a fun, sassy read for 11- 14 year olds, with engaging characters and generous servings of amusing made up slang.
The 10pm Question
Kate Di Goldi
2009
PB $17.95
Frankie Parsons is twelve going on seventy. He's a worrier. He worries and frets about absolutely everything: his family, his friends (few in number though they are), the smoke alarm batteries, the cat having worms, the small but growing rash on his chest...
He has a vast and terrifying litany of possible diseases he might contract and a private hierarchy of squeamish experiences that can ruin his day and set him off obsessing about yukky things in general. Like ants on the kitchen bench, catching sight of maggots in a discarded rubbish bag, or having a chance encounter with a used band-aid floating in the local pool. "Hey Frankie", I want to shout, "you're not that weird!"
All this worrying leads to rodent voices in his head that culminate in nightly visits to his Ma's bedroom where he talks about the fears that only she can soothe. The problem is that his agoraphobic Ma is his greatest worry of all. She hasn't been outside in all the years that Frankie can remember, and too afraid to ask, he struggles to understand.
Through the course of the book, I watched helplessly as Frankie crumbled, overwhelmed by his worries and assumed responsibilities towards his family and friends. Then I shed a quiet tear followed by a noisy hurrah as Frankie emerged from his emotional minefield with strength and courage he never knew he had.
New Zealander Kate De Goldi has created a wonderful cast of characters in Frankie's sprawling family of card-playing Russian aunties with hearts of gold, his Ma who fills the house with the wonderful aromas of her daily cake-baking, his quietly-coping Dad, hormonal older sister Gordana, his best friend Gigs, and the zany, forthright Sydney, the new girl at school who unwittingly forces Frankie to step up to life.
A thoroughly enjoyable read for 11 to 14 year olds.
My favourite children's book
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
by Salman Rushdie
While writing The Satanic Verses, his fourth novel, Rushdie's 9 year old son Zafar said he should write books that children could read. So, in 1989, just a few months after the fatwa was issued against him, Rushdie started writing Haroun. It was published in 1990.
Rashid, the Shah of Blah, the Ocean of Notions, the greatest storyteller of all, has lost his Gift of the Gab. He and his son Haroun travel to Kahani, one of Earth's satellite moons whose orbit is controlled by Processes Too Complicated To Explain. Aided by a panoply of weird and wacky characters they have gathered along the way, they battle the evil Prince of Silence, who has plugged up the Sea of Stories.
Like much of Rushdie's writing for adults, this is a work of magic realism. It is full of allegory and has a wonderful dream-like, phantasmagoric quality to it. It's one of the few books I have read more than once, and I especially treasure my gorgeous hardback edition, brilliantly illustrated by Paul Birkbeck (and now sadly out of print). As it can be read and enjoyed on many levels, this little gem would appeal to good 10/11+ readers as well as adults.
My favourite children's picture book
Impossible! There are so many wonderful, brilliant storytellers and artists working in the world of picture books ...
Amongst my favourites are Emily Gravett (Wolves, Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears, The Odd Egg), Shaun Tan (The Lost Thing, The Arrival, Tales From Outer Suburbia), Russell Ayto (hilarious and quirky illustrator to many), Maurice Sendak (best known for Where the Wild Things Are, but you should check out his other books, most notably Mr Rabbit and the Lovely Present written by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by Sendak), Neil Gaiman (The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, and the very spooky The Wolves in the Walls, both illustrated by Dave McKean), David Lucas (The Robot & The Bluebird), Eric Carle (who can forget the Very Hungry Caterpillar, who just turned 40!) , Graeme Base (Animalia) and the inimitable Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, who I often suspect made all this delicious mayhem possible!
What's beside the bed
Worldshaker by Richard Harland
A sort of steam-punk fantasy set aboard the juggernaut that is Worldshaker. In the vein of Phillip Reeve's Mortal Engines, for a slightly younger audience (good 10 year old readers to 13). I'm about a third of the way through and I'm enjoying it so far. The author lectures at Wollongong Uni.
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Volume 1 : The Pox Party by M T Anderson.
I'm not usually drawn to historical fiction, but I've heard and read wonderful things about this book (and Vol 2). It's been described as an 'imaginative and highly intelligent exploration of the horrors of human experimentation'. Slavery, revolution and an exiled princess. 12+ and adults.
Feather and Bone: Ghost Writing from the Underground by Laslo Strangolov.
A mystery involving spooked chickens, bloated bunnies and one very worried boy.
Pig City by Louis Sachar
From the author of the brilliant book Holes.
The Ask and the Answer Book 2: Chaos Walking by Patrick Ness
Book 1 (The Knife of Never Letting Go) was excellent, and word has it that this is no disappointment. Due out in August. Mature 12+ and adults.