Contemporary

A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness

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Later this year a movie will be released of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls.

I’m keen to see the movie, but reluctant at the same time.

Anybody who loves a book will know the feeling; excitement at seeing a great story brought to life, but anxious at the thought it could be ruined.

The trailer looks hopeful.

The story centres on Conor, who lives with his mother who has cancer. Her illness has made Conor feel isolated and alone, and he has been plagued with a recurring nightmare of darkness and screaming.

One night after midnight a voice calls to him outside his window. It’s the huge willow tree from the graveyard of the church he can see from his room, terrifying and stern, who insists it will come back and tell him three stories, and then Conor must tell his story to the tree. The yew does as it promises, each time returning after midnight. 

The consequences of the yew’s visits to Conor
grow more and more severe.

Ultimately, it leads him to confront his deepest fears.

9781406311525A Monster Calls has a sad history. In an Author’s Note at the beginning of the book, Ness explains that the premise of the book was conceived by author Siobhan Dowd, along with the characters and the beginning. It would have been her fifth book. “What she didn’t have,” he says, “unfortunately, was time.” What he doesn’t mention in his note is that she had cancer.

However, he was asked to turn her beginning into a book. He felt like he’d “been handed a baton, like a particularly fine writer has handed me her story and said,

‘Go. Run with it. Make trouble.’

“So that’s what I tried to do.”

He had only a single guideline: “to write a book I think Siobhan would have liked. No other criteria could really matter.”

He certainly wrote a book a many people like. Ness and the illustrator Jim Kay won the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals for writing and illustration, as well the British Children’s Book of the Year and a swag of other awards. I’d include it on any list of the best books for pre-teens/teenagers, and would recommend it to most adults. It’s a deceptively simple story, with a huge depth of psychological and emotional sophistication.

Film is a very different media to print, but I hope the underlying complexity, the confusion, grief, fear, love and alienation that Conor deals with manages to be portrayed in the film.

The monster paused again.
You really aren’t afraid, are you?
“No,” Conor said. “Not of you, anyway.”
The monster narrowed its eyes.
You will be, it said. Before the end.

Details
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Candlewick Press/Walker Books
ISBN 1406311529
Pub: May 2011

Links
Patrick Ness’s website
Second trailer for the A Monster Calls movie

Two Wolves – which will you feed?

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Released as “On the Run” in the US

Ben Silver is home with his little sister one afternoon when the cops show up looking for his parents. After they leave, his mum and 19392551dad arrive and bundle them in the car, supposedly taking them on a spontaneous ‘holiday’.  Ben finds it hard to believe the two things aren’t linked.

So begins a tale of tension, suspicion and fear. Why did they leave so fast, without clothes or food? Why do his parents take Ben and his sister, Olive, to a filthy cabin in the middle of nowhere?

What’s in the bag his father
tries to hide?

Two Wolves is a novel at the lower end of the YA bracket that tackles some difficult questions. Parents are supposed to look after you, but what if other things are more important to them? What if they neglect you, or worse? What if they betray you? What if you come from a family who do things that are wrong? Does that mean you’ll be just like them?

Tristan Bancks handles these and other questions with skill. While his other books have lighter subjects and tones, Two Wolves captures the confusion, loneliness and longing of Ben as he tries to make sense of what’s happening to him and his family.

The title is taken from a story in the pages of Ben’s grandfather’s almost-empty journal, which is printed as a brief preface before the first chapter. In this version of the old story, a man tells his grandson that inside all of us a battle rages between two wolves.

“One wolf is bad – pride, envy, jealousy, greed, guilt, self-pity.
The other wolf is good – kindness, hope, love, service, truth, humility.”

23310747When the child asks who will win, the grandfather answers, “The one you feed”.

The conclusion to the novel isn’t a tidy, neat, Disney happily-ever-after, but it’s a satisfying resolution that stays true to the characters and story, while still allowing the reader to ask themselves, “What would I do?”

Highly recommended, for readers from late primary school up.

 

 

Details
Two Wolves by Tristan Bancks (On the Run in US)
Random House Australia
ISBN: 9780857982032
Published: March 2014

Links
Tristan Bancks website: http://www.tristanbancks.com

AUSSIE-AUTHOR-2016 Aussie Author Challenge 2016

Zeroes – What’s your superpower?

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If you had a supernatural ability, what would it be?
Not what you’d like it to be, but what it would be?

The fifteen-year-olds in Zeroes didn’t get to choose their abilities. While their powers let them do things others can’t, not all the effects are easy to live with. Ethan (nicknamed Scam), for instance, has a ‘voice’ that talks its way into getting anything he wants when he lets it take over, but it doesn’t take consequences into account. This time, it ends up getting him involved with gangsters and bank robbers, and the police don’t buy his lame explanations.

Though he hasn’t spoken to them since his temper got the better of him last summer, his fellow Zeroes come to his rescue. The fallout of Scam’s interference is the discovery of a new Zero, and she wants them to help find her father.

They’ll be risking more than their group. They’ll be risking their lives.

24756394Zeroes is a young adult novel by three well-established authors, Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti. It’s fast-paced action, each chapter from the perspective of one the six Zeroes characters, though all written in third person. Though each author wrote from the perspective of two characters, they blend seamlessly.

What holds the narrative together is not just the action but the relationships. All is not well among the Zeroes. They’re a diverse bunch with little in common other than their possession of a strange ability. There’s dissent, there’s friction, there’s sexual tension, all of which provide conflict and interesting places for the characters to go.

On the other hand, around half-way through the book I found myself looking for other things to read. I lost interest for a while; I didn’t feel like finishing it. This was in spite of an excellent plot with plenty of menace to keep the pages turning. It had all the right ingredients, and I really wanted to love this book.

Why wasn’t I engrossed?

After a little thought, the answer was obvious. I didn’t like the Zeroes very much. They’re interesting, complex, well thought out, and definitely flawed as all good characters should be. They’re well written. I just didn’t enjoy being with them. The suspense and ‘need to know’ were outweighed for a while by the need for space away from the characters, the way you sometimes need space away from friends who are irritating you.

If I was a newly discovered Zero they’d asked to join their group, I wouldn’t be keen. They mean well – mostly – but they’re pains in the bum. They’re a smorgasbord of self focus, arrogance, resentment and anger, and even Flicker, the mild-mannered blind girl who can see through other’s eyes, doesn’t have much compassion for her twin sister when their relationship is encroached upon by another Zero.

24885636It was also difficult to get a clear picture of the Zero, Nathan. The others call him Glorious Leader, but it was hard for me to get a handle on the nature of his power. We know it has to do with the attention of crowds, but I found it nebulous until close to the end of the book where we get a small demonstration. His nickname, Bellwether, didn’t help. I’d heard the term but had no idea what it was. I probably should have bitten the bullet and just looked it up, but I was reading a hard copy and e-reading has made me quite lazy. (I eventually looked it up, and it made more sense of Nathan’s power.)

Overall, Zeroes has a great premise, is well-written, fast-paced with a compelling plot, and full of complex, interesting characters. Eventually I picked it backed up again and finished it. The plot brought me back and I wanted to know what happened, specifically to the new girl, Mob. I liked her the most – though she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the Zeroes superpowered shed.

Though I didn’t love Zeroes as much as I wanted to, it’s still a good book. The writing is great, and it certainly wasn’t a book I could leave unfinished indefinitely. I’ll be reading later books in the series, but the events in this one have changed its characters. Hopefully that means they’ll be less irritating.

Details

Zeroes by Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, & Deborah Biancotti
Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781925266955
Published: September 2015

Links

Scott Westerfeld’s webpage
Margo Lanagan’s webpage (called Among Amid While)
Deborah Biancotti’s webpage

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Getting Back Into Reading. Guest Post by Morgan Bell

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2Morgan Bell is a movie and book reviewer for Salty Popcorn, author of Sniggerless Boundulations, contributor to several anthologies and editor of the upcoming Sproutlings. A good friend and supporter of writers in Newcastle, she’s written a guest post for me while I’ve been under the weather.

READING FOR PLEASURE: WHY DID YOU STOP?

You used to be an avid reader as a kid, consuming books ravenously, your library card tattered and maxed out. But now as an adult you can barely concentrate on novels. You buy a lot of books with good intentions but really struggle to read them. You become embarrassed and don’t want to admit you are a slow-reader, and rarely finish books you start.

One of the most common reasons you stop pleasure-reading is that you choose to pursue tertiary education. If you have a lot of reading to do for your academic study, or as part of your job, you become a certain kind of reader who is accustomed to reading specific non-fiction formats.

You can begin to associate reading with work.
It then seems like a tiresome chore.

Academic and professional reading involves a lot of scanning and skimming. It involves gleaning for key words, bullet point lists, and subheadings. Too much time spent exclusively in the business-reading world can make it impossible for you to cope with a text that doesn’t come with an executive summary or a precis.

When you try to go back to reading novels it can be really difficult. Novels are generally free-form with little internal structure. You cannot go into them with rigid expectations.

Here are three tips to getting back into reading for pleasure:

  1. Mix up your media
  2. Rediscover the public library
  3. Start with short stories
MIX UP YOUR MEDIA

It is possible that when you grew up there wasn’t a great amount of diversity in fiction delivery. The technology didn’t exist or the cost was prohibitive or there was a social stigma about delivery modes and/or genre fiction.

We now live in a more tolerant world, where certain comic books are not the exclusive realm of nerds and losers. Where the definitions of “women’s books” or “men’s books” or “children’s books” are slowly losing their meaning.

shortstories
Audible has made audiobooks accessible to everyone. Plug in a set of headphones to your mobile phone and listen to your Audible purchases on your commute to work, while your exercise, or while you do the dishes. Listening is a form of reading.

 

Smartphones have made every phone an e-reader. You don’t need a specialised device. You don’t need to lug heavy books around in your handbag or backpack. And authors have embraced the digital format. There are Kindle Singles, individually published short stories, and electronic versions of literary journals, magazines, essays, picture books, comics, graphic novels, poetry, and zines.

REDISCOVER THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

Over your life your tastes change. Your opinions change. Your values change. Maybe not 100%, but they shift, expand, shrink, skew. It is possible that what you are going to enjoy reading today is different to what you enjoyed reading a decade ago, or in your youth.

Browsing the library is the book version of free samples. Grab a few books from different shelves and sections, take your stack over to a table, and, in the relaxing cool and quiet, read the first pages of a whole bunch of books. Have a yes and no pile. The books won’t be offended.

You might start to see a pattern in what you find the most readable or intriguing. You might have new preferences for narrative voice, point of view, tense, experimentation, tropes, escapism, self-reflection, hooks, slow burns, conflicts, themes, or even happy endings.

Libraries also lend magazines, periodicals, CDs, DVDs, audiobooks and e-books these days.

START WITH SHORT STORIES

The shorter the better.

Nano, micro, vignette, flash … then maybe stretch yourself to a novella.

It can be a difficult adjustment to get back into self-motivated, self-directed, solitary reading. The studies that you have undertaken during your pleasure-reading sabbatical may have left you waiting for someone to assign you a book before you read it, and then test you on your comprehension of it afterwards.

You may feel like reading materials ought to be increasingly challenging to be worth your time. While you are relaxing into the idea of reading as a carefree exercise, you should tap into some meaningful and engaging short story collections.

My top five are:

  1. The Devil’s Larder by Jim Crace
  2. Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy
  3. The Turning by Tim Winton
  4. Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff
  5. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

I am currently reading a paperback of An Astronaut’s Life, a collection by Sonja Dechian, listening to the audiobook of Tenth of December, a collection by George Saunders, and e-booking Snow & Shadow, a collection by Dorothy Tse.

Short stories are ultra-condensed little lessons on life, the meatiest little chunks to savour and consider. They don’t ask you for the over-investment that a novel does when you are focussed on evaluating style and messages. They respect that your time is precious, your patience finite, and your joy is inextricably linked to analysis.

I hope you enjoyed my suggestions for short story collections to read. If you would like the full list there is an Editor’s Choice Reading List as a $2 pledge reward on the Kickstarter for the anthology of flash fiction I am currently editing.

kickstartersproutlingsfacebookcoverThe paperback of Sproutlings: A Compendium of Little Fictions is just $20 delivered to your door in Australia – when pre-ordered through the Kickstarter – and features over 40 delectable slices of flash fiction about wicked plants. It might be just the thing to pull you out of your reading slump!

Find the Kickstarter campaign here.

And the Winner Is …

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… Young Adult books!

Though the literary world seems abuzz with Man Booker fever over a novel that sounds like Stephen Hawking meets Psycho, the #LoveOzYA community is celebrating the winners of the Inky Awards. (I’m sure the MB prize winner is a great book; I’m just excited by the Inkies.) If you haven’t heard of the Inkies, don’t despair. Once upon a time no one had heard of the Man Booker Prize either – or the Oscars.

The Inky Awards are bestowed through The Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria, who promote reading as “not just something that is done as school work” and “an active, pleasurable and essential activity for all young people”. One of their projects is Inside a Dog, a website which promotes young adult literature, showcasing both Australian writers and their work and the cream of international YA literature.

Why “Inside a Dog”? It comes from a Groucho Marx quote:

insideadog-small“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

The name of the award comes from the Inside a Dog mascot, Inky, the all-round wonder-dog. The Gold Inky is awarded to a book by an Australian author while the Silver Inky is awarded to a book by an international author.

So, who are the winners for 2015?

The Gold Inky winner is:

Gold_winner_nobkgnd_1 9780732297053

The Intern,

by Gabrielle Tozer

 

 

The Intern is great book, a contemporary story of a girl in her first year of university who is pushed out of her comfort zone by an internship at a fashion magazine as part of her course requirement. You can read my review of The Intern here. Congratulations Gabrielle!

The Silver Inky winner is:

Fangirl_Pan Macmillan_0_1.previewSilver_winner_nobkgnd_0

Fangirl

by Rainbow Rowell

 

 

I haven’t read Fangirl yet but it’s on my list, and this has bumped it up quite a few places.

A quick look at the long list for this years awards shows the calibre of books that were in the running for the Inky Awards this year.

2015-Inky-longlist

Though I’ve only reviewed Clariel by Garth Nix, the quality of books is amazing. It’s impossible to keep up with all the excellent YA being produced as well as Australian speculative fiction – and that’s great news for everybody.

Links

Inside a Dog Homepage

The process of nomination and judging the Inky Awards plus previous Long Lists, Short Lists and Winners, here

Gabrielle Tozer’s website

Rainbow Rowell’s website

Man Booker Prize 2015 Announcement

 

Cloudwish, by Fiona Wood

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Wishes aren’t real. Are they?

Vân Uoc knows the score. She’s a scholarship kid in an exclusive school where most of the other kids were born with silver spoons in their mouths. She’s under no illusion about fitting into the designer-clothes-and-huge-house set, but it hasn’t prevented her crushing on A-lister and rowing star Billy Gardiner.

24248906When a creative writing teacher hands around a box of items as prompts, Vân Uoc picks out a little glass tube with the word ‘wish’ on a slip of paper inside. Her wish? For Billy Gardiner to prefer her to everyone else. Afterwards she can’t find the glass tube, and Billy takes notice of her for the first time. Coincidence – isn’t it?

Though Cloudwish begins whimsically, the struggles Vân Uoc experiences between home and school feel very real. Being the only daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she feels the full weight of her parents’ expectations and the responsibility of being worthy of all the terrors they suffered and sacrifices they made so she could have a better life. Her day-to-day world is one of restriction and enforced study in their housing commission flat, carving out her small freedoms by bending the truth in translation to her barely-English-speaking parents and rationalising her dishonesty.

She doesn’t want anyone at school to know any of that, of course. She’s always tried to fly under the rader; life is easier if she’s invisible. With Billy’s sudden attention comes an unwelcome spotlight, and a few girls in particular aren’t too happy to see Billy’s affection straying outside home turf.

Billy really seems to like her, though, just for herself. She doesn’t believe wishes are real, but how else could this have happened? And can she live with that, if he hasn’t really chosen it?

Cloudwish is the story of a girl caught in the tension between two cultures. Fiona Wood immerses us in Vân Uoc’s world and we can’t help but feel the pressure from her parents and the otherness she experiences at school. The book begins with a quote from Alice Walker at Sydney Writers’ Festival:

I recognised myself in Jane Eyre. It amazed me how many white people can’t read themselves in black characters. I didn’t feel any separation between me and Jane. We were tight.

I love this quote and find it puzzling at the same time. The magical thing about stories is that they enable us to become other people, to understand who they are from the inside, to ‘look out through other eyes’ as Neil Gaiman has said. A good book is a leveller, making us all see from the same perspective, and I find it incredibly sad that some people have a racial barrier stopping that process.

The quote is perfect, though, because Jane Eyre is Vân Uoc’s hero and muse. “What would Jane do?” is a refrain throughout the story, and lovers of Charlotte Bronte’s classic will love the way Wood weaves snippets into Cloudwish.

While Vân Uoc seeks to be as brave as Jane, she suffers from the insecurities endemic in young women – or women in general – and many girls will identify with her doubts when the most popular boy at school pursues her. Is it a set-up? A joke? If not, it must be the wish.

Though most of the novel is written in third person, it perfectly fits the voice of its lead character. It’s a lovely touch that her name, Vân Uoc, means ‘cloudwish’ in Vietnamese.

I can’t help comparing Cloudwish with Looking for Alibrandi in the way it presents the life of a second generation Australian living between cultures. Reading it doesn’t feel like an education, only a great story, but afterwards I realised I understood a lot more than I had before I read it.

That’s a great book.

* I received an e-copy of this book for review through Netgalley

Details
Cloudwish by Fiona WoodNetgalley badge
Pan Macmillan Australia
ISBN: 9781743533123
Published: 1 Sept, 2015

Links
Fiona Wood’s website

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Afterlight, by Rebecca Lim

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What would you do if a ghost turned up in your bedroom, giving you the terrors every night? What if she had tasks for you to do? What if it all led to a mystery that put your life at risk?

Sophie hasn’t had it easy. Her parents were killed in a motorcycle accident. and in the pain and loneliness of grief she threw herself at her long time crush and only managed to incur public humiliation. So in her final year she moves to a new school, and though her height and bright red hair quickly earn her the name “Storkie”, at least it’s a fresh start.

25215400Then the ghost turns up, who looks so much like her mother they could have been sisters. As her terror lessens, it becomes obvious the woman won’t leave until Sophie does what she wants. Instead of leaving her alone, though, things get more complicated. It all starts to snowball, even involving Jordan, the most popular and enigmatic guy at school. But it’s all a lot more dangerous than either of them were expecting.

Afterlight is a story of a girl trying to make sense of her life, while dealing with the afterlife. In Sophie, author Rebecca Lim gives us a protagonist who is grieving, lacking confidence and lonely, yet finds the strength to carry out the tasks the ghost sets for her, even though they’re way out of her comfort zone. The more involved she gets with the ghost, the more she comes to life.

There’s romance woven in, though Jordan serves more purpose in the plot that just the ‘hot guy’. Sophie has shut out everyone from her old school and is a loner in her new one. It’s only the ghost that brings Jordan and Sophie across the walls they’ve built around themselves.

The writing is tight and well-paced, witty and charming in many parts. It’s one of those books where the words disappear and all you see is the story.

The only thing I didn’t like about this book was the ending. I had that feeling, as you get closer to the last page, ‘How is this all going to be wrapped up in the space left?’ It wasn’t, of course. There is obviously more to come.

So, on one hand that’s great, because there’s more story. On the other hand, I was left on the last page, yelling, ‘Nooo!’

I can’t wait for the next one.

Details:
Afterlight by Rebecca Lim
The Text Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781925240498
Published: June 2015

Links:
Rebecca Lim at Text Publishing

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The Fault in Our Stars VS Zac and Mia #LoveOzYA readalikes

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I didn’t want to read The Fault in Our Stars.

Not because it was everywhere, not because it had been done before, and not because it was a teen romance written by a man, though if I’m honest those prejudices were part of the package. The real reason was because it was about teenagers with cancer.

11870085I have a thing about putting people with a life-threatening illness on a pedestal, and referring to someone’s “battle with cancer”. Why do we need to label it as a battle? Sometimes it’s as much as they can do just to hang on. Likewise, many stories about kids and teenagers with cancer have presented them as half-saints. This can shape people’s expectations of cancer victims, and put an even greater burden on them when they most need understanding.

So, this was my rather disparaging attitude towards The Fault in Our Stars. I’d seen the cover, read the blurb, saw it was on the New York Times best-seller list for ages, and turned up my nose.

Then one day I saw a Youtube video of John Green in Sydney. It resulted in a conversation with my daughter that went something like this:

Me: Did you know John Green had been in Australia?
Dtr: No! When?
Me: Not sure. There’s a video on Youtube of him, walking in Hyde Park, I think.
Dtr: Maybe he was here to promote The Fault in Our Stars.
Me: No, not that John Green. The one from Crash Course.
Dtr: Yeah, he wrote The Fault in Our Stars.
Me: No, not the old author guy. (Raises voice for emphasis.) The Crash Course guy.
Dtr: What old author guy? (Peering at me to determine the extent of brain damage.) The Dtr: John Green from Crash Course is the same one who wrote The Fault in Our Stars.
Me: You’re kidding.
Dtr: Nope.
Me: How did I not know that?
Dtr: No idea. But this particular win is going last me quite a while.

I felt stupid. How had I not linked these two John Greens together? And why had I assumed the novelist was some ‘old author guy’? Were my prejudices showing? (Coughs and decides that question is rhetorical.)

I enjoyed the Youtube Crash Course series, in which he teaches literature and history (and his brother, Hank, teaches various sciences). It’s upbeat, insightful, no crap, and demonstrates a love of words and learning. Could this guy have written a novel about teenagers with cancer that didn’t drive me insane? I went back to Youtube and sought out some interviews he’d done about the book.

The first thing I discovered was that he’d worked as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital for six months, during which he’d encountered a lot of kids and teens with cancer. He also often mentioned a young friend who’d had cancer. The thing that impressed me the most was the way he spoke about people with cancer – as people. Not with awe or pity, but that someone with cancer was just that, a normal person with normal interests and normal emotions, who has this horrible thing happening to them. I decided this teens-with-cancer book might be worth a look after all.

It was. Given all the hype that had surrounded it, I was surprised it more than lived up to expectations. The teenagers we get to know in The Fault in Our Stars, Hazel, Augustus and their friend Isaac, aren’t saints. They’re teenagers who have their own interests, hang out, laugh, get angry, take advantage of their ‘cancer perks’, and fall in love. Sometimes they try to be strong for their parents, but often can’t be. The love story is sweet but down-to-earth, shadowed always by the knowledge that it will never be a long one.

The writing is beautiful with many memorable phrases, many of which capture reactions that a diagnosis of cancer at a such a young age may induce. One that sticks with me is:

The world is not a wish-granting factory.

It’s such a succinct statement of bald reality, flipping the fairy tale on its head. Another beautifully prosaic line is:

The existence of broccoli does not affect
the taste of chocolate.

This is in relation to the oft-spouted rationalization that bad things have to happen in order for us to appreciate goodness, or “Without pain, how could we know joy?” This point has been discussed for centuries, but for those experiencing the ‘broccoli’ the discussion tends to become, if not irrelevant, then ridiculous. How does their cancer promote the experience of joy?

The Fault in Our Stars, though, is a romance at its core, though a tragic one and as unlike a Disney fairy tale as it’s possible to be while still allowing the romantic element to predominate. It deserves its success.

Since reading it, my prejudice against so-called ‘sick lit’ has been broken down to a large extent. If John Green has written about people with disease in a more realistic way, maybe other authors have too. I heard about Aussie author A.J. Betts’ novel Zac and Mia, and her job teaching kids and teenagers in an oncology ward seemed to place her in an excellent position to understand the realities of their lives better than most people. I’d been intending to read it for ages, but it wasn’t until blogger Danielle Binks posted her first #LoveOzYA Readalikes that I finally did something about it.

15757486Like Hazel and Augustus, teenagers Zac and Mia both have cancer. They have adjacent rooms in a Perth hospital, but don’t meet face-to-face at first because Zac is in isolation after undergoing a bone marrow transplant for his leukemia. Mia is loud and angry, but they end up communicating, first through taps on the wall, then through messaging in Facebook.

It isn’t a match made in heaven; Mia isn’t letting anyone close enough to help her, and Zac doesn’t have the energy to take the crap she dishes out.

Zac and Mia isn’t a romance. It’s a story about two young people who’ve had the stuffing knocked out of them, and how they react to each other. By telling the story from both Zac and Mia’s perspectives it allows us to see two very different people with some of the same problems, and the impact of their illnesses on their lives.

I found the portrayal of Mia particularly interesting – a girl who had based all her self-worth on being beautiful and popular suddenly thrust into a world of needles, medication, surgery, and vomiting. As she starts losing her hair due to chemotherapy, she goes ballistic. Her world is falling apart, and the people around her keep telling her she’s ‘ lucky’. No one seems to understand how devastated she is.

There is no sugar-coating, and both Zac and Mia have their struggles and successes, but it’s the differing perspectives that make Zac and Mia such a strong story. Zac’s life back on the family olive farm and tourist petting zoo, and his preoccupation with cancer statistics, play against Mia’s stormy relationship with her mother, refusing to tell her friends she’s sick, and going on the run in an attempt to get as far away from her life as possible. The reader understands why each of them feel the way they do, even when they oppose one another across a wide chasm.

So how does Zac and Mia compare with The Fault in Our Stars?

The Fault in Our Stars
 Zac and Mia
Setting Indianapolis and Amsterdam Perth and
W. Australian farmland
Reality of being a teenager with cancer Very good Excellent
Plausibility of events Good Excellent
Writing Excellent
(often poetic)		 Very good
Romantic elements  Major  Minor

It’s inevitable that Zac and Mia will be compared to The Fault in Our Stars, because it’s about a boy and a girl who both have cancer, and it came out the year after TFIOS. In many ways that’s a shame, because if someone picks it up expecting another John Green book with the same romantic feel they’ll be disappointed.

However, if it means Zac and Mia gains more attention, as it did with me, then it should be encouraged. It’s an excellent book in its own right. Don’t expect a love story, but do expect an insightful and emotional book about a strange relationship, amid the realities of being a teenager who’s been hit by the cancer bus.

Details

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Dutton Juvenile
ISBN: 9780525478812
Published: January 2012

Zac and Mia by A.J. Betts
The Text Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781922147257
Published: July 2013

Links

John Green: website, tumblr
John and Hank Green: Vlogblothers (Wikipedia), How to be a Nerdfighter (Youtube)
Crash Course: English Literature, World History, a list of other Crash Courses
A.J. Betts: website
Daniel Binks: Alphareader #LoveOzYA Readalikes

Aussie-Author-Challenge-2015-300x264 50Aussie Author Challenge

awwsml-2015Australian Women Writers Challenge