Review: Children’s and young adult books

Reviews: Lauren O’Connor-May

Everybody Toots

Jonny Leighton, Illustrated by Mike Byrne

Buster Books

I immediately knew that this book would be a hit in our family because as I’ve said before, children love stinky stories.

There are no moral lessons or educational leanings — perhaps aside from cultivating a love for reading — in this purely for-fun book but I challenge even the adults who read it not to giggle.

In the simple story, a little jerboa accidentally lets one rip. Mortified, the rodent apologises to the wilds at large but the elephant steps in and tells him that, basically, everybody poeps and then proceeds to list some hilarious, rhyming examples.

Spot it! World Atlas

Megan McKean

Hardie Grant

This educational board book attracted the interest of several of my children. My 10-year-old daughter liked the map captions and sidebar fact boxes while my three-year-old liked the spot-it game and identifying the different pictures.

The book is a graphic introduction to geography for young readers.

It cleverly uses images to teach about countries, borders, exports, landmarks and culture.

I thought this book’s use of graphics was genius and was very happy to add it to the family collection.

Unicorn Boy

Dave Roman

Hodder

Billed as appropriate for ages 6-9, this book was very popular among my children and their friends. My 10-year-old daughter took it to school and reported that it had generated a lot of interest and is now in borrowing rotation in her class.

Planned as the first of a series, the graphic novel tells the story of a shy boy who suddenly grows a magically powered unicorn horn, which he uses to help people.

Fundamentally, the short story is about tolerance and reaching out to others.

Our Cursed Love

Julie Abe

Pan MacMillan

This is a young adult best friends-to-lovers romantasy about university applicants Remy and Cam who lose each other while on a trip to Japan and spend the rest of the novel trying to reconnect. It is a follow-up to The Charmed List by the same author.

The story is charming but didn’t attract my teens because: “I don’t like fantasy”, “It’s boring” or “It took too long for the story to start”.

I finished the book but wouldn’t rate it among my favourites. This is one of the few books where I preferred the chemistry between the main characters and the other corners of the love quadrangle, so I was somewhat disappointed when the friends did become lovers — but I suspect my opinion will be singular.

Arch-conspirator

Veronica Roth

Titan Books

I was excited to see this book in the review catalogue because it combines two of my favourite genres, mythology and post-apocalyptic speculative fiction.

This book is a short and bleak young adult retelling of the tragic Antigone. In the original story Antigone, who is born of incest, incurs the wrath of her uncle, who killed her father, by defying his orders and trying to bury her murdered brother.

In this retelling, Antigone is cursed not by incest but by natural birth in a radioactive world surviving through genetic manipulation.

Roth is the author of the Divergent series and if you are familiar with her work, you will know that she writes worlds that are stark and grim. This book is in the same vein.

Divergent

Veronica Roth

Harper Fire

First released in 2011, this wildly popular young adult dystopian drama has been reprinted again, with a new cover.

The novel kickstarts the series set in a world where the population is divided into factions based on dominant personality traits.

Teens who come of age are given the choice to change their factions and the lead character, Beatrice Prior, does exactly this by moving from Abnegation, the severely selfless, to Dauntless, the recklessly fearless.

There, separated from her family, she has to endure a series of harrowing initiation trials while hiding a deadly secret.

The Divergent trilogy spawned a fourth book, Four — about Beatrice’s love interest, nicknamed Four, and a movie series, which was abandoned after the third movie. Some fans felt this was a blessing in disguise though since a large *cough* faction of them hated how the books ended and lobbied hard to have a different ending in the movies.