Dim's Write Stuff

It's interesting the number of kids' stories I'm encountering of late addressing social issues surrounding AI and tech advancements. It's little wonder actualisation of this concerning reality is becoming more subject-worthy in kids' lit. Ask any older Gen Alpha or Gen Zer how they feel about the advent of these often-invasive AI platforms and you might be surprised by their response. Middle grade and young adult author, Emily Gale takes this premise and massages it into an action pumped adventure taking us into The Wild Unknown . Incredulously, some 11 or so years ago, I penned a virtual reality YA short story set in 2040. That date seemed eons away at the time but it's the exact decade Eddie and his mate Kit find themselves in The Wild Unknown;  2045 to be precise, but a skip and hiccup around the future corner! It's an interesting future, too. Sophisticated AI tech dominates human existence, dictating outcomes wherever possible, guiding humans who appare...

We're all guilty. Spurred by an impulse too intense to ignore. Rationale and logic shoved to the backseat in favour of letting impetuousness drive. Despite knowing better, validation for such behaviours is often reduced to a dismissive, all encompassing, we did it anyway, which is the haunting underlying premise of Carla Salmon's latest young teen novel, We Did It Anyway. Hot on the heels of our first encounter with the youths of the coastal Red Sands community, this racy adventure focuses on other erstwhile members of the friendship circle; Alex, Otto and Jasper. The spotlight doesn't just rest on the boys however with Luna and best mate, Milly, firmly lending narrative nouse and balance. Set on the rugged island of Talmar, the group gather to partake in an Easter holiday life-saving club training camp. Opinions oscillate wildly about this; the boys are all up for a bit of freedom. Luna is less convinced about the camping vibe but with the twins' dad there to supervi...

Dreams are the conduits to adventure. We've all had a few. Mine, as a freedom seeking teen, was to buy the red and cream bus for sale that I passed everyday on my way to school. Imagine living in a bus, traversing the highways and byways of Oz! Well, Dave Petzold did and wrote about it in the family based adventure, We Live in A Bus . My love of the ocean pulled me in a different direction however thanks to another picturebook-inspired dream - to live on a boat.  I remember a book filled with friendly marine creatures, a sea of swirling colours, freshly caught sea bass for dinner and grilled peaches for dessert, luxuriously illustrated and brimming with whimsical adventure. Could Petzold have shared this dream as well?  We Live On A Boat , is a magnificent ode to the ocean and salute to the 'live aboards' who frequent her currents and tides. Lyrical verse begins with the reoccuring sentiment; we live on a boat which is immediately reinforced with the vessel's name: Luc...

Oliver Jeffers' exciting and thought-provoking picture book stories orbiting around the Boy, have a new out-of-this-world addition, Where To Hide A Star . Among the boy’s many loves is his predilection for playing hide and seek with his two besties, penguin and the star. Neither of them is much good at counting or hiding imaginatively but that hardly matters when the real gain behind the game is spending time with your friends. Until one day, through an unplanned misadventure, the boy loses track of the star. Try as he might, he genuinely is unable to find the star so decides to call in the big guns, aka the Martian, who unquestionably knows more about stars than him. Thanks to a neat bit of Martian tech and a good deal of happenstance, they trek star’s whereabouts all the way to the North Pole, where it turns out, it is very much not lost. Star had found a new friend; a girl who has always dreamed of having a star as a playmate. An inevitable Mexican standoff ensues. How do...

Look, it's true, I’m more of a dog person than someone with a fetish for felines, but Itty Bitty Kitty is so utterly adorbs and cute (although whatever you do, DON'T call her that), how could one not want to cuddle her up. Itty Bitty Kitty features in all three tales that appear in each of the four five books (latest in the series out November 2024!) in this junior fiction series. She is teeny tiny. Winsome and mischievous. But don’t let her size fool you. With her tigress attitude and feline smarts, Kitty is the penultimate adventurer, even if those adventures extend no further than her home with her Humans. Told in endearing first person cat-speak, each instalment is sweet and manageable for young newly independent and emerging readers. Engagingly illustrated chapters provide plenty of visual stimulation. Text is punctuated with bolded words that break up the text and signify significance. Typography aside, Kitty’s tales are full of playful fun and cheeky abandon, perf...

The meaning of life. The beginning of time. Existential significance for human kind. Pretty hefty topics for pre-schoolers and those over 14 years of age. And yet, here are an eclectic collection of picture books that I feel do these notions proud. Funny, informative and touching; the scope is broad as are the concepts but their combined purpose further serves to broaden our children’s minds in the aspects of time and space and humanity. Enjoy! Ada And The Galaxies by Alan Lightman and Olga Pastuchiv and Susanna Chapman Ada loves the night sky and not just for its twinkling stars. Yet living in the city can make it difficult to appreciate distant galaxies of stars, let alone see them! So, when Ada spends time with her grandparents at their seaside home, new universes of nature, meteorology and space become accessible in the most spectacular way. Visually arresting and factually fascinating. A gem in the night sky. Walker Books Australia (Mit Kids Press imprint), September 2021 ISB...

As a young tween, the closest phenomena I encountered resembling pestilence and epidemics was the odd mouse and locust plague. Both highly irregular, indescribably disturbing occurrences that eventually, mercifully passed. For the generations before me, war assumed similar levels of upheaval and unrest. Imagine though being born into an era of extreme disruption, disease and prolonged uncertainty as your 'new normal' as  recently experienced by many modern-day Gen Alphas. How would you function? What expectations of the future would you possess? Would you want to escape to a better place? This is the unspoken premise of Wendy Orr’s latest middle grade fiction, Honey and The Valley of Horses . ‘Horses’ was my immediate pull card as I’m sure it will be for hundreds of equine enthused fans but the horses in Honey’s tale are much more than decorative incidental whimsy. They inhabit an enchanted valley and hold the key to the family’s survival and subsequent escape. Beset by t...

I'm a bit of a junior fiction fan, a genre I believe is almost as exacting as picture books to pen. They rely on just the right tempo, vocab choice and audience engagement with the added complexity of appealing to newly independent readers. The new Riz Chester series champions all these qualities. Here is my KBR review that appeared earlier this month. Riz is a 10-year-old primary schooler with a penchant for noticing the unnoticeable. She is reticent to share this phenomenon with others even her closest friends for fear of seeming odder than she already feels. Instead, Riz records her observations in her ‘Weird Stuff Log’ with enough detail and smattering of sass to make Miss Marple grin. And grin young readers will for Riz’s abilities are about to be stretched to the limit after she notices some faulty banknotes on a shopping expedition with her mum. Suspicions are raised. Police are engaged and for Riz, doubts set in. Has she done something wrong just because she has identified...

To throw the reader immediately into the action is a writing pre-requisite we authors often hear or try to adhere to. Doing so creates an immediacy that snags attention in the snap of just a few lines. Accomplished children’s writer of historical fiction, Pamela Rushby, achieves all this and more in each and every one of her novels. The Mud Puddlers is no exception. Oozing with atmosphere, animated characters and a fascinating glimpse into London’s not so distant history, this middle grade fiction beckons kids to believe in the possibility of time slipping. Twelve-year-old Nina is relegated to spend a year in London while her parents head to Antarctica on a research mission. Although she and Aunt Bee are close, Nina succumbs to a state of insubordinate gloom. Nothing Aunt Bee does or says can shake Nina out of her blue funk resentment at being left behind. Not even the adventure of living on her aunt’s converted barge on the river Thames is enough to enthuse. Nor the fact that her a...

Family. Always there. Usually supportive. Supremely significant. And, forever changing. A shift in family dynamics may be as inconsequential as a new goldfish or as disturbing as moving house. It might be easily accepted and temporary in nature like a visiting relative or as permanently disruptive as a new addition to the family. Double that turmoil when not one new sibling but two appear and you've got twice the potential for trouble. Imagine the confusion and disorder a young child might feel, how these emotions might galvnize into feelings of displacement, resentment and pure fury when faced with a pair of cute but persistent attention hoggers.  Now pretend you are a young pigeon with the whole world before you, keen to keep on exploring its wonders and your capabilities only to have your dreams curtailed by two very small, very noisy, extremely annoying baby brothers. This is what our favourite feathered friend, Pippa encounters following the arrival of Pepi and Penn, her new...

Stressed Anxious Nervous Drunk Overtired Suffering from Tourette Syndrome? Answer: A Streamer No, not a party streamer, but a video gamer who regularly broadcasts live using the Twitch platform . And while this little black duck may be more inclined to dance around with streamers in her hair rather than pretend to understand the online world of live gamer streaming, she can now claim to have yet another SM platform that she barely comprehends! The good news is, she shares this new found space of interactive entertainment with the clever clogs at Story City and did so in hilarious fashion recently as part of their weekly Adventure Hour eps . Let me explain. Several moon dips and rises ago, I was part of an immersive, interactive storytelling project with Story City. The result was a WA Premier's Book Award shortlisted locative digital narrative cheekily entitled, The Chapel of Unlove . This immersive, choose your own styled, multi ending adventure is a slapstick, riotous romp throug...

A recalcitrant goat, a gung-ho orphaned boy. An exiled self-doubting monk and a battle-scared girl who would be queen. These are just some of the extraordinary characters that people The Beatryce Prophecy . Bubbling with medieval barbarities at a time when misguided kings and ruthless ambition collide with common decency and humanity, this tale embraces an astonishing number of ideas all deftly woven into one rich reading experience thanks to DiCamillo’s sure hand. Beatryce is found blooded and battered in the stalls of Brother Edik’s monastery. She is feverish and unresponsive. The monastery’s arch nemesis, Answelica, an irascible goat who prefers to bite first and consider later, stands guard. She answers to no one but when Brother Edik announces to the goat that he must tend to Beatryce, a reluctant acquiescence occurs on Answelica’s part. And so then begins an incongruous relationship the deepens with time and necessity. Beatryce is nursed back to health but presents a new dan...

Neridah McMullin’s latest middle grade fiction is more of a tender-hearted hug than simple story. It is also the perfect example of latching onto an actual historical event and unlocking the story within by utilising those two liberating words: What if? When a steamship is wrecked off the coast of south-west Victoria in the late 1800s, a young parentless mute girl is the first on scene. Instead of waterlogged sailor survivors, she discovers an altogether different kind of flotsam on the beach of her rugged rural home; an Indian rhinoceros, aka, Rhinoceros unicornis . How delightful that this creature’s scientific name reflects the magical qualities of this human animal encounter and ensuing tale. Rhino was part of the exotic cargo of animals bound for the Royal Melbourne Zoo as part of their questionable ‘acquisitions’ projects. Despite sluggish improvements on the captive animal front, the care of these horrendously displaced animals and birds was still woefully misconceived and ...

WendyOrr is a master of fantastical mythical historical middle grade fiction. You’ll forgive that mouthful of adjectives once you immerse yourself into the genesis of Orr’s second Minoan fantasy novel, Swallow’s Dance . There’s a third too! Cuckoo’s Flight released last year. My first journey into the Aegean Bronze Age with Orr and Aissa, Orr’s character from the first book, was through, Dragonfly Song . I was inspired by Orr’s poetic artistry and sublime use of language: part prose and part verse novel, I was utterly swept away by the beauty and tragedy of Aissa’s plight. The use of verse to relay Aissa’s internal dialogue and inner most dread and desires is genius and executed with such finesse I wished it never ended. Dragonfly Song is an adventure story, a tale of daring and hope and a quest for love and acceptance that will have you weeping and cheering. Gripping, artful, and exciting, this novel has broad appeal for both male and female readers aged twelve and above. Swa...

I read What We All Saw some months ago and what I can’t remember of the storyline is better ingrained in the intense feeling of creepy spinechilling awe that distilled to pure enjoyment. So much so, I want to re-read it and have recommended it as Book Club read. Mike Lucas is no stranger to books and curating stories however this, his first foray into YA, is astonishing. Swift moving narrative is gilt with historic horror, suspense-filled seesawing moments and just enough humour to keep the whole thing real. References for this tale involving four tweens embarking on a nightmarish summer of terror and its resemblances to The Body (Stand By M e) and IT are many but I honestly didn’t make these initial comparisons because Lucas’ writing is so assured and vivid, I was never not in the cul de sac or by Hags Drop with Sam and his mates. In fact, for me, there are more imbued elements of Yann Mantel’s, Life Of Pi in terms of surreal reality. There is no mistaking the premise of this ...

Nerdy swerving, mind-bending mysteries have always been lightbulbs for my moth-like curiosity, so action orientated whodunnits like this new Eddie Woo? series have serious appeal. Breakneck bewilderment and equally rapid problem solving provide plenty of page-turning moments for fans of adventurous lateral thinking. And you don’t even have to be a whizz at numbers to appreciate the analytical aspects of these storylines … thank goodness! Maths genius and revered Australian maths teacher (shortlisted as one of the top ten teachers in the world!), Eddie Woo co-authors each story injecting the snappy storylines with intriguing maths equations, dilemmas and revealing details for fans of facts and factoids. He is also the self-named main character of these junior novels. Accompanying school-aged Eddie are his two valued sidekicks, DT and Rusty – a super sleuthing prerequisite. These three share a love of mathematical conundrums as well as a deep passion for their seaside suburb of Red H...