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Seventeen-year-old girls and their circumstances are portrayed very differently in Vikki Wakefield’s Inbetween Days (Text Publishing) and Holly Goldberg Sloan’s I’ll Be There (Scholastic). Could the authors’ nationalities – Australian and American – and writing style be part of the reason? Vikki Wakefield uses an Australian regional town setting (provokingly named ‘Mobius’) to forecast the […]

1.  Looking for something to read?  Go no further than this lovely little Literature Map highlighted by Flavorwire.  Just type in your favourite author and watch a series of names juggle to and fro in order to arrange a recommended reading list of authors.  Even better, young adult adults are in the mix including Sarah Lessen, Jennifer Echols, JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett and more.

Literature Map
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2.  Need proof that time allows you to be more creative?  Check out this two minute video out on youtube.
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3.  Do you know all the punctuation marks?  Buzzwire presents 13 that you might not know existed.  I am particular fond of the The Asterism  which they claim “…has an awesome name, a cool look, and a really lame usage.”  Agreed.

13 Punctuation Marks You Never Know Existed
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4.  The Amperstand Project is a brand new initiative at Hardie Grant Egmont to flush out those new, undiscovered Australian writing talents.  Targeted at writers of contemporary Australian young adult fiction they are hoping to discover the next Melina Marchetta.

HGE have a whole list of suggestions of what they are on the look for, which you can find here.  Submissions close on the 27th of February, 2012.
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5.  Readings has released their top young adult titles picks for 2011.  We were extremely excited to see Vikki Wakefield, Kelly Gardiner and Jane Higgins (among many other fabulous books) on the list as we’ve bee graced by their presence in our programming in 2011.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from Adele Walsh, the new head honcho at the State Library's Centre for Youth Literature. For a number of reasons she explained to me, she was offering to bring the Teenage Booktalkers to us. Would we be interested?

Would we?!? I've taken my book club to the CYL for one Teen Booktalkers last year and to the youth day at Reading Matters this year, but this way ALL our kids could have the treat and no excursion forms to fill in or collect and no transport issues, just set up the library and welcome the guests. When I went to the evening session the night before, Paula Kelly, the head librarian, told me they were thinking of regionalising the youth days, taking the show to schools and letting other schools in the area come over instead of into town and this was going to be an experiment to see how it would work.

I chased up copies of the books The Comet Box, All I Ever Wanted and Five Parts Dead by the visiting authors and read them in a weekend - yes, all three of them! I got them processed and promoted, although by last Wednesday only one student was reading any of them (and loving it - the book was Five Parts Dead, the student Dylan). It didn't matter - after the talk, every last copy of all the books was checked out!

Wednesday morning, the first visitor, Adrian Stirling, arrived about 10.15 am as I was finishing my setup. We had a lot of students missing - an ESL excursion, that included half my tiny literacy class, the netball team, the Bridge-Building science team that included two of my book club members who would have loved to be there. So I'd invited a bunch of students from our Ardeer campus. I would also have invited students from another local school, but the teacher-librarian doesn't work on Wednesday and in the end, it was just as well, because we had a big audience for each of the two sessions and only just enough chairs for them all.

I got Adrian to use the remote control to bring the screen down - the computer was set up ready for the presentations, as it had been used the night before for a year 10 info evening and the principal kindly left it set up for me. Meanwhile I did the finishing touches elsewhere. I knew there would be an autograph session and thought it might work well to print out some book covers. Some of my book clubbers not on an excursion turned up offering to help. There wasn't much to do, it was all set up, but I introduced them and asked Dylan to set out the boo