Spaced Out/Camp Croc

Lightning Strikes Series

Walker Books. Australian, Middle Reader delights. Paperback RRP $12.95

Guest reviewer Jo Burnell

It’s often really hard to find spell-binding stories for middle readers, but Walker books nail it with their Lightning Strikes Series. Of their most recent releases, Spaced Out and Camp Croc are my favorites. How can you choose between the two? Don’t. Enjoy them both.

Spaced Out

by Moya Simons

Jessie lives hundreds of years in the future, but he’s no different to any 12 year old I know. Impulsive decisions get him into trouble regularly. However, instead of getting detention or being grounded, he travels clear across the Universe to Centuria, the Shopping Capital of the Universe. All he has to do while there to keep out of trouble is stay inside the city borders. How hard could that be?

Jessie isn’t very good at forward planning or self control so the situations he encounters stretch him to the limit. It all starts when he buys a life-like robot boy, only to watch it walk ‘home’ to the dodgy salesman.

Things get complicated when robot boy wants to find his own kind. Rumour has it they all live in the Farlands. You guessed it. The Farlands are outside the city walls. Will Jessie break the rules again? There’s only one way to find out. Get ready for a fast-paced story with intrigue and unexpected twists. Perfect for anyone who wonders what the world might be like in a few hundred years.

The Reading Stack has reviewed Simons’ Let Me Whisper You My Story, Walk Right In Detective Agency Series and Hello God.


http://www.moyasimons.com/

Camp Croc

by Trudy Trewin

This is it: the camp that the whole class has been waiting for. Set in tropical outback Queensland, the boys can’t resist exploring just a little bit further than the actual camp boundary. A rope dangling over a trickling creek is too tempting to pass up.

However, life is never that simple and one thing leads to another. A close encounter with a giant crocodile is just a blip in the boys’ series of heart thumping exploits.

An extra bonus in Camp Croc is Dak’s Fact boxes with a difference. Dak’s words of wisdom are not quite like any I have come across before. They make even the most serious reader crack a grin. For example, ‘teachers with names like Longbottom should just suck it up. I mean, do they really think kids can let a name like that go un-messed with?’

High action and debacles combine with Dak’s fact boxes to make a surprisingly quick read. I wondered where all the pages disappeared to.

http://trudietrewin.com/

Fall Girl

by Toni Jordan

The Text Publishing Company. Australian, Crime. Paperback RRP $32.95


Reviewer – Barbara Brown

Here is a wonderful book that challenges classification. It has a bit of crime, a hint of mystery, a touch of romance and a smidgen of passion – and it is a very clever story.

Dr Ella Canfield is not yet in her 30’s and seeking funding for a very unorthodox research project – in search of the last Tasmanian Tiger, but not in Tasmania, around Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria.

Daniel Metcalf is the young, attractive, distracted wealthy benefactor who Ella is seeking funding from.

But both are not what they seem. One of them is posing as someone else – or is it both? One is wealthy – or is it both? One is a professional scammer – or is it both?

A brilliant story with some fantastic twists. Once you read Fall Girl you won’t believe anyone ever again!

http://www.tonijordan.com/

Vinnie’s War

by David McRobbie

Allen and Unwin. Australian, Children’s Fiction. Paperback RRP $15.99

Guest Reviewer - Anastasia Gonis

Hitler’s first air raid hits London just as children are being sent away to the country as public evacuees. Vinnie is amongst them. Or

phaned at 11 years old, he was allocated by welfare to a sterile and emotionless home environment. Vinnie secretly worked at the local pub. Befriended by the pub owners and Isaac, a Jewish refugee, he got a taste of the laughter and warmth that had been missing from his life. He learnt about music and it became an integral part of his life. But those temporary joys ended with his evacuation.

Vinnie, siblings Kathleen and Joey, and Dobbs, all travel, arrive and stay close at Netterfold where they are billeted out to families. Vinnie goes to the ageing but aristocratic Miss Armstrong who initially remains unseen. But he is content to be enveloped in the kindness and caring of the housekeeper.
Vinnie is always warring with someone or something in his search for a place to belong. In Netterfold he finds himself in a more confronting war than the one he’d escaped. This war is declared by the town’s children who see the evacuees as usurpers to their established way of life. They bully and ridicule the newcomers who also have to cope with separation from family, home, and everything dear and familiar.

Rationing becomes everyone’s way of life. Others find rorting the system and using children to their advantage, another alternative to surviving the austere measures enforced by the war effort. But Vinnie’s life is transformed when Miss Armstrong turns out to be more than he had dared hope. As the war ends, he realises that he is not who he was, that he has found his place in the world.

The ‘Afterward’ allows the reader into the writer’s life as a child during the war years. These experiences were the starting block for this book; a book about displacement and separation, about war and its casualties which were more than the wounded. It is a book about strength and courage; about compromise and community.