Book Week: Younger Readers

Aster attends a school for gifted kids, but she doesn't think she's special at all. If she was, her mother wouldn't have left. And if she isn't careful, everyone else will leave her too.

Each day Aster must do a good, right thing - a challenge she sets herself, to make someone else's life better. Nobody can know about her 'things', because then they won't count. And if she doesn't do them, she knows everything will go wrong. Then she meets Xavier. He wears princess pajamas and has his own kind of special missions to make life better. When they do these missions together, Aster feels free...but if she stops doing her good, right things will everything fall apart?

Meet 11-year-old Bindi. She’s not really into maths but LOVES art class and playing hockey. Her absolute FAVOURITE thing is adventuring outside with friends or her horse, Nell.

A new year starts like normal—school, family, hockey, dancing. But this year hasn’t gone to plan! There’s a big art assignment, a drought, a broken wrist AND the biggest bushfires her town has ever seen!

Bindi is a verse novel for mid-upper primary students. Written ‘for those who plant trees’, Bindi explores climate, bushfires, and healing. Written from the point of view of 11-year-old, Bindi and her friends on Gundungurra Country.

When Esther returns to boarding school for another year, she has a couple of very interesting new classmates. There’s an odd teacher who is possibly an ogre, and two of her best friends are missing. Esther hears talk of evil shadow mages and witches lurking in the nearby mountains. Inexplicable things keep happening in the ocean, too. This is all becoming quite confusing, and very stressful, for Esther. It might be up to her to protect the whole school! Or even the whole world!

Worse Things follows the lives of three main characters: Blake, an Aussie Rules football player who suffers a devastating injury; Jolene, a hockey player who hates the game and and is grieving over the recent death of her father; and Amed, a soccer-loving, non-English speaking orphan who feels like an outsider since arriving in Australia after being raised in a refugee camp.

Sometimes it's good to be wild.

Sometimes you have to be wild.

When the Russian Army marches into East Prussia at the end of the war, the Wolf family must flee. Liesl, Otto and their baby sister Mia find themselves lost and alone, in a blizzard, in the middle of a war zone. Liesl has promised Mama that she will keep her brother and sister safe.

But sometimes, to survive, you have to do bad things. Dangerous things. Wild things.

Sometimes to survive, you must become a wolf.

Chance is a black-and-white thinker until she realises that sometimes there are shades of grey.

Chance is in Year 7 and thinks she has it all - a loving mother, dog Tiges, best friend and almost-sister next door. But when a reality TV team makes over her house, she discovers newspaper cuttings from the past that cause her to question the world as she knows it and everyone in it. Then she finds herself caught between two realities, identities and worlds. Face-to-face with the truth, Chance has a very difficult decision to make, which almost splits her in two. This powerful story explores what is true and what is fake in today’s world. And while Chance is all about the truth, she ponders whether "Maybe being truthful was really just a big lie."