Just So Stories

UWA Publishing

RRP: $15.99

This is a brilliant new JF series that all kids will eagerly engage with and enjoy. The whole is set in Cockatoo Hill English Language School and casts a group of eight culturally diverse, enthusiastic and delightful refugee kids as main characters. Despite their differences in experiences, cultural backgrounds, language and beliefs, they bond together and reckon themselves as true ‘super heroes’.

They help each other, have fun together and explore living in Australia with all its many differences to their home countries. Having worked in some very multicultural libraries and with kiddos from many different cultures (especially when I was right in the middle of the embassies in Canberra!), not to mention my tenure at Marrickville Library – one of the most culturally diverse LGAs in the country! – these had great appeal for me.

But more than that they are written so well with the emphasis on the growing friendships and the cooperation that helps the struggling member of the group overcome their problems. Just charming!!

These are just terrific for your newly independent readers and will help them not only on their reading journey, but in their path to becoming more accepting and kind humans. You can look forward to the next instalment in the new year.

Definitely a 5 🌏🌏🌏🌏🌏rating for this one – for kiddos from around Year 1 to Year 3 or 4.

Elif’s Itchy Palm

ISBN: 978-1-76080-314-8

Elif has recently arrived from Türkiye and is the newcomer to the class. She knows a little English but is very nervous about her new school and teacher. Luckily she has a special aide who speaks her language to help her, her class enthusiastically welcomes her and her teacher is sympatico and very warm.

Elif has a special $2 coin that her Dede (grandfather) has given her – this new to them Australian money – and he tells her to spend it thoughtfully. When she discovers her coin is missing at school it’s a disaster! Was that why she had an itchy palm? It seems though, that in each of her new friend’s countries that an itchy palm means different things.

The Cockatoo Crew are ready and willing to help her find her missing coin and go into action. At the same time, the class is preparing for Open Day and keen to share their own cultures. It is certainly quite a roller coaster start to her new school but Elif soon finds she is in great company with the Cockatoo Crew as her team.

Sambu Won’t Grow

ISBN: 978-1-76080-315-5

Sambu’s family is from Kenya. While his parents are busy at work, his older sisters are in charge and although he is almost 10, they always make him feel like mtoto – a baby. He knows he’s not very tall and really wants to grow like a proper Massai warrior – as tall as his big cousins, and when someone at school steps over him in a tangle, he is convinced that he’s been cursed to stay small. That’s what it means in Kenya!

It doesn’t help much that he’s also been so scared at night with the dreadful noises he hears outside his bedroom window. What kind of monsters lurk in Australian backyards? Sambu tells the Cockatoo Crew about his fear that his stature will never change and, of course, there are many variations on both the ‘curse’ and the ‘cure’.

Even though his Baba says that curses aren’t real, Sambu is playing it safe but a clever plan from the Crew helps to reverse the curse and all is set for Sambu’s big birthday party. And look what the Crew has got for him! Not only something he really, really wanted but something that leads to him discovering that those night time noises are not vampires or werewolves – they are just possums!!