Just So Stories

Random Reviews and Ramblings from Redcliffe

  • How Stella Learned to Talk – Christina Hunger

    Allen & Unwin May 2021 ISBN: 9781760878764 RRP: $32.99 Of course, we have known for years that animals can understand us and some have even been able to communicate with us in simple ways – think Koko and signing. It would be truly presumptuous for humans to imagine that we are the only species capable…

  • Tell Me Why for Young Adults – Archie Roach

    Simon & Schuster Australia (March 3, 2021) ISBN13: 9781760858865 I can say unreservedly that this is one of the most powerful memoirs I have read in recent years and for young adults this is a book worth promoting heavily. Archie’s life story is at times harrowing and confronting but also uplifting and inspirational. Taken away…

  • I am Sasha – Anita Selzer

    Penguin Random House April 2018 9790143785743 RRP $17.99 Some triumphant recounts of survival against all odds have come out of the horror of the Holocaust. I am always humbled in admiration for those who endured such deprivation, suffering, cruelty and pain with courage and dignity and who rose from the basest of treatment to resume…

  • The Boy with Two Lives – Abbas Kazerooni

    ISBN:9781743314838 Publisher:Allen & Unwin Imprint:A & U Children Pub Date:September 2015 RRP: $15.99   Many of you will resource units of work/inquiry examining the lives of inspirational people through biographies and memoirs. This book and the previous memoir are perfect, timely and contemporary for readers from Middle Primary upwards. This second instalment in Kazerooni’s powerful…

  • Not a book – a movie

    Many of you will have read articles particularly fairly recently about the real life bear who inspired A. A. Milne’s classic stories about Winnie-the-Pooh. A recently published picture book sparked some of these. I was so delighted to pick up the DVD of the movie ‘A Bear Named Winnie’ at the local  Km*** last Friday…

  • Ugly – Robert Hoge

      ISBN: 9780733634338 Publication date: 11 Aug 2015 Page count: 160 Imprint: Hachette Australia RRP $16.99 It has taken me a while to get to review this Younger Readers’ version of Robert Hoge’s successful memoir. My Year 8 students have been working on an English task which was to research and write a feature article about an inspirational hero…