Just So Stories

Random Reviews and Ramblings from Redcliffe

  • The Silken Thread – Gabrielle Wang

    Penguin Australia July 2025 This beautiful new novel from former Laureaute and multi-award winner, Gabrielle Wang, is an absolutely outstanding, and almost mystical, exploration of East meets West. It is not a time-slip but rather a shift in the universe, from Chongming Island in China to Melbourne, Australia, with two very different young people crossing…

  • Into the Bewilderness – Gus Gordon

    Hardie Grant July 2025 ISBN:9781761211287 Price:AU$24.99, NZ$27.99 Publisher:Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing Where to start with this piece of magnificence, I ask myself? I know! I’ll start with this anecdote. A week or so ago, the estimable Gus Gordon was going to be at Quick Brown Fox in Grange and I had determined I would go.…

  • Ava Spark: Hello, I’m here! – Alex Field. Illustrated by Joanna Bartel.

    New Frontier Publishing May 2025 ISBN : 978-1-923145-92-4 PRICE : $16.99 Meeting Ava Spark will be something quite different for most of your readers, I think. While they may already be aware or even familiar with some methods of communication, especially AUSLAN/sign language, which many schools are incorporating into their programs, not so many will be aware…

  • The Hat of Great Importance: Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody – Patrick Ness. Illustrated by Tim Miller.

    Walker Books Australia June 2025 Imprint: Walker Books ISBN13:9781529517965 Australia RRP:$16.99 New Zealand RRP:$18.99 When your copy of The Hat of Great Importance arrives with its own matched hat, it’s a red-letter day indeed! After the first in the series, I was looking forward to the second and another round of monitor angst, humour, diabolical…

  • The Haunting of Hindmarsh Hall – Kate Gordon

    Riveted Press Simon & Schuster April 2025 RRP: AU$ 16.99 / NZ$ 18.99 If you have kidlets who are mad for detectives and mystery, and particularly if they’re the ones who love an Enid Blyton ‘find-outer’ adventure, then you are going to need this one. In a small town of indeterminate location, two boys are…

  • Ebb & Flo series – Laura & Philip Bunting

    Hardie Grant Australia Ebb & Flo: Short Cut June 2025 ISBN:9781761214790 Price:AU$11.99, NZ$13.99 These are the first I’ve seen in this series but I’m sure they won’t be the last. And how good is it to see another set of titles for those emergent, newly independent readers that is FUN as well as providing some…

  • In Plain Sight: Friday Barnes #13 – R. A. Spratt

    Penguin Australia It was quite synchronistic to get #13 Friday Barnes arriving on Friday 13th, I thought! And, needless to say, I promptly gobbled it up over two nights with much snickering and snort laughing [No R. A. Spratt is ever read without the snaughling!]. The Friday romp continues with our intrepid but ‘special’ detective,…

  • The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest – Aubrey Hartman

    Walker Books Australia May 2025 ISBN:9781761601453 RRP: $17.99/New Zealand RRP:$19.99 Now, how to describe this delightfully quirky and sometimes dark quasi-horror with heart? It’s a little bit My Dead Rabbit, maybe a little bit Coraline, and a little bit The Graveyard Book. And then there’s A Girl Called Corpse – and soon you will get…

  • Ella and the Sleepover Safari – Cassy Polimeni. Hykie Breeze.

    UWAP March 2025 ISBN: 9781760803018 RRP: $15.99 How utterly apt that it happens I can be writing this review today on World Frog Day! Lucky it hopped into my mail just in time. So many of you will know the sensational series start of the first Ella book, when we met her family, friends and…

  • Neeka and the Missing Key: Wilder Zoo #1 – Tina Strachan

    Harper Collins Last night (13/03) I had another wonderful evening at Quick Brown Fox bookshop for a Reading Between the Wines event. Tina Strachan was one of the authors, and it was fortuitous that I had just read this first in her series. We all know that so many kiddos are mad for animal stories,…