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Be Prepared: An All-Age Disaster Book List

Be Prepared: An All-Age Disaster Book List

Children and young adults in Aotearoa are particularly attuned to natural disasters. In today's book list, Miriam Hurst delves into disaster literature from here and other shaky, volatile places around our world. Then Snufkin said slowly: “It would be awful if the earth exploded. It’s so beautiful.” -Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland One of the first books I remember reading is Tove Jansson’s Comet in Moominland, an exquisitely terrifying mix of cosiness and catastrophe. Vis

Book List: NZ-focused young reader novels

Book List: NZ-focused young reader novels

In response to a request The Sapling put out on Twitter, teacher and author Sarina Dickson has compiled this wonderful list of New Zealand titles for those young readers who have finished Harry Potter and are reading above their age level at primary school. Advanced readers, assemble! As a child I loved to read. By the age of eight, I was reading anything I could get my hands on and in desperation had moved onto the books my mother had read. I read all about what Katy did at

The planet has a pulse: Maurice Gee, O and me

The planet has a pulse: Maurice Gee, O and me

Maurice Gee's O Trilogy is one of the most enduringly excellent works of Aotearoa literature. Megan Dunn recalls its power. In the South Island, at the back of an old mineshaft is the entrance to the planet O. There are two ways to get there. You can be forced by a coil of venomous yellow smoke like Susan Ferris. Or if you are lucky, you can get there by ‘Shy’, a small silver plant, a dozen blue flowers just visible in its leaves. It only grows on O. The Woodlanders know wher

2017 Christmas Shopping List: Best YA Books

2017 Christmas Shopping List: Best YA Books

Do you want to be sure you're getting top-shelf books for your favourite people this Christmas - or on any gift-giving occasion? We are making it easy for you! Here is our selection of the very best New Zealand books of 2017 for teens. The Severed Land by Maurice Gee Published by Penguin Random House NZ RRP $19.99 The Severed Land refers to a world split through by ‘the wall’. No heraldic capitalisation, just ‘the wall’. An invisible rupture across the landscape separating th

Three fantasy novels for teens and pre-teens

Three fantasy novels for teens and pre-teens

Briar Lawry reviews Maurice Gee's latest, The Severed Land, as well as The Edge of Everything by Jeff Giles and Maybe a Fox by Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee. There are a great many high-calibre children’s authors in the world who manage to do new and exciting things with fantasy – pushing the genre’s limits, reconfiguring our expectations of what the supernatural can be, taking us to places we haven’t yet been when we thought we’d seen everything. Recent months have been esp