Ruth Starke

Ruth Starke reviews 'Wolf’s Sunday Dinner' by Tania Cox, 'Too Many Pears!' by Jackie French, 'Fiona the Pig' by Leigh Hobbs, 'Trumpet’s Kittens' by Carolyn Polizzotto and Sarah Spinks, and 'Baby Boomsticks' by Margaret Wild

March 2004, no. 259 • 08 November 2022

Where would the picture book industry be without animals? Talking or non-speaking, cute or obnoxious, mischievously alive or poignantly dying, animal characters can be utilised to teach life lessons, and to make complex issues accessible and less confronting for young children. Add humour, passion and strong original writing, and you have a winner. Leigh Hobbs combines all three in Fiona the Pig, ... (read more)

Ruth Starke reviews 'Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two children tell' by Virginia Lowe

October 2007, no. 295 • 01 October 2007

Virginia Lowe has carved an academic career in the area of ‘childist criticism’ based on the responses of very young children (particularly her own) to books. Shortly after their daughter, Rebecca, was born in 1971, the Lowes began to read to her. Virginia recorded the process in a daily journal. Three years later, when their son, Ralph, was born, she recorded his reactions as well, and contin ... (read more)

Ruth Starke reviews 'Stillwater Creek' by Alison Booth

March 2010, no. 319 • 01 March 2010

The sticker on the cover assured me that if I had enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society I would ‘love’ Stillwater Creek. Had I been browsing the bookshop shelves, this would have been fair warning not to part with my money. Myriad readers obviously did love Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s international bestseller. Alexander McCall Smith certainly did: he chaired the ... (read more)

Ruth Starke reviews 'Family Business' by Sophie Masson and 'The Rented House' by Phil Cummings

April 2000, no. 219 • 01 April 2000

When she sat down in that Edinburgh café almost three years ago to write Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling apparently determined that it would take a further six books to tell the complete story of her pubescent wizard. Millions of entranced and thoroughly hooked readers around the world are now breathlessly awaiting volume four. The books are immensely readable with a stro ... (read more)

Ruth Starke reviews 'Rain May and Captain Daniel' by Catherine Bateson and 'Too Flash' by Melissa Lucashenko

April 2003, no. 250 • 01 April 2003

In the list of life’s most stressful events, family breakups and moving home are way up there in the top ten, and one often follows the other, compounding the trauma. This is the situation for eleven-year-old Rain in Catherine Bateson’s Rain May and Captain Daniel, when her mother, Maggie, sells their inner-city house in the aftermath of divorce. They head for the country to turn Grandma’s d ... (read more)

Ruth Starke reviews 'The Midnight Zoo' by Sonya Hartnett and 'The Red Wind' by Isobelle Carmody

September 2010, no. 324 • 01 September 2010

I had fun imagining Sonya Hartnett and Isobelle Carmody indulging in a little pre-publication chit-chat: IC: What are you working on now, Sonya?SH: A children’s story about two orphaned brothers battling for survival in a world turned upside down; talking animals; themes of freedom and loss. What about you?IC: A children’s story about two orphaned brothers struggling for survival in a world s ... (read more)

Ruth Starke reviews four recent Young Adult novels

June–July 2016, no. 382 • 25 May 2016

Summer Skin (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 347 pp, 978192526-6924) by Kirsty Eagar, a raunchy romance for older readers, is set in the halls of residence of a Queensland university during O-Week. Jess Gordon – nickname Flash – has devised a little game for the freshers, a payback for what her friend Farren endured the previous year when she was secretly filmed and Skyped having sex with a boy ... (read more)

Ruth Starke reviews 'Pieces of Sky' by Trinity Doyle, 'The Pause' by John Larkin, 'Frankie and Joely' by Nova Weetman, and 'Talk Under Water' by Kathryn Lomer

November 2015, no. 376 • 29 October 2015

In Trinity Doyle's Pieces of Sky (Allen & Unwin, $16.99 pb, 290 pp, 9781760112486), it has been eight weeks since Lucy's older brother Cam drowned while surfing. Images of his death fill her head and prevent Lucy, a backstroke champion, from returning to the pool. She suffers a panic attack and flees from a training session, unable or unwilling to explain why: 'I know I'm not going to drown ... (read more)

Reading Australia: ‘The Gathering’ by Isobelle Carmody

Reading Australia • 03 June 2015

My postgraduate student frowned. ‘The Gathering? Isn’t that the one where someone sets a dog on fire?’ Spoiler alert: indeed it is. It is the book’s most memorable scene; it is certainly the most horrific. My postgrad had read Isobelle Carmody’s 1993 novel in high school and that was the first memory of it which surfaced. The scene shocked readers and alienated many: ‘I re-read the nov ... (read more)

Ruth Starke reviews 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants' by Mark Rafidi

April 2015, no. 370 • 27 March 2015

‘When I think about picture books,’ writes Mark Rafidi in the first line of his foreword, ‘the words of the young girl in David Legge’s Bamboozled strikes [sic] me immediately.’ What strikes me immediately is that Standing on the Shoulders of Giants is a book that hasn’t been properly edited. By the time I reached the final page I wondered if the book had been edited at all. Rafidi ha ... (read more)