Junior and middle-grade fiction offerings
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Loading... - Emillie Mertens
- 28 Feb 2023
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In junior fiction on offer at Bologna this year, Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing has Monsties: The Lost Bunny (Zanni Louise & Kyla May) featuring Orla, Pearl, Mig, Boo and Oops—five best friend monsters who live in Scaryland, surrounded by scary monsters, but who are hopeless at being scary. They much prefer candy and cupcakes to spiders and centipedes. From UQP in junior fiction comes Leo & Ralph (Peter Carnavas), in which Leo finds that saying goodbye to an imaginary friend is harder than dreaming one into the world. How will Leo make a new start with an imaginary friend who refuses to give up on him? And from the creators of the Real Pigeons comes the ‘joyous early graphic novel series about four twigs and their adventures’, Hello Twigs (Andrew McDonald & Ben Wood, Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing), which celebrates ‘friendship and emotional expression, and explores wanting independence and needing the safety of home’.
In middle-grade, look out for the two new fantasy series: The 113th Assistant Librarian by Stuart Wilson (Melanie Ostell Literary/Penguin Random House Australia) is the first in a new series from the author of Prometheus High (Bold Type Publishing), and The Quest for the Galleon of Time (MidnightSun Publishing) is a debut from Tanya Hunter (Bold Type Publishing).
In standalone middle-grade, Anna Feinberg, author of Tashi, has a ‘new heart-warming standalone for teens’ called Picasso and the Greatest Show on Earth (A&U), in which a blossoming friendship between two new school students, who each have a secret loneliness, helps one another surface through grief, find their voice and reconnect with happiness. Also from A&U is Two Sparrowhawks in a Lonely Sky, the latest by Rebecca Lim, publishing locally this year (Annabel Barker Agency). Read More..
