 Hi everyone, my name is Steph. This is Little Bookish Teacher and welcome or welcome back to my channel. Today I am here to share with you the six books that have been shortlisted for the Readings Kids Prize for 2023. So there are six books on the shortlist. I think this is the 10th year of the Readings Kids Prize and what it celebrates is, hang on, I'll read the wording, the Readings Children's Prize is presented to the best contribution to Australian children's literature from an emerging author. So every year for the last 10 years they have selected six middle grade titles for their shortlist and then they always choose a winner and the winner should be announced sometime this month. It has been my goal to read these six books before then and I think I have done it. I'm going to laugh so hard if this video grows out and the winner has gone out but at this stage the winner has not been announced as I'm filming this on the 8th of October. So this is a combination of contemporary mystery, fantasy, historical middle grade fiction and I'm going to talk to you about all of the books and then at the end I'm going to share my favorites with you and why they're my favorites. Again, I'm not the intended audience for middle grade books. Middle grade books are written for children who are aged between eight and 12 years of age. Sometimes you can go a little bit either side of those age categories. They're written for a very specific audience that is not me. I'm coming at them from the perspective of an adult who really enjoys kids fiction, who really enjoys children's middle fiction but I have specific genres that I tend to read more in so that will always impact my thoughts on books and also I'm always wearing my teacher hat and thinking about okay do I know kids in this age category who would really love this type of story as well. So I come at this from multiple perspectives. These reviews are always just to share some thoughts that I had while reading them that might impact or help out parents who are selecting books or teachers who are selecting books for kids that read within this age category. We might go in the order that I read them. So the first one that I read was Evian Rhino by Nara Dermak-Mullen. This one is illustrated by Astrid Hicks and I actually read this one. You'll remember when I was talking about the CBCA Younger Readers category books. So this was shortlisted both for the CBCA as well as for readings. This is a historical story set in Victoria. We have a young girl who lives on a remote estate and she ends up finding a rhino that has been shipwrecked on the coastline and this rhino and a host of other animals were on their way to the Melbourne Zoo. So this was in 1891 and Evie has never seen a rhino. She has no idea what it is and she ends up taking it back to her family's property, popping it into a safe place and giving it food and shelter and then eventually admits to her grandfather that she has this monster or this creature on their grounds and he used to be part of the Zoological Society and he recognises the rhino straight away. This one does have discussions in it around how we care for animals, how we treat them. Evie and her grandfather are very concerned about what the Zoological Society will do to this animal, putting it into a very small enclosure that's full of concrete that doesn't have any natural elements to it. So you can have that environmental conversation with students as well. It's beautifully written. I loved that it was historical and it is based on a true story of animals on a cargo ship being stranded on their way to Melbourne Zoo in the past. So that is a really cool element as well. And for those who like these inclusions in book, there is also a recipe in here for a apple pie that is constantly referenced through the story. Then I read Seaglass by Rebecca Fraser. This is a much shorter middle grade fiction book and this one is about a young girl and her mother who end up moving in with her father's father, her grandfather who she hasn't really had much contact with over the summer because her mother has struggled to find a job and the place where she gets a job happens to be closer to where the grandfather lives. Kalen's father passed away when she was quite young. So she never really got a chance to know her grandfather and over the summer they get to know each other as they comb the beach behind his property for Seaglass. And she learns about how Seaglass forms and develops this relationship with her grandfather which is at war with sort of the life that she knows from when she was living in the city. And so despite the fact that Kalen thinks this is going to be the worst summer ever because she's not with her friend, she's in a place she doesn't know with a strange person, she doesn't know, she does begin to connect and then of course in the way of kids everywhere when things aren't quite going the way she expects, she says things she doesn't mean and also comes to realize that her grandfather is her grandfather. He's not young and he does have a heart attack in this story so be aware of that if you are talking about this or reading this with students because they might have experienced loved ones going through that. So obviously for Kalen this is quite a confronting thing to know that her grandfather is quite unwell and the timing of it in the story as well impacts her. But it is about connection, it is about cross-generational connection as well which is so important. This is a really beautiful little book and I loved all of the elements that it wove together. It was quite powerful for the for how short it was. People who can write a short narrative in I think less than a hundred pages and still pack that emotional punch. It's incredible because this is really powerful. Then I read the book Sellers Apprentice by Amelia Mellor. This is actually I think the second book in the series. I think it follows the grandest bookshop in the world. I actually listened to this on audio and it was a really interesting story. This is a more historical fantasy set in Melbourne and we have Billy Pike who is 12 years old, the oldest of his siblings, and he's constantly trying to sort things out for his very chaotic family and he ends up getting a job working for a bookseller at Paddy's Market and he's so excited to work there but he's then also approached by this very strange kind of sinister guy who is a magician and he wants to trade Billy for something and Billy realizes straight away that this isn't quite right. Billy himself has some magic and he doesn't feel right around the Obscura Smith. What he comes to realize is the Obscura Smith has done deals with people all over Paddy's Market and it impacts the way that they interact and the Obscura Smith doesn't like that Billy once says no to him but also has magic and their magic clashes and this sort of sets them on a course to a confrontation that impacts on many, many people. This is very action packed. It does have a bit of a race against time countdown sort of feel to it. There's a lot of magic and it was a really interesting read. I'm not much of a historical middle grade reader but it was interesting and the audiobook was great so if you're interested in listening to that I can highly recommend it. I think I got it off Libby from my local library so well worth checking that out if you're interested. Then I read No Words by Marianne Master. This is a contemporary fiction story. It is about Hiro who is a young girl, I think they're in Year 7 maybe? I think Hiro is in Year 7 or Year 8 and she is grappling with the fact that she feels like she never really lives up to her name. She finds it really hard to stand up to people even when she knows that they're doing something wrong and she and her best friend Jazz have befriended Arya who is a boy at school who is 12 years old who doesn't speak and he is constantly bullied by another student at the school and Hiro wishes that she could just step up and stop it but she like she doesn't know how and then one day she finds out that Arya has won a poetry contest and that he is an incredible poet and she never knew this about him. Obviously he doesn't speak at school but what we find out is that he has selective mutism, he doesn't speak at school but he does speak at home. We also find out that he is a refugee from Iran, he and his family fled Iran to get away from the conflict there and that while that was happening they lost, he lost his mother. So that is, that's quite a profound part of the story so do be aware of that because that may be triggering for some students but Arya has this incredible ability to use language and poetry to convey what he's feeling. Hiro and Jazz eventually convince him to take part in a slam poetry competition which would be really far outside his comfort zone so they work with him and as he begins to warm up with them and trust them he begins to talk to them and they begin to explore this new creative outlet. This book is told in two perspectives so we get Hiro's perspective and we also get Arya's perspective and it deals with some heavy topics but it was just a really incredible powerful book. I really enjoyed this one. Again it's not overly long, you can tell I've got my tabs because there were just so many phrases and passages in here that I just loved reading and I really like Mary and Master's writing style. I also read The Eerie Excavation by Ash Harrier. This is the second book in the Alice England mystery series. I did read the first one so that I could read this one. It felt like I needed to read that one before I read this book just to get the setup for the characters. We have Alice England and her friends Violet and Cal and they are hoping to go on a K-pop summer camp but when they can't get into that Alice ends up signing them up for an excavation or archaeological dig camp where the excavation team are hosting young teens to come and help them over the summer. They end up staying at this very old mansion that is reported to be haunted and as they're helping out on the dig site they begin to uncover a mystery that may or may not have occurred on the property in the past. Alice is a character who loves a good mystery. She can't help but get involved. She lives with her father who runs the town's funeral home and so Alice helps out there so she's seen as a little bit quirky by most people around her because she's got no problem being around dead bodies. We have Violet who has a severe sunlight allergy so she can't be outside indirect ultraviolet rays and we have Cal who is a character that they met through the course of the first book. That seems like a strange addition to their little trio but fits in perfectly. This is the perfect book for those kids who love a mystery. It is a little bit quirky, a little bit fun. There is plenty of things going on and plenty of mysteries to solve throughout the entire book. And then there is The Winterish Girl by Melanie LeBroy. This is the first book in the Talismans of Fate series. It is quite a chunky fantasy story so if you have a child or a student who loves middle grade fantasy books this is probably one that's going to interest them. It is set in the fantasy world of Aurelia. We have Pen who is our main protagonist. She is an outcast from this society. She is actually Winterish which is a different group of people that have been locked out of Aurelia and she was taken from her family at only three days old because she was born on the same day as the future ruler of Aurelia and he's said to be Seraphine's not sister so it's kind of this close tie and part of Aurelian lore is that the rulers need to have their not sibling with them and so Pen has been treated quite horribly by the court. Seraphine is an orphan and hasn't yet taken the throne so there is a regent in place and the regent is doing some fairly dodgy things as you would expect but as they approach a really special day for kids in Aurelia which is the talisman day where they get to choose a talisman that has special properties or magic that allows them to do incredible things. Things start to go wrong. Dark evil malevolent force suddenly rises again and everyone blames Pen for it because she's the outcast. She's the person she's from one of their sort of you know rival towns and then it is up to Pen and her friend Juniper. They meet Arthur along the way and Seraphine and Seraphine gets involved as well. They need to uncover who exactly is behind it and how they can use their talismans to try and beat this evil force that is rising. The first half of this book is quite heavy world building. Obviously being the first book in a series has been quite a different world with a very different magic system. It needs that. I found that I was probably most interested in the last third of the book in the third act once we start getting some of the reveals and once we start diving a bit more into the history of why this evil force is rising as opposed to just the the history of the magical system but it was a really intriguing read and a really interesting fantasy world. I was quite intrigued by all the characters and the relationships that they have and also the complicated nature of Pen and Seraphine's relationship being not siblings because they just they don't get along. They know that there is a difference in a class difference between them that has been encouraged by the Regent which has caused a lot of issues but yeah it was a really interesting read and I'm glad that I read it. So those are the six books of those my top three. I actually I can actually rank these into the top three. So what I will say is that the booksellers apprentice, the eerie excavation, and the winterish girl all full sort of outside of my preferred genre in children's middle grade fiction get great books but for me personally they just didn't fit within my particular reading tastes. So my top three were these and in this order. So my third favourite was Evie and Rhino. I found this to be a really intriguing concept even though historical fiction is not necessarily my forte I thought this one was really interestingly done and I liked that it explored a part of Australian history that I'd never even considered. It was not even floating around in my head about how the Melbourne Zoo was first set up. I know I probably should have thought of that before now but I just haven't and I thought this was a really interesting take on real historical events being made into a story and also the language and the way that Naredo McMullen wrote it was just beautiful. Sea Glass was at one point my favourite book of the shortlist so far. As I said I just I enjoy any book that can be this short and have pack a really powerful emotional punch. I also like that this one is contemporary, it's easily relatable, the writing and it was great and I also like that it explores a hobby that I haven't seen featured in a book collecting Sea Glass. I thought that was great but hands down my absolute favourite from this shortlist was No Words by Merriam Master and look in part part of that is my personal connection coming through. My brother-in-law is originally from Iran and he and his family left Iran because of the conflict over there when he was quite young as well and so there is that sort of connection to the story that I bring to it. I'm always interested in learning a little bit more about the history of Iran and the conflicts that are going on over there but also the fact that this is set in a school. We have these characters who are dealing with real-life friendship issues and they're using poetry to express themselves. If I choose to write anything I tend to write poetry so I have that connection in terms of I find it really interesting when it's included in books as a way of characters being able to communicate or process their feelings and their emotions so to me this probably had the strongest connection which is probably why I enjoyed it the most but also Merriam Master's writing as I said when I was talking in my review is just really really wonderful. Some of her terms of phrase and the way that she writes was just lovely. So those are my top three and I'm really interested in seeing which of these six end up coming out with the readings prize this year so hopefully that will be soon and I will probably share that over on my Instagram page. Thank you very much for watching. If you got through this entire video well done. In the comments I'd love to know if you've read any of these books or if you're planning on picking them up or if you have any recommendations for books that sound similar to these books feel free to let me know down below. If you want to let me know that you're here but you don't want to leave a comment feel free to leave a trophy emoji down below. Otherwise I hope that we're in the world you're staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye everyone.