Super Special Top 5 for Friday Part 1

It's a massive Top 5 for Friday this week, with not just one list, but two. This week we are counting down the five finalists in two of the sections of the New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards 2011.

Introducing Picture Books
Baa Baa Smart Sheep Mark Sommerset & Rowan Sommerset. Publisher Dreamboat. Target age 3+. Little Baa Baa is bored so he decides to play a practical joke, telling Quirky Turkey that the pile of round, brown things on the ground are "Smarty Tablets". Who is smarter, sheep or turkey?
A Dog Like That! Janene Cooper & Evie Kemp. Publisher Duck Creek Press. Target age 2+ . All dogs should be like this! Everybody tells her how dogs should be, but this girl knows better. This is a story about a little girl and her unruly, loveable best friend. Local author.
Hill & Hole Kyle Mewburn & Vasanti Unka. Publisher Penguin Group (NZ). Target age 3+. Hill loves being a hill, but sometimes he wishes he could feel the earth breathing beneath him. Hole loves being a hole, but sometimes wishes he could see the sun rising. Their friend Mole is happy to help and soon Hole is a hill, and Hill is a hole, but what at first seemed wonderful turns out to be not so great after all. Will they find a solution to their problem?
Marmaduke Duck and the Marmalade Jam Juliette MacIver & Sarah Davis. Publisher Scholastic New Zealand. Target age 4+ . Down in the woods, not far from the sea, Marmaduke Duck found a grapefruit tree. What luck! cried the duck. How lucky I am! I'll take some and make some marmalade jam. The smell of Marmaduke Duck's marmalade jam cooking draws a lot of other animals to his river.
The Moon & Farmer McPhee Margaret Mahy & David Elliot. Publisher Random House New Zealand. Target age 4+. A heart-warming story - with lots of fun wordplay - about a grumpy farmer whose animals keep him awake at night singing and dancing by the light of the moon. Eventually he is won over by the moon and the animals and learns how to be happy.

Introducing Junior Fiction
Finnigan & the Pirates Sherryl Jordan. Publisher Scholastic New Zealand. Target age 7+. Wildbloode the Wicked is the fiercest, most ferocious pirate in all the seven seas. All she wants is for her nephew to follow in her footsteps. But Finnigan's not interested in piratical pillaging. All he wants to do... is dance!
The Haystack Jack Lasenby. Publisher HarperCollins Publishers Target age 8+. Maggie's growing up during the Great Depression without her mother in the little Waikato dairying township of Waharoa.
Hollie Chips Anna Gowan. Publisher Scholastic New Zealand Target age 8+. Hollie Chips is an unusual girl. Not just because she has one blue eye and one brown eye... but she just cannot tell a lie, no matter how small. So when she finds out that the unscrupulous Barry Buckscud has been lying to her and her neighbours, she plans to get even.
Shadow of the Boyd Diana Menefy. Publisher HarperCollins Publishers Target age 8+. Historical novel based around the events of the Boyd masscre in which two young boys, a Māori and Pakeha, find their friendship stretched to breaking point.
Tussock Elizabeth Pulford. Publisher Walker Books Australia Target age 9+. When a family is struck by tragedy a little hope is all that is needed. When Kate and Madeline's father goes missing on a routine local flight, family life is thrown into chaos. While the close rural community help the family deal with their grief, Kate lights a lamp every night in the window of the old tin hut on the hill in the hope that it will help her father find his way home. Madeline invests her hope in building a replica of the fabled stone man. But it is the appearance of the troubled Troy that brings comfort to Kate in the most unexpected way. To Kate, Troy seems nearly as lost as her father and the mystery surrounding him and also the stone man leads Kate into dangerous territory.

There is also a People's Choice award. Call into the Library and pick up a voting card or go online to the NZ Post Book Awards website.

Puffin Short Story Competition

We have just received this press release from Puffin and we know there are heaps of keen budding authors out there (especially after our Scribbles to Books New Zealand Book Month Events last week). So check out the website.

The Puffin Short Story Awards are back for 2011! We had some amazing entries last year and are looking forward to receiving another huge blast of creativity from our nation's future writers in the coming months. There are three entry categories spanning school years four to eleven and the winner in each category will receive an Apple iPad as well as 50 books for their school library!
Last year's winning stories and everything you need to get started are available on the webpage, so click the link and start getting creative!
Happy writing,
The Team at Puffin

As you will see from the website there are categories for Junior, Intermediate and Secondary school students, with fantastic prizes for both the author and their schools. Entries are now open and close on Friday 3rd June. The competition is held in partnership with The Storylines Children's Literature Charitable Trust and winners are announced at the Storylines Festival Day in August.

From Scribbles to Books

How do you take an idea and turn it into a book? That was the subject of the New Zealand Book Month events that were taking place around Auckland last week. It is a dream of many of us that those ideas that wake us up in the middle of the night might one day find themselves onto the shelves in a bookshop, but only a few of us take the next leap.

Maria Gill and Heather Arnold visited the Warkworth and Orewa Libraries to show us how their latest collaboration Call of the Kokako (coming out later this year) made the journey. This children's non-fiction book follows a similar style to their earlier collaboration Rangitoto and includes both fact and story to draw the reader in.

A packed hall of Warkworth Primary and Mahurangi Christian School students listened attentively as Maria showed us scribbled pages from her notebook, photos she had taken, people she had talked to and told us about the amount of research that she did. Heather then picked things up by showing us how she took those photos and turned them into the fantastic artwork that is part of the book. Along the way there were helpful tips for the budding authors and artists, a quiz or two and the opportunity for questions to be asked (and answered).

I have heard from colleagues around Auckland that the visits from authors and illustrators to their local libraries as part of New Zealand Book Month have been equally successful. Stay tuned here for any future events so that you can be part of it.

Top 5 for Friday - Celebrating Pasifika

The week of the Pasifika festival culminates this weekend with the main festival happening at Western Springs. But if you can't get there and still want a taste of the Pacific, here are some ideas (from a purely personal point of view today) of the resources available from your local library.

1. The Silent One - Joy Cowley. A child is washed up in a basket in the Cook Islands. He is reluctantly adopted by a tribe as his being a deafmute is considered a bad omen. Isolated Jonasi, as he is named, befriends and gains a mystic communion with a white sea turtle. But the turtle is also regarded as a bad omen by the tribe and when Jonasi steps in to protect it, he is ostracized. This story is 20 years old now but it is timeless and is a great place to start out countdown. It has also been made into a movie which is available from the library.


2. Vaka Moana: voyages of the ancestors : the discovery and settlement of the Pacific / editor, K. R. Howe. Published in association with the Auckland Museum to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at the Auckland Museum, 9 December 2006 - 1 April 2007, and touring internationally until 2011. Chapters cover: the human settlement of the globe; origin and traditions of Pacific peoples; important findings in archaeology, linguistics and genetic studies; traditional canoe building and sailing techniques; pre-instrument navigational systems; ancient Pacific voyaging and trading routes; the arrival of the West and its impact on Pacific peoples; the modern revival by today's Pacific peoples of canoe building and traditional navigation. This award winning Book (Montana New Zealand Book awards, 2007) is a special combination of information and glorious colour plates that inspire the reader and will impress anyone who sees it on your coffee table.


3. Overnight sensations : hotels for the discerning traveler : Asia Pacific / Philippe Kjellgren. The title says it all and if that wasn't enough the picture on the cover makes you just want to lie back and imagine the waft of breeze as you enjoy the warmth with a cocktail in your hand. It's not just the Pacific, but I love leafing through things like this and dreaming so much it had to go on the list.


4. South Pacific [DVD videorecording] one ocean, 20,000 islands, a quarter of the world's water. The wildlife, culture and history of this immense ocean and its myriad islands are revealed in this series. Not the musical. If you are going to watch a DVD about the South Pacific you may as well make it one from the BBC and something that is as current as you can get. This 2010 two disc set ticks the boxes on both counts.


5. The stuck there forever boat / Gillian Torckler ; illustrated by Bruce Potter. Tama's idyllic island life is changing. The surrounding sea is slowly flooding their land, the coral is dying and the fish have disappeared. Tama's family must move to a higher island, but his beloved nanny won't listen. What can Tama do to convince his nanny to leave? For my last choice today I am going picture book and local author. As well as talking about how climatic changes are affecting the islands, this book also has themes of family relationships especially with our grandparents.

Libraries helping Christchurch

After the catastrophic earthquake in Christchurch, more and more evacuees have arrived in Auckland and Rodney seeking refuge and respite. I know several families are already up here in the Warkworth area. If this is you and you are missing your library fix, we can help.

At Auckland Libraries we will:
1. Offer evacuees a full three-month membership. There is no charge for this membership. Just pop along to the local library and ask about it, bringing with you some form of identification if you have it.
2. Return evacuees’ books and items to Christchurch City Libraries for them. Christchurch Libraries have an amnesty on overdue items and advise the following on their customer blog
We have extended due dates of all items issued to 1 May 2011. Sorry if, in the meantime, you have had an automated email about an overdue item. We are waiving all fines incurred from the 22 Feb. We will keep you updated with information here, and from twitter @Christchurchlib. If you are from Christchurch watch this blog for information as at present they are asking that items be kept at home as they do not have the capacity to cope with returns.

Upcoming Christchurch Earthquake Fundraiser
In addition to the immediate help we can give above, the libraries and the NZ Society of Authors will jointly host a fundraiser on 25 March to further help with the recovery efforts in Christchurch. Watch this space for information.