The Prize for Young Adult Fiction: Shortlist 2005

Judges
Clare Renner (Convenor), Pam Macintyre and Lili Wilkinson

While the shortlist reflects the quality of Australia’s new and established writers, for young adults the judges felt that some of the strongest entries in this year’s competition were books more suited to a younger readership. They would like particularly to commend Rosanne Hawke’s Soraya the Storyteller and Judith Clarke’s Kalpana’s Dream.

Shortlist

Secret Scribbled Notebooks
Joanne Horniman
Allen & Unwin
Abandoned as small children, Kate and her older sister Sophie have been raised by Lil, the woman who runs the bed and breakfast where their father left them. Secret Scribbled Notebooks spans Kate’s final months at school – a kind of limbo where endings and beginnings collide.

Kate buys three notebooks and uses them to record her thoughts at the present time, her memories and the fictional account of a young woman in the city. Later, she links the notebooks with the ‘wild typewritten pages’, written from a retrospective point of view. The separate narratives combine to tell of Kate’s relationship with Lil and Sophie and her delight in being an aunt to Hetty, Sophie’s newly born baby. They tell also of her falling in love, her awakening confidence and her gradual understanding of what constitutes family.

Much of Horniman’s skill as a writer lies in the way she builds up characters in deceptively simple layers. The interwoven narratives create a self-portrait that is gradually revealed through Kate’s responses to people, objects and events. Kate also uses her writing to explore the nature of love and responsibility, finally allowing herself to recognise that leaving is not always about abandonment and that although people cannot escape their past they can choose whether or not to be imprisoned by it.

Throughout the novel, Kate makes frequent reference to other writers and their lives as she seeks to make sense of her own. Amongst other things, Secret Scribbled Notebooks is a celebration of literature and of the ‘ultimate intimacy’ between the book and the reader.
 
The Running Man
Michael Gerard Bauer
Omnibus/Scholastic
Joseph is a quiet, artistic boy. By day, he is fascinated by old Tom Leyton, the reclusive Vietnam veteran who lives over the road. By night, he is haunted by dreams of the Running Man, a nightmarish figure based on a local eccentric who frightened him as a child. When he is asked to draw Tom Leyton for his school art project, Joseph slowly starts to discover that there is more to the world than gossip and rumours, and that even the Running Man is deserving of  ompassion and understanding. Bauer sensitively weaves together the stories of the three men in Joseph’s life: his absent father, the  isturbed Tom Leyton and the mysterious and terrifying Running Man. Poetry is skilfully drawn into the narrative, particularly Douglas  tewart’s ‘The Silkworms’. A poignant and tender  exploration of  udgment, tragedy and miracles.

So Yesterday
Scott Westerfeld
Penguin
It is twenty-first century New York, and seventeen-year-old Hunter is a ‘cool taster’ for a multinational sports clothing firm, an athletic shoe company named after a certain Greek god.

Hunter narrates in an acerbic, first person voice, the puzzling and threatening events that follow the apparently sinister disappearance of his employer, Mandy, and the discovery of the athletic ‘shoe-of-shoes’. With Logo Exile friend, Jen, Hunter is drawn into the world of the anti-client, the Jammers, when together they search for Mandy. To help them on their mission, the two use the know how of various innovators, trendsetters, early adopters, geeks, consumers or laggards/classicists (who wear their mullets proudly) and a member of the future fantastic tribe.

Little is as it appears, and Hunter’s and Jen’s sleuthing tactics, inspired by television cop shows, provide hilarious moments in this fast-paced action mystery in which expertise in cutting edge technology is essential. A clever, witty narrative wryly examines adolescent obsessions with being cool, or choosing not to be, without talking down. To be cool or not: the book asks whether it is a conscious choice, or manipulation by organisations such as ‘a certain computer company whose name is a fruit often used in making pies’, or ‘a certain megacorporation known for its relentless grip on all media, including scores of newspapers and a certain faux-news channel’. 

If you don’t use ‘The Nod’, or recognise ‘coolsters’, you may be too ‘so yesterday’ to appreciate Westerfeld’s inspired young adult vision that recalls Naomi Klein and William Gibson. This original novel confirms adolescents as the savvy people they are.