CTV.ca | Atwood releases third tongue-twisting kids book
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda is the third book in an alliterative series which began with Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes and followed up by Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut."I wrote that on the train to Windsor, which lasts about three hours," she said....
In addition to Kenneth Oppel winning a Governor General award for his novel Airborn (see entry for 16 November), Stephane Jorisch has been awarded his third Governor General illustration award (he has won previously in 1993 and 1999) for Jabberwocky (Kids Can Press):
Andrea Deakin writes:
Stephane Jorisch's rendering of Jabberwocky is not for young children, there are other editions more suitable for them. This is a version for secondary students or students at college or university, not little ones. That stated, it is a challenging and gripping exercise for the imagination. Limbless ex-soldiers stand before rows of television sets on which an officer is backed by a text,"Beware the Jabberwock". An old soldier sends his son, a dress designer, off to tackle this enemy. When his son returns victorious "Callooh! Callay!" is cried out from a hospital bed where the old man lies dying; and the whole ends with the old soldier's funeral. Alice found the poem hard to understand, she would certainly have had trouble with this version. This is an interpretation that contains clues only truly accessible to those who have lived a little and are cognizant of repressive invasive societies and war. The illustrations explore war, the freedom to do as you wish, the right to be creative in a militarized world. The overwhelming presence of television comments on the influence of the media and the power of this influence in the wrong hands. Ink drawings, splashes of sombre shades of colour challenge the reader to see and then to see again. Powerful, dramatic, an outstanding interpretation, Jorisch's visual narrative is for an older, more sophisticated audience.
Kenneth Oppel confessed to a seminal movie moment Monday after accepting the 2004 Governor General's children's literature prize for his latest novel, Airborn. "Someone asked me what the most memorable event in my childhood was - it was at a book conference, too - and I scandalously said it was seeing Star Wars for the first time," said the 37-year old Toronto author."Some people got quite mortified that I would even dare to say this at a book festival. But it was true."
Recomended - Report of acceptance speech given by Canadian author, Kenneth Oppel, on receiving the 2004 Governor General's children's literature prize for his latest novel, Airborn.
Andrea Deakin writes of Airborn:
In the alternative world of Kenneth Oppel's Airborn luxury airships fly over the Pacificus, operating only in charted skies. Matt Cruse, fifteen-years-old, is a cabin boy on the Aurora. He is following in his dead father's footsteps, training to be a sailmaker and, if fortune smiles, a captain. When we first meet him he is undertaking the daring rescue of an elderly balloonist who speaks, in his dying moments, of beautiful winged cat-like creatures,"Kate would've loved them". A year later Kate de Vries, the granddaughter of the balloonist, comes aboard as a passenger. Through the sharing of her grandfather's diary the two become close friends who face danger together as air pirates board the Aurora, leaving her badly damaged. A storm forces the battered airship to set down on a desert island. Oppel's invention is totally convincing. It is a world in which the "what ifs" of invention have come to pass; in which a Nineteenth Century swashbuckling adventure can come true and feel true. In Airborn masterly storytelling offers mystery, adventure, discovery and growth. It is a tale in which courage, quick thinking and loyalty exuberantly succeed.
