If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! I picked up Susan Hill’s A Change for the Better from the shelves of the Little Library, a literary free-for-all thanks to which I’ve stumbled across all manner of elderly, fusty little books. The sorts...

  “Sixteen years on the streets and you can learn a lot. But all the wrong things, not the things you want to learn. Sixteen years on the streets and you see a lot. But all the wrong sights, not the sights you want to see.” One of the things I feel that I don’t see enough of in today’s YA is unpolished rawness. Instead there’s...

Though Crash Coogan’s nickname might have had its origins in a football incident involving his cousin and a bodytackle, it’s more than applicable to his personal ideology. You see, Crash essentially functions as a human steamroller. He’s like one of those suitcase-toting, umbrella-wielding executives storming through the CBD during peak hour:...

Kieran lives in a small town that’s all about weekend football, meat and two veg, and boys being boys and girls being girls. There’s no room for eccentricity, and there’s no room for ambiguity. So when new kid Bon shows up at school sporting a long plait, toting a sketchbook, and favouring storytelling over football, it’s little surprise...

Jess Hill and Peyton Brentwood are at war. Although they were once the very best of friends, things have changed, and now the two spend their days figuring out how to make the other the laughing stock of the school with prank after prank. But a good prank begets an even better prank, and over the years, things have begun to escalate, with the whole school...