Irrepressibly joyful and utterly unique, with lavish illustrations by Katherine Quinn, MAGNOLIA MOON has all the spirited imagination and jubilance of Pippi Longstocking, and is a delightful reminder of just how much can happen in a year of being nine.
THE SECRETS OF MAGNOLIA MOON (Book 1)
THE MAGIC OF MAGNOLIA MOON (Book 2)
THE WONDERS OF MAGNOLIA MOON (Book 3)
by Edwina Wyatt
Walker Australia, November 2019; October 2021; Winter 2022
Magnolia Moon is nine years old, likes Greek mythology, her best friend Imogen May (who understands the importance of questions like, “If you could be one fruit, any fruit, what would you be?”), wishing trees, and speaking crows. She knows instinctively that buffadillos are armadillos crossed with buffalos and believes there are walramingos living in her garden. She’s also the kind of person who can be entrusted with a great many secrets.
Each chapter in this novel, which captures Magnolia’s year of being nine and ends on Chapter Almost 10, reveals a secret that Magnolia is keeping. But the novel also chronicles a year of change for Magnolia. From her best friend moving to the birth of her little brother Finnegan, Magnolia navigates every challenge and secret that comes her way with the kind of authenticity and innocence that comes from being nine years wise.
• CBCA Young Readers’ Book of the Year 2020
• Shortlisted for the Readings Children’s Book Prize 2020
• A Sydney Morning Herald 2019 ‘Stand Out’ Title
“Utterly sublime. . . Sophisticated and elegant with a nice splash of quirkiness and gentle humour.” —Children’s Book Review
Edwina Wyatt is an Australian children’s author. She grew up in Sydney and worked as a lawyer and a high school teacher before becoming a writer of books for young readers. Her debut junior fiction novel The Secrets of Magnolia Moon (Walker Books) was awarded the CBCA Honour Book of the Year for Younger Readers (Australia’s version of the Newbery), and shortlisted for the Readings’ Children’s Book Prize. She has twice been awarded a CBCA Notable for her picture books. Edwina lives in the Victorian High Country with her husband, two children, a dog, cat, and too many chickens.
Eleven-year-old Maybelle Lane collects sounds. She records the Louisiana crickets chirping, Momma strumming her guitar, their broken trailer door squeaking. But the crown jewel of her collection is a sound she didn’t collect herself: an old recording of her daddy’s warm-sunshine laugh, saved on an old phone’s voicemail. It’s the only thing she has of his, and the only thing she knows about him. Until the day she hears that laugh—his laugh—pouring out of the car radio. Going against Momma’s wishes, Maybelle starts listening to her radio DJ daddy’s new show, drinking in every word like a plant leaning toward the sun. When he announces he’ll be the judge of a singing contest in Nashville, she signs up. What better way to meet than to stand before him and sing with all her heart? But the road to Nashville is bumpy. Her starch-stiff neighbor Mrs. Boggs offers to drive her in her RV. And a bully of a boy from the trailer park hitches a ride, too. These are not the people May would have chosen to help her, but it turns out they’re searching for things as well. And the journey will mold them into the best kind of family—the kind you choose for yourself.
Mateo Garcia and his younger sister, Sophie, have been taught to fear one word for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico has started to fade. Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and they’re hard workers and good neighbors. When Mateo returns from school one day to find that his parents have been taken by ICE, he realizes that his family’s worst nightmare has become a reality. With his parents’ fate and his own future hanging in the balance, Mateo must figure out who he is and what he is capable of, even as he’s forced to question what it means to be an American. Daniel Aleman’s INDIVISIBLE is a remarkable story – both powerful in its explorations of immigration in America and deeply intimate in its portrait of a teen boy driven by his fierce, protective love for his parents and his sister.
Her destiny was death. The shadows brought her back. Wrongly accused of her brother’s murder, Sonara’s destiny was to die, sentenced to execution by her own mother. Punished and left for dead, the shadows have cursed her with a second life as a Shadowblood, cast out and hunted by society for her demon-like powers. Now known as the Devil of the Deadlands, Sonara survives as a thief on the edge of society, fighting for survival on a quest to uncover what really happened to her brother and whether he is even dead at all…
Everything happens for a reason.