The Children’s Book Coun­cil of Aus­tralia grants Best of the Year awards in five cat­e­gories: Older Read­ers (sec­ondary school-age), Younger Read­ers (inde­pen­dent ele­men­tary read­ers), Early Child­hood (pre-reading to early reader), Pic­ture Book and the Eve Pow­nall Award for Infor­ma­tion Book.  The lat­ter two awards are for any age up to 18. I choose two of the 2011 win­ners to read in April.

The Pic­ture Book award very deservedly went to Jean­nie Baker’s Mir­ror. Mir­ror opens to two nearly-wordless sto­ries, one of an urban Aus­tralian fam­ily and the other, a rural Moroc­can fam­ily. This is a book that can be looked at again and again search­ing for sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences in the boys’ days. The detailed col­lage illus­tra­tions give a lot to peer at and pon­der. Inspired by her own expe­ri­ences trav­el­ling in Morocco. Where words are used, they are in Eng­lish for the Aus­tralian story and Ara­bic for the Moroc­can and the Moroc­can story reads right to left.

The Older Reader award went to Sonya Hartnett’s The Mid­night Zoo. Clearly a Hart­nett book was unavoid­able to truly check Aus­tralian book awards off my chal­lenge list. Hart­nett won the Astrid Lind­gren Memo­r­ial Award for her body of work as well recog­ni­tion from the CBC of Aus­tralia for The Ghost’s Child (2008), The Sil­ver Don­key (2005, Younger Chil­dren), For­est (2002), an Honor in 1996 for Sleep­ing Dogs and has been short­listed for just about every­thing else she’s ever written.

After two Roma broth­ers and their infant sis­ter stum­ble upon an aban­doned zoo, the zoo ani­mals and the broth­ers share their tragic sto­ries with each other. The tragedy of World War II affects them all, but the ani­mals make it clear to the boys that they have suf­fered at human hands long before the war. The courage and deter­mi­na­tion of Andrej is inspir­ing, but over­all the story is not an uplift­ing one. The Mid­night Zoo is a quiet and mov­ing story which will remain with me long after the read­ing. While it is wor­thy of crit­i­cal acclaim for its sparse yet emo­tional writ­ing I am not sur­prised that it has not been fly­ing off the library shelves. Hope­fully it will find a home within World War II units, par­tic­u­larly due to its Roma main char­ac­ters, not often found in World War II young adult fiction.