Bartlett and the Ice Voyage by Odo Hirsch

I had not heard of author Odo Hirsch until I picked up this tongue-in-cheek quest tale, and I was pleasantly surprised given it's somewhat ho hum cover. His writing style is reminiscent of Roald Dahl and bit like David Walliams. Odo is an Australian born doctor who has worked for Amnesty International and many of his novels have been short-listed for the Children Book Council of Australia Awards. This novel is about a snooty queen who owns seven countries and who is far too busy to leave her home country to visit the others. She constantly receives gifts from the people in these countries but becomes exasperated when the tasty melidrop fruit cannot be delivered before it goes rotten and starts obsessing about it, causing everyone in her kingdom great misery. You see there is no modern fast forms of transport and the tree or its seeds will not grow in her country. Thus the challenge for Bartlett, the famous explorer, is to transport this fruit to The Queen before it turns to mush. Boys may need encouragement to persevere through the first three chapters which focus on The Queen, in order to enjoy the sea adventure of Bartlett, which in fact makes up the majority of the novel.

The soft pencil illustrations by Andrew McLean help bring the characters to life and depict life in the royal court and at sea.

Toad Heaven by Morris Gleitzman

There are now four copies of this in our little library so you could read it with a few friends. This is the sequel to Toad Rage and it is all about a cane toad who longs to find a place where his family can live safely from the humans who seem to delight in squashing them. After an encounter with a conservationist, Limpy, the main character, mistakenly believes that he has been injected with a virus that will decimate his species. After hearing about a national park where living things are protected, he sets out, hoping to find this refuge for his family before he dies. Limpy is the brain box and a reluctant leader who manages to guide the others through battles with stinging ants, crocodiles, and a boatload of tourists. The over-the-top dialogue includes lots of body humour and tummy-turning descriptions of toad diet and personal habits. Death is a frequent source of amusement, from the toads' eerie use of a flattened relative as an insect trap to the companions' unsettling experiences among stuffed souvenir cane toads in a gift shop. This book has so many things in common with the film called Canetoad: the Conquest which I saw at the cinema earlier this year. It was funny in a very droll sort of a way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYUHnf7Uy1k

Also click here to hear the first chapter of the novel:

http://www.morrisgleitzman.com/books/fst_heaven_audio.html.