GHR is the book I’m doing with my Yr9 class at the moment. I’d not read it before, but I was surprised and impressed when I read it – I like it a lot. Don’t know that much of the class does, at the moment, but that may be more of a factor that it’s a class text + they’re in Yr9 than a reflection on the book itself.

It’s Australian, which is nice – by a woman named Brigid Lowry – largely set in Perth. It’s written in a really interesting way, which I think is largely its appeal: you get the perspective of lots of different characters throughout the book; there are no chapters as such, just different sections with revealing titles. Asher, the main boy, writes his parts as a flow of consciousness; no punctuation, etc (much like an email, really…). The characters all go through interesting changes, and there are some rather interesting insights into teenage Aussie culture, I think (it was written almost a decade ago, so I wonder if it has lost/is losing some relevance?). Anyway – at the moment I’m trying to think of how to encourage the kids to engage with the themes etc, and I’m finding that particularly difficult