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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

BooksFebruary 8, 2023

The Unity Books children’s bestseller chart for January

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

In the life-cycle of a reader we bet it’s the childhood reading memories that matter most. Here are Unity’s bestselling books for January.

AUCKLAND

1  Sleepy Kiwi by Kat Quin (Tikitibu, $20, babies)

A bold, black and white board book for newborns and up.

2  Midnight Adventures of Ruru and Kiwi by Clare Scott (Puffin, $23, 3+)

A kiwi take on the Owl and the Pussycat, featuring a midnight feast, and plenty of honey.

3  Diper Överlöde Kid: Diary of a Wimpy Kid #17 by Jeff Kinney (Puffin, $18, 6+)

Here’s what the blurb says to expect: “When he decides to tag along with his brother Rodrick’s band, Löded Diper, Greg doesn’t realise what he’s getting into. But he soon learns that late nights, unpaid gigs, fighting between band members, and money troubles are all part of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Can Greg help Löded Diper become the legends they think they are? Or will too much time with Rodrick’s band be a diper överlöde?”

4  Pax by Sara Pennypacker with illustrations by Jon Klassen (Harper Collins, $19, 3+)

Get the tissues out. Here’s a taster: “Pax and Peter have been inseparable ever since Peter rescued him as a kit. But one day, the unimaginable happens: Peter’s dad enlists in the military and makes him return the fox to the wild.”

5  Wildlife of Aotearoa Colouring Book by Gavin Bishop (Puffin, $13, 4+)

Can’t go wrong with this one. Colouring in Gavin Bishop’s illustrations? Sign me up, get me the felts, and move over kids.

6  Down the Back of the Chair by Margaret Mahy (Frances Lincoln, $21, 3+)

A rambunctious classic from Queen Mahy. There are coins back there of course, but so much more…

7  Collaborations: Cat Kid Comic Club #4 by Dav Pilkey (Scholastic, $20, 6+)

Fun graphic book about kids who make comics instead of tidying their rooms and doing chores.

8  Kuwi & Friends Māori Picture Dictionary by Kat Quin & Pania Papa (Illustrated Publishing, $35, all ages)

A fantastic te reo Māori learning resource for home, school and preschool.

9  Maui & Other Legends: 8 Classic Tales of Aotearoa by Peter Gossage (Penguin, $40, all ages)

10  Big Ideas For Curious Minds: An Introduction to Philosophy by Alain de Botton and Anna Doherty (Affirm Press, $40, 9+)

A journey through some of the big philosophical ideas in human history, for kids. 

WELLINGTON

1  A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson (Hardie Grant, $23, 14+)

Intrigued. This is Jackon’s debut moider novel with teen detectives, and Winner of the British Book Awards’ Children’s Book of the Year 2020, and Shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2020, as well as being a New York Times number one bestseller. And we are just ready to tuck up, with a cuppa and Tim Tams, and dive right in. The blurb goes: “The case is closed. Five years ago, schoolgirl Andie Bell was murdered by Sal Singh. The police know he did it. Everyone in town knows he did it. But having grown up in the same small town that was consumed by the crime, Pippa Fitz-Amobi isn’t so sure.” 

Great to know that the teens of today are as into gruesome whodunnits as the kids of the 90s were into pulp horror. You can get nostalgic about those gems with Erin Harrington’s essay right here.

2  The Boy, the Mole, the Fox & the Horse by Charles Mackesy (Ebury Press, $40, all ages)

The story of Instagram characters, turned book, turned movie, Mackesy’s Winnie-the-Pooh-eque tales are a global hit.

3  Adventures of Mittens: Wellington’s Famous Purr-Sonality by Silvio Bruisma (Penguin, $20, 3+)

In the words of Scarface Claw, YEEEEOOOOOWWWFTTTZZZZZZ.

4  Good Girl, Bad Blood by Holly Jackson (Hardie Grant, $23, 14+)

Part two in the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder trilogy.

5  Wildlife of Aotearoa Colouring Book by Gavin Bishop (Puffin, $13, 4+)

6  Atua: Maori Gods & Heroes by Gavin Bishop (Penguin, $40, all ages)

The big, beautiful winner of all the awards last year, this should be on the top 10 lists all year, every year.

7  Five Survive by Holly Jackson (Farshore, $23, 14+)

HOLLY JACKSON IS ON A ROLL! This one is a standalone thriller, and is, yet again, a bestseller in the US and the UK, and here, too.

8  Little Yellow Digger by Betty & Alan Gilderdale (Scholastic, $22, 3+)

Alphabet adventures with the accident prone little digger is always a lovely time.

9  Big Book of Mysteries by Tom Adams (Nosy Crow, $35, 5+)

Love the continuation of spine-chills and creepy tone in this January list. This is an anthology of real-life mysteries: the Loch Ness monster, Big Foot, alien abductions, hauntings… definite Unsolved Mystery vibes for the parents that occasionally get uncomfortable flashbacks to that 90s TV phenomenon.

10  Stolen Heir by Holly Black (Hot Key, $33, 14+)

The first in a fantasy trilogy set in the world of Elfhame, this is a bestselling novel with consistently stonking ratings on GoodReads. Here’s a taste:

“Eight years have passed since the Battle of the Serpent. But in the icy north, Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth has reclaimed the Ice Needle Citadel. There, she is using an ancient relic to create monsters of stick and snow who will do her bidding and exact her revenge.”

Keep going!
Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

BooksFebruary 7, 2023

Why the second It movie compelled me to write my first novel

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Author I.S. Belle reveals the top five influences on her debut LGBT horror/paranormal YA novel, Zombabe.

Zombabe is a LGBT found family horror/paranormal YA about a group of friends putting down an ancient evil inextricably linked to their sleepy town of Bulldeen, Maine. Does all of that bring anything to mind? It should. Here are five works that inspired me, from mild inspiration to most potent influence:

5. Stranger Things 

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a band of teens stop a monster from ravaging their small town with help from their friend who has strange, unknowable powers. 

Stranger Things has a lot of Zombabe’s greatest hits: Creepy hometown mystery! Found family! An ensemble of queer teens (I know there’s only two canonically queer teens in the Stranger Things crew, but I hold out hope for a couple more in season 5. Give Will a boyfriend, goddamnit, that boy deserves something nice after all he’s been through).

Not to mention the distant time period. Stranger Things is set in the 80s, Zombabe in the early 2000s – which, I’ll remind everyone, was two decades ago. I know.

4. The Raven Cycle series by Maggie Stiefvater

“[She] was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.”

I, like many of us, was a Raven Cycle teen. I fell in love with the vague, mysterious plot (seriously, what the hell HAPPENED in those books), the gorgeous prose, the small town plagued with paranormal happenings – but mostly I fell for the friend group. Those strange, magic teenagers living in old warehouses and trailer parks and a small house with a million aunts.

These friends are obsessed with each other. They think the world of their friends throughout all the amazing and stupid shit they get up to. They bicker – OK, sometimes it dissolves into screaming arguments – but at the end of the day they’re glued together through all their paranormal shenanigans. Waxing poetic about each other the whole way.

3. Santa Clarita Diet

The family that slays together stays together. Santa Clarita Diet is a delightful horror-comedy about a husband and wife whose mundane suburban lives are thrown into chaos when the wife becomes a zombie. Cue a stressed but supportive husband, smoothies chunky with body parts, and an industrial freezer to store corpses. 

‘Til death do they part – and then some.

This real-estate duo murder people every week, but the beating heart of the show is the deeply affectionate relationship between husband and wife. They’re in love, sure, but they’re also best friends. Partners in crime. They banter while driving to the PTA meeting and while they stash a body in the trunk of their car.

The romance in Zombabe is between a boy and the best friend he resurrected. Underneath their romance is a solid base of friendship: not only do they love each other, they also like each other. They trust each other. They support each other, they have fun, they’re each other’s first priority and they know it. 

They kill for each other. Then they get lunch – after they wash the blood off, of course.

2. Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Jennifer’s Body is about cheerleader Jennifer Check devouring teenage boys after coming back Wrong from a failed human sacrifice, while her best friend, Anita “Needy” Lesnicky, tries to snap her the hell out of it. 

What queer teenage girl growing up in the 2010s didn’t get deeply into the masterpiece that is Jennifer’s Body? “I don’t know why I like it so much”, I kept saying, staring at the screen as Jennifer and Needy’s strange, sapphic, twisted friendship turned into obsession and death.I just do.”

The movie ends tragically, of course. Needy stabs Jennifer in the heart, killing her and stopping her murder spree. She gets carted away to a mental institution. Then – and this is important – she escapes using powers Jennifer accidentally gave her, and murders the men who made Jennifer into a monster, implying that Needy is now part monster, too.

When I first watched it I took it at face value – a toxic friendship that tore itself apart in the most disastrous way possible. But in later viewings, I found myself thinking … wouldn’t it have been nice if they ran away together? Maybe Needy could’ve leaned into her monstrosity earlier: helped out with Jennifer’s killings while they found some way to cure her that didn’t involve a knife to the heart? What if they made their love into something kinder, shining through all the horror around them? 

I thought about this a lot while writing the book. Zombabe’s dedication reads:To everybody who wanted Jennifer and Needy to ride off into the sunset at the end of the movie.”

1. It by Stephen King

And here’s the kicker. The one that kickstarted that first draft. It Chapter Two came out in 2019. I wasn’t interested until I found out they were making Richie Tozier gay in this adaptation. You know me – if it’s gay, I’ll take a squiz. So I cautiously stuck a toe in the water and found myself sucked into a whirlpool, devouring the second and first movie, then the book and the 1990 miniseries in less than two weeks. Sometimes we choose the rabbit hole, sometimes it chooses us.

IT is about a group of friends putting down an ancient evil inextricably linked to their sleepy town of Derry, Maine. Sounds familiar, right? I was immediately struck by the claustrophobic doom of Derry; the clown’s shapeshifting into whatever its prey feared most. The adults are useless, the villains are lethal, and nobody is coming to save the kids of Derry.

And through all that horror – that damn friend group. They’ve grown up together, they’ve pulled each other through hell. They love each other so much it makes me cry. They vowed to come back to Derry if IT ever returned, and – despite everyone being scared out of their wits – they do. Of course they do. They made a promise.

In Zombabe, devotion to your friends is a given. Your friend gets resurrected and needs human flesh to survive? Cool, let’s start killing local bigots. We need to find a way to end this spooky shit that’s plagued our town for generations? Let’s do it. There’s romance in Zombabe, sure, but it never overtakes the friendship radiating through the core of the story.  

Zombabe is the first book in a trilogy. Unlike Stephen King’s magnum opus, you can count on two things when you reach the final page: one, the friends stick together. Two, the gay guys get a happy ending. 

You can purchase Zombabe by I.S. Belle ($38) from Unity Books Wellington, Good Books Wellington, and from Amazon. You can also get its best-selling prequel novella Babylove from Amazon.