Category Archives: Kidlit

Alone in Space by Tillie Walden

Alone in Space by Tillie Walden

Alone In Space compiles award-winning cartoonist Tillie Walden’s short comics into a stunning and comprehensive collection of the early work which shot her to fame.

We start with Tillie’s first published comic The End of Summer, in which Lars battles illness in a secluded castle at the start of an endless winter with a giant cat to keep him company amid mounting family tensions. Also featured are I Love This Part – Tillie’s bittersweet breakout story of small-town teen romance, and A City Inside – a study of growth and adulthood through a surreal and poetic recounting of one woman’s life.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Coming out themes
  • Internalised lesbomisia
  • Terminal illness
  • Graphic death of a pet cat

The Girl with the Gold Bikini by Lisa Walker

The Girl with the Gold Bikini by Lisa Walker

Eighteen-year-old Olivia Grace has deferred her law degree and ducked out of her friends’ gap-year tour of Asia. Instead, she’s fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a private investigator, following in the footsteps of Nancy Drew and Veronica Mars – who taught her everything she knows, including a solid line in quick-quipping repartee and the importance of a handbag full of disguises.

Playing Watson to the Sherlock of her childhood friend, detective agency owner Rosco, Olivia pursues a routine cheating husband case from the glitzy Gold Coast to Insta-perfect Byron Bay, where she faces yoga wars, dirty whale activism, and a guru who’s kind of a creep.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Fatmisia
  • Cheating
  • Disappearance

This is How We Change the Ending by Vikki Wakefield

This is How We Change the Ending by Vikki Wakefield

Sixteen-year-old Nate McKee is doing his best to be invisible. He’s worried about a lot of things—how his dad treats Nance and his twin half-brothers; the hydro crop in his bedroom; his reckless friend, Merrick.

Nate hangs out at the local youth centre and fills his notebooks with things he can’t say. But when some of his pages are stolen, and his words are graffitied at the centre, Nate realises he has allies. He might be able to make a difference, change his life, and claim his future. Or can he?

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic abuse
  • Child abuse

Friday Brown by Vikki Wakefield

Friday Brown by Vikki Wakefield

Friday, 17, flees memories of her mother, granddad, and the family curse. She joins Silence in a street gang led by beautiful charismatic Arden, and escapes to a ghost town in the outback. In Murungal Creek, the town of never leaving, Friday faces the ghosts of her past. Sometimes you have to stay to finish what you started, and before you can find out who you are, you have to become someone you never meant to be.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Death of a mother

Ballad for a Mad Girl by Vikki Wakefield

Ballad for a Mad Girl by Vikki Wakefield

Everyone knows seventeen-year-old Grace Foley is a bit mad. She’s a prankster and a risk-taker, and she’s not afraid of anything—except losing. As part of the long-running feud between two local schools in Swanston, Grace accepts a challenge to walk the pipe. That night she experiences something she can’t explain. The funny girl isn’t laughing anymore. She’s haunted by voices and visions—but nobody believes a girl who cries wolf.

As she’s drawn deeper into a twenty-year-old mystery surrounding missing girl Hannah Holt, the thin veil between this world and the next begins to slip. She can no longer tell what’s real or imagined—all she knows is the ghosts of Swanston… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Death of a parent recounted

Lost It by Kristen Tracy

Lost It by Kristen Tracy

Tess Whistle is a high school junior with ridiculous problems. Her best friend is plotting the annihilation of a neighbourhood poodle. Her parents are newly-born-again Christians who just moved to a survivalist Outward Bound–type camp in Utah. And Tess is about to lose her virginity—under a canoe—to her serious boyfriend, Ben Easter.

Luckily, none of these dramatic turns spells catastrophe. Because Tess Whistle is a high school junior who is about to discover that, ridiculous as her life may seem, she is finding out exactly who it is she wants to be.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Alcohol consumption
  • Bombing
  • Car accident
  • Animal death

Blood Will Out by Jo Treggiari

Blood Will Out by Jo Treggiari

Ari Sullivan is alive—for now. She wakes at the bottom of a cistern, confused, injured and alone, with only the shadowy recollection of a low-pitched voice and a gloved hand. No one can hear her screams. And the person who put her there is coming back. The killer is planning a gruesome masterpiece, a fairytale tableau of innocence and blood, meticulously designed.

Until now, Ari was happy to spend her days pining for handsome, recent-arrival Stroud Bellows, fantasizing about their two-point-four-kids-future together. Safe in her small hometown of Dempsey Hollow. But now her community has turned very dangerous—and Ari may not be the only intended victim.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Child abuse
  • Murder
  • Torture
  • Graphic animal death

Iron Heart by Nina Varela

Iron Heart by Nina Varela

For too long, Automae have lorded over the kingdom of Rabu, oppressing its human citizens. But the human revolution has risen, and at its heart is Ayla. Once a handmaiden, now a fugitive, Ayla narrowly escaped the palace of Lady Crier, the girl she would’ve killed if she hadn’t fallen in love first. 

Now Ayla has pledged her allegiance to Queen Junn, who can help accomplish the human rebellion’s ultimate goal: destroy the Iron Heart. Without its power, the Automae will be weakened to the point of extinction. Ayla wants to succeed, but can’t shake the strong feelings she’s developed for Crier. And unbeknownst to her, Crier has also fled the palace, taking up among travelling rebels, determined to find and protect Ayla.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Panic attack
  • Body horror
  • Murder
  • Torture

Crier’s War by Nina Varela

Crier’s War by Nina Varela

After the War of Kinds ravaged the kingdom of Rabu, the Automae, Designed to be the playthings of royals, took over the estates of their owners and bent the human race to their will. Now, Ayla, a human servant rising the ranks at the House of the Sovereign, dreams of avenging the death of her family… by killing the Sovereign’s daughter, Lady Crier. Crier, who was Made to be beautiful, to be flawless. And to take over the work of her father.

Crier had been preparing to do just that—to inherit her father’s rule over the land. But that was before she was betrothed to Scyre Kinok, who seems to have a thousand secrets. That was before she discovered her father isn’t as benevolent as she thought. That was before she met Ayla.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Slavery
  • Abandonment
  • Self-harm
  • Blood depiction
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a sibling
  • Murder
  • Animal death

Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah

Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah

Alem is on holiday with his father for a few days in London. He has never been out of Ethiopia before and is very excited. They have a great few days together until one morning when Alem wakes up in the bed and breakfast they are staying at to find the unthinkable. His father has left him. It is only when the owner of the bed and breakfast hands him a letter that Alem is given an explanation. Alem’s father admits that because of the political problems in Ethiopia both he and Alem’s mother felt Alem would be safer in London – even though it is breaking their hearts to do this. Alem is now on his own, in the hands of the social services and the Refugee Council. He lives from letter to letter, waiting to hear from his father, and in particular about his mother, who has now gone missing…

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Murder, off-page
  • Death of a mother