Rockhopping

Next month in the Convent book club we are looking at the winners of the 2017 CBCA Awards. Trace Balla's Rockhopping was the winner of the Younger Readers' Book of the Year category (an award I was also honoured to win with Crow Country a few years ago).

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's like a cross between a picture book and a junior graphic novel, with a deceptively simple cartoonish style which contains lots of marginal detail: birds and insects, wildflowers and trees. Clancy and his uncle Egg take a hike through Gariwerd (the Grampian mountains near Melbourne), with detours and adventures along the way. Indigenous placenames are foregrounded, with European names given in parentheses. While Clancy and his uncle are not Indigenous, Uncle Egg's best mate is Aboriginal, and gives snippets of local knowledge and mythology which are respectfully received by Clancy and Egg. There is humour and danger, and Clancy discovers he is more resourceful than he thought.

Of course I was always going to enjoy a book set in Victoria, and especially when Clancy and Egg set off from near Merri Creek, my own local waterway. Designed for younger readers, this book will be enjoyed by curious travellers of all ages.