Coolock Library: Australian Standing Orders Teaching Notes

Sixteen-year-old Grace lives under a bridge in Melbourne's CBD. It's cold and wet, but hidden. Safe, at least, until she can go home. When winter drives her to the City Library one morning, Grace meets Louie, a weird kid with his own problems, and discovers a community piano. The piano reminds Grace of her mum, a celebrated pianist whose mental illness makes life a roller-coaster and not always a fun one. When Grace comes up with a plan to find the help she and Mum need, life begins to look up. But things don't work out as Grace imagines and suddenly her world's turned upside down again, and maybe for good this time. (Publisher)

Each of the stories in Always Will Be is set in its own future version of the Tweed. In one, a group of girls plot their escape from a home they have no memory of entering. In another, two men make a final visit to the country they love as they contemplate a new life in a faraway place. Saunders imagines different scenarios for how the local Goori community might reassert sovereignty reclaiming country, exerting full self-determination, or incorporating non-Indigenous people into the social fabric – while practising creative, ancestrally approved ways of living with changing climates. (Publisher)

Long, long ago, storytellers all around the world told tales of wonder both to enchant and entertain us, and also to teach us that - if we are good and kind and courageous enough - we can change the world for the better. For this is what fairy tales do. They give us hope. As we travel through the dark and dangerous world of the fairy tale, as we fight dragons and outwit ogres and save our sisters and brothers, we learn that we are capable of anything. And then we return to our own world with all that we have learned along the way, stronger and braver than before. The stories in this book come from all the corners of the world. Some were told in deep time before history was recorded, and some were written not so long ago. All of them have been unjustly forgotten. (Publisher)

In 1942, much of France is occupied by the Nazis. Twelve-year-old Miri is Jewish, so she is not safe. Separated from her parents, she rescues her neighbours' two-year-old daughter Nora and escapes to a village, where she is given a new name and pretends to be Catholic to escape Nazi capture. Miri is at first wary of the convent school nuns, but soon learns that there is much more than meets the eye to these knowledgeable women. One night she is asked to undertake a terrifying task that could allow her to escape. But what about Nora? The person Miri meets that night could save her life. And the person Miri becomes that night could save the lives of many more. (Publisher)

Sixteen-year-old Nesta believes in the fairy tales - the true stories of powerful magical women who shaped and ruled the world decades ago. But the world has changed since then, and now she is forbidden from wandering too far from the isolated woodland cottage where she lives with her grandmother. Nesta longs more than anything to see the city that lies beyond the forest, and when her grandmother is abducted, she gets her chance, journeying there in the hope of rescuing her. But once there, she is horrified to see her grandmother's warnings were true: girls are forced to wear certain clothes and punished if they don't behave in certain ways. The city's Authorities have rewritten history, replacing the fairytale heroines with weak girls who must rely on men. Worse still - everyone believes this is how the world has always been. Only Nesta knows the truth. But truth is a dangerous thing, and suddenly she finds herself a target.

Marco's always done the right thing. But now it's time for wrong answers only. Marco should be at university, studying biomedicine. Instead, he's been sent to live on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean with his estranged uncle, all because of a 'blip' everyone else is convinced was a panic attack. (Which it most definitely was not.) And even though Marco's trip is supposed to provide answers - about himself, about his family - all he finds on board the Ocean Melody are more and more questions. But then his best friend CeCe proposes a new plan- for someone who has always done the right thing, in every possible way, it's time for Marco to get a few things wrong. And hooking up with a hot dancer from the ship is only the beginning. (Publisher)