{"id":1162,"date":"2018-02-24T20:39:25","date_gmt":"2018-02-24T09:39:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/?p=1162"},"modified":"2018-02-24T20:39:25","modified_gmt":"2018-02-24T09:39:25","slug":"book-launch-quarks-academy-by-catherine-pelosi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/book-launch-quarks-academy-by-catherine-pelosi\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Launch: Quark’s Academy by Catherine Pelosi"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I taught a short course in writing for children and young adults for more than ten years, and over those years, I must have taught hundreds of people, and some of them became and remained friends (online and in real life). I’m always excited when one of them finds success with their writing, and I’m quietly proud that several of my students have had children’s books published. It’s not so much that there’s any question of taking credit, just a pleasure that they may have taken something from your teaching that stuck. (Talent is one thing; the determination to persist with one’s craft and be patient with the process is a whole other thing. It’s the willingness to do the work that separates people who want to write from those who just want to be published.)<\/p>\n

One of those students is Catherine Pelosi<\/a>, who I know from our online friendship and personal correspondence has quietly persisted with her writing over the years, and now is seeing the fruits of that labour, with three children’s books scheduled to be published this year and next.<\/p>\n

The first of those books is Catherine’s debut children’s novel,\u00a0Quark’s Academy<\/em><\/a>, and I was thrilled when Catherine contacted me earlier this year and asked if I might be available and willing to launch the book.<\/p>\n

You bet I was. And today, at the very impressive Lindfield Learning Hub<\/a>, I gave the following speech to launch\u00a0Quark’s Academy<\/em> into the world.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u03a9\u03a9\u03a9\u03a9<\/p>\n

It is a great honour to be here today to launch Catherine\u2019s first children\u2019s novel, Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em>. I first met Catherine some years ago in a writing course I used to teach, and we\u2019ve been online friends pretty much ever since. We share a love of great books\u2014especially great kids\u2019 books\u2014travel, cats, and stories. Perhaps most of all, stories.<\/span><\/p>\n

And does Catherine have a story for you. In Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em>, Catherine has achieved something I don\u2019t see all that often any more in novels for young readers. First of all, it\u2019s a self-contained novel. While she might have more adventures for our three young heroes planned, I have to say, it\u2019s such a delight to read a book and get to the end and feel absolutely happy and complete by a story well-told, and complete in itself. I know lots of people like series, but I\u2019m a big fan of the stand-alone novel, especially one where the world of the book and its characters is as well-realised as it is in Catherine\u2019s novel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Secondly, what I love about Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em>, is that it\u2019s a good old-fashioned adventure story, where the kids have to rely on their own spunk\u00a0 <\/span>and resources\u2014including their brains and courage\u2014where the adults are either useless, absent, evil, or all three!\u2014and the author\u2019s inventiveness translates into high adventure and tricky challenges for both the characters and the readers. And when I say old-fashioned, I don\u2019t mean that at all in any negative sense, because the reason Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em> is such a great book for today\u2019s young readers is that Catherine has learned the lessons of all the great kids\u2019 writers going back to Enid Blyton<\/a> and Roald Dahl<\/a> as well as more contemporary writers for kids like our own Deborah Abela<\/a> and Paul Jennings<\/a>, by bringing the adventure story well into the modern age. Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em> is the perfect book for today\u2019s young reader who loves science and technology as much as school and, most of all, stories, and doesn\u2019t see any reason any all these parts of their very modern lives should be separate from each other.<\/span><\/p>\n

Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em> features three young people who are bursting with ideas and ambition, but whose home lives aren\u2019t as happy and supportive as they could be. We have Augustine, weather-fanatic and science genius, whose parents are also scientists, and perhaps not quite as clever as they think they are. There\u2019s Celeste, whose sports-nut parents love but don\u2019t really get their daughter, so much so that Celeste sometimes thinks she\u2019s been born into the wrong family. And then there\u2019s Oscar, who just wants to be noticed, and sometimes goes about that the wrong way.<\/span><\/p>\n

Each of our three heroes\u2014and might I just add what an incredibly job Catherine does at juggling three narrative points of view in her novel, not an easy feat for any writer, but especially a relative newbie!\u2014receives an invitation to the Quark\u2019s Academy of the title, a place where child scientific genii can go for a week long boot camp to work on their inventions\u2014there\u2019s a big prize on offer\u2014but also to learn science and technology from some of the world\u2019s top inventors. But as you might expect, Things Are Not As They Seem, and before long, Augustine,\u00a0 <\/span>Celeste and Oscar are fighting not just to win the competition, but for their very lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em> is full of science, thrills, danger and adventure, but it\u2019s also a story about friendship, and how when the world lets us down\u2014including adults, our teachers, and even our parents\u2014our friends can literally save our lives. It\u2019s also at times very, very funny, and for kids who love language as much as they love black holes and jet packs and stink bombs, there\u2019s a lot of pleasure in store for you as well. Oh, and let us now forget the cat\u2014children\u2019s books generally have a long history of great cats, and Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em>\u2019s Copernicus joins a great line of fictional felines<\/a>, from Wonderland\u2019s grinning Cheshire Cat<\/a>, Kipling\u2019s Cat Who Walked By Himself<\/a>, through the magical cats of Diana Wynne Jones<\/a>\u2019s multi-universe Chrestomanci<\/a> fantasy books, to Carbonel<\/a> the King of Cats and Minnie<\/a> the Danish newspaper cat… and I could go on but you get the gist. Copernicus is a great, dare I say, invention (and no, that\u2019s not a spoiler\u2014OR IS IT?!) as are the rest of Catherine\u2019s characters, human and non-human alike.<\/span><\/p>\n

I recommend Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em> to everyone here who loves a great story, especially, but not only the kids. I am going to be adding the book to my own school\u2019s wide reading collection and making sure we have a copy in the library. I wish it, and you, Catherine, all the success in the world. Congratulations also to everyone at Hachette Australia<\/a> for this beautifully designed book, and may I leave you with these fine words of wisdom: if you can smell squid, you can bet there will be squid. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

And so it is with great pleasure that I officially announce Quark\u2019s Academy<\/em> launched\u2014with or without a jet pack!<\/span><\/p>\n

Quark’s Academy<\/em> is published by Hachette Australia<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I taught a short course in writing for children and young adults for more than ten years, and over those years, I must have taught hundreds of people, and some of them became and remained friends (online and in real … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misrule"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1171,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions\/1171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}