Inside Bubble Earth: Climate Change

 

Inside Bubble Earth: Climate Change

Des Hunt (2021)

One Tree House

56 pages, paperback NZ$40

ISBN 978-0-9951176-8-6

 

‘By now it should be obvious that holding your breath until your face turns blue isn’t going to save you or Bubble Earth. But there are other things we can do …’

Des Hunt is a writer who needs no introduction. His novels and non-fiction books are in every school

library. Inside Bubble Earth: Climate Change is his explanation of climate and climate change for young readers.

He begins by summoning up a tuatara’s-eye view of the history of climate patterns on earth and the possibility that the tuatara may face mass extinction as a very early victim of our current climate crisis. Along the way readers will be fascinated by his account of how the sex of tuatara eggs is determined by the temperature as eggs incubate. If the temperature three months after laying is above 22.5℃ all eggs will hatch as males! Hunt takes this possibility and uses it to explain the importance of variation in survval. Colourful diagrams and illustrations help to make his points.

As a former teacher and a full-time science explainer, Des Hunt does a good job of explaining the scientific method and applying it to climate change and its significance for ‘Bubble Earth’. Starting with the basic building blocks of life – atoms – he works through photosynthesis (how plants get energy) and respiration (how we breathe) to describing the nature of light and the perils of the greenhouse effect. This brings the reader to carbon dioxide, fossil fuels and the part played by our farms. There is also a simple analysis of six renewable energy sources.

Des Hunt always has a lovely conversational writing style.  ‘Now is the time to talk about the scary stuff,’ he warns before listing the consequences if we do nothing, Some grim examples of extreme weather events follow, although many of us have already had a mild taste of these lately. The dangers threatening our oceans and our environment are sketched in. Will we allow the human race to be the next example of mass extinction?

It won’t be Des Hunt’s fault if we do. He also offers young readers a couple of pages of actions they can take personal responsibility for to help save Bubble Earth. These are: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rethink.

There are two pages of Activities, four pages of Glossary and two pages of suggested Websites, as well as a solid index. The book design is by Vasanti Unka.

 

Trevor Agnew

18 June 2021

 

Sunken Forest Des Hunt

Sunken Forest    Des Hunt

Reviewed by Trevor Agnew

Sunken Forest

Des Hunt
Scholastic (2016)
269 pages, paperback
ISBN   978 1 77543 413 0

Given that New Zealand’s longfin eels can live for a century and grow to a length of two metres, it was a certainty that Des Hunt would one day write a novel with an eel as the hero. Or in this case, heroine. Elsa is the name young Matt gives to the queen-sized eel he encounters in Lake Waikaremoana. (Matt reads widely and has definitely been influenced by reading Born Free.)

“Waikaremoana is not a lake to be messed with,” warns a fisherman and Matt would be the first to agree with him.

“This was deep jungle – New Zealand style.”

Matt doesn’t want to be there, but he has been sent to this tightly-run wilderness camp because of his tainted reputation at his new school. Already suspected of theft, Matt has fallen in with bad company in the form of Cam and Jay. At the adventure camp at Lake Waikaremoana, which is run on semi-military lines by Mr Klineck, Matt is suspected of further misdemeanours. (It is interesting that Matt finds some literary comfort in comparing himself to the falsely-accused David Balfour in Kidnapped.)

He strikes up an odd companionship with the bookish Paul and comes a little closer to understanding girls like Azura and Maddy. When one of Cam’s vicious tricks has serious consequences for the group members, they begin plotting revenge but a natural disaster puts many lives at risk.

As always Des Hunt provides a strong element of science – in this case geology – but he also raises moral issues which will be important to his young readers. Matt’s reputation is repeatedly slurred by a caller on talk-back radio, and the powerful influence of social media on opinion is well shown. The harmful power of peer pressure and gossip is also sharply depicted. Words can wound and leave scars.  

There is also a strong moral issue. Are Matt and his friends seeking justice or do they just want revenge? The matter is well debated in a lively and satisfying adventure that manages to bring together unrelated events from decades earlier, and produce a satisfying conclusion, featuring the monster eel as a key player.  As Matt reflects, “Lions were animals that scare people… Eels were much the same, scary in form with a bad reputation.” 

Sunken Forest may indeed give us all a better appreciation of eels.

Trevor Agnew 

23 Jul 2016

 

THE TOOTH Des Hunt

The Tooth, Des Hunt, HarperCollins, paperback, 176 pages, $16.99
ISBN 978-1-86950-638-4

Des Hunt’s lively action novels for boys always feature a tech-savvy lad meeting an interesting creature during a quest in dramatic scenery, and The Tooth certainly puts horse-loving Tim into the Hawkes Bay hill country to seek dinosaur remains. Yet, there is something new in The Tooth – verse!

Tim’s great grandmother writes songs, so the prologue to this adventure is told in ‘The Ballad of Wee Timmy Thomas’, while Tim gets to sing another of her ballads – about the Kaimanawa horses, which play a part in the story. The rest of the story, told more conventionally, follows Tim and his friend Mits as they apply scientific logic to his childhood memories of a fossil tooth to deduce its location. They’re in a race against time because a dam is being filled, and some rough types are horning in. There are those horses as well. A perfect book for boys who don’t like reading.

Trevor Agnew

This review first appeared in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand on 28th December 2007.

Humour and History for Young

My Life of Crime Fleur Beale, Mallinson Rendel, 138 pages, paperback, NZ$17
ISBN 978-1-877423-05-5

Archie’s Adventures Leonie Thorpe, HarperCollins, 144 pages, paperback, NZ$16.99
ISBN 978-1-86950-656-8

Shadows in the Ice Des Hunt, HarperCollins, 224 pages, paperback, NZ$16.99
ISBN 978-1-86950-673-1

Dead Dan’s Dee Phyllis Johnston, Longacre, paperback, NZ$16.99
ISBN 978-1-877361-75-3


These four good novels have a common theme of adolescents achieving self-reliance in the face of difficult events. They are also completely different from each other.

Leonie Thorpe, a Lyttelton author, has gone for the humorous approach in Archie’s Adventure, where Archie Roach seems to be a failure at everything he tries. Arriving in Port Collerden, he finds fulfilment by learning to fish, whistle and join the activities of the local sea scouts. His encounter with Theo Sussex, a former TV personality eager to be elected Mayor, is particularly funny. (“You wouldn’t know him, dear. He used to be famous,” says a local.) As Archie battles his way through a fishing contest and a regatta he gains self-esteem and his readers gain some cheerful moments.

In Des Hunt’s Shadows in the Ice, the sequel to Frog Whistle Mine (2006), young Tony still fancies himself as an amateur detective but is soon out of his depth when he returns to the West Coast. At Fox Glacier he encounters the mystery of a corpse – the wrong corpse - emerging from the ice after a seven year journey. Tony also befriends the intriguing Murray ‘Simple’ Kimpel, a gentle giant who disposes of cattle carcasses and cares for injured birds.
Tony is resourceful in gathering evidence but, to his embarrassment, it takes his indomitable friend Rose to help him clear up the mystery. She also provides his first kiss. The conclusion is dramatically exciting. This novel also contains enough gruesome humour and painful puns to make it a sure hit with young male readers.

My Life of Crime is a readable and witty personal confession. Anthony, the narrator, admits he was a “useless, whinging, snivelling, moaning blob” and tells how he became Ant, a self-reliant and confident young man, able to outwit his enemies and even win some of them over as friends. Ant’s first-person narrative is very amusing especially when it becomes clear that his plans for the future still include the life of crime of the title. His dreams of instant wealth through a little kidnapping and ransom are never achieved but some surprising events do occur and Ant finds himself facing a major personal challenge. Fleur Beale has created a witty story that also offers some helpful tips for people who want to better themselves

“You must be Dee. You look like your father.” Historical novels for the young continue their growth in popularity. Phyllis Johnston’s Dead Dan’s Dee is a moving recreation of the problems faced by the soldiers of World War One, both on the battlefield and in later life back in New Zealand.
Dee’s father, Dan, had died on the Somme, so when her mother and aunt develop tuberculosis, she has to live first in a grim orphanage and then on a backblocks farm near Rotorua with her father’s best friend Joe and his wife Essie.
Life is hard, with low dairy prices and the threat of bush sickness, but Dee has the added difficulty of being haunted by the secrets that surround Dan’s death. She eventually learns the truth and finds happiness but at a cost. This richly detailed story brings the past alive for young readers and links Dee’s discovery to more recent events.


This review by Trevor Agnew first appeared in The Press, Christchurch on 3rd November 2007.

Adventure Novels for Young Readers

And Did Those Feet… Ted Dawe, Longacre Press, 192 pages, paperback, NZ$18.99
ISN 1-877361-49-6
Too Close to the Wind, and other stories Tessa Duder, HarperCollins, 169 pages, paperback, NZ$16.99 ISBN 1-86950-608-1
Where Cuckoos Call Des Hunt, HarperCollins, 175 pages, paperback, NZ$16.99
ISBN 1-86950-607-0
The Amazing Adventures of Razza the Rat Witi Ihimaera, ill. Astrid Matijasevich, 54 pages, paperback, NZ$19.99
ISBN 1-86978-004-3

In the same month in 2007 that Investigate magazine claimed (falsely) that there are no healthy adventure novels for young adults in New Zealand, I received eight for review. Here are the first four.

When his mother dies and his father fails to cope, Sandy is sent to live with his Uncle Frank and Aunt Lorna on their Taranaki farm. In the lively first-person narrative of And Did Those Feet…, Sandy adjusts to the different routine of country life, pulling turnips, milking, and befriending a pig. Sandy’s acceptance of country life is humorously drawn but a more interesting issue lies at the heart of this novel. Uncle Frank is no ordinary farmer; he has developed a philosophy of life based on the writings of William Blake, which at first baffles and then intrigues Sandy. At school, Sandy is viewed with suspicion as a ‘cultie’ but finds acceptance and fulfilment during a traumatic class camping trip on Mount Taranaki. This is a strikingly original novel with well-drawn and likeable characters. As well as winning prizes, it is also likely to have young readers seeking more information about William Blake.

Des Hunt’s novels follow an enjoyable pattern where a young person becomes aware of the importance of nature. On his twelfth birthday Ben Mansfield finds a Shining cuckoo chick and tries to raise it, in Where Cuckoos Call. Ben has no illusions. “Cuckoos are parasites,” he declares but he soon has Bigmouth thriving. The rest of Ben’s life is not going as well. His father is ill and the family’s Coromandel Peninsula farm is being developed into a coastal marina.
A keen birdwatcher, Ben tries to protect the local coastal birds, erecting fences and signs, but hostile trail-bikers destroy some nesting sites. When all seems lost Ben receives a message from Vanuatu: Bigmouth has migrated there. The unexpected events that follow, including Cyclone Alex, create a roller-coaster of surprises for Ben and his readers. A well-paced, often exciting novel.

Environmentalists were depressed that a monitored rat named Razza had swum half a kilometre to Otata Island, but Witi Ihimaera scented a story. The Amazing Adventures of Razza the Rat follows Razza as he defies his tribal elders and heads off on the ultimate OE. Razza swims and flies (on an albatross) to several world capitals, survives a tsunami and collects a Mousehood from the Queen on the way. By the end, Razza has his beady eye on even higher goals: “one long step forward for mousekind.” Ihimaera uses a frisky mixture of poetry and prose to produce a light yarn for young readers. Astrid Matijasevich’s colourful cartoon illustrations add to the genial mood.

Tessa Duder has been publishing stories for more than quarter of a century and Too Close to the Wind brings together ten of the best. Duder’s sailing and swimming interests predominate, especially in my favourite, the very funny Freddie Bone, where the main character’s plump build proves an advantage in a midwinter endurance race. His wily sponsor’s horror as dogged Freddie reaches 109 laps for $9500 is well portrayed. Other stories have young people recognising their abilities in everything from making music to telling stories. One of the several boating stories contains a good joke in its title; when big-headed Robert goes over the side, Robin calls ‘Person Overboard’ because ‘you’re no man.’ Fresh and lively reading for a range of ages.

Trevor Agnew

This review first appeared in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand on 10th March 2007.