Star Eaters
By Brooke Carter
Orca Book Publishers: February 2023 release
PB-9781459834675
e-book-9781459834699

Originally published in the Winter 2023 BC Bookworld quarterly magazine.

Orca Book Publishers, based in Victoria, B.C., has had great success over the past two decades with specialized series of books written for teens in the hi-lo (high interest, low vocabulary) category. Orca has attracted renowned writers in other genres to contribute to their trail-blazing literacy line-up like Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Marty Chan, Carrie Mac, Mahtab Narsimham, Eric Walters and Pam Withers. Wilderness adventures, sports, LGBTQ+, romance, fantasy, horror and lots of mysteries pique the diverse reading interests of 12-16 year olds as they strive to make sense of written English — and, bonus, some are translated to French as well.  

Star Eaters, by acclaimed author Brooke Carter, is a novel written for what is likely the most challenging new series, Orca Anchor, developed for teens with a reading level below or at Grade 2. The publisher has integrated design and production features to make reading even more accessible: dyslexic-friendly fonts (typefaces), cream-coloured paper, and a larger page size with wider margins and thus, fewer words per line. Carter’s novel is action-packed yet thoughtful, as it considers the ethics of blindly following orders and thereby causing mortal damage to other species and entire environments. Destin is a young man on a solo space mission to raid the energy sources of other planets. He is alone with his orders from his “owners”, the IRIS Corps, and his own thoughts, which are informed by an illicit cache of books a previous pilot had left onboard. This discovery enriches his mind and elevates the concepts and language of the narrative through Destin’s point of view.

“What world, what kingdom, what shores? Words floated in his mind. They were bits and pieces of old books he’d read.”

The IRIS Corps, predictably, want their young Raiders to stick to training manuals and star maps and do not allow them to read “old books”. Even though this novel is set in the somewhat distant future, the fear of information from other sources and even ancient knowledge still lingers in the minds of those in power. Destin thinks he’s lucky in this regard because he is a solo pilot and no one else, or so he thinks, can discover his contraband stash of books or prevent him from setting foot on another planet if his screen goes blank from time to time. So he is lured by the green of the trees and the blue of real water and the warmth from the only small sun this “pretty planet” orbits…the sun he is supposed to steal with his spacecraft’s energy catcher. Destin loathes his job title: Raider.

He hesitates to follow this order because it will condemn a beautiful place to a sun-deprived death. But he is threatened by his Commander with the loss of his job and with being returned to the massive, dismal orphanage for war orphans from whence he came. Could things get any worse? Why, yes, he has a stowaway on board from the very planet he has just raided! A young woman with golden eyes, desperate to save her home, slipped into his spacecraft while he was looking at the way sunlight danced on the leaves and water.

What teen reader in 2023 is not familiar with war after war in this world? Or of thousands of children being separated, forcibly in most cases, from their parents and put into institutions to wait for adults to free them? Who has not heard of people desperately trying to save their own environment, whether a river valley, mountainside, prairie grassland, polluted lake or entire ocean. People being dehumanized is the age-old strategy of war-mongers and the destruction of other species and their habitats for the sake of profit continually haunt contemporary headlines.

Hence the high interest factor of this superbly written book for teens which pits Destin’s empathy for someone fiercely protective of her homeland against the insatiable need for energy by those in control who falsely declared her planet “uninhabited”. Now Destin is faced with the ultimate decision of his young life.

Award-winning writer Brooke Carter has contributed a timely and thoughtful tale, a social and political allegory and a beautifully depicted budding romance amidst hellish life or death circumstances…at a Grade 2 vocabulary level. It is no small literary feat to investigate the possibilities for the human condition in the future, which any reader would find engaging and pertinent to Planet Earth.

 Review of Chasing Africa: Fear Won’t Find Me Here -A Memoir
By Lisa Duncan
Published by Rocky Mountain Books (October 2022)
9781771605816-trade paperback   Also available as an e-book.

 

Originally published in the Fall 2022 BC Bookworld magazine.



Lisa Duncan’s memoir shows us the lifelong value of the Grand Adventure we chose when we were young. Our travels can be our escape hatches, our tickets to places where we can be whoever we want to be in the company of strangers. Like Duncan, we’ll learn lessons, harsh and hurtful as well as gloriously life-affirming,  lessons we have the rest of our lives to comprehend and to write about, if we so choose. If life favours us with good health, we may travel again. We’ll know what to pack and we’ll learn what emotional baggage to leave behind too.

 As readers, we can be grateful to have had armchair African adventures along with Duncan’s 24 year old self in 1996 but also, we’ll have been spared her difficult family history. What are the odds, in a family of six, for one member, the father, being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in his late fifties and another, a brother in his early twenties learning he has primary progressive multiple sclerosis? There is no known genetic link between these diseases and the father, an angry man, suffers from depression too. The author’s mother, a Dutch immigrant and briefly a free spirit in her own youth, became a a devoted caregiver to both men while in her early sixties.

Youngest-born of the four siblings, the author knew she wanted to travel so, with her mother’s blessing, she flew to Japan to study the language for a year when she was only seventeen. Among other jobs, she worked as a bilingual clerk at Vancouver Airport’s foreign exchange wicket. She attended UBC to study art history for her bachelor’s degree which her father, unable to further his own post-secondary education, scoffed at. But Duncan inherited her mother’s talent with languages as well as a strong and healthy body. She went on to teach Japanese as a second language and also visual arts history for several decades before earning her Masters in environmental education.

Where her life became most sadly conflicted was when she discovered rock climbing. She could not bear to share her passion for being outdoors and up high in the mountains with her brother and her father trapped in their deteriorating bodies or her mother trapped in the never-ending work as their care-giver. Guilt and self-censorship kicked in, guilt for having that strong and healthy body and an increasingly independent mind.

The maternal Dutch side of her family had settled on four different continents, one of which was Africa. Her long-standing dream of travelling to Africa took hold as a child, twirling the  globe to find her far-flung cousins. She began saving for her dream trip and she had the confidence to travel solo after her Japanese experience, and knowing she would meet her family in Johannesburg to begin with. She pored over guide books in the pre-Google era and carefully picked her must-see and-do destinations given her time frame, three and a half months, and a backpacker’s budget.

Lisa Duncan writes like a painter and brings her trained eye to every landscape, looking down at the view from her airplane window of the Zambezi River gleaming far below or up at the red dunes of Namibia in the early morning sun. She kept a travel diary and brings a charged immediacy to all the sights, smells, and sounds as she takes us with her in a cramped Volkswagen with no air-conditioning in 40 C heat. Or on the same Zambezi River in an inflatable kayak, having water fights with her fellow paddlers while keeping an eye out for lethal hippos and crocodiles. She loves meeting people and exploring the land and water, the spice-scented roads of Zanzibar or swimming across Lake Malawi to another island -and sensibly taking a boat ride back again.

The serendipity of backpacker travel, those magical moments which stay in the mind’s eye forever, are wonderfully presented here. Singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ to children while waiting hours for a bus to arrive is just one such moment. Yes, of course there are the skilled pickpockets, the romantic infatuations, the dysentery (a guaranteed romance killer), and the frustrations of dealing with bureaucracies but also the sheer happiness of meeting kind and generous locals and fellow travellers.

Even if your own mind and body no longer tolerate overnight twelve hour bus rides or long hikes down unlit roads to find a campground in the pouring rain, you can still enjoy the thrills of intrepid and thoughtful adventurers like Lisa Duncan.

Lisa Duncan now lives with her family in Squamish where she loves to hike, cycle, paddle and write. She has travelled widely, often on long-distance bicycle adventures.