Where the river runs gold by Sita Brahmachari

Shifa - the one who heals ...

There are scenes near the beginning of this book that I found so horrifying I just had to stop reading and take a breath. In this world of the future, society is completely stratified. Citizens are divided into Paragons, Freedoms and Outlanders. The rich, called Paragons, live almost obscenely opulent lives while the poor live in fear of the authorities in Kairos City.  There are optical eye checking points all over the city. Someone is always watching you.

Shifa has decided to sell her hair so she can leave some money for her father when she, and her brother Themba, leave to work in long hot polytunnels at the pollination farm. The siblings will have no contact with Nabil for the next five years. Shifa goes to a shop called Agora Hairtakers. She has to remove all her clothing and take a shower. Her clothes are taken away and steam cleaned. When she emerges from the shower her daisy dress is returned to her and it is now sparkling clean. Shifa sits in a seat and the hairtaker:

"opened her sharp metal shears. Shifa held her breath and was unable to stop the flow of tears as Nita made a clean sheer cut at the nape of her neck. She caught the length of hair in a pouch-like contraption attached to the chair."

Shifa is paid four hundred and sixty groits. But later she sees hair just like hers for sale for 1,000 groits. "With the groits she had in her pocket she wouldn't even be able to buy a quarter of her own hair."

So much happens in this story and working at the Freedom Farm is every bit as horrible as I anticipated. When the children arrive their palms are tattooed with a unique sunflower, their finger nails are treated (but Shifa bites her nails so this procedure is wretched) and the children are taken to have their eyes changed. The machine is called an Eyequaliser.

"Shifa felt the spherical orb inside the Eyequaliser pincer her lids open, as a jelly like substance shot into her eyes. ... Sifa glanced down at the tattoo on her hand. How she could pick out every coded seed dot in the centre of the sunflower. She peered into the distance, but the survivor tree had grown fuzzy, shimmering like a mirage on the horizon."

The children's eyes are changed because they need to be able to see very find details when they work pollinating many different flowers. This procedure is especially terrible for Themba and while Shifa wants to help, she finds she can no longer protect her precious brother from the horrors that continue to unfold.

Where the River runs gold will be published in July 2019. I highly recommend this book for senior primary and junior high school students. I do hope this book reaches a wide audience. You can read more plot details on the publisher web site. On her web site Sita talks about the inspiration for her story. She other books by Sita on the Love Reading 4 kids site.

I would follow this book with How to Bee which also explores the idea of our future world without bees.  It would be interesting to compare the idea of children as pollinators and to consider which plants are considered important. In How to Bee it is fruit trees and in Where the river runs gold the children pollinate flowers for the rich people to enjoy. The idea of exploiting children for this unnecessary luxury adds to the power of this dystopian story.

The Dog Runner by Bren MacDibble

In her earlier award winning book How to Bee the premise was a dystopian world without bees. The Dog Runner continues this same genre imagining another dystopian future this one where ALL grass crops in the world are killed by an invasive fungus.

Take a moment to think about grasses:
Wheat
Rice
Corn
Oats
Barley
Rye
Sorghum
Millet

Now think about the consequences of this. No food for grazing animals means no meat. No wheat means no bread and other products from flour such as pasta. No rice means this crisis has international consequences I can hardly imagine.

In the city there is a constant threat of violence. Bren MacDibble takes a close view by focusing on one small family living in an Australian city. Infrastructure is breaking down. Government promises of food are just empty words. Looting and extortion are rife. Ella, her older brother Emery and their dad are living in their apartment but they don't feel safe. Ella's mum, Jackie, has not returned. She has been gone for 8 months supposedly restoring essential services but now all the electricity has failed. Ella thinks mum will return any day but she doesn't. Then dad leaves to find Jackie and he does not return. Emery knows it is time to take action. His mother (not Jackie) and grandparents live in a remote outback region. The journey will take many days and it will be dangerous but staying in this city is also dangerous. Emery knows there will be food if they can just reach his Grandmother who is growing mushrooms in hidden caves.

Living with Ella and Emery are three huge dogs. Early in the story, Emery adds two more to the team. The dogs are attached to a set of harnesses and the kids are able use a dogsled with wheels. The race is on. Not against time but against the violence of desperate city gangs who are moving further away from the city in search of food. One really sinister aspect of this is the use of electric bikes. In one harrowing scene Ella and Emery very narrowly escape a gang of thugs who arrive on these silent vehicles.

The journey is made more difficult by their lack of food for themselves, the need to keep feeding five huge dogs and their daily need for water on our dry continent. I won't explain why but I may never look at a tin of sardines in quite the same way after reading this book.

The strength of this writing comes from the way Bren MacDibble allows her readers to 'join the dots'. You will need to notice every tiny detail so you can work out these family relationships. Reaching the farm will mean there is hope for the future, for Ella and her family and perhaps for everyone but just how this will happen is sure to surprise you.

I would follow The Dog Runner with an old book that you might find in a school library - Chance of Safety. There are some violent scenes in The Dog Runner so I would recommend it for readers aged 11+. For teachers it might be a good exercise to compare some of the more violent scenes with an old book called Angie's Ankles by Gary Hurle.

You can read over twenty pages on the publisher web site. I was lucky to have an Advance Reader Copy and I actually read it twice which is something I very rarely do. The Dog Runner will be published in February, 2019. I am a huge fan of How to Bee (CBCA Book of the Year Younger Readers 2018) and so I am happy to see these two books have related cover designs by the same illustrator Joanna Hunt.

Forbidden Memories by Jamila Gavin

In a few months I will attend the IBBY Congress in London so I am trying to read as many books as I can by some of the major speakers. I started this week with a book I have loved for years and years – Forbidden Memories by Jamila Gavin. Several decades ago there was a movie called Logan’s Run – Forbidden Memories has a similar theme as does The Giver by Lois Lowry and The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.

The world has been destroyed and people have been forced to set up a new society underground or in a dome far removed from the surface of the earth. In Forbidden Memories, as in the other books I have mentioned, the government controls all aspects of citizens' lives. Babies are raised for specific occupations and roles in the community. In Forbidden Memories we read “The dome controlled everything; it decided who should be born, how, when and with what genes. From the egg bank, the determiners selected future citizens for the different zones and fertilized them to be thinkers, artists, wealth creators and operators, adding or manipulating genes as necessary.”

Sasha and Devi are twins.  They have been raised as an experiment and so they are under extra scrutiny. Devi will become a scientist and Sasha will be a dancer. The story opens on separation day. Their childhood is over and the girls will not meet again until Regeneration Day which happens every ten years but Devi has a plan. She has made sure the girls can still communicate via their thoughts. This is highly illegal and dangerous but they are desperate to stay connected. Chapter two opens one hundred years later. It is once again Regeneration Day and Devi is excited to be seeing Sasha. Regeneration is like a car service with all sorts of new parts added so that the aging process is all but eliminated in this world but this time the regeneration goes horribly wrong. Devi sees an image of the sky and she transmits it to Sasha during the process. Mind pictures are forbidden. Sasha is immediately taken away to be decommissioned. Devi must now race to save her sister and in the process she will discover the truth about the Dome and about the Earth outside.

This is an old book. It is a very short novel with only 80 pages but it is such a powerful and thought provoking story. It is in my school library and I do hope it is in yours.