The Carmel College team created Wordles for each of the shortlisted novels. Students worked in small groups and brainstormed five letter words they felt best represented the novel and then tried to find the best ‘Wordle’ fit for them.
They then wrote a short summary, explaining their process:
GRACE NOTES:
Grace Notes is a prose novel about Grace, a talented violinist, and Crux, an aspiring street artist, who struggle to own and express their art during the 2020 lockdowns. The story centrally depicts the love the pair share for their creative outlets, music and paint, and for each other. Both grapple with the separation not only caused by the virus, but also their cautious, protective parents. While Grace dreams of playing contemporary music in bars, her lawyer mother wants her to pursue a safe academic career and quit making all that noise. Crux’s dad is supportive of his art but restricts him to the family garage to stop Crux getting on the wrong side of the law. The words represent aspects of the novel, represented in a popular quarantine creation. This book deserves to win because of its powerful language and portrayal of the COVID-era and following your calling.
TWO CAN PLAY THAT GAME:
We created a Wordle that ended in rival because throughout the entirety of the novel, two teens go back and forth in their relationship from friends to rivals. Their dreams both revolve around video games, because they wanted to solve puzzles within those games to achieve a ticket that will make their dreams come true.
A HUNGER OF THORNS:
For the CBCA Shadow Judging Competition, a wordle was created for the novel, ‘A Hunger of Thorns’ by Lili Wilkinson, created out of six five-letter words that all related to the novel. The words story, ruins, witch, gloom, Maude and magic were chosen. These words were chosen as the book focuses on the main character, Maude, who likes to tell stories and finds out she is a witch who can conduct magic and goes on an adventure to some forest ruins and faces doom and gloom. The final word, magic, was chosen as the entire novel is centred around the concept of magic.
THE QUIET AND THE LOUD:
During The Quiet and The Loud by Helena Fox, George is left alone with nothing but her own voice, the soft rocking from the kayak, and a bird’s call far away. This incredible novel moves forward from this moment showing the readers how George heals from this influential moment in her life and the trials and tribulations that come from love, family and healing. Her healing includes learning how to move past the dreadful silence she traps herself in and learning how to speak- how to be loved. This book is deserving of CBCA Book of The Year for Older Readers Award due to how well Fox encapsulated the difficult feelings that come with trauma and forgiveness, and how she did so through the Character of George accurately shows PTSD and the issues of our modern world with mental health representation.
INKFLOWER:
Filled with the shame of his past, Lisa’s father comes to terms with the fact that he finally needs to tell the truth. After the Mayor of Glenrock is told that he has six months left to live, he gathers his family each Friday night to reveal the horrors of his story that he has kept hidden for far too long. But his daughter, Lisa, doesn’t want to hear about it. Lisa has secrets too, secrets that she is just as ashamed of as her father is of his. No one knows about Lisa being Jewish. No one knows about her dad being sick. No one knows about the boy that was sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz. But this is his story and his story to tell. And for once, he isn’t sorry.
Beautifully retold by his teenage daughter, this coming-of-age true story is set in 1980’s Australia and captures everything in a novel you would want to read. Delving into the depth of human emotions, Ink Flower is a powerful message of hope in the unlikeliest of places.
LET’S NEVER SPEAK OF THIS AGAIN:
Our focus word was ‘drama’, we felt that this best summed up the story in Let’s Never Speak of This Again’. We also chose the words phone, grief, bride, crash and drank as each of these words link to key events and themes within the novel. This was a hard-hitting novel that covered a range of emotions, it ultimately all comes back to the drama within our lives.
