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Indian in the Cupboard Study Guide

 

Omri receives several conventional gifts for his ninth birthday. However, two gifts you would expect to be of least interest to a young boy prove to be magical and exciting. Suitable for primary aged students this study guide has learning outcomes in key learning
areas such as English, Art and Society and Environment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Books for you to Read Right Now

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Beautiful Malice

~ Rebecca James

An international sensation that The Wall Street Journal called a “publishing phenomenon,” this layered, poignant, and chilling novel of psychological suspense is the year’s most stunning American fiction debut. From its wrenching opening to its shocking climax, Beautiful Malice unfolds a haunting story in which people, motives, and circumstances are never what they seem.

   

Full dark

~ Stephen King

I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger...' writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up '1922', the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerising tales from Stephen King, linked by the theme of retribution. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife Arlette proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness. In 'Big Driver', a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger is along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face to face with another stranger: the one inside herself. 'Fair Extension', the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Harry Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment. When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends 'A Good Marriage'. Like DIFFERENT SEASONS and FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT, which generated such enduring hit films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, FULL DARK, NO STARS proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.

   

Dannii: My Story 

Dannii Minogue

 

Dannii Minogue first appeared on television aged seven. She signed her first record deal at the age of seventeen and ever since she has been wowing audiences around the world with her charm and her charisma.  In this very personal and uplifting autobiography, Dannii talks openly for the first time about the highs and lows of her 30 year career; her marriage and subsequent divorce to Julian McMahon; the trials and tribulations of her role as an X Factor judge; her relationship with sister Kylie and, of course, becoming a mother. Explosively revealing, Dannii Minogue: My Story was one of the big autobiographies of 2010

 

   

Don't Sing at the Table: Life Lessons from My Grandmothers 

~Adriana Trigiani

Fans of novelist Trigiani will be delighted with this guided tour through the author's family history via her grandmothers, Lucia and Viola. She lovingly details the women's lives and recounts the lessons she's learned while offering a fascinating look at U.S. history from the perspective of her Italian-American forebears. She credits them with telling good stories: "I mimicked their work ethic imagining myself in a factory, layering words like tasks until the work was done. I took away more than life lessons from their stories; I made a career out of it." Here, Trigiani combines family and American history, reflections on lives well-lived, and sound advice to excellent effect, as a legacy to her daughter and a remembrance of two inimitable women

   

 The Power

~ Rhonda Byrne

You are meant to have an amazing life! This is the handbook to the greatest power in the Universe - The Power to have anything you want. Every discovery, invention, and human creation comes from The Power. Perfect health, incredible relationships, a career you love, a life filled with happiness, and the money you need to be, do, and have everything you want, all come from The Power. The life of your dreams has always been closer to you than you realized, because The Power - to have everything good in your life - is inside you. To create anything, to change anything, all it takes is just one thing...THE POWER.

   

The Finkler Question                                                          Winner 2010 Man Booker Prize

~ Howard Jacobson

Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding. It is also beautifully written … Indeed, there’s so much that is first rate in the manner of Jacobson’s delivery that I could write all day on his deployment of language without once mentioning what the book is about.”—Edward Docx, Observer (UK)

It takes in the mysteries of male friendship, the relentlessness of grief and the lure of emotional parasitism.”—Alex Clark, Guardian (UK)

The Finkler Question is characterized by [Jacobson’s] structuring skill and unsimplifying intelligence—this time picking through the connections and differences, hardly unremarked but given fresh treatment here, between vicariousness and parasitism, and between Jewishness, Judaism and Zionism.”—Leo Robson, New Statesman

   

 FREE RANGE KIDS has become a national movement, sparked by the incredible response to Lenore Skenazy s piece about allowing her 9-year-old ride the subway alone in NYC. Parent groups argued about it, bloggers, blogged, spouses became uncivil with each other, and the media jumped all over it. A lot of parents today, Skenazy says, see no difference between letting their kids walk to school and letting them walk through a firing range. Any risk is seen as too much risk. But if you try to prevent every possible danger or difficult in your child s everyday life, that child never gets a chance to grow up.

   

The Gene Thieves 

By Maria Quinn

Brilliant, lonely genetic scientist Piggy Brown is desperate for a child, but he's in a tricky legal situation. Dancer is a lawyer with his own reasons for wanting to grant Piggy's dearest wish - and he can set up Conjugal Contracts which push the envelope of the law. Dancer visits The Nest, the official centre for surrogates, and inveigles them into recommending someone they have used before, someone who won't ask too many questions about the baby she carries. But choosing a surrogate can be risky, and this one, Angela, comes with baggage: her own child, Molly, a six-year-old who has already seen too much of her mother's world. When a grotesque kidnapping occurs, everything is thrown into chaos and Jack Lee, Chief Investigator for the UN Ethical Science Council, decides it's time to take charge of the case - for the sake of humanity's future.

(Winner:  The inaugural Norma K Hemming Award for excellence in the exploration of themes of race, gender, class and sexuality in Australian speculative fiction )

   

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 

Mark Twain

Edited by Harriet E. Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer , Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz , Leslie Diane Myrick

"Dip into the first enormous volume of Twain's autobiography that he had decreed should not appear until 100 years after his death. And Twain will begin to seem strange again, alluring and still astonishing, but less sure-footed, and at times both puzzled and puzzling in ways that still resonate with us, though not the ways we might expect."   --New York Times

 

 

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