Conrad Cooper's Last Stand by Leonie Agnew - Puffin Books, 2014.

This children's book by Leonie Agnew was a finalist in the NZ Children's Book Awards this year, and won the 2015 Esther Glen Medal for Junior Fiction and the Storylines Notable Book Award 2015. I have been wanting to read it for a while and cherished hopes that it might prove a good junior text: knowing that it was set against a backdrop of the Bastion Point protest I hoped it might actually be a political text which would address Maori Land rights and Treaty issues from a child-friendly perspective.  In a way it does and, via the persona of Conrad's Irish next door neighbour, Mrs O'Leary, even manages a few pointed parallels between British colonialism in Ireland and New Zealand.

Yet I was doomed to disappointment. Firstly, as I probably could have worked out in advance from it being in the Junior Fiction section of the book awards rather than Young Adult fiction, this book is written for a younger audience than Year 9 or 10, featuring a primary-aged protagonist. Secondly, despite some nice touches in the narrative and dialogue, Leonie Agnew falls into the fatal trap of 'dumbing down' her writing for the younger audience. To Kill a Mockingbird and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas have shown that it is not necessary to 'dumb-down' in order to tell a story through the eyes of a child protagonist who does not fully understand everything they are narrating. All we achieve by this 'age-appropriate' dumbing down is a nation of students with an incredibly narrow vocabulary, reading about things they already know.

However, my third and greatest disappointment with the novel was that it is not a fun story about kids getting political, rather the main plot revolves around Conrad coping with his dysfunctional family: an abusive step-father and his co-dependent mother. It is The God Boy updated by 20 years, cleaned up slightly and without a murder; just not as well-written.

However, before I discount the possibility of using the book totally, I would like to read some reviews from the target audience. Maybe young people today do want to read books about children living in apparently hopeless family situations. Personally, I just found it depressing.