| "48 SHADES OF BROWN"
Author: Nick Earls
Interest Level: Upper Grades (9-12)
ATOS Reading Level: 4.9
AR Points: 10.0
Publisher Recommended Age: 12+
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Book Type: Trade Paperback
Pages: 288
Book Description:
Australian teenager Dan Bancroft had a choice to make: go to Geneva with his parents for a year, or move into a house with his bass-playing aunt Jacq and her friend Naomi. He chose Jacq's place, and his life will never be the same. This action-packed and laugh-out-loud-funny novel navigates Dan's chaotic world of calculus, roommates, birds, and love.
Book Reviews:
School Library Journal: "...insightful, appealing, and very funny novel...about a teenage boy whose...father takes a job in Geneva and he...(stays)...in Australia..." Grades 9+.
Publishers Weekly: "Through Dan's voice, Earls perfectly captures the obsessive, self-conscious, confused state of mind that goes along with adolescence. A vibrant rendition of growing pains."
VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) (Starred Review): "With small details about throwing up, basil, Romeo and Juliet, brown birds, postcards, and sex, Earls build a too-true story that neither older young adults nor adults will be able to put down as their smiles become belly laughs that lead them to new perspectives."
Horn Book: "Dan is a good kid, and his ruefully observed narration of unrequited love will keep the attention of any boy once persuaded into its pages."
Book Awards:
Australia: CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers 2000
About the Author:
Nick Earls (born October 8, 1963 in Newtownards, Northern Ireland) is an award-winning novelist from Brisbane, Australia. He writes humorous popular fiction about everyday life, and is often compared to Nick Hornby. The majority of Earls' novels are set in his hometown of Brisbane, a fact which led to his high local profile, and his fronting of a major Brisbane tourism campaign. Nick Earls emigrated to Australia from Northern Ireland in 1972 with his parents and sister, and attended the Anglican Church Grammar School while living in Brisbane. He completed a medical degree at the University of Queensland, and worked as a GP before turning to writing.Zigzag Street, his second novel, won the Betty Trask Award in 1998 (sharing with Kiran Desai's Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard).
His young-adult novel 48 Shades of Brown won the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for older readers in 2000. Several of his novels (After January and 48 Shades of Brown) have been adapted for theatre, and 48 Shades of Brown was adapted into a film entitled 48 Shades, released in August 2006. Earls has also written other novels, including Bachelor Kisses, Perfect Skin, Solid Gold, World of Chickens, The Thompson Gunner, and young adult novels After January, and Making Laws for Clouds.
Earls has also contributed to the four best-selling anthologies in the Girls' Night In series as well as Kids' Night In and Kids' Night In 2 as editor. His most recent novels are Monica Bloom, based on his own adolescent experience of an ill-fated crush; and Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight, co-authored with Rebecca Sparrow. |
