Star Jumps

Publisher: Walker Books, Australia

Release Date: 2009

ISBN: 9 781 9211 5072 2

Star Jumps won the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, for Children’s Fiction in 2010.

Star Jumps is a warm narrative verse-novel about a family’s life on the farm during harsh times. When Ruby, Connor and Keely invent games a Star Jump is always involved.

Marshmallow weed and calves. Tunnels and games. Hope and tears. Birth and death. These are all aspects of a farm life. A dairy farm life. Star Jumps is a book researched through years of living on a dairy farm. It’s a slice of social history. Farming as it is, not farming full of stereotypes.

My husband and I were dairy farmers for many years and although the book certainly springs out of closely lived details, the characters are fictional.

Teachers notes for Star Jumps 

 

This novel just flowed, a rare event but I knew I wanted to write about drought and a dairy farm, to show part of Australia’s rural history as it really is- so much of this book is modeled in a way on our own children growing up on a dairy farm. With one difference- once I’d set Ruby on a quest, there was a solution she had to find, her own solution. And miraculously I used something I did as a child on my childhood farm to ease the drought in Ruby’s world.

Awards:

Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards for Children's Fiction, 2010

Short-listed for the Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year Awards, Lower Primary Category, 2010

Notable mention in the Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards, 2010