Frankie Parsons is twelve going on old man: an apparently sensible, talented Year 8 with a drumbeat of worrying questions steadily gaining volume in his head:
Are the smoke alarm batteries flat?
Does the cat, and therefore the rest of the family, have worms?
Will bird flu strike and ruin life as we know it?
Is the kidney-shaped spot on his chest actually a galloping cancer?
Most of the significant people in Frankie’s world – his father, his brother and sister, his great-aunts, his best friend Gigs – seem gloriously untroubled by worry. Only Ma takes seriously his catalogue of persistent anxieties; only Ma listens patiently to his 10 p.m. queries.
But of course, it is Ma who is the cause of the most worrying question of all, the one that Frankie can never bring himself to ask.
Then the new girl arrives at school and has questions of her own: relentless, unavoidable questions.
So begins the unravelling of Frankie Parson’s carefully controlled world. So begins the painful business of fronting up to the unpalatable: the ultimate 10 p.m. question.
The 10PM Question is a novel which defies all age categories. It does so with a sparkling wit and an operatic cast of characters so delightful and maddening they become dear to us.
A tender, beautifully told and endearing story. By the end, you’ll wish you had a Frankie Parsons of your own.
(From Publisher). |
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Kate De Goldi is a full time writer who grew up in Christchurch and now lives in Wellington. Her first book was for adults: called like you, really, it was published under the name Kate Flannery, and gave a series of interlinked short stories about the women in a Catholic family. Since then she has won numerous awards and accolades for her fiction, including the American Express and Katherine Mansfield Awards for short stories, and the overall Children’s Book Award in 1997 for her young adult novel Sanctuary.
In 2000, her novel about adoption, Closed, Stranger won an Honour Award in the New Zealand Post Children’s and Young Adult Book Awards, and in 2001, Kate was made an Arts Foundation Laureate. Her book Clubs, illustrated by Jacqui Colley, won the picture book category of the New Zealand Post Children’s and Young Adult Awards in 2005; that year it also won the overall book of the year, and it also gained the Russell Clark Award at the LIANZA Book Awards.
Kate’s most recent novel, The 10PM Question (2008), won Book of the Year and Best Young Adult fiction at the New Zealand Post Children’s and Young Adult Book Awards. It is also a finalist in the Montana NZ Book Awards (announced 27/7/09), a finalist in the LIANZA Children's Book Awards - Esther Glen Award - Fiction (announced 10/8/09), and has been shortlisted for the Nielson BookData NZ Booksellers' Choice Award. The 10PM Question will also appear in the international publication The White Ravens 2009. The novel has spent many weeks on the national bestseller list, has sold over 10,000 copies and so has earned Silver Premier NZ Bestseller status. It is due to be published in North America later this year.
Kate is also very well known as an astute and energetic book reviewer for radio and television. |
