 | In 2009 Leanne Hall won the Text Prize for Young Adult and Children's Writing for her novel This is Shyness. That novel has now been published and the author has been interviewed by Jo Case for Readings.com: |
The book began with the names of Wildgirl and Wolfboy, the two narrators, and thinking about what kind of place they would inhabit led to the 'suburb of darkness idea'. From there, the central theme of the one long night emerged. 'I wanted to write about one of those really, really crazy magical nights - probably one of the first really crazy magical nights you ever have as a teenager - and how you never forget that kind of situation.'
The teenagers in the book are vividly drawn - not just their youthful bravado and conscious hipster cool, or the delicious, volatile fizz of attraction at that time of life, but their transitional state. They're no longer children, but not yet adults - and while they're both on an irreversible path away from childhood, they're young enough to relish a brief return to some of its forgotten pleasures, even (perhaps especially) as their problems - and their feelings for each other - are anything but childish. Wolfboy and Wildgirl ride their bikes and explore underground tunnels on their quest to recover a precious item of stolen property from the sugar-crazed Kidds. 'I thought it was pretty funny to set a couple of urban streetwise teenagers on a quite old-fashioned quest for an object,' laughs Leanne. 'To me that was the biggest joke, to send these really cool teenagers on a quest for an object, which is such a sort of dorky childhood thing.'
