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Self-esteem for older teens is hard to come by. In Brooke Carter's first novel for and about teens, Another Miserable Love Song (Orca, 2016), a girl down on her luck looks to join a punk band. Two concerns nag the heroine, Kallie Echo: will she find new purpose in punk? And will the drummer with a killer smile break her heart? In Carter's second, Learning Seventeen (Orca, 2018), smart and sarcastic Jane Learning feels she is being held captive in a Baptist reform school called New Hope Academy. A gorgeous bad girl with fiery hair, named Hannah, persuades her there's hope beyond the confines of the reform school that Jane prefers to call No Hope.
Carter's first poetry collection, Poco Loco (Anstruther Press, 2016) was published as a chapbook.
Her contemporary hi-lo (high interest, low vocabulary) books have received recognition such as Learning Seventeen (commended by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre as a Best Book for Teens), The Unbroken Hearts Club (a CCBC Starred Best Book for Teens) and Double or Nothing (a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection).
Brooke Carter was born and raised in British Columbia, where she earned an MFA in creative writing at UBC. She makes her home in Maple Ridge. Her stories, poems and articles have appeared in literary journals and national magazines.
***
Star Eaters by Brooke Carter
(Orca $10.95)
Review by Caroline Woodward (BCBW 2022)
Far into the future in a far-off galaxy, a cadre of high-tech pirates—known as Star Eaters—rob energy sources from other planets in order to feed their fleet of roving starships and serve a hunger for corporate profits in Brooke Carter’s latest teen novel, Star Eaters, to be released in February 2023. The Star Eaters’ work often leads to the destruction of the planets they raid.
A new Star Eater, Destin, is soon reluctant to fulfill his job duties. On a solo mission with orders from his “owners,” the IRIS Corps, Destin is distracted by an illicit cache of books a previous pilot had left onboard. This discovery enriches his thoughts as he approaches a planet he must raid.
“What world, what kingdom, what shores? Words floated in his mind,” writes Carter. “They were bits and pieces of old books he’d read.”
The IRIS Corps, predictably, want their young Raiders to stick to training manuals and star maps and do not allow them to read “old books.” Even though this novel is set in the distant future, the fear of information from other sources and even ancient knowledge still lingers in the minds of those in power. They understand the power of words.
Destin thinks he’s lucky in this regard because he is a solo pilot and no one else, or so he thinks, can discover his contraband stash of books or prevent him from setting foot on another planet if his screen goes blank from time to time. So, he is lured by the green of the trees and the blue of real water and the warmth from the only small sun of this “pretty planet” orbit…the sun he is supposed to steal with his spacecraft’s energy catcher.
Destin loathes his job title—Raider —and he hesitates to follow this order because it will condemn a beautiful place to a sun-deprived death. But he is threatened by his Commander with the loss of his job and with being returned to the massive, dismal orphanage for war orphans from whence he came. Could things get any worse? Why, yes, he has a stowaway on board from the very planet he has just raided! A young woman with golden eyes, desperate to save her home, slipped into his spacecraft while he was looking at the way sunlight danced on the leaves and water.
What teen reader today is not familiar with war after war in this world? Or of thousands of children being separated, forcibly in most cases, from their parents and put into institutions to wait for adults to free them? Who has not heard of people desperately trying to save their own environment, whether a river valley, mountainside, prairie grassland, polluted lake or entire ocean. People being dehumanized is the age-old strategy of warmongers; and the destruction of other species and their habitats for the sake of profit continually haunt contemporary headlines.
Hence the high interest factor of this superbly written book for teens, which pits Destin’s empathy for someone fiercely protective of her homeland against the insatiable need for energy by those in control who falsely declared her planet “uninhabited.” Now Destin is faced with the ultimate decision of his young life.
Carter’s novel is action-packed yet thoughtful, as it considers the ethics of blindly following orders and thereby causing mortal damage to other species and entire environments.
Victoria-based Orca book publishers has had great success over the past two decades with a specialized series of books written for teens in the hi-lo (high interest, low vocabulary) category. Orca has attracted renowned writers in other genres to contribute to their trailblazing literacy lineup, such as Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Marty Chan, Carrie Mac, Mahtab Narsimham, Eric Walters and Pam Withers. Wilderness adventures, sports, LGBTQ+, romance, fantasy, horror and lots of mysteries pique the diverse reading interests of 12-to-16-year-olds as they strive to make sense of written English—and, bonus, some are translated to French as well.
Star Eaters is a novel written for what is likely the most challenging new series, Orca Anchor, developed for teens with a reading level below or at Grade 2. The publisher has integrated design and production features to make reading even more accessible: dyslexic-friendly fonts (typefaces), cream-coloured paper and a larger page size with wider margins (and thus, fewer words per line).
Award-winning writer Brooke Carter has contributed a timely and thoughtful tale in this Orca Anchor series; a social and political allegory and a beautifully depicted budding romance amidst hellish life or death circumstances…at a Grade 2 vocabulary level. It is no small literary feat to investigate the possibilities for the human condition in the future, which any reader would find engaging and pertinent to Planet Earth. 9781459834675
Caroline Woodward wrote and illustrated a short story collection called Work is a 4-Letter Word for adult learners as part of a National Literacy project.
BOOKS
Another Miserable Love Song (Orca, 2016) $9.95 Ages 12+ 978-1-4598-1312-0
Poco Loco (Anstruther Press, 2016) $10 978-0-9948146-8-5 [Poetry]
Learning Seventeen (Orca, 2018) $9.95 978-1-459815-53-7
Lucky Break (Orca, 2018) $9.95 978-14598164-11
Unbroken Hearts Club (Orca, 2018) $9.95 978-1-45982-061-6
The Stone of Sorrow (Orca, 2020) $14.95 978-1-45982-439-3
Double or Nothing (Orca, 2020) $10.95 978-1-45982-381-5
Sulfur Heart (Orca, 2022) $10.95 9781459831605
Star Eaters (Orca, 2023) $10.95 9781459834675
Ghost Girl (Orca, 2023) $8.95 9781459836884
[BCBW 2023]
ARTICLE
Double or Nothing by Brooke Carter (Orca $10.95)
[BCBW 2021]
Essie Tomasi starts college at the age of fifteen. By eighteen, she is already taking advanced courses. It’s clear that Essie and her identical twin Aggie are geniuses.
What no one knows is that Essie has a serious gambling addiction.
In a third-year English class where Essie is supposed to be watching the movie Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, looking for particular themes, she thinks about a thousand other things during a scene where the characters are talking about the odds of coin flips.
Readers learn what is going through Essie’s mind in her interior monologue: “I’m thinking about coin combinations on the screen. I’m thinking about probability theory. I’m thinking about the odds of my coin matching the flips the characters make. I’m thinking about Hamlet and the sucky life he’s living. To be or not to be, dude. Yeah, that is the question.”
But mostly, the monologue reveals Essie is thinking about her online gambling and stock trading apps, and the several windows that are open on her computer waiting for her attention. “Every second that goes by, I’m losing money,” says Essie.
Her gambling gets so bad that Essie wrangles a dorm room to herself rather than rooming with Aggie. Essie tells her family that she needs space to figure out who she is besides a twin. But it’s really so that she can gamble in private.
It gets to the point where Essie makes a bet she can’t cover and Aggie comes to the rescue, making a dangerous deal herself. Together the two have to find a way out of their gambling mess or face daunting consequences. 978-1-45982-381-5
Carter's first poetry collection, Poco Loco (Anstruther Press, 2016) was published as a chapbook.
Her contemporary hi-lo (high interest, low vocabulary) books have received recognition such as Learning Seventeen (commended by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre as a Best Book for Teens), The Unbroken Hearts Club (a CCBC Starred Best Book for Teens) and Double or Nothing (a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection).
Brooke Carter was born and raised in British Columbia, where she earned an MFA in creative writing at UBC. She makes her home in Maple Ridge. Her stories, poems and articles have appeared in literary journals and national magazines.
***
Star Eaters by Brooke Carter
(Orca $10.95)
Review by Caroline Woodward (BCBW 2022)
Far into the future in a far-off galaxy, a cadre of high-tech pirates—known as Star Eaters—rob energy sources from other planets in order to feed their fleet of roving starships and serve a hunger for corporate profits in Brooke Carter’s latest teen novel, Star Eaters, to be released in February 2023. The Star Eaters’ work often leads to the destruction of the planets they raid.
A new Star Eater, Destin, is soon reluctant to fulfill his job duties. On a solo mission with orders from his “owners,” the IRIS Corps, Destin is distracted by an illicit cache of books a previous pilot had left onboard. This discovery enriches his thoughts as he approaches a planet he must raid.
“What world, what kingdom, what shores? Words floated in his mind,” writes Carter. “They were bits and pieces of old books he’d read.”
The IRIS Corps, predictably, want their young Raiders to stick to training manuals and star maps and do not allow them to read “old books.” Even though this novel is set in the distant future, the fear of information from other sources and even ancient knowledge still lingers in the minds of those in power. They understand the power of words.
Destin thinks he’s lucky in this regard because he is a solo pilot and no one else, or so he thinks, can discover his contraband stash of books or prevent him from setting foot on another planet if his screen goes blank from time to time. So, he is lured by the green of the trees and the blue of real water and the warmth from the only small sun of this “pretty planet” orbit…the sun he is supposed to steal with his spacecraft’s energy catcher.
Destin loathes his job title—Raider —and he hesitates to follow this order because it will condemn a beautiful place to a sun-deprived death. But he is threatened by his Commander with the loss of his job and with being returned to the massive, dismal orphanage for war orphans from whence he came. Could things get any worse? Why, yes, he has a stowaway on board from the very planet he has just raided! A young woman with golden eyes, desperate to save her home, slipped into his spacecraft while he was looking at the way sunlight danced on the leaves and water.
What teen reader today is not familiar with war after war in this world? Or of thousands of children being separated, forcibly in most cases, from their parents and put into institutions to wait for adults to free them? Who has not heard of people desperately trying to save their own environment, whether a river valley, mountainside, prairie grassland, polluted lake or entire ocean. People being dehumanized is the age-old strategy of warmongers; and the destruction of other species and their habitats for the sake of profit continually haunt contemporary headlines.
Hence the high interest factor of this superbly written book for teens, which pits Destin’s empathy for someone fiercely protective of her homeland against the insatiable need for energy by those in control who falsely declared her planet “uninhabited.” Now Destin is faced with the ultimate decision of his young life.
Carter’s novel is action-packed yet thoughtful, as it considers the ethics of blindly following orders and thereby causing mortal damage to other species and entire environments.
Victoria-based Orca book publishers has had great success over the past two decades with a specialized series of books written for teens in the hi-lo (high interest, low vocabulary) category. Orca has attracted renowned writers in other genres to contribute to their trailblazing literacy lineup, such as Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Marty Chan, Carrie Mac, Mahtab Narsimham, Eric Walters and Pam Withers. Wilderness adventures, sports, LGBTQ+, romance, fantasy, horror and lots of mysteries pique the diverse reading interests of 12-to-16-year-olds as they strive to make sense of written English—and, bonus, some are translated to French as well.
Star Eaters is a novel written for what is likely the most challenging new series, Orca Anchor, developed for teens with a reading level below or at Grade 2. The publisher has integrated design and production features to make reading even more accessible: dyslexic-friendly fonts (typefaces), cream-coloured paper and a larger page size with wider margins (and thus, fewer words per line).
Award-winning writer Brooke Carter has contributed a timely and thoughtful tale in this Orca Anchor series; a social and political allegory and a beautifully depicted budding romance amidst hellish life or death circumstances…at a Grade 2 vocabulary level. It is no small literary feat to investigate the possibilities for the human condition in the future, which any reader would find engaging and pertinent to Planet Earth. 9781459834675
Caroline Woodward wrote and illustrated a short story collection called Work is a 4-Letter Word for adult learners as part of a National Literacy project.
BOOKS
Another Miserable Love Song (Orca, 2016) $9.95 Ages 12+ 978-1-4598-1312-0
Poco Loco (Anstruther Press, 2016) $10 978-0-9948146-8-5 [Poetry]
Learning Seventeen (Orca, 2018) $9.95 978-1-459815-53-7
Lucky Break (Orca, 2018) $9.95 978-14598164-11
Unbroken Hearts Club (Orca, 2018) $9.95 978-1-45982-061-6
The Stone of Sorrow (Orca, 2020) $14.95 978-1-45982-439-3
Double or Nothing (Orca, 2020) $10.95 978-1-45982-381-5
Sulfur Heart (Orca, 2022) $10.95 9781459831605
Star Eaters (Orca, 2023) $10.95 9781459834675
Ghost Girl (Orca, 2023) $8.95 9781459836884
[BCBW 2023]
ARTICLE
Double or Nothing by Brooke Carter (Orca $10.95)
[BCBW 2021]
Essie Tomasi starts college at the age of fifteen. By eighteen, she is already taking advanced courses. It’s clear that Essie and her identical twin Aggie are geniuses.
What no one knows is that Essie has a serious gambling addiction.
In a third-year English class where Essie is supposed to be watching the movie Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, looking for particular themes, she thinks about a thousand other things during a scene where the characters are talking about the odds of coin flips.
Readers learn what is going through Essie’s mind in her interior monologue: “I’m thinking about coin combinations on the screen. I’m thinking about probability theory. I’m thinking about the odds of my coin matching the flips the characters make. I’m thinking about Hamlet and the sucky life he’s living. To be or not to be, dude. Yeah, that is the question.”
But mostly, the monologue reveals Essie is thinking about her online gambling and stock trading apps, and the several windows that are open on her computer waiting for her attention. “Every second that goes by, I’m losing money,” says Essie.
Her gambling gets so bad that Essie wrangles a dorm room to herself rather than rooming with Aggie. Essie tells her family that she needs space to figure out who she is besides a twin. But it’s really so that she can gamble in private.
It gets to the point where Essie makes a bet she can’t cover and Aggie comes to the rescue, making a dangerous deal herself. Together the two have to find a way out of their gambling mess or face daunting consequences. 978-1-45982-381-5
