Kids into books - The Silent One

This week's title: The Silent One

Author: Joy Cowley

Publisher: Penguin Books, $9.95

Illustrator: Colin Edgerley

Age group: 8-13 years


Behind the village rose the steep dark mountains, slopes covered in a jungle that hid waterfalls and beasts and many strange birds. Somewhere on those mountains, the pighunters were spreading their nets.

All his life, Jonasi had waited for this day. Year after year he'd watched the young men prepared their spears and nets for the long trek into the jungle. They would leave at sunrise with much energy and good humour and would return at the end of the day with their quarry, big pigs bleeding on poles, ready for the women's fires, and small pigs writhing and trussed with vines. He had watched the dances of welcome and later sat behind the hungers at the feasting, sharing leftovers with the other children.

Every pig hunt he had dreamed of the day when he, too, would go to the green darkness of the mountains.

This should have been his day, but the men had gone without him. They'd taken his thirteen-year foster brother Samu, even though Samu was too small to carry his share of the kill. They'd taken Aesake. They'd even taken that foolish Etika whose spear arm was so weak he couldn't hit a canoe at ten paces. But when Jonasi had rushed forward to join them, they'd pushed him back among the old men and women and children.


Tomorrow: Pictures of pain and revenge