Ship Kings 02 Voyage of the Unquiet Ice

Review

I love this series. The Ship Kings is fast becoming one of my favourite modern children's series, along with Michelle Lovric's The Undrowned Child, and Helen Dunmore's Ingo (sensing a sea theme, anyone?) The second installment in the Ship Kings, Voyage of the Unquiet Ice, had me enthralled from the get go. If you seriously want adventure - good, old-fashioned adventure, but at the same time modern and fresh - then Ship Kings are the books for you.

Andrew McGahan is a great writer - he knows how to enthrall, how to invoke emotion, how to write beautiful passages that portray a character's feelings, without being pretentious and flowery. Voyage of the Unquiet Ice also benefited greatly from upping the pace a bit: one of the things I thought the first book had working against it. This book, however, is pretty much a non-stop adventure - it is thrilling and dangerous and pushes the characters to their very limits, and it perfectly captures the wonder Dow feels setting out on his first real adventure at sea.

Once again the descriptions of the ocean, and the connection people have to it, are wonderful. The descriptions in general are wonderful - once we get to the 'unquiet ice', McGahan throws us into the cold, the wet, the eerieness, the stillness, the danger, the terrible beauty of the icebergs. The atmosphere leaks onto the pages. The way Dow's life on the ship is described is very informative, but never dry.

I really enjoyed the characters in Voyage of the Unquiet Ice. They are a terrible, brutal, and fascinating bunch, and Dow is a great character to navigate the waters around them. I also found the political side to the story (something which generally loses me in fantasy) easy to comprehend and extremely interesting. Having ship kings politics play out in the background while Dow embarks on his adventures gives the story urgency and weight.

Read these books. Do it. You may struggle to get into them at first because they are quite dense - but persist, because they are fabulous. I haven't enjoyed such a well-written book since I read Seraphina last year. Can't wait until the third one.

'How Can We Help' my new play at ETC

News

If you head on down to the Essendon Theatre Company (Bradshaw Street, Essendon) tonight you will see my short play being presented on stage by some very talented and very funny actors.

'How Can We Help?' is a short play I wrote for Essendon Theatre Company's second season for 2013, Whatever Comes Along. It is set in the waiting room of a doctor's surgery and follows the dramas and quirks of the five patients waiting to see a doctor, and of course the harried receptionist. It was heaps of fun to write and is even funnier to watch (although I did feel like a bit of a loser laughing at my own jokes!) Directors Rosalin Shafik-Eid and Rhiannon Dhummet have done a great job, and it is really fulfilling to see my words (and also some of my own waiting room experiences) turned into a story on stage.

The show season runs from tonight, 13th June, to Saturday 29th June. All details can be found on the ETC website (www.essendontheatrecompany.com). There are also two other short plays being presented on the night.