Meet the author
Andy Griffiths, the bestselling children's author of the 'Treehouse' series and 'The Day My Bum Went Psycho'.
Bestselling author John Marsden sold millions of his teen fiction books and has now turned his skills to adult literature. He says his real achievements stem from life as a school principal and stepfather to six boys.
Ghost Boy is a timeslip novel set partly in the grisly past of the Quarantine Station in Sydney.
Froggy dreams about drowning. When his nightmare begins to come true, he is saved by the mysterious ghost boy, Tad. Froggy learns that his future lies in understanding the past, when Sydney was gripped by disease and there was death and disorder at the Quarantine Station.
In her latest novel for middle grade readers, Ghost Boys, Jewell Parker Rhodes blends history with current events and historical characters with fictional ones to weave a tale of an African-American boy whose life is cut short by a white policeman’s bullet. We spoke with Rhodes about her personal experiences of racism in America, why Emmett Till, an African-American teenager lynched in Mississippi in 1955, plays a major role in a story set in contemporary Chicago, and how writing this novel was painful, but also cathartic for her.