Super Susannah!

Susannah McFarlane, like her heroine EJ12, is a girl’s hero and also a boy’s one. Susannah is on a crusade to write fiction that is age appropriate while at the same time being engaging and inspiring for young girls and boys.

I spoke to Susannah ahead of her recent visit to Tasmania on her ‘hooking kids’ and ‘code breaking and beast-making’ tour and events at Fullers bookshops.

You won’t see Susannah’s heroine EJ at a shopping mall very often because she has the world to save and does it with the use of intelligence, including a mastery of maths, which gives her the skills to deftly decipher codes. EJ likes maths because it is ‘not changeable and it is ‘trust worthy’.

Where EJ differs from other female heroines like Hermione Grainger (who shares a investigative intelligence) is that while Hermione might have been the brains behind the boys she was also alongside them, a side kick to the boys. EJ ‘is front and centre’, there are no boys she works alongside, in fact in the EJ12 books all the characters are women apart from EJ’s dad and brother.

Susannah wants to encourage girls to read by showing them positive role models. Susannah recalls the famous lateral thinking puzzle that tells the story of a father and son involved in an accident and the son being rushed to hospital where the surgeon remarks ‘I can’t operate on that boy because he is my son’ The enigma is ‘how can this be?”

Of course, now, we are able for the most part to answer this by saying the surgeon is the boy’s mother.

Susan is pleasantly delighted to note that people she has posed this story to of recent times, have come up with the correct answer but it wasn’t always that way. In the not so distant past the thinking puzzle was used to ‘break down perceptions’ that only men could be surgeons.

It’s not only girls that Susannah is aiding in her quest.

Susannah also helping reluctant boy readers. Her series ‘Boy vs Beast’ taps into the things boys are interested in, computer games, visual entertainment, and beasts in a battle with humankind. Boys that do have trouble reading are often given texts that might be deemed of a more childish nature to work with and this can be embarrassing for them and so put them off reading forever.

Susannah’s texts cater to boys interest but are also are carefully researched to include less words on a page but more of the words they need to learn. At each reading success their self esteem grows rather than if they use the more inappropriate texts aimed at younger readers which Susannah suggests ‘create a deeper chasm’. In a nutshell Susannah’s books are providing ‘ reading in their own terms’.

Susannah’s experiments have been a success and she is always impressed by the mother consumer who is so enamoured of the difference in her child that she goes that extra step of getting in touch with the publishers to thank them for causing their sons not to come to dinner because they are reading!

Its a lot of blood sweat and tears that Susannah has put in to this mission and sometimes it might seem an insurmountable one to get every discouraged child reading but Susannah cites to me the story of the starfish.

You can read the story below,

‘The Starfish Story
Everyone can make a difference
Loren Eiseley

One day at the beach we noticed someone picking up starfish that had been washed ashore at low tide.

One at a time he was throwing them back into the sea. When we asked why, he replied “If I don’t they’ll die from lack of oxygen.”

“But there are thousands of starfish on this beach and thousands more on other beaches, you can’t possibly make a difference,” we said.

Throwing another starfish back into the sea, he smiled and shouted jubilantly “Made a difference to that one!”

And one by one we all can.

[from http://www.ardoch.asn.au/4392550/ardoch-youth-foundation-making-education-a-reali.htm]

Susannah’s book series ‘EJ12’ and ‘Boy vs Beast’ are available now.
Paula Xiberras