#LoveOzYABloggers is hosted by #LoveOzYA, a community led organisation dedicated to promoting Australian young adult literature.

The theme for this fortnight is ‘Spring Reads’.

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When I saw ‘Spring Reads’ I internally shrieked. I couldn’t think of any stories set in spring (correct me if I’m wrong), so I started to think of other ways to tackle the prompt. What does spring mean? New Life? Still I couldn’t think of anything much. What colours do I think of when I think of spring? Umm yellow! I texted my mother (formally a high school art teacher).

With my mind still screaming yellow, like daffodil yellow. I googled daffodils, turns out they bloom in autumn – far out my brain is muddled. Keeping on the flower brain wave I then googled Australian spring garden’s.

GREEN!! Green Trees!!! Mother knows best, she did say GREENS and pastels.

In the end I picked three books solely by their covers.

This whole process was kind of wonderful. I found three #loveozya books I’d never heard of and that in Australia daffodils blown in autumn. Woop Woop.

Stray (Touchstone #1) by Andrea K. Höst  [View on Goodreads]

On her last day of high school, Cassandra Devlin walked out of exams and into a forest. Surrounded by the wrong sort of trees, and animals never featured in any nature documentary, Cass is only sure of one thing: alone, she will be lucky to survive. The sprawl of abandoned blockish buildings Cass discovers offers her only more puzzles. Where are the people? What is the intoxicating mist which drifts off the buildings in the moonlight? And why does she feel like she’s being watched? Increasingly unnerved, Cass is overjoyed at the arrival of the formidable Setari. Whisked to a world as technologically advanced as the first was primitive, where nanotech computers are grown inside people’s skulls, and few have any interest in venturing outside the enormous whitestone cities, Cass finds herself processed as a ‘stray’, a refugee displaced by the gates torn between worlds. Struggling with an unfamiliar language and culture, she must adapt to virtual classrooms, friends who can teleport, and the ingrained attitude that strays are backward and slow. Can Cass ever find her way home? And after the people of her new world discover her unexpected value, will they be willing to let her leave?

The Red Shoe by Ursula Dubosarsky   [View on Goodreads]

 Funny, tough-minded and tender, this is the story of Matilda and her two sisters growing up in Sydney, Australia, in the early 1950s. Their father is mentally unstable and largely absent, their mother is possibly in the thrall of his brother, and a headline-making Russian spy defection is taking place next door. Punctuated by the headlines of the times, The Red Shoe depicts how the large events of the world can impinge on ordinary lives. This is a novel to savor by one of Australia’s most gifted writers for young people.

New Guinea Moon by Kate Constable   [View on Goodreads]

Julie has grown up not knowing her father, with just the occasional Christmas card and the knowledge that he flies planes for a charter company in New Guinea. When she comes to stay with him one long summer, she learns to appreciate not only her long-lost father and his love of flying, but also New Guinea itself and the people she meets.

An awkward romance with a young expat contrasts with her growing attraction to the son of a local coffee plantation owner. And, left to her own devices much of the time, Julie learns to rely on herself and gain her own independence. A tragedy and then a mystery leave her reeling, but force her to evaluate what she really wants out of life.