Sisters no way
This book allows the reader to choose to start at the front or the back of the book and read about two girls who are about to become sisters when their parents decide to marry each other. Each girl keeps a diary and the events recorded show things in a very different light. Parkinson said while the idea was not original, she and the publisher deliberately planned the book so as there was no correct way to read it.
We even left things like the bar-code off at the back of the book, we put it in the inside so that there would be no hint which way round this book was supposed to be read. The whole point is that the choice is up to the reader, she said.
Four kids, three cats, two cows and one witch (maybe)
Four children visit an island and have an unusual encounter with someone who lives there. The text comes alive as Parkinson differentiates characters through their accent.
I didnt consciously not give the Dublin children an accent but I did consciously give the boy from the West an accent because I wanted to make him different because the whole point was about their relationship with him especially at the beginning. The reason there was antagonism in the beginning was partly because he was local and they were from somewhere else, so I wanted to make it kind of clear through the language.
Moon King
I was working at the time with an organisation called Focus Ireland, a charity that looks after people who are homeless. I was working in the publications department, so a lot of things would have been published of say children who had been in foster-care, because they tend to be the kind of kids who end up very often falling into trouble later, onto the street, so I kind of came across the idea I suppose through my work, Parkinson said.
Breaking the Wishbone
This is a story of homeless teenagers who discover the grittier side of life living rough in a squat.
My last book Breaking the Wishbone, which is really a teenage mother, its pretty hard hitting and its pretty grim, its about homeless kids, she said.
About the team
This article was produced by editor Daniel Monaghan, 14, and reporter Amy Magowan Greene, 12. It was published on the Belfast Festival website.
