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Tasmanian Literary Awards

Aster's Good, Right Things by Kate Gordon (Yellow Brick Books)

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Aster's Good, Right Things

I can’t let go of them – the good, right things—because if I do I’llurn into a cloud and I’ll float away, and a storm will come and blow me to nothing. Aster attends a school for gifted kids, but she doesn’t think she’s special at all. If she was, her mother wouldn’t have left. Each day Aster must do a good, right thing—a challenge she sets herself, to make someone else’s life better. Nobody can know about her ‘things’, because then they won’t count. And if she doesn’t do them, she's sure everything will go wrong. Then she meets Xavier. He has his own kind of special missions to make life better. When they do these missions together, Aster feels free, but if she stops doing her good, right things will everything fall apart? I can’t let go of them – the good, right things—because if I do I’llurn into a cloud and I’ll float away, and a storm will come and blow me to nothing. Aster attends a school for gifted kids, but she doesn’t think she’s special at all. If she was, her mother wouldn’t have left. Each day Aster must do a good, right thing—a challenge she sets herself, to make someone else’s life better. Nobody can know about her ‘things’, because then they won’t count. And if she doesn’t do them, she's sure everything will go wrong. Then she meets Xavier. He has his own kind of special missions to make life better. When they do these missions together, Aster feels free, but if she stops doing her good, right things will everything fall apart?

Read an extract from the book

About the author

Kate Gordon grew up in a very booky house, with two librarian parents, in a small town by the sea in Tasmania. Kate’s first book, Three Things About Daisy Blue – was published by Allen and Unwin in 2010. She has since been published multiple times by everyone from Yellow Brick Books through to Penguin Random House Australia. Kate won the 2016 IBBY Ena Noel Award for Writing Clementine, and in 2018 was shortlisted in the Dorothy Hewett Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript. Her Young Adult novel Girl Running, Boy Falling (2018) is a CBCA Notable. In 2021, Aster’s Good, Right Things (published by Riveted Press) won the CBCA Book of the Year for Younger Readers. Her first historical timeslip novel was published in August 2022. Whalesong explores the early days of Hobart’s history and emphasises the power that we each have to make a difference in the world.