Fishtailing vs In The Sea There Are Crocodiles

The judge for this round was Ms Thom.

It was difficult to choose a "winner" out of these two books.

I read Fishtailing first and it only took me a little while to complete the book but I felt I had entered the world of a number of different characters. This was developed very creatively, through poetry.

The book follows four students who are all in the same poetry class. Each has different situations and issues at home but come together with a terrible twist at the end.

Each of the teenager's stories was very engaging and the prose was so cleverly written that it took a simple number of words to describe the feelings and emotions of the students. I found it extremely easy to picture them in my head.

The character of the teacher who was asking them to write poetry was just as interesting as the teenagers themselves. Her journey, from a very strict exterior, to the image of her crying in the car ar the end used incredible imagery.

I loved the fact that the story did not need a full narrative but still was dramatic and painful. The characters were very believable through the poetry form and it seemed obvious to me that Wendy Phillips had been a teacher as she was able to capture the teenagers' emotions very well.

In The Sea There Are Crocodiles was an equally compelling story, following the journey of Enaiatollah - a refugee from Afghanistan.

His journey from his small Afghan village to Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece and then finally to Italy where he receives refugee status was harrowing at times.

When you are reading a true story of such a young boy being left by his mother to make his way in the world, it seems so shocking. I cannot imagine any of the eleven year olds here having to do some of the things that Enaiatollah was expected to put himself through.

He was constantly put into extreme danger by his traffickers, and these people were doing the trafficking purely for money with no thought of the human life they are in charge of.

There were moments I found very distressing, for example, the walk over the mountains into Turkey where many of the refugees died and it was pure luck whether you survived the journey, or the journey in the under carriage of a truck for days - in a squatting position with many other people wailing and crying to get out.

However, there were moments when friendship and laughter and the kindness of strangers made me smile and I hope that it has made me look differently and think what would I do if I came across someone who had been on such an immense journey.

My winner is Fishtailing.