A cat detective, a girl band, and a slice of our sporting history are some of the subjects covered in the 2025 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
Detective Beans and the Case of the Missing Hat
Author and illustrator: Li Chen
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia 2024
Winner, Junior Fiction, 2025 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults
Aspiring kitty sleuth Beans takes on the case (or should that be ‘chase’?) of his missing hat in this 200-page, full-colour graphic tale by author Li Chen.
The young cat’s search for the brown fedora that is essential for his detective work has endless twists and turns involving birds, more kittens and more hats, a magician, a soupy restaurant, a scarecrow, an ice-cream inventor, a jazz singer called Trixie, and Beans’ friend Biscuits.
There are philosophical musings, dead ends and near-misses. Some of the humour is laugh-out-loud, although youngsters may not get jokes that require a knowledge of the detective genre and other adult references. On the way to retrieving his beloved hat, Detective Beans even manages to solve a real-life crime, win the admiration of local police and still be home in time for tea.
Detective Beans and the Case of the Missing Hat is cute, quirky and written for children aged seven up.
It’s a classic pursuit story enhanced by Li Chen’s superb comic illustrations that paint vivid scenes from surprising angles, don’t always rely on text and will draw in less advanced readers.
Li Chen was born in Beijing, China and moved to New Zealand when she was five. Detective Beans and the Case of the Missing Hat, based on her two adopted cats Copy and Paste, is her first book. It has been written for an international audience and also published in the USA. She has since written a second book in the series.
Violet and the Velvets: the case of the missing stuff
Author: Rachael King
Illustrator: Phoebe Morris
Publisher: Allen & Unwin 2025
Shortlisted, Junior Fiction, 2025 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults
Violet Grumble wears a tartan skirt, has a bright blue streak in her hair and wants to be in a band. Not as a singer like most girls but playing guitar. Violet also has ADHD, ‘a magic brain’ that makes her forgetful and untidy but allows her to see music in colours and feel it ‘fizzy like sherbet, warm and sweet in my stomach like hot porridge with brown sugar’.
When auditions for BandChamps are announced at Oakleaf primary school, Violet enlists her friends to form Violet and the Velvets, even though none of them can play an instrument. They survive conflict, betrayals and the mysterious theft of their band gear to take the stage for the audition, only to be beaten by the more proficient boys. But Violet is not one to give up easily.
This heartwarming story will appeal to young girls aged eight to twelve chasing their dream. There’s a strong message that you don’t have to be the best as long as you do what you love, stick at it and have fun. Author Rachael King’s empathy for her main character (she herself was diagnosed with ADHD in 2022 and began performing bass guitar as a teenager) comes through in the accessible prose and Violet’s honest, humorous self-reflection.
Her long-suffering musician Mum backs her daughter while letting her figure out her own answers, while Violet’s friends also grow from the band’s struggles.
Illustrator Phoebe Morris’s clean, engaging graphics capture Violet’s pizzazz and the personalities of those around her.
This is the first in a series of Violet and the Velvets books by Rachael King who has previously written two stand-alone middle-grade novels, Red Rocks (now a television series) and The Grimmelings.
Black Magic: The inspiring story of why Aotearoa sports teams wear black with a silver fern
Author: David Riley
Illustrator: Munro Te Whata
Publisher: Reading Warrior 2024
Shortlisted, Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction, 2025 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults
If our national flag is blue, red and white, why do our sports teams all wear black with a silver fern?
This is the question that author David Riley poses in Black Magic. To answer it he goes back first to the discovery of New Zealand and then to the story of Joseph Warbrick, son of a Pākehā father and Māori mother.
In 1888, Warbrick led a 26-strong New Zealand Natives rugby team on a tour of Britain, the first New Zealand sports team to wear a black uniform with a silver fern. Warbrick chose the ponga to represent the silver fern leaves laid on a forest path at night to help light up the way home.
On why he chose black for their uniform, Riley suggests the team planned to do something magic. Which they did. Not only were they the first national sports team to visit Europe, they played 107 games over 18 months – the longest tour in the history of rugby! Five team members were Pākehā and some like Joe and his brothers had a Pākehā parent. All loved sharing Māori culture through karakia, haka, wearing korowai and speaking te reo Māori on the field. They also won great praise for their attacking, free-flowing style of play.
A black and white photo of the 1888 team reminds us that this is history, but there’s nothing dull about Black Magic. Informal anecdotes and Munro Te Whata’s dynamic illustrations bring key moments in the tour to life. The book will interest sports-loving boys aged ten and up. Sketches of recognisable New Zealand sportsmen and women from other codes on the cover broaden its appeal and reinforce Riley’s message that, whatever sport you play, remember who you represent and where you come from . . . and go and do something magic!
David Riley is a writer and part-time English teacher at Tangaroa College in Otara. He aims to inspire young people with stories from Aotearoa New Zealand and Oceania, and to encourage them to write their own stories. He runs workshops for students and staff around the country, and can be contacted at davidrileynz@gmail.com, david@readingwarrior.com or davidr@tangaroa.school.nz
Pip Desmond and Pat Martin are writers and editors who run communications company 2Write. They have been reading books to their three children and eight grandchildren for four decades.