Tristan Bancks' "Scar Town" teachers' review

Brief description and distinctive features

Distinctive features of Scar Town

• Wonderful tension in this thriller that hooks the reader from the first page with its compelling flash forward
• First person narrative and an explosive opening
• Fast paced and with cliffhangers galore
• There is tough stuff for the young protagonists to deal with but they have agency and courage and each other
• A brooding atmosphere of old houses, dark nights, fast bike rides and menacing cars adds to the tension
• Vivid scenes often full of threat, tension, emotion and loss
• Realistic development of characters both adult and children, with friendships tested, lost and regained
• Hard decisions and ethical dilemmas about keeping the money, telling the parents, and going to the police
• Could be part of a genre study with many elements of the thriller genre.

Ways to use Scar Town in the classroom

Prediction and introduction

Use the short book trailer to introduce Scar Town to the class.

In groups ask students to predict what they think could happen in the novel based on the book trailer

Then read pages 1-2 to the class.

My eyes flick open to a blood-red sky, water lapping at my face, head split-aching, my mouth a cave of pain. I hear footsteps move away, sloshing through the shallows. I don’t know if I’ve been out for a second or a year. I cough up a throatful of water and try to move but my neck screams in protest.

Broken? I wonder, too dazed to feel real panic.
My head throbs and I push up but the explosion in my neck is nuclear. My brain feels squishy, like a sponge full of water. I feel a hard, heavy throb at the front of my mouth. I touch my teeth. Fresh, warm blood. I rub it between my fingers, sniff it to check, as though I know what blood smells like. And, somehow, I do. Animal and mineral at the same time. Like meat and metal.

There’s a scream nearby, sending a thrill of fear through me. Without thinking, I turn fast, pain slicing me in half, and I see the house.

The house is where all this began.

Ask the class to consider what they could add to their prediction (or change) based on additional information gathered from the opening pages and the book blurb. Then distribute envelopes and ask the students to write down their predictions for the novel and seal them in th envelope. The envelopes can be opened at the end of the unit for students to see how close they were to the ending.

The thriller genre and wide reading

Genre is defined in the NSW 7-10 English Syllabus (2022) as

“categories into which texts are grouped based on similarities in premise, structure and function. The ‘genre’ of a text describes larger recurring patterns of subject matter and textual structures observable between texts, such as typical plots, characters and setting. ‘Genre’ can also describe categories of form and structure in texts.”

The Thriller genre has elements that are common to the Adventure genre.

For example, there are:

• Heroes and villains
• Quests or a mission or crimes
• Threats, risks and danger
• Cliffhangers
• High stakes
• Fast pace
• Surprises and plot twists and a revelatory ending.

Student could identify and explore the ways such conventional elements operate in Scar Town. Offer the class the opportunity of reading more widely in the genre and discuss the overlap between adventure genre and thriller genres in texts such as A Walk in the Night, Holes, The Amber Amulet, The Good Thieves, The Wolf Wilder and Trash. Sometimes the difference between these two genres comes down to mood, tone and purpose.

Teaching Notes

Teaching notes by the author, Tristan Bancks, are available from Penguin. They will be very useful for teachers as they show the influence of other thrillers on the writing of the novel and the way the author plans and writes his novel using a vision board and plotting cards.

Relevant details in relation to the new NSW English 7-10 syllabus

Text requirements: Scar Town is a novel (extended prose) written by an Australian author and includes a range of cultural, social and gender perspectives.

Concepts could include Narrative • Genre • Characterisation.

Relevant NSW English 7-10 Syllabus content

Reading, viewing and listening to texts

A student uses a range of personal, creative and critical strategies to read texts that are complex in their ideas and construction EN4-RVL-01

Reading, viewing and listening for meaning

• Explore the main ideas and thematic concerns posed by a text for meaning
• Engage with the ways texts contain layers of meaning, or multiple meanings
• Identify and understand that relevant prior knowledge and personal experience enables and enhances understanding when reading, viewing or listening to texts
• Explain personal responses to characters, situations and issues in texts, recognising the role of written, oral or visual language in influencing these personal responses
• Explain how the use of language forms and features in texts might create multiple meanings
• Using a range of texts, describe how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors convey connections between Culture and identity
• Understand how language use evolves over time and in different places and cultures, and is influenced by technological and social developments

Reading for challenge, interest and enjoyment

• Read texts selected to challenge thinking, develop interest and promote enjoyment, to prompt a personal response
• Read a variety of texts that present a range of perspectives and experiences, including those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, and respond in a range of ways, including sustained written responses where appropriate
• Read texts of interest for sustained periods of time and respond to this reading in a variety of ways
• Use strategies to enhance interest and overcome challenges experienced when reading
• Communicate purposefully with peers in response to texts
• Understand the ways reading helps us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world

Understanding and responding to texts A

A student analyses how meaning is created through the use of and response to language forms, features and structures EN4-URA-01

Characterisation

• Analyse how engaging characters are constructed in texts through a range of language features and structures, and use these features and structures in own texts
• Describe how characters in texts, including stereotypes, archetypes, flat and rounded, static and dynamic characters represent values and attitudes, and experiment with these in own texts
• Understand how the interactions of characters, such as protagonists and antagonists, might be perceived to represent aspects of human relationships, and experiment with interactions when composing texts

Narrative

• Understand narrative conventions, such as setting, plot and sub-plot, and how they are used to represent events and personally engage the reader, viewer or listener with ideas and values in texts, and apply this understanding in own texts
• Examine how narratives can depict personal and collective identities, values and experiences

Genre

• Understand how a genre addresses its purpose through patterns of textual elements, such as structure, choice of language, character archetypes and settings, and apply these patterns in own texts
• Analyse how texts can participate in larger, established patterns of narrative, purpose, theme and tone by exhibiting and challenging conventions, and experiment with conventions in own texts
• Explore particular genres to identify ways they may be adapted to different modes and media, or refreshed by combining with other genres, and experiment with these in own texts

(English K-10 Syllabus 2022 © NSW Education Standards Authority for and on behalf of the Crown in right of the State of New South Wales, 2023)

Connecting texts