Katherine Rundell's "The Explorer" teachers' review - Talking Texts with Deb & Jane #43Katherine Rundell's "The Explorer" teachers' review - Talking Texts with Deb & Jane #43

Brief description and distinctive features

  1. The Explorer
    The Explorer
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For Stage 4

Katherine Rundell has swum in the Amazon River. She has caught tarantulas and eaten them, built jungle fires and carefully gutted a piranha. She has taken trapeze lessons and has walked on rooftops in Oxford. She uses her experiences to write wonderful survival stories, in which children fight their fears and work together as a team as they struggle to stay alive against the odds. Characters face peril, often in vivid and exotic settings as humour and courage prevail. The Explorer is a classic adventure story and a fascinating and thrilling read. Year 7 students will really enjoy the adventures of Fred and company as they make their way from a plane wreck through the jungle and down the river to a lost city and finally home. The Explorer won the Costa Children’s Book Award in 2018 and Katherine Rundell was named author of the year at the British Book Awards in 2024.

 

Brief description of The Explorer

Fred is flying to Manaus over the Amazon jungle in Brazil when his pilot has a heart attack and the plane crashes. Shades of Hatchet! But the differences soon start to emerge. Survival is still the number one problem, but in this story the main character has company on the plane. There’s Con, a pale and angry girl, and Lila and her five-year-old brother, Max. Lila’s parents are scientists and know about plants and so does Lila. Con has a photographic memory and Fred has always been fascinated by explorers and has a high degree of curiosity. All these talents prove invaluable. Relationships in the group are strained at first, especially as life at home for Fred and Con is difficult; but working together helps them find some food and the remains of an old shelter as they try to work out what to do. The feeling that someone has been here before is strengthened when a map is found during a hunt for honey. Building a raft and following the map leads them to a lost city and an explorer who prefers to remain hidden. He is not the welcoming adult they hoped for and their honesty and courage are sorely tested. However, the caustic explorer who finally aids the children to return home had a very good reason to leave the company of the world and keep the lost city secret. He saw the decimation of the Indigenous people through European contact and lost his wife and child to the introduced diseases. But the children open his heart again and he wins their pledge to keep his city hidden.

Distinctive features of The Explorer

  • Excitement, action and adventure are guaranteed when the plane crash starts in the first four pages
  • A survival story set in a jungle as Rundell captures the feeling of being utterly lost for four, very different children
  • Strong character development as the four young characters are profoundly changed by their experiences in the jungle
  • Authentic accounts of the children’s response to their predicament e.g. their natural outbursts, anxiety and terror that they experience, in a jungle far from home
  • Vivid description as the animals (the baby sloth deserves special mention) and plants of the area
  • The children’s experiences with grubs and spiders for food are wonderful and sometimes disgusting but always feel authentic
  • Provides insight into the effects of European contact on First Nations Peoples
  • An author who positions her characters, as Daisy May Johnson said “as beings of power in their own world” with agency, leadership, and resilience
  • A splendid adventure written in peerless prose.

Ways to use The Explorer in the classroom

Decide on your approach: will it be close study or author study or wide reading in survival stories?

 

Close Study

A way into the text with different covers 

Show images of three different covers of The Explorer and ask students to predict what they think could happen in the novel, based on the covers and the title. Ask them which cover gives the most information. 

Display students’ predictions on the classroom wall and then distribute the novel and read the first page together. Or consider using an audio version to start the reading e.g. the author reading the start of The Explorer.

 

As they read the novel in class students can check and change their predictions displayed in the classroom. At some stage in the class reading show the YouTube video in which Katherine Rundell eats a tarantula and have a period of discussion about why the author thought she should do this.

 

After students have read the novel or nearly finished it, show them the YouTube video in which Katherine Rundell gives a synopsis of The Explorer and explains why she wrote the novel and ask them to improve on her synopsis.

 

Task: Make a short book trailer to show to other classes to promote the novel

Start by playing this book trailer in the classroom and ask students to consider if it would have encouraged them to read The Explorer.

How could this book trailer be improved? Could they do better? Put students in groups and discuss what are the elements required for a good book trailer. They could consider:

  • A hook to grab attention
  • Features that reflect the book’s theme and atmosphere
  • Insight into the story without revealing too much (no spoilers)
  • Choosing text/voice over/images/music that reflect the tone and intent of the book
  • Indications of the book’s suggested audience.

To give them ideas you could show them the book trailer for A Monster Calls and one for The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf as they demonstrate two very different approaches to this task.

Remind students that their task is to create a book trailer to promote The Explorer to their peers in other classes.

 

Author Study

Katherine Rundell’s books call out for an author study in Year 7. Faced with The Explorer, The Good Thieves, Rooftoppers and The Wolf Wilder, students will want to read them all. Remember this is an author who has eaten tarantulas on televison when discussing her book, The Explorer, because her characters eat one! Rundell’s novels would provide many models of resilient, adventurous children with courage and conviction. Also consider using her wonderful fantasy novel, Impossible Creatures, which was featured on Five Senses' Talking Texts blog #23 in February 2024.

Brief descriptions of the novels

The Good Thieves

Young Vita Marlowe is out to right a wrong. In The Good Thieves her grandfather’s home has been stolen and Vita is planning to get it back from the criminal con man, Victor Sorrotore who stole it. Along the way she gains the help of a pickpocket, a circus high flyer and a boy with a magic ability with animals. Silk, Arkady and Samuel are impressed with Vita’s grit and planning and together they explore Manhattan as Vita devises a way to defeat Victor and regain her grandfather’s home. Vita pushes through the pain of her polio-affected body to bring joy to her grandfather. The courage and loyalty of the group as they face danger is very moving. Set in New York in Prohibition times this fast moving and sometimes menacing adventure is a wonderful contrast in setting to The Explorer while retaining the importance of the loyalty of the group.

The Wolf Wilder

This novel is set in Tsarist and pre-revolutionary Russia. Feo, and her mother, Marina, are wolf wilders. Wolves are a status symbol in aristocratic circles. But as people grow tired of their pets, they send them away and people like Feo and Marina teach them to be wolves again. Feo loves her harsh life and her friendship with the wolves that she helps to release back into the wild. That life is in danger when General Rakov turns up. He demands money with menace and is determined to kill the wolves, while falsely suspecting Feo and her mother of rebellion. When Marina is taken to prison, Feo and her wolves set out to Saint Petersburg to free her. Along the way they fall in with villagers and the rescue becomes a revolution but it is the wolves that defend Feo in her final encounter with General Rakov. The General makes the mistake of trying to shoot Feo while forgetting that the wolves are wild!

Rooftoppers

Rooftoopers is an an extraordinary adventure on the roofs of Paris. One-year-old Sophie was found floating in the English Channel in a cello case, after the ship she and her mother were on, was wrecked. Although she remembers her mother waving there is no sign that her mother was rescued and Sophie is brought up by the man who lifted her into the rescue boat, a scholar by the name of Charles Maxim. Sophie is brought up with love and books, an unconventional upbringing according to the National Childcare Agency, who do all they can to remove Sophie from his care. Sophie grows up tall and generous and bookish, just like her guardian. They are both wonderfully appealing characters who run away to Paris when the authorities come to separate them. It is in Paris that Sophie hopes to find her mother, based on a clue in the cello case.

If you thought the first part of the book was pacey wait until Sophie finds herself on the rooftops of Paris with Matteo. He is a boy who escaped from his harsh orphanage and now lives above Paris. Matteo is skilled at navigating the rooftops, while never touching the ground. There is danger here and violence; it takes all Sophie’s courage to follow him across the rooftops, but she does it and thereby meets others who come to like her and help her.

A start to an author study

Full class set of The Wolf Wilder (short and great wolves) or The Explorer (longer and amazing adventures in the Amazon)

  • 10+ copies of the other texts
  • Students to read in class and at home
  • Quick check-ins: Where are you up to? What do you think?
  • Class discussion on the distinctive qualities of Rundell’s novels e.g.
    • Kids collaborate and work as a team, fight their fears, often with the help of others, and prevail
    • Adults are often absent or flawed friends or foes
    • Settings are vivid, detailed and often exotic
    • Characters face peril, with both emotional and physical danger
    • Use of humour and exaggeration.

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

Text requirements: The Explorer is a novel (extended prose) from around the world.  It includes a range of cultural, social and gender perspectives. 

Concepts could include Point of view, Characterisation and Narrative  

 

Relevant NSW English 7-10 Syllabus content

Reading, viewing and listening to texts | EN4-RVL-01

Reflecting

  • Reflect on how reading, viewing and listening to texts has informed learning
  • Reflect on how an understanding of texts can be enhanced through re-reading and close study
  • Discuss and reflect on the value of reading for personal growth and cultural awareness
  • Use reading strategies, and consider their effectiveness, when reflecting on the successes and challenges of extended reading
  • Reflect on how reading promotes a broad and balanced understanding of the world and enables students to explore universal issues
  • Reflect on own experiences of reading by sharing what was enjoyed, discussing challenges to strengthen an understanding of the value of reading

Understanding and responding to texts A | EN4-URA-01

Point of view 

  • Recognise how texts engage and position the audience to perceive events, characters and ideas using narrative voice and focalisers, tense, sequencing and intrusion, and apply this understanding in own texts
  • Understand how choice of first, second and third-person voice can establish different relationships between creator and audience, and experiment with changes in point of view in own texts

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

 

(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

Connecting texts with individual survival themes for wide reading