'In some ways, Barry Jonsberg has always been ahead of his time. While his early work navigated class and friendship in the rough-and-tumble world of the schoolyard, his Pandora Jones trilogy, published in 2014-2015, was one of the first Australian attempts to replicate the massively popular Hunger Games books and stories like it. My Life as an Alphabet, turned into the film H is for Happiness, was about awkward protagonist Candice Phee, who is perhaps on the autism spectrum, although this is never confirmed in the book. Jonsberg was more overt in his efforts to introduce a transgender character in A Song Only I Can Hear, a middle-grade novel praised in Books+Publishing for its “powerful treatment” of gender identity issues.' (Introduction)
