On the 20th March this year, the Year 9 and 10 Book Club were invited to attend the N.I Book Awards Finale, to see which book was the overall winner from the eight short-listed titles. After getting lost, going in circles and asking for directions our busman finally reached Bangor Grammar School, which was hosting this year’s Finale.

Following the welcome speech from the Principal, we got to watch book-trailers made by WellingtonCollege, Glenlola and Campbell  College for their favourite short-listed books which helped us understand the respective books better. After the trailers, Aquinas performed a scene from one of the short-listed books, Twelve Minutes to Midnight, which was directed by our librarian, Mrs. Cullen. We got great applause and even better……. lots of Easter eggs for participating!

This was followed by a “back-to-front” quiz in which we had to guess the questions from the answers that were given. Abishek from Year 9 won the quiz and got a creme egg for his prize.Next came a talk on her first book “Death and Co” from debut author D.J McCune. She is from Northern Ireland and was very interesting and very easy to talk to as well.She had the privilege of announcing the winners.

First place went to Wonder by R.J Palacio, while Itch by Simon Mayo came second and The Adjusters by Andrew Taylor came third.

We were all slightly disappointed that the book our school voted for, Itch, didn’t win but we were still glad that Wonder, an amazing book, had won. It was great that all our hard work in putting together and performing our drama piece was well appreciated  with the organisers commenting on the NIBA website

“Aquinas must be a drama school in disguise, because pupils, who were lunatics in the asylum and then woke at twelve minutes to midnight to scrawl foreboding messages of the future, were surely RADA inspired?”

All in all it was a very fun day out of school and we all can’t wait for next year’s awards.

READERS ANONYMOUS (Our Year 9 and 10  Bookclub)