Sunshine on Vinegar Street

A sweet and emotional novel about friendship, family and accepting change from a fresh new voice.


NOTABLE BOOK: 2024 CBCA Book of the Year, Younger Readers 

WINNER: 2024 Queensland Literary Awards, Children's Book Award 


Freya's world is turned upside down when she and her mum move to inner-city Melbourne. Now she's ... 


Stuck in a new apartment on the eleventh floor and Freya is afraid of lifts. 

Stuck in a new basketball team where not everyone likes a new star player. 

Stuck in a classroom of kids who don't know Freya is a donor-conceived baby. 

Stuck, just like Little Audrey in the Skipping Girl sign suspended over the suburb of Abbotsford. 


Being the new girl makes Freya feel like a dark cloud on a summer's day. Can she figure out how to belong on Vinegar Street?


'Very tender and also very funny - a tumbling collage of words and wonderings, fears and triumphs, where the child's world is both the hard, real thing and the stuff of magic,' URSULA DUBOSARSKY, Australian Children's Laureate 2020-2021