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Guardian Review

Another quite negative children's fiction review from this past Saturday's Guardian Reivew....

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine, reviewed by Simon Mason

The past 10 years have seen an outburst of children's novels with autistic characters, particularly in the US, where Mockingbird won the prestigious National Book award. There may be a difference between British and American approaches to the subject, however. For British readers the classic of the genre remains The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. But where Mark Haddon's book is sui generis, Erskine's seems as if written with America's annual "Autism Awareness month" in mind. In the end, like Caitlin's drawings, Mockingbird is a neat outline in black and white. It could have done with more colour. SIMON MASON

Bizzy Bear On The Farm

Enthusiastic GiggleApps review of a Nosy Crow interactive book.

Refereshingly Original

Zac Harding, a children's librarian from Christchurch, New Zealand, reviews ACHUKAbooks' launch title, The Field by Bill Nagelkerke on his My Best Friends Are Books blog...

Guardian review

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat by Dave Shelton, reviewed by Philip Ardagh

To an adult reader, the title A Boy and a Bear in a Boat instantly brings to mind Yann Martel's Life of Pi, with its boy in a boat with a tiger, and Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats, with a Jewish refugee in a boat with a jaguar. (What is it with a single male cast adrift with a wild animal?) One of the big differences in Dave Shelton's illustrated children's novel, though, is that it's the animal that does the rowing.

The lovingly designed jacket and hardback cover, with its slightly mottled paper and "worn" spine, evokes memories of Mervyn Peake's Letters from a Lost Uncle or Reif Larsen's more recent The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. But despite the fact that Shelton is currently best known as a comic book illustrator, A Boy and a Bear is less highly illustrated than either of these....

As for any niggles? Just one. The illustrations of the bear. Nothing can beat the image of the bear Shelton paints with his words. That's the picture I shall take away with me from this very special book. PHILIP ARDAGH

Guardian Review

In Darkness by Nick Lake, reviewed by Patrick Ness

Couldn't agree more with the intro to this review...

There are occasionally voices in the children's book world who argue that the kind of serious children's novels that win prizes and get newspaper reviews are, in fact, books that are only loved by prize judges and middle-aged reviewers, not by kids themselves. But this, I think, works from an incorrect premise: that there is only one sort of child reader. There isn't, of course. Young readers are as varied as adult readers, and as eclectic in their individual tastes. Just because you read the latest Booker winner doesn't mean you don't also read the latest Scandinavian corpse-fiest, and vice versa. It's actually a bit of an insult to young readers to assume that a challenging, literary book must automatically be off-putting, and it's not at all my experience of the young readers I meet. It's certainly not how I read when I was young. I read both bestsellers and more obscure fare - anything that might give the remotest clue to the world outside my suburb.

Ness then goes on to say...

In Darkness is both violent and subtle, unexpectedly reminding me of The Wire. Characters, settings, and the half-believed Haitian vodou religion are handled with patience and complexity, even in a terrifying, poverty-stricken setting. Also, as in The Wire, Lake doesn't shy away from Shorty's immersion in gang culture, nor the profanity that permeates it and Shorty's own participation in its brutality and murder. Sometimes Lake might go a bit too far with the roughness, but I don't doubt his seriousness. Nor, I think, will the kind of young reader who'll embrace this book.

In Darkness is a serious, nuanced, challenging novel. Trust me, there are plenty of young readers who hunger for exactly that. PATRICK NESS

Huffington Post's Children's Books Picks

Huffington Post is starting a new monthly feature to highlight children's books for different ages... Here are their picks for January...

Guardian Review

Blood Red Road by Moira Young, reviewed by Anthony McGowan

McGowan is one of The Guardian's more acerbic children's book reviewers, but "a risible collection of clichés strung together by a barely coherent plot" is strong criticism even from him.

The fact that the book has won a Costa Book Award he finds "rather baffling".

On the other hand, " My nine-year-old daughter got hold of my review copy and was so entranced that I had to machete it into sections so we could both carry on reading it."

"Yes, this is the perfect apocalypse for pre-teens," he ends.

Children's Books Reviewed - Daily Mail

Sally Morris reviews:
MY GRANNY IS A PIRATE by VAL McDERMID

WILD CHILD by JEANNE WILLIS ILLUSTRATED BY LORNA FREYTAG

ERIC! by CHRIS WORMELL

Library Journal's Pick From 2011

Some good, wide-ranging recomendations here, including

and on Kindle

Guardian Review

The Double Shadow by Sally Gardner, reviewed by Mary Hoffman

The Double Shadow is a book about loss and damage, identity and illusion, cruelty and, ultimately, healing. It's an astonishing departure for a writer who has found a new and very distinctive voice... MARY HOFFMAN

Guardian Review 2

Ruby Redfort: Look Into My Eyes by Lauren Child, reviewed by Simon Mason

It's unusual for a Guardian children's books review to be as negative:

there's an awful lot of detail and it tends to pile up all over the place, blurring the characters, clogging the dialogue and cluttering the plot. The theft-of-Mrs-Digby subplot appears in brief flashes at set intervals, breaking in like commercials for another story entirely. In the main story, clues arise at suspiciously convenient moments, like brightly coloured balloons, to be promptly solved by Ruby with a knowing wisecrack.

Codes and puzzles are at the heart of it all, some very nifty indeed, some a little shopworn, and others rather lame. Ruby herself is an odd mixture of likeable sauciness and child-genius stereotype. A child-genius is a challenging thing for an author to create, and I'm not convinced. There are some great moments - Ruby's exchanges with the Spectrum agents are funny and warm - but too often I'm told how clever she is (she's reading War and Peace in the original Russian, apparently) without seeing her intelligence in action for myself. Worse, I don't feel I get to know her. The chemistry with her best friend Clancy is intermittent, and she struggles to express herself beyond jokes and the endless "Jeepers", "Darn it" and "Boy, is this guy a prize potato head".

She's a cartoon who lives in a cartoon world, and I fear the brilliant premise, charming detail and occasional wonderful moments can't sustain her through the long haul of a novel. SIMON MASON

Guardian Review

Collected Folk Tales by Alan Garner, reviewed By Neil Gaiman

This Collected Folk Tales is, by definition and by temperament, a patchwork, and reading it is like entering a rag and bone shop in which every object has been polished up and repaired and made fit for use, while always leaving in the cracks and dents that show that the goods have had years of use already. With the exception of some of the poems, there is nothing new or shining here, and the book is all the better for it. If I had small children, or a class, I would read to them from it.

And if, by the time I have grandchildren, there are still public libraries, as I hope there will be, I trust that they will find this book themselves in one (for it will be all the better for not being given or suggested or recommended to them by an adult), and take it to a quiet corner and read. NEIL GAIMAN

Independent - Children's Books

Daniel Hahn is the reviewer, and I'm pleased to see we feel the same about...

Lissa Evans's Small Change for Stuart (Doubleday, £10.99), a small book about a small boy, and one of this year's great delights. Stuart Horten is 10, but tiny for his age. (The nickname SHorten is unfortunate.) When his mother, a doctor, and his father, a crossword compiler who uses words such as sylvan and perambulation and matutinal, decide to move to the village of Beeton, Stuart thinks the whole prospect rather grim. Until, that is, he finds himself on the hunt for the workshop that used to belong to his great-uncle, an incredible magician. It's a finely written book crammed with exciting incident and colourful characters; something quite special. DANIEL HAHN

Observer Review - Teenage Fiction

reviewed by Geraldine Brennan, who finishes her piece with a recommendation for a title to be published early in the New Year:

Look out early in the new year for India Dark by Kirsty Murray (Templar £6.99), the tale of many orchestrated hissy fits on a floating prison: the ship carrying a troupe of Australian child performers on a tour of Indonesia and India in 1910. They thought they were going to America; they won't get home for two years; their biological clocks are ticking (once past puberty they soon become too old to perform); and their promoter is a charlatan. As a result, some of them are a little disturbed. The Red Shoes crossed with Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on a true story. Unmissable. GERALDINE BRENNAN

Observer Review - Fiction

reviewed by Kitty Empire

Sapphire Battersea (Doubleday £12.99), Jacqueline Wilson's 654th novel (or thereabouts) packs in plenty of bloody tubercular coughs and end-of-the-pier freaks (kindly drawn). This is the next book along in the Hetty Feather series, in which Wilson's care home heroine Tracy Beaker is basically reincarnated as a foundling hospital girl 135 years previously. Plucky Sapphire (formerly Hetty) goes out to earn her keep, fuelled by Wilson's class rage and carnivorous sense of yearning.

Even better, though, is Lauren Child's Look into My Eyes (HarperCollins £12.99) which features Ruby Redfort, a Clarice Bean bit-parter now enjoying her own spin-off series. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy lends a hand with the puzzles thrown in the path of this rich, pampered but razor-sharp American teen sleuth. The villains are cartoonishly bad, in the most enjoyable way. And if it lacks any actual ooze, Ruby makes up for it in being witty and stylish. Having pretty much abandoned the little ones for the tween market, the writer really ought to change her name to Lauren Older Child by deed poll. KITTY EMPIRE

follow the link for the remainder of the recommendations