Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
MEASLE AND THE WRATHMONK
by Ian Ogilvy
This is the kind of old-fashioned tale in which youngsters triumph by being courageous and clever, most grown-ups are kindly and everything works out well. And there's always a place in children's reading for that.
A selection of recommendations from children aged 7 - 13.
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Back from the future
Diane Samuels reviews Useful Idiots by Jan Mark:
Useful Idiots is brimming with ideas. The vision of the future is neither dystopian nor utopian. It is engagingly realistic. Some things have improved. Others have not. People still have a quest for knowledge, are greedy, fearful, indulge in political intrigue and get on with their lives as best they can. It is written with a sharp eye to the present as the world of the reader is regarded through the telescope from centuries ahead.
EducationGuardian.co.uk | eG weekly | Invasion games
Having frist been selected as the Sunday Times Children's Book of the Week, Andrew Billen's 'Short Book' biography of Samuel Johnson has now been mention in by Lindsey Fraser in The Guardian. The Tuesday book review is rather more hidden than it used to be in the paper, and even on the weblink, you'll need to scroll down before you get to the review.
Billen's evocation of the physical man is so effective that his tales of Johnson's perambulations through Britain have an almost cinematic quality.
See entry for May 23, for bookjacket and link.
Sunday Times Children's Book of the Week
SAM JOHNSON: The Wonderful Word Doctor
by Andrew Billen
Andrew Billen?s 90-page account of Dr Johnson, is an excellent example of how facts can make good stories. Billen does not presume to tell us what Johnson thought or felt (except as he wrote it himself) but does report what he did and said and looked like, according to his own and contemporary reports. NICOLETTE JONES
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Get Shorty
Keith Gray reviews Boy Kills Man by Matt Whyman
Keith Gray starts his review: "Perhaps the greatest paradox for any young person's novelist is that first you have to please the adults. It's the parents, librarians and teachers who are the gate-keepers..." I think you can overplay that argument. Especially in terms of Young Adult books, as opposed to children's books; but even there, the degree to which children's own tastes override adult preferences can be witnessed over and over again if you eavesdrop in the children's section of any bookshop. Aiming to please the adults is definitely not something I would recommend to any children's author.
Gray fears that the subject matter, the provocative book jacket and title, and the age of its protagonists will somehow lead those 'gatekeepers' to block the book from its readership. What does he mean? Does he imagine that it will actually be banned? That librarians will decide not to shelve it but hide it behind the counter; that booksellers will refuse to sell it? That parents will confiscate it if they find their children reading it?
"For a slim volume with this kind of subject matter the story does seem slow in places and not as focused as it could be..." That was not my impression. It's not a gung-ho, episodic action adventure, and (for me) the book's pace seemed perfectly modulated to its subject matter.
Gray's review is broadly positive. "Ignore the appalling title, and inside there is a powerful, affecting novel about lost youth and a sharp evocation of one boy's terrible passage from innocence to experience." Gray is clearly intimating that the book's title is appallingly bad and ill-judged. If the title is 'appalling' it is intentionally so. We are supposed to be appalled by the notion of a boy killing a man.
"Admittedly it's difficult to know which age-group the book was written for..." Not that difficult, surely, unless, as Gray does, you take an overvalued generalisation "Children are aspiring readers - they prefer to read about characters older than themselves..." and apply it to this book with an absurd disregard for common-sense. Gray's argument seeems to be that because the protagonists are 12 years old, no one over that age will want to read it, and that those gatekeepers won't want younger readers of about 10 going anywhere near it. Gray knows perfectly well that Whyman is writing for the same audience as he himself addresses in his young adult fiction.
In the end Gray recommends the book on the basis of its 'issue'. "Why would any right-minded person want to hush an open debate about the dangers of guns in today's society? It's set in Medell?n, but it could quite easily be Manchester."
No, it couldn't.
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Sunday Times Children's Book of the Week
The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo
...it is written conspiratorially, as if a storyteller were recounting the tale, so it suits reading aloud. Its short sentences and paragraphs, and pacey action, also motivate children to read for themselves. It is complemented by skilled, shadowy illustrations that are a tad scary for sensitive seven-year-olds. NICOLETTE JONES
"Insanely funny about the appalling way rich kids are brought up, this spunky British trio knock the Lemony Snicket siblings into a cocked hat, says Amanda Craig..."
Craig was impressed by Sam Llewellyn's Little Darlings, and also by The Fish In Room 11 by Heather Dyer.
But Craig's review, in yesterday's Times, had been sloppily served by the paper's copyeditors, who wrongly give (or do not correct) a definite article at the start of Llewellyn's title ('The Little Darlings') and then attribute an illustration extracted from The Fish In Room 11 to 'Heather Dyer's The Tale of Emily Winsnap', having carelessly misunderstood a passing reference to Liz Kessler's mermaid novel, correctly attributed in Craig's trademark Read On box.
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | By the Bat's Earpiece!
Jan Mark reviews Piratica by Tanith Lee
There are real human stories being played out amid the mayhem, genuine excitement and some memorable characters, notably the ex-slave Ebad Vooms; the whole thing delivered in a kind of parallel English that contrives to be elegant and out of kilter at the same time. On recent evidence, pirate stories look like being the next big thing. If so, may they all be as much fun as this one, by the Cat's Elbows!
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Cat and Mouse Games
New York Times picture book reviews, including
Tiny's Big Adventure by Martin Waddell
Until about 20 years ago, full-color picture books were rare because they were so expensive to print. That is why most children's books were illustrated in black and white. When there was color it was prepared on handmade overlays. All that has changed...
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Children's Books in Brief
Children's Books in Brief...
includes an enthusiastic US review of Lion Boy by Zizou Corder
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > As Cats Can
A New York Times review of two books about cats:
Gobble, Gobble, Slip, Slop by Meilo Slo
STORYTELLERS have given human speech to hundreds of animal species (including some extinct ones), making heroes and heroines of rabbits, pigs, monkeys, bears, badgers, elephants, aardvarks and mice, to name just a small zooful. Two stories featuring cats, those most domesticated of animals, take to extremes such particular human foibles as insatiable hunger and stage fright. These cats behave ridiculously, but there's something familiar about their actions.
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
THE FISH IN ROOM 11
by Heather Dyer
This optimistic little fantasy for young readers, with its lightly executed line drawings, is refreshing and breezy, rather like the sea air.
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Sugar and spice
Natasha Walter reviews a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett:
[Burnett's] great fame brought with it drawbacks too; it is quite salutary to realise that it is not only in our times that writers are hounded by journalists to expose their private lives. Her divorce in 1898 made front page news, her ex-husband was harassed for his thoughts on the breakup, and the New York Times and the Washington Post used it as the basis for speculation on how her success and "advanced ideas" on women had contributed to her marital failure.
Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Gender blender
Philip Ardagh reviews Boy 2 Girl by Terence Blacker in The Guardian:
There's a laugh-or-your-money-back guarantee with Boy 2 Girl, the latest children's book from Terence Blacker, probably best known in children's circles for his Ms Wiz series for younger readers. I wish there hadn't been. The guarantee, that is. Boy 2 Girl is a very enjoyable read, but the "if this book did not make you laugh" promise steered me down the wrong path. I was expecting something written simply for laughs. What I got - and was very pleased to get - was something far more thought-provoking.
Philip Ardagh has recently given ACHUKA an interview update.
Read it now.
Weekly book reviews and literary analysis from the Times Literary Supplement
A N Wilson reviews C. S. Lewis's Collected Letters Vol. II in the Times Literary Supplement...
The letters convey a man who by many standards was trying to be good and, which is more unusual, succeeding. But there is a tremendous coarseness here. I do not just refer to the Lewis who spent Christmas Day 1931, his first Christmas as a converted Christian, describing the ghastly-sounding 'binge' held at the end of the previous term (ie, a drunken all-male dinner going on until the small hours) with all the words of a bawdy rhyme written out. I mean that even when he is describing delicate things, such as the effect on the soul of beautiful landscape or the fall of a poetic line, the coarseness remains. It is what made him, as a Christian apologist and as a children's writer, a bestseller; but it does not make the effect of reading over a thousand pages of his letters an especially ennobling one.
USATODAY.com - Morrison, and the children, remember
Morrison, and the children, remember - a review of Remember: The Journey To Integration by Toni Morrison
Amanda Craig begins her review of Abhorsen by Garth Nix and Montomorency On The Rocks by Elizabeth Updale (from yesterday's Times) by asking "Where does evil come from? If adult fiction rarely asks this, children's fiction never fails to, and shows it as external, imposed upon innocense."
Rather a bold generalisation, that ;-)
Of Abhorsen, she says: "Though at times the plot makes it feel too much like a computer game, the evocative prose and strong sense of character lift Abhorsen into a thrillingly complex, metaphysical adventure that oozes menace and mystery."
In Updale's sequel to her first Montmorency book, she "excels at catching the nature of male friendship, period details and keeping her plot rattling along between London and the Hebrides. But something of the atmospheric strangeness of the first is missing. It has become a little too close to an adult novel."
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
AL CAPONE DOES MY SHIRTS by Gennifer Choldenko
"This engaging tale develops its characters subtly and skilfully and has an improbable but enjoyable ending involving Capone as the deus ex machina." NICOLETTE JONES
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Mind games
Nicola Morgan writes about Rachel Klein's The Moth Diaries in a review that perfectly captures the book's heady, psychotic claustrophobia.
Both the book and the review are highly recommended.
3 in brief by Julia Eccleshare
