Reviews: April 2005 Archives

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Ordeal by fire

Sonya Hartnett won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 2002 for Thursday's Child. Her subsequent novel, What the Birds See, explored childhood but did not address children. Surrender does not address children, but the fastidiously visceral narrative examines the infantile preoccupation with the wholly physical. It is a demanding experience but it can be hardly be called a crossover book. Adults who unblushingly read Harry Potter in public would never be able to cope with it. JAN MARK

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Caleb and the swan

Review of Ambergate by Patricia Elliott

Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online

Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week

The Other Ark by Lynley Dodd

The strength of the book is Dodd’s ability to write words and rhythms that roll round the tongue and that are fun to read aloud. Young children respond to alliterative, rollicking language: it is nourishing to their verbal development, and it has to be done well. For this we can count on doodley, diddley Lynley Dodd. NICOLETTE JONES

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Honour among hounds

Jan Mark is impressed by Christopher Russell's first novel, Brind and the Dogs of War: "Original, humane and hugely satisfying both fictionally and historically..."

Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online

Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week

The Unrivalled Spangles by Karen Wallace

... This lively and skilful novel explores and explodes delusions about love, learning, wealth, family duty and the nature of performance in a way that can resonate for modern readers, without being untrue to its historical setting. Roll up and be entertained. NICOLETTE JONES

The Globe and Mail: When 007 was only 13

Children's book publishers are understandably wary about violence in books, even books that will likely be read by parents as well, and Higson says he tried to find the balance between "Tom and Jerry and Sam Peckinpah." In the next novel, due to be published early in 2006, he made a decision to back away from the cartoonish mayhem of the movies. "In the Bond films you had those scenes where hundreds of guys in colour-matching bodysuits get blown up, and it's a bit of fun. But I thought I'd like the kids to think about this a bit more."... ...

From a Candiain review of Silverfin by Charlie Higson...

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Lizzie McGuire meets Queer as Folk

The book is intimate, feel-good and quick-fire. We dart from kitchen to street, to phone call to bedroom to school. The dialogue is snappy and full of the kind of therapy-talk that is the bread and butter of middle-class American life: "I'll deal with it." "You don't have to deal with it by yourself." The book is full of echoes of Judy Blume and the late Paula Danziger with its loving accounts of private jokes, memories and slang... ...

Michael Rosen in a very positive review of Boy Merts Boy by David Levithan.

Recommended

Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online

Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week

Ark Angel by Anthony Horowitz

This volume, involving a bad billionaire with interests in space and destructive plans, contains some of the series’ funniest put-downs, most cunningly constructed scenes and ambitious settings. With Ark Angel, Horowitz reaches unprecedented height...NICOLETTE JONES

Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Review: Ark Angel by Anthony Horowitz

Philip Ardagh, in The Guardian, thinks that with Ark Angel Anthony Horowitz has written a children's book 'in the purest sense':

Highbrow literature this ain't, but neither does it purport to be. For me, this is a children's book in the purest sense. It's not a crossover title that spills over into adult fiction. It's perfectly pitched at its readership. Ark Angel reads the way a children's thriller should read...

The Japan Times Online

The Japan Times reviews Skinny B, Skaz and Me by John Singleton...

Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online

Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week

The Amazing Story Of Adolphus Tips by Michael Morpurgo

Although this is a succinctly engaging tear-jerker, it is also full of happiness and affection and has a joyful ending... NICOLETTE JONES

Telegraph | Arts

Dinah Hall's children's book roundup from last Sunday's Telegraph, now online...

Hall is particularly keen on Permanent Rose by Hilary McKay and Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan...

Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | In safe hands

Kevin Crossley-Holland is won over by a debut historical novel, dep[site its lack of lexical vigour:

Like many a children's novelist, in fact, what Chandler writes is well-organised, well-observed, strongly felt, and psychologically astute, but how she writes is somehow grounded by a lack of much lexical vigour. I dare her to dare herself.

But the healing revelation with which this novel ends is so unexpected and utterly right that it made me gulp. Chandler has found the perfect way to tell us how tolerant faith, religious or secular, can in any age restore and empower what self-interest and cruel intolerance take away.

Warrior Girl by Pauline Chandler

Scotsman.com News - Features - Chapter play

Having already blogged my own teenage fiction reviews from last Saturday's Scotsman, I remembered today that all mention of Nigel Hinton's superb and unmissable TIME BOMB! had been omitted. The reason why is that the book was included at the end of a roundup of younger and middle-age fiction published the same day. So I am blogging the link to that now.

The Independent Online Edition > Enjoyment

"Hilary McKay's novels are like beacons of light shining over the dark and troubled waters of so much other contemporary teenage fiction. Her latest, Permanent Rose (Hodder, £10.99), is so good it almost hurts," says Nick Tucker in his roundup of recent teenage fiction.

Picture Books were also reviewed in today's Independent...