Reviews: September 2005 Archives
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Operation Red Jericho by Joshua Mowll
This is not just an adventure story; it is a designer object. Written by a graphic artist, it includes detailed fold-out plans and cross-sections of ships and weaponry. It pretends to be a notebook and associated papers inherited by the author from his late aunt, giving an account of her adventures with her rebellious brother in their youth in the Far East in the 1920s, after their parents have gone missing. NICOLETTE JONES
Books - reviews and literary news from The Times and The Sunday Times
Amanda Craig reviews Percy Jackson And The Olympians by Rick Riordan:
"almost as funny as Paul Shipton’s The Pig Scrolls"
N.B. We've got a free copy of Rick Riordan's novel plus (!!!) a pair of brand new Converse All Star trainers to give away to the lucky winner of a cmpetition that will be running on ACHUKA next week...
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Review: Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Philip Ardagh considers Frank Cottrell Boyce's second novel for children, Framed, marks him out as a 'true master':
There's a nice twist in a subplot at the end and it's all very satisfying, but it's the characters that make you read this book. I don't know how hard Frank Cottrell Boyce finds it to write, but he makes it seem easy, which is the mark of a true master.
In the same Guardian Review section Diane Samuels reviews The Witch's Boy
by Michael Gruber:
The writing can sometimes be a little overblown, but it also captures the tone of traditional fairytale narration, while touching it with a contemporary voice. This is a rich and imaginative book which undertakes in literary terms what the author describes as the work of his grey-eyed woman - to adjust "the pattern of things so that life flowed smoothly through time, the sun becoming the sunflower seed and the sunflower seed becoming the mouse ... round and round, ever changing, the patterns crisp and balanced as they danced to the unknowable tune".
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Charlie Cook's Favourite Book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
Scheffler’s creatures and characters, with their expressions of bemused enjoyment, can’t keep their round eyes and big noses out of stories, making this a satisfyingly self-referential volume about reading and the pleasure of reading. NICOLETTE JONES
The Observer | Review | Trickier Ricky
Stephanie Merritt review of picture books in The Observer includes this observation of Where's My Cow? by Terry Pratchett (not published till Oct 1st):
It's a strange concept: the simplicity of the story suggests it's aimed at very young children, yet the illustrations are quite frightening and you need to know the context of the characters to elaborate on them. Perhaps it is intended for Pratchett fans to induct their young into the ways of Discworld at the earliest possible stage...
Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Teen fiction: Sep 18
Kate Kellaway, in The Observer, is not impressed by American critic, Dale Peck's first children's novel, Drift House:
...this month, American novelist Dale Peck, best known as the critic who out-Burchills Burchill for savagery, publishes Drift House (Bloomsbury ?12.99) an almost unreadably fogeyish, camp version of CS Lewis. Drift House is exactly as it sounds, a house that floats into the sea....
However, of the 'boxloads' of teenage and children's books she read this summer, she found two that were outstanding:
The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean - "dazzling, pitiless"
and Ingo by Helen Dunmore, a story that "adheres in the mind"
The Observer | Review | Children's books: Sep 18
A mini roundup of new older fiction from The Observer...
Curious George's narrow escape - Arts & Leisure - International Herald Tribune
An International Herald Tribune review of The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Magret and H. A. Rey by Louise Borden.
New York City - Part 2 / Features Print Edition
from a review of Girl Sleuth by Melanie Rehak:
Melanie Rehak's "Girl Sleuth" takes a long look at women's positions in 20th century American public life through the biographies of three women, two real and one imaginary. The most famous is the fictional Nancy Drew, the teenage heroine of dozens of mysteries for children from 1930 to today. Nancy sleuthed her way with pluck, politesse and persistence through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, the war between the sexes and the age of irony, as economic and social upheavals hurried her sister Americans back and forth from home to workplace. The other two protagonists of "Girl Sleuth" are Nancy's main creators: Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, a housewife-turned-CEO, and journalist Mildred Wirt Benson, who between them wrote all but three of the Nancy Drew books under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene...
See also this article from the Boston Globe...
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett ills. Brett Helquist
Beautifully packaged, with noir-ish, atmospheric drawings by Brett Helquist (who also illustrates Lemony Snicket’s stories), the book is not so much about solving a puzzle by logic and reason, as about the patterns and coincidences that connect ideas and events that may or may not be meaningful.... NICOLETTE JONES
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Review: The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean
McCaughrean writes every sort of book and she seems to produce them in the way a rose bush produces flowers: effortlessly and beautifully and over and over again. There's something in her work for everyone.
Adele Geras reviews The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean
CEN Lifestyle : Arts and Music : Album reviews
Cambridge Evening News:
...this bizarre vanity project from Rollo Armstrong, member of Faithless and brother of senselessly boring chill out queen Dido. It's not just a CD, it's also a children's book about a boy who runs away from home and meets some monsters, then runs up a hill and meets a clone of himself then… actually I'm just going to leave that one - suffice to say it is likely to leave the average child completely baffled and probably slightly distressed...
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The >Week
Nicolette Jones, reviewing Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce (author of Millions), is pleased to find that the author is not a 'one-book wonder'.
What makes this book so enjoyable is that the writing is full of jokes and touching moments, and the dialogue is as lively and arresting as a film script. And yet the book offers more than could be shown on screen, such as Boyce’s startling use of metaphor. Driving up a mountain through cloud and coming out into the sunshine, for instance, is described as “like opening a cupboard and finding a beach”. NICOLETTE JONES
Books - reviews and literary news from The Times and The Sunday Times
Amanda Craig reviews Ingo by Helen Dunmore:
Although the first part of this trilogy needs to speed up to hold the attention of children, the lyrical writing and Dunmore’s intense sympathy for all she describes make this a perfect book with which to wind up the summer holidays, or to recollect them.
