Reviews: June 2006 Archives

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Enchanted by words

Adele Geras on Exchange by Paul Magrs:

This is a wonderful novel about bereavement, growing up and above all about the power of books to console and amuse; to give us a means of escape and also a means of understanding ourselves and the world....

Here be monsters - Books - Times Online

Amanda Craig loves Beast by Ally Kennen...

I really love this book: it is so good to discover a writer who does not depend on the supernatural for suspense. Kennen has taken an urban legend and turned it into a tense, funny and touching tale of how a troubled adolescent could, against extraordinary odds, gain control of his life. Gorgeously jacketed with lumpy scales and a glowing yellow eye, Beast should be a monster hit.

See also the 5-chick review on achukareviews

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

Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week

The North Pole Was Here by Andrew C Revkin

Full of fascinating facts and generously illustrated with maps and photographs, this is a timely, myth-busting warning for a new generation. NICOLETTE JONES

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Review: Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson

Kate Thompson reviews Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson:

The desire of writers of adult literature to venture into children's fiction is an understandable one. The genre offers a wider palette with which to explore ideas, and Winterson has made full use of this. Tanglewreck is an ambitious project, wide-ranging and colourful, but it suffers from a lack of discipline and, more seriously, from a lack of credibility. When we first meet the Throwback Gabriel, we learn that he and his kind die if they live above ground, but in the closing chapters Gabriel reveals, without explanation, that he can live there now. The book is full of similar short cuts. The rules that govern the imagined world are insufficiently developed, and the author feels free to change or break them on a whim. Elaborate explanations of the laws of quantum physics are expounded and then ignored, in the belief, presumably, that children won't notice. The author makes a great deal about the difference between science and magic, but in the end most of the solutions emerge out of neither, as when Gabriel is pulled from the Black Hole by "the power of love". This does a great disservice to young readers, who have as much right to expect internal logic in a book as adults do..

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | A kind of magic

In a highly recommended feature, James Campbell writes about the splendid Walter d la Mare, on the 50th anniversary of his death, saying:

we should read him for enchantment, which is plentifully supplied in his peacock pie, his wind's tittle-tattle, his down-adown-derry, and even in his "winter fallen early".

The stories

The poems

We’re in deep waters here - Books - Times Online

Amanda Craig chooses mermaids has her theme in today's revew in The Times, in which, amongst others she mentions The Tide Turner by Angela McAllister and The Tide Knot by Helen Dunmore:

This summer a fresh wave of mermaid books, and the timely release of Aquamarine, a fishy tale from 20th Century Fox, will be washing into bookshops...

CNN.com - A child looks at children's books - Jun 6, 2006

A 6-year-old son of a CNN worker reviews some children's books.

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

Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week

Gideon The Cutpurse by Linda Buckley-Archer

Stimulating about the relative merits of then and now, and so convincing a picture of the 18th century that we feel transported ourselves, this first book of a planned trilogy of time-travel adventures is skilled, engrossing and irresistible. NICOLETTE JONES

The first cut is the deepest - Books - Times Online

Westerfield has created a gripping thriller about a dystopia founded on ideas of beauty, with all the gadgets, urban planning, moral dilemmas and medical disasters of superior science fiction.

Amanda Craig on Scott Westerfield's Pretties. Her Saturday review column in The Times also included (slightly less enthusiastic) comment on Sara's Face by Melvin Burgess.

While at Hay, Sherry Ashworth spoke to me about my recent comment about my not entirely trusting Craig's taste. I said that at least there was a consistent critical viewpoint in The Times, as opposed to The Guardian, which continues to use a host of mainly peer reviewers. Ashworth said that, as an author, she preferred The Guardian's approach, because it made her feel that at least her kind of novel stood a chance of being reviewed in The Guardian, whereas she felt (probably correctly) that Craig is not best disposed towards her brand of fiction.

I still feel very strongly that the reviewing of children's fiction deserves to be put on the same footing as, say, film reviews. In other words, a selection of recently published novels (not, as so often happens, a themed selection) should be reviewed by a regular reviewer, whose critical tastes and standpoint become familiar to readers. The Guardian Review page continues to distress me in this regard.