The Observer | Review | Love of the comma people
Review of the children's version of Lynne Truss's bestseeler Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Whyt Commas Really Do Make A Difference
Reviews: August 2006 Archives
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
The Monstrous Memoirs Of A Mighty McFearless by Ahmet Zappa
Ahmet Zappa is Frank Zappa’s son and this book shows signs of the celebrity fast-track to publication: the prose (made-up names aside) is ordinary and the author’s marginal doodles of monsters unskilled. And yet it has something. What it lacks in writerliness it partly makes up for in sincerity. NICOLETTE JONES
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Moonbird by Joyce Dunbar and Jane Ray
In the light of In the Picture, the Scope campaign that aims for more children with disabilities to be represented in children’s literature, this lovely picturebook warrants wide dissemination. It is a fairy tale about a young prince who is deaf.... ...
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | The lost chord
Nicola Morgan is impressed by <em>A Note Of Madness by Tabitha Suzuma:
If this book weren't so compassionate, it would be a case study, and it is indeed a clear exposition of manic depression, or bipolar illness. We even learn the specific name, bipolar two, as well as some of the drugs that treat it and the risks of taking lithium. In other hands such information could be clod-hopping, but here it feeds our fascination and feels right.
The little people are big business - Books - Times Online
Amanda Craig reviews Artemis Fowl And The Lost Colony by Eoin Colfer:
Colfer’s technological wizardry, Chandler-esque dialogue and comic gusto have built a robust and detailed world, comparable to those of J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman and Diana Wynne Jones.
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
this disturbing, blackly comic, sophisticated meditation on death, madness and sexuality is powerful and tenaciously haunting. NICOLETTE JONES
Natural magic of the brave and good - Books - Times Online
Amanda Craig reviews Forest Mage by Robin Hobb, part of The Soldier Son trilogy:
The Soldier Son [trilogy] can be read as a political satire on American military aggression, but on a more personal level it is profoundly perceptive about the challenge faced by the honourable, brave and good.... ...Rich in character and plot, and 900 pages long, this is the kind of fantasy that Anthony Trollope would have written if he lived now.
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
The Fantastic Mr Wani by Kanako Usui
This picturebook won the best new illustrator award in Booktrust’s Early Years awards for 2005. Usui has a sophisticated sense of the design of a page, and his pictures have the child-friendliness of computerised cartoons without the nasty slickness...NICOLETTE JONES
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Review: Centre of My World by Andreas Steinhofel
Meg Rosoff reviews Centre Of My World by Andreas Steinhofel:
Centre of My World qualifies as one of the increasing number of crossover novels that punch full weight both in terms of style and subject. Breaking all the rules of the young adult novel with its calm, internalised landscapes and eccentric, meandering narrative, it pulls the reader forward powerfully towards the open air, towards freedom and possibilities and growth.
Portraits of artists as young men - Books - Times Online
Amanda Craig reviews
Will Shakespeare and the Pirate's Fire by Robert J Harris
"Packed with spies, sword-fights, daring escapes and traitorous villains, this is just the kind of swashbuckling adventure to engage bored schoolchildren in Shakespeare..."
and
The Medici Seal by Theresa Breslin
"Not only is it a gripping historical thriller, it is an exceptionally touching exploration of a relationship between a man and a boy..."
