Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Ghosts! The Ultimate Guide For Ghost Hunters by Richard Brassey, previously also an ACHUKA Choice title:
enough spookiness here to stir children’s imaginations, but none of the images will haunt them... NICOLETTE JONES
Review: Frozen Fire by Tim Bowler | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Mal Peet "sometimes found himself struggling through deep drifts of prose" but in the end foud Tim Bowler's Frozen Fire a satisfyingly rewarding read:
Like all good books, it manages in the end to be both satisfying and richly ambiguous. Read it alone, at night. Wrap up well, and don't forget to strap on your mental snow-shoes.
As you would expect from so good a novelist, this is a superior book review. I recommend you follow the link to he full review.
1. The right not to read | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Josh Lacey signs up to Daniel Pennac's wise and liberating 10-point manifesto, The Rights of the Reader ...
Discover this year's best books for teenagers - Books - Times Online
The Booktrust Teenage Prize rewards the best in teen fiction. Here the four young judges give their verdicts on the shortlisted books...
The Observer | Review | Welcome to the post-apocalypse
"The best recent novels for older children run the gamut from wild fantasy to gritty realism, with several doing their best to amalgamate both..." said Geraldine Beddell, reviewing older fiction in The Observer
Also
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1928238,00.html
StEphanie Merritt on picture books
and
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1928239,00.html
Kate Kellaway on Michael Morpurgo's new novel, "his best book in years".
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
The Getaway by Ed Vere
Vere uses dialogue from the cinema (“You know how to whistle . . .”) and drawings superimposed on atmospheric photographic backgrounds that suggest the mean streets of Chicago. He offers a lot of knowing entertainment to adults while drawing young readers in to a chase and a guessing game, with tracks to follow across the page, a fold-out surprise, a dark denouement and a hopeful coda. The endpapers are for the adults to laugh at after lights out, with their spoof newspaper pieces about the theft of The Maltese Stilton, and parodic film credits. Verbally playful and visually stimulating... NICOLETTE JONES
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | To Hell and back
Philip Ardagh reviews The Black Tattoo by Sam Enthoven
The juggling act between humour and horror is a tricky one: take your eye off the ball for too long, and all credibility can end up on the floor. Sam Enthoven gets away with it. What he may lack in originality of plot, he makes up for in sheer freshness and enthusiasm.
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Larklight by Philip Reeves
Reeves’s remarkable new novel imagines that the Victorians travelled to the moon. Aimed at younger readers than the author’s Moving Cities sequence, this space adventure is more Jules Verne than Arthur C Clarke. ..NICOLETTE JONES
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | There and back again
Kathryn Hughes enjoys Lyn Gardner's glorious mish-mash of just about every quest story and fairytale you can think of, Into the Woods ...
Peter Pan’s sequel doesn’t quite get to fly - Books - Times Online
Amanda Craig finds much to admire in Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan In Scarlet -
"begins superbly, picking up on the end of the original with Wendy now a mother and the Lost Boys turned into Old Boys..."
"The story rattles along at breakneck speed, with so much in every chapter that there isn’t time for a child of 8 or more to get bored..."
"has captured both the exquisitely silly Edwardian flavour of Barrie’s language and even improved on his narrative style with descriptive touches such as rain coming down 'in exclamation marks'..."
But...
W. H. Auden pointed out how odd all great children’s authors are, and this is certainly true of Barrie, who suffered from psychogenetic dwarfism. Perhaps one of the reasons why McCaughrean’s admirably inventive but ultimately doomed novel doesn’t in the end work is that she is too sane and too knowing.
The Observer | Review | The ascent of Pan
Kate Kellaway senses that Geraldine McCaughrean is somewhat of an imposter in Neverland:
McCaughrean has dreamt up a busy odyssey in which her best innovation, her masterstroke, is the Grief Reef, a landscape made up of broken prams and distraught mothers looking for the fallen children they lost long ago. But elsewhere, the sense is that she has too much to prove, that she is reluctant to slow down for a second lest she discover what I think in our hearts we already knew - that she was not supposed to be in Neverland at all....
Independent Online Edition > Reviews
The Harsh Cry of the Heron by Lian Hearn reviewed in The Independent
It's rare, too, that such an extended narrative, especially one sustained over more than a single volume, plays out so gratifyingly. The Harsh Cry of the Heron builds to a climax that proves both fittingly cataclysmic and wholly satisfying in formal terms. Without any conspicuous cliffhanging it also leaves a way open to further instalments, though the author's next book, due in a year's time, is expected to relate the events leading up to the first book. The Otori sequence is already a considerable achievement. Cheeringly, it looks as though it will only get better.
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Peter Pan In Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean
Making copious use of arresting metaphor (“They ran until their lungs hung inside them like dead bats in a cave”), [McCaughrean] is funny, creative, clever, nostalgic and sound about mothers. A delight. NICOLETTE JONES
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Return to Neverland
Philip Ardagh lapped up the Peter Pan sequel in a single sitting:
Without there being even the faintest whiff of pastiche, McCaughrean has created a sequel so similar in tone and flavour to the original that they make a perfect matching pair. This is an extraordinary achievement.
N.B. At the time of posting the Guardian online review is showing the US not the UK jacket.
Bedtime with broomsticks - Books - Times Online
Amanda Craig picks out the latest Winne the Witch title and ACHUKA's current CHOICE selection, Ghosts by Richard Brassey, to demonstrate that there's "no trick to finding a treat this Hallowe’en."
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
This novel may not be Pratchett's most philosophically complex, nor the one with the cleverest plot, but its skilful whimsy is given substance by its timeless theme of seasonal change, and as the Feegles say: “Ye cannae fight a story as old as that”. NICOLETTE JONES
