Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
I Am A Cloud, I Can Blow Anywhere by Jonathan and Shirley Tullock
This moving and engrossing story is a tale of courage in the most extreme adversity... NICOLETTE JONES
From whiffling to waffling - Books - Times Online
from Amanda Craig's review of Monster Blood Tattoo: Foundling by D. M. Cornish:
D. M. Cornish’s debut, Monster Blood Tattoo, begins with maps to its Half-Continent and an abandoned boy called Rossamund in desperate need of a job. Illustrated by the author, it is a fantasy closer to Peake’s Gormenghast than the appalling Eragon, and suffers from an excess of somewhat stale inventiveness. An orphanage is a foundlingery, sailors are vinegaroons, a cup is a biggin and so on; there is an “Explicarium” at the end, with Appendices and yet more maps. Maddeningly, Cornish can really write, and his story gets off to an engaging start when not tripping over these idiotic extras...
The heroine who's heading for Hell | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Josh Lacey on the first volume Kai Meyer's unusual trilogy, The Flowing Queen, winner of the Marsh Award:
In this adventure story set in an alternative version of the 19th century, the Egyptians have conquered most of the known world and only plucky little Venice holds out. Mermaids pull boats up and down the canals. Stone lions fly overhead...Curiously, the trilogy has already been published in the US under a different title and in a different translation. Anthea Bell, the translator of Egmont's edition, has won the Marsh Award twice already in its 10-year history and occupied two of the six places on this year's shortlist. That may be a sign of her skills as a translator or the lack of children's books in translation. Or both. She has previously translated Stefan Zweig, WG Sebald and every Asterix. Although Kai Meyer isn't quite in the same league, The Flowing Queen is enjoyable, inventive and full of imaginative details, and should please fantasy fans.
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
The Saddest King by Chris Wormell
The tone is lively, cheerful and surprising, even though the book considers grief and how to deal with it, because it sanctions feelings that are appropriate to events. NICOLETTE JONES
Experiments in learning | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Kathryn Hughes recommends The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume 1: The Pox Party by MT Anderson
...anyone prepared to keep faith with the demands that Anderson makes of his readers is due a huge reward. The language may be chilly but it has a swell of elegance that carries you along like a clipper...
Dark secrets of the pawn shop - Books - Times Online
Amanda Craig is hooked from the first sentence of The Black Book Of Secrets by F. E. Higgins:
IN THE ETERNAL BATTLE of children’s books versus computer games, nothing beats a cracking start. If you find a first sentence such as: “When I opened my eyes I knew that nothing in my miserable life prior to that moment could possibly be as bad as what was about to happen,” in F. E. Higgins’s The Black Book of Secrets, you know that you are in for a terrific read.
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Rubies In The Snow by Kate Hubbard
engrossing fictionalised diary of Anastasia Romanov, the doomed daughter of Tsar Nicholas NICOLETTE JONES
Children's book of the week - Sunday Times - Times Online
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
The Black Book Of Secrets by F E Higgins
this clever, atmospheric debut, about kindness and cruelty, with its richly drawn and sometimes grotesque characters, its mysteries, its magic and its surprising climax, is a piece of perfectly constructed, old-fashioned storytelling of the most compelling kind... NICOLETTE JONES
Review: Song for Eloise by Leigh Sauerwein | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Marcus Sedgwick, in a pleasingly anecdotal review of Song for Eloise by Leigh Sauerwein, reveals himself to be a fellow fan of short novels:
Bookshops are fuller than ever these days of fat tomes that waste words as if they were easy to come by, only encouraging the reader to glide as quickly as possible through their verbiage. Song for Eloise, meanwhile, takes its rightful place in my fantasy shop. It's just over there, under the sign Short Books: Read Slowly.
Review: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Philip Ardagh, in effusive mood, after reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusack:
Unsettling, thought-provoking, life-affirming, triumphant and tragic, this is a novel of breathtaking scope, masterfully told. It is an important piece of work, but also a wonderful page-turner. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I am currently reading this book myself. I'm only a quarter the way through it at the moment, and at this stage feel far more ambivalent about it. In particular, I'm not comfortable [because that's the sort of reader I am] with Zusack's teasing, tantalising approach to storytelling. We shall see.
Mean streets, men of the road - Books - Times Online
Alfred Noyes’s poem The Highwayman is part of many children’s education, even today. Its romantic sense of doom, its repeated rhythms and the drama of its betrayed lovers are unforgettable, and Nicola Morgan has had the excellent idea of creating a historical novel, The Highwayman’s Footsteps, inspired by it.
Amanda Craig on Nicola Morgan's new novel, and, in the same review, on Charlie Higson's second Young Bond novel, Double Or Die, which she prefers to the first.
