Review: Unheard Voices edited by Malorie Blackman | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
a useful primer for younger readers who have only the faintest idea of what the slave trade - let alone its abolition - was all about.
Kathryn Huighes, on Unheard Voices, an introduction to the horrors of the slave trade edited by Malorie Blackman
Children’s book of the week-Arts & Entertainment-Books-TimesOnline
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
The Boyhood Of Burglar Bill by Allan Ahlberg
0141382848
a classic document about Britain as it was, every description careful and accurate (the “crazings” of drying mud on knees, as it falls away in “eggshell layers”), as well as comic, poignant and true. Anyone will be enriched by reading it. NICOLETTE JONES
Children’s book of the week-Arts & Entertainment-Books-TimesOnline
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Being by Kevin Brooks
Although this novel reads like a thriller, with action and surprises, it is a meditation on the nature of humanity: it asks what it means to be yourself. The end, frustratingly, does not offer answers to all the questions posed by the plot, but it does suggest that to feel, and to love, is enough. NICOLETTE JONES
From the horse's mouth | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Mary Hoffman reviews I Am The Great Horse by Katherine Roberts
Roberts wears her considerable research lightly, and you never question for a minute that this was how Alexander came to rule the Mediterranean and the east, from Macedonia to India. But it is not romanticised; you feel the glory of victory but also see how it ultimately corrupts the victor. And the end, for both king and horse, is as moving as anything I've read in a children's book, including Black Beauty.
Worm that doesn’t turn-Arts & Entertainment-Books-Children-TimesOnline
Amanda Craig reviews the following:
Boobela and Worm by Joe Friedman and Sam Childs
The Tinderbox by Hans Christian Andersen
Akimbo and the Snakes by Alexander McCall Smith
Independent Online Edition > Reviews
Nick Tucker's review of Jacqueline Wilson's autobiography, Jacky Daydream, from The Independent On Sunday:
This gently amusing account of her first 11 years is written with apparent total recall. It also provides an excellent guide to the often overlooked changes for the better that have happened to most children's lives since 1945, the year she was born.
Children's book of the week-Arts & Entertainment-Books-TimesOnline
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Jacky Daydream by Jacqueline Wilson
Wilson has aimed this autobiography, which takes her up to the age of not quite 12 years old, at her young readers. It concentrates on her clothes, schoolfriends, toys, seaside holidays (full of 1950s detail) and the books she liked to read. It quotes passages from her work that have come out of her own experiences. She does not try to be serious or analytical about her psyche and the book’s tone is chipper...
Review: Being by Kevin Brooks | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Hmmm! Philip Ardagh says he was expecting something 'edgier' in his review of Being, Kevin Brooks' first novel for Puffin.
Something edgier than the opening, when the hero is cut open on the operating tabe while fully conscious?
It's a curious review, because Ardagh admits that Brooks handles both aspects of the book - the thriller and the philososphical stand about identity - "expertly". And yet, he ends on this note. The kind of review, one imagines, (and I've probably been guilty of wiritng a few myself) thay must be very frustrating for an author to read.
I was expecting something edgier and more intense. Had Being been the work of a new writer, I'd be singing its praises - though, sadly, not necessarily in print. As it is, I've come to expect a further dimension from Brooks which, for me, this book doesn't deliver. But there's nothing wrong with going more mass market and, if it hooks in new Brooks fans who then go on to read his earlier work, all the better.
It’s no fun being a girl-Arts & Entertainment-Books-Children-TimesOnline
GIRLS NOW SEEM SO much in the ascendant, triumphing over boys in exams and trumpeting girl power, that it’s easy to forget how vulnerable, unhappy and uncertain their common lot still is. I am sick of the flood of pink books I get sent, tittering over dates and discos like an eternal sleepover party. Even when genuinely funny – those by Louise Rennison or Sue Limb, for example – they don’t probe any deeper into what Louisa May Alcott dubbed “girlitude”... ...
So starts Amanda Criag's review of
Dirty Work by Julia Bell
and
Life As We Knew It by Susan Pfeffer
Enthusiastic Salon review for Un Lun Dun, the first children's novel by adult SF and fantasy writer, China Mieville
Children's book of the week-Arts & Entertainment-Books-TimesOnline
Sunday Times Children's Book Of The Week
Dexter Bexley And The Big Blue Beast by Joel Stewart
This book is an inspired celebration of imaginative play, working at simple and sophisticated levels, in real time and fantasy time. It is comic, suspenseful and tender, has surprising developments, and Stewart’s grainy, surreal, retro images — with, for instance, a mountainous sundae, a beastie whose face looks as though it has been torn off at the edge and characters tied up with sausages — are a delight. NICOLETTE JONES
Psst, want to join a conspiracy?-Arts & Entertainment-Books-Children-TimesOnline
"Voake’s third novel is a giant leap forward from his debut, The Dreamwalker’s Child," says Amanda Craig in her review of his third children's novel, The Starlight Conspiracy
Voake’s third novel is a giant leap forward from his debut, The Dreamwalker’s Child.
Into the shadows | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
There isn't anything like the grand intellectual ambition of Pullman here; none of the serious moral intelligence of His Dark Materials. Likewise, while the horror elements should appeal to Shan fans looking for their next fix, Becker doesn't yet have Shan's command of tone. Where Shan excels at building a sense of creeping unease, keeping the tension levels constantly rising, Becker is a little too preoccupied with plot mechanics to create genuine terror.
"All of which is to judge a first novel by the very highest standards," adds S F Said, in his review of Tom Becker's Darkside.
