ACHUKA Book of the Day Thu 23 Jan 2020
Such a brilliant biographical series, filling a gaping gap in the children’s market. This latest title publishes 4 Feb 2020.
David grew up in Leicester on the campus of a university, where his father was a professor. As a child, he spent hours in the science library, collating his own specimens and creating a mini animal museum. When he was old enough to go to university, he studied science and zoology–but what he wanted most of all was to be close to the animals he was studying. So, he started working in television, visiting animals in their natural habitats, and telling the world the untold stories of these animals. This moving book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the broadcaster’s life.
Nesbit’s influence can be felt everywhere from the Chronicles of Narnia to Kate Saunders’s Costa Prize-winning Five Children on the Western Front, which takes Cyril, Robert and the rest from the eternal Edwardian summer of the earlier books to the First World War. Meanwhile, Jacqueline Wilson’s modern retelling, Four Children and It, is currently being made into a film with Michael Caine as the Psammead.The link between Wilson and Nesbit is closer than you might think. Wilson’s resolutely contemporary creations, Tracy Beaker and Dolphin in The Illustrated Mum, share the same determination and hopefulness that make Nesbit’s children, despite the knickerbockers and pinafore dresses, still as fresh and engaging still as they must have been a century. Nesbit’s clear eye for the way we interact makes her a startlingly modern writer.
