ACHUKA Children's Books UK

children's & YA recommendations on the go

You are here: Home / Archives for family

Heiress Apparently by Diana Ma

By Leave a Comment

Waterstones
Amazon
Bookshop

“Ma successfully creates vivid settings in Los Angeles and China as she uncovers important issues facing Asian Americans, including family expectations, identity, sacrifice and honour.”
School Library Journal
“Soap-opera–worthy twists are grounded by ties to significant events in contemporary Chinese history in this meaningful debut.” KIRKUS

The first book in an epic and romantic YA series following the fictionalized descendants of the only officially recognized empress regent of China

Gemma Huang is a recent transplant to Los Angeles from Illinois, having abandoned plans for college to pursue a career in acting, much to the dismay of her parents. Now she’s living with three roommates in a two-bedroom hovel, auditioning for bit roles that hardly cover rent. Gemma’s big break comes when she’s asked to play a lead role in an update of M. Butterfly filming for the summer in Beijing. When she arrives, she’s stopped by paparazzi at the airport. She quickly realizes she may as well be the twin of one of the most notorious young socialites in Beijing. Thus kicks off a summer of revelations, in which Gemma uncovers a legacy her parents have spent their lives protecting her from-one her mother would conceal from her daughter at any cost.

Diana Ma is a debut Chinese-American author who holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Washington and an MA in English with a creative writing focus from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She lives in a suburb of Seattle.

The Silent Stars Go By by Sally Nicholls

By Leave a Comment

Seventeen-year-old Margot Allan was a respectable vicar’s daughter and madly in love with her fiance Harry. But when Harry was reported Missing in Action from the Western Front, and Margot realised she was expecting his child, there was only one solution she and her family could think of in order to keep that respectability. She gave up James, her baby son, to be adopted by her parents and brought up as her younger brother.

Now two years later the whole family is gathering at the vicarage for Christmas. It’s heartbreaking for Margot being so close to James but unable to tell him who he really is. But on top of that, Harry is also back in the village.

Released from captivity in Germany and recuperated from illness, he’s come home and wants answers. Why has Margot seemingly broken off their engagement and not replied to his letters? Margot knows she owes him an explanation. But can she really tell him the truth about James?

Waterstones
Bookshop
Amazon

Charles Keeping, Artist | Spitalfields Life

By Leave a Comment

Hugely recommended feature on Charles Keeping from The Gentle Author blog:

The illustrations of Charles Keeping (1924–1988) burned themselves into my consciousness as a child and I have loved his work ever since. A major figure in British publishing in the last century, Keeping illustrated over one hundred books (including the entire novels of Dickens) and won the Kate Greenaway and Carnegie Medals for his superlative talent.

In 1975, Keeping published ‘Cockney Ding Dong,’ in which he collected songs he remembered sung at home as a child. Illustrated with tender portraits of his extended family, the book is an unusual form of autobiography, recreating an entire cultural world through drawing and popular song.

Recently, I visited the Keeping Gallery at Shortlands in Kent to meet Vicky and Sean Keeping who talked to me about their father’s work, as we sat in the family home where they grew up and where much of his work is now preserved and displayed for visitors. You can read my interview at the end of this selection of illustrations from ‘Cockney Ding Dong.’

via Charles Keeping, Artist | Spitalfields Life.

Five children and a philandering husband: E Nesbit’s private life

By Leave a Comment

TelegraphNesbit’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.

via Five children and a philandering husband: E Nesbit’s private life.

Little Bits of Sky by S. E. Durrant

By Leave a Comment

LittleBitsOfSKy

A memorable and moving tale about growing up, making friends and finding a home.

“I’ve put this story together from the diaries I kept when Zac and I were children. I wrote them because I felt we were almost invisible and I wanted to make sure our story was told, and also in the hope that life would get better for the small unloved girl that was me, and my even smaller unloved brother.”

Waterstones

Netflix ‘doubling down’ on children’s programming

By Leave a Comment

marketwatch

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, said Sunday the on-demand video provider is “doubling down” on children’s programming, increasing the number of family-friendly original series from the current 15 to 35 in the next year.

Speaking at the Television Critics Association in Pasadena, Calif., Sarandos said Netflix NFLX, -2.82%   has become “a family product that everyone is using in the house.”

“Families have subscribers with kids in the house, and they tend to be much more engaged,” Sarandos said. “We’ve had great success with our original content. Given the complexity of children’s TV on cable these days, creating and managing our own content is preferential.”

One of those kid-friendly programs is “Fuller House,” the revival of the popular 1990s ABC sitcom, that will be released in February.

via Netflix ‘doubling down’ on children’s programming – MarketWatch.

Between Two Worlds: The Photography of Nell Dorr

By Leave a Comment

NellDorr

On Sunday, May 3, 2015 from 1 to 3 p.m. the Gunn Museum in Washington, Connecticut will host a free opening reception for their new exhibit, Between Two Worlds: The Photography of Nell Dorr.

This retrospective exhibit commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Horace Mann School’s John Dorr Nature Laboratory in Washington and the 75th anniversary of the Dorr Foundation. Nell Dorr’s photographs and artifacts from the Massillon Museum in Ohio, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Texas, and area residents are featured in this show. New touch screen technology has been incorporated into the exhibit allowing visitors to watch friends and descendants share their stories about Nell Dorr and the lasting impact that she made on their lives and our town.

via Between Two Worlds: The Photography of Nell Dorr – News – The Litchfield County Times.

Forty Portraits in Forty Years

By Leave a Comment

New York Times

Nicholas Nixon was visiting his wife’s family when, “on a whim,” he said, he asked her and her three sisters if he could take their picture. It was summer 1975, and a black-and-white photograph of four young women — elbows casually attenuated, in summer shirts and pants, standing pale and luminous against a velvety background of trees and lawn — was the result. A year later, at the graduation of one of the sisters, while readying a shot of them, he suggested they line up in the same order. After he saw the image, he asked them if they might do it every year. “They seemed O.K. with it,” he said; thus began a project that has spanned almost his whole career. The series, which has been shown around the world over the past four decades, will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, coinciding with the museum’s publication of the book “The Brown Sisters: Forty Years” in November.

sisters1

Who are these sisters? We’re never told (though we know their names: from left, Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie; Bebe, of the penetrating gaze, is Nixon’s wife). The human impulse is to look for clues, but soon we dispense with our anthropological scrutiny — Irish? Yankee, quite likely, with their decidedly glamour-neutral attitudes — and our curiosity becomes piqued instead by their undaunted stares. All four sisters almost always look directly at the camera, as if to make contact, even if their gazes are guarded or restrained.

sisters2

via Forty Portraits in Forty Years – NYTimes.com.

Two lost novels by Cold Comfort Farm author Stella Gibbons are unearthed in drawer

By Leave a Comment

The family of Cold Comfort Farm author Stella Gibbons has revealed the existence of two completed novels that they hope a publisher will be interested in taking on:

A PAIR of unpublished novels by the renowned comic novelist Stella Gibbons have come to light three decades after they were finished.

And the New Journal can now reveal how the writer’s daughter, Laura Richardson, and her family hope they may find a publisher willing to finally put her last two books into print.

The manuscripts have been gathering dust in a drawer for more than two decades and will be a source of great excitement in literary circles, where her works have enjoyed a trendy renaissance.

The New Journal revealed last week how Ms Gibbons is set to have a plaque unveiled on her Vale of Health home where she penned the classic Cold Comfort Farm, a book that has enchanted readers since its first edition in 1933.

Laura, who lives in Kentish Town, contacted the paper last week after reading of the plan by the Heath and Hampstead Society to honour her mum and in an interview recalled how Stella Gibbons finished two novels that she never sent to her publisher prior to her death in 1989.

Ms Richardson said: “The first is called An Alpha and is about a young woman who is from the Far East. She moves to Britain and becomes a successful writer.

“The second is called The Yellow Houses and is a bit of a ghost story. My mother converted to Christianity after meeting my father – she had been brought up an atheist – and they dabbled in spiritualism. This novel deals with that and other issues such as reincarnation. It was about a house where spirits flourished.

“They were finished and I would love to see them published.”

via EXCLUSIVE: Publisher sought after two lost novels by Cold Comfort Farm author Stella Gibbons are unearthed in drawer | Camden New Journal.

X-Factor and Strictly set good example, says Jacqueline Wilson

By Leave a Comment

Talent shows such as The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing are educational because they teach people that perseverance and hard work can get you to the top, one of the nation’s best-known children’s authors has said.
Dame Jacqueline Wilson said that prime-time reality programmes highlight how anyone can succeed regardless of background and praised their ability to bring families together.
The former Children’s Laureate poured scorn on people who turned their noses up at such shows, saying that they represented one of the few areas in television where older and younger entertainers could enjoy equal billing.
Her comments are in stark contrast to a number made recently by school heads who have suggested that pop stars such as Miley Cyrus and the celebrity culture more widely are leading girls astray.
Dame Jacqueline, best known for her Tracy Beaker books, chronicled her appreciation of talent shows in an article for yesterday’s Mail on Sunday.

via X-Factor and Strictly set good example, says children’s author – Telegraph.