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Irish Times Reviews

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Sara Keating leads her Irish Times piece with a review of In The Key Of Code  by Aimee Lucido.

In The Key of Code (Walker Books, £6.99, 10+) takes a totally original approach to the verse novel, using the language of music and computer code to carry the story. Emmy is the daughter of struggling musicians who have moved to California hoping for a big break. Unable to make instruments sing the way her parents can, Emmy feels like an outsider in her family, and her status as the new girl only heightens her alienation. At her new school, she is the “only one in a room full of duets trios symphonies singing a solo”…. … In the Key of Code is thoroughly original in both concept and execution, and it manages to sneak in an empowering history of women’s involvement in computers too.

See what other books are reviewed in the piece here >>> https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/children-s-books-in-the-key-of-code-breaks-new-ground-1.4037729

 

YA Roundup in Irish Times

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This roundup of YA titles in the Irish Times culminates in a summary of And The Ocean Was Our Sky, the latest title form Patrick Ness:

“This is an elegant novella with a mythic feel, beautifully illustrated by Rovina Cai, whose black-and-white (with the occasional striking, powerful splash of red) drawings capture the dreamy sense of this world, even as its preoccupation with power reflects our own. Another modern classic from Ness.”

Other novels reviewed in this piece (by Claire Hennessy are:

>>> https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/young-adult-round-up-tina-callaghan-s-debut-horror-novel-for-teens-1.3641011

The Young Person’s Guide To Grievance – Wall Street Journal Roundup

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Concluding an admirable round up of ‘grievance’ titles recently published for children and young people, the Wall Street Journal reviewer Meghan Cox Gurdon writes:

Amid this angsty abundance, who or what is being resisted and persisted against is kept mostly in the shadowy realm of understatement, though in the Hudsons’ book there are references to bullies and kids in MAGA hats. In Ms. Styron’s handbook, the actress Lena Dunham bemoans the “slight condescension” of doctors. Ms. Styron herself inculpates “the people in control of things” and “some sects” that in history “have done a pretty bang-up job of oppressing other sects.” Ms. Rich, in “Girls Resist!,” blames “society” for giving young women “messed-up notions” and encourages activists to identify their “enemies” by compiling lists of those who are “entrenched in the opposite view.”

Listing enemies, tabulating “daily oppressions” (Ms. Rich again), sewing up a man’s mouth, even on paper—it seems such a joyless way to spend the fleeting years of adolescence. I suppose there’s a market for everything.

>>>https://www.wsj.com/articles/childrens-books-the-young-persons-guide-to-grievance-1535674669

ACHUKAreview: All These Beautiful Strangers by Elizabeth Klehfoth

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This is an exceptionally good pageturner of a novel.

It opens with an immaculately written Prologue, a single page of beautifully cadenced scene-setting prose which immediately sets up high expectations.

The opening chapters are set in a college called Knollwood Prep and I was briefly concerned that the book was going to be a conventional teen drama about a secret student club.

But it opens up in the fourth chapter to bring in a compelling back story involving the main character’s family.

Charlotte Calloway’s father, Alistair, had attended Knollwood a generation earlier and been a member of the the same society that Charlie herself joins.

From this point on the novel is variously told from the points of view of Alistair, Charlie’s mother Grace, and of Charlie herself.

As the thriller builds momentum, and the mystery surrounding both Grace’s disappearance several years previously and the true explanation behind the apparent suicide of a student who was at Knollwood with Charlie’s father, the reader is increasingly drawn into a web of intrigue and betrayal involving the older generation.

Klehfoth doesn’t pull any punches when writing these scenes, which is what makes the book so admirable. This is very much a Young Adult novel, rather than a work of teen fiction.

Some of the contemporary escapades involving Charlie and her fellow students can have a bit of a Riverdale vibe about them, even occasionally of boarding school antics as seen in The House of Anubis. Klehfoth’s writing never falters, always hitting the appropriate note.

She is particularly good at describing the foibles of the rich and privileged set who make up the membership of the secret society and from which Charlie herself comes. So good I wondered if the author herself comes from a similar background.

I had the opportunity to ask her this question during a lightning interview at an event in London recently. Apparently not. Her Indiana upbringing was far more humble, though when she attended college in Orange County, she was surrounded by students from a smart set whose parents would, quite literally, be able to buy them houses.

I also learnt that All These Beautiful Strangers is her first attempt at full-length fiction, which makes the way she manages to structure and interweave her mixed point of view narrative so extraordinary.

The book is already optioned and I can imagine it making a really good Netflix drama. But it’s as a thoroughly good read that I am recommending it here and giving it the full five out of five, because this is as good a YA thriller as you are likely to come by this year.


ACHUKAreview

Guardian Review: Children’s and teens roundup

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latest Guardian roundup from Imogen Russell Williams:

The stand-out title this month is a picture book, Julian Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love (Walker). When Julian sees three women dressed as mermaids, he wants to be one too; but how will his Nana react? In this bravura feat of understated storytelling, the richness of Julian’s day-to-day reality and free-floating imagination is caught in images layered with colour, movement, muscle and life, celebrating black and Latin experience. Julian invents a tail and flowing hair, and Nana’s acceptance, as she accompanies him on a wild parade of mermaids, will leave the reader filled with joy.

via Children’s and teens roundup: the best new picture books and novels | Books | The Guardian.

Sunday Times Children’s Books Easter Roundup

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Nicolette Jones in her Easter roundup of the season’s best children’s books includes this praise for Running On Empty by SE Durrant

Lyrical, moving and realistic, SE Durrant’s Running on Empty (Nosy Crow £6.99, 8-11) is about the struggle of an 11-year-old carer who is starting secondary school and wants to run like Usain Bolt. With a rich and diverse cast, it sings.

>>> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/culture/children-s-books-big-dog-little-dog-who-was-that-read-the-book-lemmings-robinson-meet-the-twitches-song-of-the-dolphin-boy-long-way-down-review-klgt98tdg

 

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The Mouse Who Wasn’t Scared by Petr Horacek (Times Children’s Book of the Week)

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Times Children’s Book of the Week 10/02/2018

Little Mouse is not your average risk-averse child. “Don’t go and play in the wood,” warns Rabbit. “It’s frightening there and full of big, scary animals.” “Nothing frightens me,” says Little Mouse. “I may be small but I’m not scared of anything!”
And into the dark trees he marches in his socks, gloves and striped tail-warmer (at least he wrapped up). So far so intrepid, as Horacek — the master illustrator from Prague whose use of bold colour and cut-outs makes him a cut above — shows our baby rodent leaping from toadstool to toadstool. Alex O’Connell The Times

Waterstones

ST Children’s Book of the Week 31 Dec

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Children’s Book of the Week

The Light Jar by Lisa Thompson

Waterstones

This psychological fantasy of imaginary friends, survival, a mysterious girl and a treasure hunt, sustains anxiety while not losing heart, and finally reaches the hoped-for new start. Written with clarity and tact, it is pitched for the young despite having a serious theme, frightening circumstances and a sinister threat.
NICOLETTE JONES

 

The Best of Roundups

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How good to see the TLS giving some space to children’s books and this piece by Imogen Russell Williams, in which she picks out and makes enthralling commentary on the best illustrated books of the year, is a cut or two above most seasonal roundups.

As introduction she warns overzealous parents, “A frequent casualty of the utilitarian focus on advancement and sheer length is illustration, and the reader’s respect for it. The children told “You’re too old for picture books” are not only banished abruptly from an enchanted kingdom. They are also held back from winkling out images’ stored secrets of detail, and from learning the artist’s language of window-frame, colour, light, shade, emphasis, the single line that communicates mood, or loss, or season – everything we mean by “visual literacy”. Sophisticated, demanding concepts may also be com­municated, via illustration, to readers unable or unwilling as yet to parse the complex language required.”

I pick out just one of the books she recommends, to give a flavour of the quality of her commentary:

While illustrated books for teenagers remain sadly scarce, the best young adult literature is reinvigorating tired tropes, scrutinizing and dissecting cliché and demanding its readers’ alert attention. In Nick Lake’s Satellite(Hachette), a timeworn science fiction scenario is brought back to full brightness, aiming its tight-beamed questions with the intensity of borrowed light. The narrator, Leo, a child born in space, and his companions, Orion and Libra, are almost due, at fifteen, to come to Earth for the first time – a “home” they have never seen or set foot on. Living all his life in the orbiting space station Moon 2, Leo has longed for years to meet his grandfather, and to achieve the familial closeness his mother – an astronaut who occasionally visits – has never offered. The green-blue beauty of the distant planet, however, heralds danger as well as welcome – and conceals some shattering secrets. The book’s depiction of an Earth both familiar and strange (and a satellite in which engineered sterility is ­pervaded by tenderness), its thrilling, audaciously unlikely denouement, and its ethical and philosophical conundrums are all communicated via Leo’s truncated, syncopated diction. While not as rebarbative as that of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, this voice is initially startling, even irritating – gradually, however, it reveals itself as the perfect means of signalling an existence analogous to that of its earth-bound counterparts, but inevitably and perpetually different. Leo’s care to note mots justes throughout also focuses the reader’s mind on both language’s power and its shortcomings – as when he first sees a sleeping puppy on his grandfather’s ranch:

i stand & stare, just stare, at this little black-&white shape, knotted on itself, only 1 ear visible, chest rising & falling as it breathes. It makes me think of the word compact & it makes me think of the word perfect & it makes me think of the word life.

Here’s a list of the other books she recommends. Follow the link for the full piece (highly advised):

 

>>> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/buzz-saw-imagination-illustrations/

 

Irish Times Roundup

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This roundup by Sara Keating mentions several books on the theme of migration, including

The Mediterranean by Armin Greder (Allen and Unwin, 8+, £12.99) looks at the idea of migration through the lens of the current refugee crisis. Do not be deceived by the fact that Greder takes a picture-book approach: he paints a harrowing picture of the reality of forced migration. The almost wordless story opens with a lifeless body floating in the water. In a series of rubbed charcoal drawings, full of smudged faces and oppressive landscapes, Greder brings us on a circular journey that reveals the world of war and poverty that forces millions of people every year to flee their homes. The darkness of the theme notwithstanding, The Mediterranean opens up an opportunity to have deeper conversations with a child about the current global political landscape.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/books-for-children-voiceless-gorillas-grumbling-dragons-and-the-refugee-crisis-1.3284328

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