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Moose’s Book Bus by Inga Moor

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Sunday Times Children’s Book of the Week 10 Oct 2021

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Moose is the most fantastic storyteller. Every night, he sits with his family around the fire and tells an enchanting story. But, one evening, Moose can’t think of a single tale he hasn’t told before! What he needs is a book of stories. What he needs is a library… With help from his family and friends in the woods, Moose recycles an abandoned bus from the junkyard into a book bus for his entire community to enjoy.

In this heart-warming companion title to A House in the Woods, beloved picture book maker Inga Moore tells a story that celebrates the joy of reading aloud and sharing stories, and the power that libraries have to bring communities together.

The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales by Alice & Martin Provensen

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 9 Nov 2021
Spectator Best Children’s Books 2021

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Back in print some half a century after it first appeared, thanks to the New York Review Children’s Collection.

Alice and Martin Provensen were one of the most talented husband-and-wife author-illustrator teams of the twentieth century. A long-out-of-print cult classic, The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales is a treasury of illustrated fairy tales from authors such as A. A. Milne, Hans Christian Andersen, and Oscar Wilde. Here too are clever retellings and newly imagined tales: refined old favourites like Arthur Rackham’s “Beauty and the Beast,” feminist revisions like Elinor Mordaunt’s “The Prince and the Goose Girl,” and sensitive stories by literary stylists like Henry Beston’s “The Lost Half-Hour” and Katharine Pyle’s “The Dreamer.”

Alice (1918-2018) and Martin Provensen (1916-1987) illustrated more than forty books together, nineteen of which they also wrote or edited. They were runners-up for the Caldecott Medal in 1982 for their illustrations of Nancy Willard’s A Visit To William Blake’s Inn and won the award outright two years later for The Glorious Flight, a book they wrote and illustrated themselves.

Alice Provensen obituary (NYT)
Martin Provensen obituary (NYT)

 

The Red Gloves: and Other Stories by Catherine Fisher ill. Anne Glenn

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“A masterful mix of truth and the supernatural will leave readers feeling discomfited and looking over their shoulders for whatever it is they can’t quite see, long after they’ve finished reading.” BookTrust
“A spellbinding collection.” Literary Review

Gripping stories of myth, folklore and magic, some new and a few previously published.

Two step-brothers share one nightmare; red gloves that reach for your throat; a changing room where a stranger asks to swap lives with you; and a ghost in the rain… An expert storyteller weaves nine spells. Fear mixed with wit, heart and magic.

Freeze by Chris Priestley

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 13 Sep 2021

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A new Barrington Stoke title from the UK’s master of scary words and illustrations…

When Maya and her classmates are asked to write a creepy story with a winter theme, they come up with some brilliant ideas. Rising floodwaters uncover long-buried bodies and ghostly children take to the ice on a frozen canal. But as each of the stories is read out in class, Maya grows more and more uncomfortable. She features in each of her friends’ creepy tales and they start to feel a little too real. Finally, when a mysterious new girl stands up to read the last story of the day, the light outside dims and it starts to snow. The classroom starts to freeze but everyone is trapped. Can Maya stop the story before the nightmare comes true?

Pity Part by Kathleen Lane

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An uproarious grab bag of short fiction, mining and exaggerating the social anxieties that plague us all and twisting them into funny, deeply resonant, and ultimately reassuring psychological thrills.

There’s a story about a mood ring that tells the absolute truth. One about social media followers who literally follow you around. And one about a kid whose wish for a new, improved self is answered when a mysterious box arrives in the mail. There’s also a sprinkling of micro-fiction: a personality test (to find out if you have a personality), a fortune teller (that 100% accurately predicts the future), a letter from the Department of Insecurity, and an interactive Choose Your Own Catastrophe.

The Story Thief by Graham Carter

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Olive is a shy girl who prefers reading about adventures to having them herself. But when a mysterious figure steals all of the books in town, Olive decides to set out straight into an adventure of her own. The thief, meanwhile, doesn’t quite know what to do with the stories he’s stolen. Olive must track down the thief and teach him the joys of reading – and sharing – stories.

Tales From the Hinterland by Melissa Albert ill. Nick Hayes

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 1 Feb 2021

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“Dark, demanding and delicious.” KIRKUS

from the author of The Hazel Wood…

A highly anticipated collection of twelve deeply creepy pitch-dark stories each with a gorgeously illustrated lino print title page by Nick Hayes. The story ‘The Clockwork Bride’ is worth the cover price alone. The writing throughout the collection is pitch-perfect, a joy to hear in one’s mind; every sentence an invitation to read aloud. We all need range in our reading but alongside books like this much contemporary young  feels insipid. Tales From The Hinterland is a book that deserves to have been published in hardback before being available in paperback.

Follow the illustrator on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nickhayesillustration/
Follow Melissa Albert on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melissaalbertauthor/

In Grandma’s footsteps: how reading links generations [Irish Times}

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This is a splendid piece:
Laureate na nÓg Sarah Crossan, PJ Lynch, Eoin Colfer, Niamh Sharkey and Siobhán Parkinson on family reading

Warmly recommended, and not just for Eoin Colfer’s humorous description of his 1970s childhood:

I grew up in a dark time, dear reader. A time when there were only two TV channels and an inordinate amount of the programmes on these channels seemed to feature cows being sold or elderly men pounding their knees with spoons. We had heard rumours of the existence of a video game, but that was in America and needed a supercomputer the size of a slurry tank to play it. And if you wanted to enjoy modern music you were forced to drop a metal needle with pinpoint accuracy onto a revolving and fragile plastic disk. Honestly it was easier for Indiana Jones to steal the golden idol than it was for me to listen to Pink Floyd.

Read the whole piece:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/in-grandma-s-footsteps-how-reading-links-generations-1.3650415

Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell on the joy of reading at Christmas

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“My vicar father had a wonderful speaking voice, and I can still remember so clearly how he would read to the five of us at bedtime [Riddell is the middle child]. In my memories of childhood, stories are among the most evocative things – the stories we were first told, that we listened to, tell each other, and then went on to acquire this skill of reading. We had a whole set of the canon of children’s books, so bedtime would be when we heard things like Black Beauty and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.”

In his turn, he read to his three children, now all in their twenties, and his calm outward demeanour doesn’t disguise quite how passionate he feels about urging all parents – and grandparents – to do the same. “No one should under-estimate the power of a bedtime story,” he insists. “It’s almost as illuminating for parents reading as it is for the children listening.”

via Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell on the joy of reading at Christmas.