Robert Swindells |
Barrington Stoke |
184299347X |
Oct 2005 |
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Click. Victor takes a photo of a crime. Next thing he’s being followed. Someone wants those pictures. Someone with a gun. |
Archives for November 2005
Clay
David Almond |
Hodder |
184509487X |
Nov 2005 |
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Since Counting Stars (a short story collection that can be viewed as a ‘Dubliners’ of the North-East), David Almond’s fiction has been set in the time of his own childhood, growing directly out of experiences he had as a young boy. In some ways there is a marked difference between this latest novel and early books like Skellig and Kit’s WIlderness. But the similarities are there too: the immaculate writing; the strange, mysterious individual, possessor of special powers, at the fulcrum of the story; the sense of menace; the intervening magic. |
Secret Scribbled Notebooks
Joanne Horniman |
Allen&Unwin |
1904442714 |
Oct 2005 |
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Another addition to the already vast array of ‘coming-of-age diary’ novels written for teenagers, Secret Scribbled Notebooks tells of seventeen year-old Australian Kate O’Farrell, who is about to finish her exams, leave school and enter the world as a fully fledged proper grown-up. We follow her musings as she struggles to come to terms with her identity, (her parents abandoned her to be brought up by the owner of a guesthouse) falls in love with a ‘Russian Prince’ who lives in a garage and works in a second-hand bookshop, and adapts to a new life as an aunt when her older sister becomes a single parent. |
In The Morning
Michael Cronin |
Oxford University Press |
1904442714 |
Nov 2005 |
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Adult books have often addressed the issue of how the history of the Second World War could have been very different. Robert Harris’s Fatherland is a classic of the genre while Philip Roth’s more recent The Plot Against America gives a US perspective. |
Ingo
Helen Dunmore |
HarperCollins |
0007204876 |
Oct 2005 |
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Ours is a land steeped in stories. Books which unite magical secondary worlds with our real landscapes, which can be found on a map, have a special appeal. Like legends which promise ‘look carefully ‘ Arthur lies there still’ they make young readers feel initiated into secret layers of reality that grown ups are too blind and too boring to notice. |
Charley Feather
Kate Pennington |
Hodder Children’s Books |
1904442714 |
Oct 2005 |
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Think Moll Flanders for the younger reader, but if that description puts you off, then consider this simply as an exciting story about thieves, highwaymen, gang warfare and disguise. It is 1739 and Charley Feather has just seen Dick Turpin hanged. This is a salutary experience as thirteen-year old Charley is a highwayman too, a member of a gang led by the notorious Jack Wild. When Wild is captured, Charley has to run and ends up heading for London with the suave ‘Frenchy’. He has a plan for survival which involves playing a dangerous game of trickery, and Charley is caught up in it. |
Century
Sarah Singleton |
Simon and Schuster |
1904442714 |
Oct 2005 |
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I did say to Michael that, for obvious reasons, I wouldn’t review fellow Simon and Schuster authors (with the exception of my test review using the excellent Sea of Trolls), but having just finished Century I feel compelled to break the rule. |
Outside In – Children’s Books In Translation
Deborah Hallford & Edgardo Zaghini |
Milet |
184509487X |
Nov 2005 |
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What a tremendous resource this is. It opens, after a short introduction by the editors and foreword by Philip Pullman, with a series of articles by a reviewer (Nick Tucker), a translator (Sarah Adams), an author (Lene Kaaberbol), an academic (Gillian Lathey), a publisher (Kalus Flugge) and others. Then there are the book recommendations themselves, organised in five age categories plus graphic novels, non-fiction, and dual language books. The last quarter of the book is given over to author and illustrator biographies and helpful resource and organisation details. Finally, there is a very good index. |
Watch Out for Sprouts! Poems, pictures, doodles and serious thinking.
Simon Bartram |
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Templar Publishing |
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Oct 2005 |
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Children who have met Bartram’s The Man on the Moon, or Dougal, The Deep Sea Diver, will already know that they are in for a treat with this concoction from the same author. Any parents who haven’t yet introduced their offspring to Bartram’s vivid colours and writing – well, what are you waiting for? Frances Hardinge Macmillan 1904442714 Oct 2005 Fly By Night is set in an imagined world (both similar to and different from eighteenth century England) and turns upon the fate of twelve-year old Mosca, the incorrigible goose Saracen and unscrupulous, highfaluting Eponymous Clent. For various reasons they are each reviled and so, seeking to escape their straitened circumstances, they become mired in the dangerous political plotting that afflicts the Fractured Realm. |