The Mixed-Up Summer of Lily McLean, by Lindsay Littleson, was the winner of the 2014 Kelpies Prize. And no wonder. It has engaging characters and an exciting plot that zips along at a cracking pace – I read through it in one session last night after it automagically appeared on my Kindle a week earlier… Read More
reviews
Othergirl, by Nicole Burstein, is a superhero book. Superheroes – known as Vigils – are real, and can fly, or shoot flames out of their hands, or have superstrength, or any of the other usual comic-book powers. So far so conventional. For most people, the Vigils don’t have much of an effect of their daily… Read More
Julius Zebra: Rumble with the Romans is the latest book by Gary Northfield, the multi-talented cartoonist best known for Derek the Sheep, Gary’s Garden, and my personal favourite, The Terrible Tales of the Teenytinysaurs! which was one of my favourite books of 2013. It’s the story of Julius, who’s definitely not a horse, and is… Read More
Recently, I was thinking about some of the books that influenced me when I was younger. In particular, I was thinking about The Hill of the Red Fox, by Allan Campbell McLean, which I re-read a while back when I picked up a second-hand copy on my trip to Hay-on-Wye – it’s a book that has… Read More
Five Children on the Western Front, by Kate Saunders, is a modern sequel to the Psammead books by E. Nesbit, which began with the classic Five Children and It. It moves time on a few years from the original books; it is now the beginning of the Great War, and the children, some of whom… Read More
Dave Shelton’s previous book, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat, was a masterpiece of the absurd. His latest book, Thirteen Chairs, is a completely different kettle of fish – it’s a compilation of creepy tales, contained in a framework where Jack, a curious boy, listens to twelve ghostly figures tell stories of death… Read More
Let’s get one thing out of the way, before we start the review proper. It is almost completely impossible to write a review of Archie Greene and the Magician’s Secret without using the words “Harry” or “Potter”. The titular character is an orphan who has grown up in the care of a relative who does… Read More
These days Haruki Murakami is so well known that his book jackets simply say “Murakami”. Which is a bit weird, as there’s another author Murakami – Ryu – who, while not as quite popular, is certainly not unknown, with works like Coin Locker Babies and Audition – which was made into a film – in… Read More
Robin Hood, in his many forms, has been an influence for virtually my whole life. The first film my parents ever took me to see at the cinema was Disney’s 1973 version, with anthropomorphic foxes, bears and wolves taking the parts of Robin, Marian, the Merry Men and the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. The 1984… Read More
I first encountered Philip Reeve’s work with Mortal Engines, the first of the series of four books of the same name – a dark far-future adventure tale of huge mobile cities (including London) that roamed the post-apocalyptic landscape, devouring everything in their path. It quickly became one of my favourite children’s books, both for the… Read More