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Book Week Scotland 2015

Nora and Lisa Patron (4) celebrate the launch of Book Week Scotland 2015
Pictures copyright: Rob McDougall

It's here again! The 2015 Book Week Scotland programme was unveiled yesterday. Thanks to our friends at Scottish Book Trust, people across the country will be invited to celebrate the transformative power of books and reading from 23-29 November. Check out the programme for schools and families for some great children's events.


Yes, I want to shout about it too!

Theresa Breslin's Divided City: Mixing the Colours

It's over ten years since Theresa Breslin's Divided City came out, and I can't believe I haven't read it before now. I borrowed it recently from the Mixing the Colours collection (part of a project in which women speak about intra-Christian sectarianism) at Glasgow Women's Library. I meant to review it for their website, but stupidly didn't check if it had been done already. It had, so I'm posting my review here instead.

Theresa Breslin’s Divided City explodes onto the page. A boy is walking down a street in a part of Glasgow he knows isn’t safe. Footsteps sound behind him – and then there's a stabbing. The boy, Graham, a Rangers supporting football fanatic, stops to help the young man who has been injured - Kyoul, an asylum seeker - and the story takes off from here.

Next we meet Joe. He and Graham have just been at the same football practice and they played really well together. The coach is hoping to set up a team drawn from all Glasgow schools, and these two seem a certainty. But Joe is a Celtic supporter – can he and Graham be friends? It’s not just a matter of football teams, it’s religion too – Joe is from a Catholic family; Graham is a Protestant whose Grandfather is hoping to persuade him to take part in the next Orange Walk.

Breslin draws the relationship between the two boys well, with its contrast of conflict and co-operation. Neither boy can be honest with his family about his new friend, and yet it is Joe whom Graham trusts to help him get a message to Kyoul’s girlfriend. After the exciting beginning I found this part of the plot unconvincing, but I can see that Kyoul was there to show that the boys are not intolerant or fearful of “the other” – apart from the blind spot that growing up with sectarianism has given them. I like that this is not completely resolved by the end of the book – it wouldn’t be in real life – but that we are left with a sense of hope that initiatives such as the all-Glasgow football team will start to build bridges.

Theresa, a former librarian, is a great supporter of libraries and is currently Vice-President of CILIPS (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). For more about her, there are many interviews and articles out there: the most recent one I've read is from the always entertaining Bookwitch. For more on Divided City, see its section on Theresa's webpage.

Other books for young people on the Mixing the Colours list include Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses series, Joan Lingard's Kevin and Sadie books, the Breadwinner trilogy by Deborah Ellis and Tribes by Cathy MacPhail.

Scottish Children's Book Awards: 2016 shortlist

Photo credit: Rob McDougall.

The shortlist for next year's Scottish Children's Book Awards, managed by Scottish Book Trust in partnership with Creative Scotland, has been announced today. Above, you can see pupils from Royal Mile Nursery, Flora Stevenson Primary and Holyrood High demonstrating their support for the nominees on Edinburgh's Calton Hill.

Over the next five months, children throughout Scotland will be reading the three shortlisted books in their age category and voting for their favourite.

Bookbug Readers (3-7 years)

(Every child in Primary 1 will receive a free copy of each Bookbug title during Book Week Scotland in November.)

• Never Tickle a Tiger by Pamela Butchart and Marc Boutavant (Bloomsbury)
• Wanted! Ralfy Rabbit Book Burglar by Emily MacKenzie (Bloomsbury)
• Mouse’s First Night at Moonlight School by Simon Puttock and Ali Pye (Nosy Crow)

Younger Readers (8-11 years)

• The Nowhere Emporium by Ross Mackenzie (Floris)
• The Mysteries of Ravenstorm Island: The Lost Children by Gillian Philip (Orchard)
• The Fastest Boy in the World by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan)

Older Readers (12-16 years)

• Black Dove White Raven by Elizabeth Wein (Egmont)
• The Piper by Danny Weston (the pseudonym of Philip Caveney) (Andersen)
• Trouble on Cable Street by Joan Lingard (Catnip)

As well as voting, children can also enter book review and book trailer competitions. To find out how to involve your class or book group, keep an eye on the SBT website. Finally, CALL Scotland has again worked with Scottish Book Trust and the publishers to create accessible digital versions of the nine shortlisted books for children and young people with physical, visual and reading or dyslexic difficulties, who can’t read the paper books. These are available free of charge from CALL Scotland.

The A to Z Challenge

This month I'm following the A to Z Challenge with two of my other blogs, both of which are WordPress. When I'm commenting on Blogger posts I sometimes forget to put in a link to my Challenge blogs, and the automatic link leads to this one. So if you've landed here unexpectedly, you might be looking for the A to Z of Gallus Glasgow on Anabel's Travel Blog or the A to Z of What's good about libraries? on Adventures of a Retired Librarian. I hope to meet you there!

A win for Alex McCall! Scottish Children's Book Awards 2015

The winners of the Scottish Children's Book Awards 2015, run by Scottish Book Trust and funded by Creative Scotland, were announced today. Two of the authors were on their third win - Ross Collins (3-7) and Cathy MacPhail (12-16) - but Alex McCall is a first-timer, and one of Scotland's youngest published authors. He won the 8-11 category with Attack of the Giant Robot Chickens.



Alex McCall. Photo credit: Rob McDougall

I've written about Alex before: first when the shortlists for the award were announced when I described how I'd met him (briefly), and second when I chose to send Attack of the Giant Robot Chickens to Japan for the International Book Giving Day Swap that I took part in. So I feel a sort of connection with him, and I'm very glad he won. So is Alex! He said:

“There’s something of a feeling of coming full circle here. This is my first book and it got published through the Kelpies Prize. But the only reason that I found out about the Kelpies Prize is through a previous winning author coming to my school, through the Scottish Book Trust’s Live Literature Fund. So while I’m delighted to win I also feel very lucky that Scottish Book Trust exists in the first place. Being able to go into school and meet the children that you are writing for is fantastic enough as it is. Knowing that those kids have voted for you makes it even better. In general participating in the Awards has been a really good experience. It is just hard to believe that I’ve been lucky enough to actually win.”

Congratulations to Alex and, of course, massive thanks and congratulations to Scottish Book Trust for these fabulous awards. Here's the beautiful trophy Alex won.

This is the beautiful @justsomeartkid-designed trophy our 2015 Scottish Children's Book Award winners will win... pic.twitter.com/rhRdeTFvJ4
— Scottish Book Trust (@scottishbktrust) March 4, 2015

The book swap: books duly swapped!

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about getting the details of my partner in Zoe's International Book Giving Day Book Swap. Since then I have picked my book, sent it off and heard that it has arrived in Japan! That's it on the left - I chose it because I wanted to get something Scottish, it's a prizewinning book and I've even met the author, Alex McCall (here's where I explain about that.)

What is Attack of the giant robot chickens about? This is what it says on the back of the book:

"Why did the chicken cross the road? To take over the world! Giant robot chickens are terrorising the city of Aberdeen. Their aim: to peck out all signs of human resistance. The streets are empty, the adults have vanished and those left behind must hide from the powerful poultry or get scrambled! Jesse and his friends hatch a plot to stop the fowl fiends and take back their city - but when a gang of kids takes on an army of angry robot chickens, things don't eggs-actly go to plan."

I'm guessing Alex likes puns a lot! I hope the humour is something that will appeal to the 10-year old bi-lingual boy in Japan who now owns the book.

And what have I received in return? Well, Jo (the recipient's Mum) and I have corresponded by email a few times, and I received a lovely letter and card in the post (see left). Then today, my book arrived from the Book Depository. It's My neighbour Totoro, a novelisation by Tsugiko Kubo of one of Hayoa Miyazaki's films. I confess that I have only seen one of those (Kiki's delivery service) so I'm not very familiar with his work. Time to find out! This is an on-going story...

More information:

International Book Giving Day 2015

Zoe's Book Swap

Jo's blog