Picture book round-up

Thanks to the good folk at Templar and Hachette for sending me the following:

Thomas Docherty The Driftwood Ball (Templar).

Every year the badgers and the otters hold a Driftwood Ball, but they never mix. Then, one year, otter Celia and badger George meet and fall in love - can the star-crossed dancers overcome the prejudices of their families? This is a lovely tale about differences and the silly reasons we find not to like other people - they're too loud, or they eat the wrong kind of food. At the end, Celia and George are still dancing "but always to their own tune."

Jonny Duddle Gigantosaurus (Templar).

Many children love books on dinosaurs. Here is a glossy addition to the canon. It's in the form of a story and the Gigantosaurus is made up, but all the other dinosaurs are real and there is an information section on them at the end. Add to this fold out pages and a poster jacket with a timeline on the other side and you have a sure-fire hit.

Craig Shuttlewood Who's in the tree that shouldn't be? (Templar).

More paper engineering - this time lots of flaps to lift. Who's in the tree that shouldn't be? Who in the snow just does not go? The rhyme romps along and children will enjoy guessing which "wrong" animal is behind the flap and where that animal should rightly be. I'd rather they had all ended up in their natural habitats at the end though, rather than in the zoo.

Shaun Tan Rules of summer (Hachette).

Shaun Tan's picture books are generally for an older audience than the titles above. This is a dark and surreal tale of two boys and what they learned last summer. Some commandments are quite sensible (never give your keys to a stranger), while others are bizarre (never leave a red sock on the clothesline). All have terrifying consequences - the red sock, for instance, conjures up a horrifically red-eyed giant rabbit. Towards the end, the smaller boy is padlocked into a runaway steam engine and the older boy runs across a dystopian landscape to rescue him with bolt-cutters. If this sounds sinister, it is! Be careful which child you give it to.

As always, I'll be donating these review copies to a local library.

Daughters of Time

One of my favourite blogs is The History Girls, a collaboration by a group of female historical fiction writers who cover different periods and different age-ranges, but are always interesting. I make a point of checking it every day, and never fail to learn something new. Now, some of the writers for younger readers have published a book, Daughters of Time (Templar), in which each imagines a story about a famous woman from the past.  The author also explains why she chose to write about that particular woman, and gives some factual information so that the tale is put into context. Then, if you like her work, there's a section at the back telling you what else she has written. The book's editor is Mary Hoffman, whose Stravaganza series I loved, and she says:

History is about chaps is still all too true a saying. So it's up to the fabulous History Girls to balance this approach with stories of impressive and inspiring women and girls - we were spoilt for choice.

They certainly were. The book ranges in time from Katherine Roberts' Tasca's Secret about a daughter of Queen Boudica (c.30-c.60 AD) to Leslie Wilson's 1980s tale of Greenham Common, which was one of my favourites because I've actually been there (though only for a day, not to stay at the camp). Some of the stories are not for the faint-hearted - the Boudica story and the next one, The Lady of the Mercians by Sue Purkiss, are quite bloodthirsty! But life in those times was like that: nasty, brutal and short for many people.

The book really appealed to me because of the work I do with the Glasgow Women's Library's Women Make History Group, which has a similar aim, so I was delighted when Templar agreed to send me a review copy. It will now find a home in GWL's new children's collection. However, I'm wondering how many of the women Scottish girls will actually connect with, as the list is very England-centric. The Greenham story will have universal appeal and there's a lot of interest in the Suffragettes, so Celia Rees on Emily Davison (Return to Victoria) will be popular - I think that was my overall favourite - but some of the others never figure on the Scottish curriculum. This is by no means a criticism of the book, which I really enjoyed, it just made me wonder if someone could write a Scottish equivalent. Any takers? And who would you put in it? Other than Mary, Queen of Scots who's a tad overdone!

Full list of subjects: Queen Boudicca, Aethelfled, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Julian of Norwich, Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth Stuart, Aphra Behn, Mary Wollestonecraft, Mary Anning, Mary Seacole, Emily Davison, Amy Johnson and the Greenham Common women.

Full list of authors: Penny Dolan, Adele Geras, Mary Hoffman, Dianne Hofmeyr, Marie-Louise Jensen, Catherine Johnson, Katherine Langrish, Joan Lennon, Sue Purkiss, Celia Rees, Katherine Roberts, Anne Rooney and Leslie Wilson

Scottish Children's Book Awards 2013 announced today

Chae Strathie, Janis MacKay and Claire McFall have been named as the winners of the 2013 Scottish Children's Book Awards. The announcement was made this afternoon at Glasgow's Mitchell Library with 800 young people from all over Scotland in the audience. The award is voted for exclusively by children and there were record numbers voting this year - over 38000, up 20% on last year. So what were the winning books?

Bookbug Readers (3-7)

Chae Strathie: Jumblebum, illustrated by Ben Cort. (Scholastic).

Johnny thinks that his room has its own special style, but Mum just sees a mess. Johnny doesn't care though - until the chaos attracts the terrible Jumblebum Beast. Will Johnny end up in Jumblebum's tum, or can he save the day with his secret plan?

Read what children themselves think about the book in the many reviews on the Scottish Book Trust site or watch a book trailer made by Bell Baxter High School. SBT also has more information about Chae Strathie on its author pages. The other shortlisted titles were:

Julia Donaldson: Paper dolls, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb. (Macmillan).
Debi Gliori: What's the time, Mr Wolf? (Bloomsbury).

Younger Readers (8-11)

Janis Mackay: The accidental time traveller. Kelpies.

Saul is on his way to the corner shop when he sees a girl appear in front of him in the middle of the road. She doesn't understand traffic or shops and she's wearing a long dress with ruffled sleeves. Her name is Agatha Black - and she's from the year 1812! Saul and his mates, Will and Robbie, try to figure out time travel so that they can help her to get home.

Again, there are lots of reviews and a book trailer, this time from Oban High School. Also check out Janis Mackay's website. The other shortlisted titles were:

Caroline Clough: Black tide. (Floris).
Daniela Sacerdoti: Really Weird Removals.com. (Floris).

Older Readers (12-16)

Claire McFall: Ferryman. Templar.

When Dylan emerges from the wreckage of a train crash onto a bleak Scottish hillside she meets a strange boy who seems to be waiting for her. However, Tristan is no ordinary teenage boy and their journey across the desolate, wraith-infested wasteland together is no ordinary journey. This is a truly original love story from a debut author.

Read the reviews, watch the book trailer (from Craigmount High School) and find out more about Claire on her website. The other shortlisted titles were:

Diana Hendry: The seeing. (Bodley Head).
Barry Hutchison: The book of doom. (Harper Collins).

Congratulations to all nine authors. And - just in! Some photographs of the winners and some excited children. All pictures by Alan Peebles.

Carmen Reid: Cross my heart

Carmen Reid: Cross my heart

The usual follow up to "Cross my heart" is "and hope to die". Here, it is "and hope to live" - for someone who has very little chance of that. Nicole is 15 and a resident of Nazi-occupied Brussels. She joins the Belgian Resistance and is transformed into Coco of Group K. La Belle, one of her fellow agents, reveals that she thinks she'll be lucky to be alive in 6 months time, and Coco too is soon risking her life for her beliefs.

The gruelling subject matter is leavened both by the romance between Nicole / Coco and fellow agent Anton / The Poet and the author's fluid writing. I whizzed through it. When I first started reading, I was sceptical that 15 year olds would have been involved in the Resistance to this extent. Nor was I convinced that Coco could have escaped some of the situations she faced in quite the way described. However, Carmen Reid's afterword makes it clear that, although fictional, her story is based on considerable research which is detailed on her website. The afterword is also worth reading for Carmen's story of her own family - she is half British, half German, and her grandparents were on different sides of the Second World War. Cross my heart is, touchingly, dedicated to them.

I won this book in a competition on Scottish Book Trust's website. I'm grateful, as always, to them for everything they do. I'm now going to donate it to Glasgow Women's Library's collection for younger women. As Carmen says "Soon all the grandparents who fought in this momentous war will be dead. We need to preserve their stories and experiences. Teenagers need to remember there was a time when turning eighteen didn't mean being able to drink and go to uni; it meant you were old enough to fight, kill people and die for your country." Her book is testament to that.

Books for Brownies - International Book Giving Day

International Book Giving Day is dedicated to getting new, used and borrowed books into the hands of as many children as possible - check the site for ideas of how to take part. I'm going to be helping my friends at Glasgow Women's Library who have been collecting books for younger women for some time. Now that they have moved to new premises, they are home to a Brownie Pack whose members are wondering why there are no books for them. Also, children's books are always useful to keep the young ones occupied while their mothers are in the library choosing books or attending an event. I've been collecting books for GWL for a couple of weeks now, and here's the result so far:

Oxfam

It's great to get second-hand books in good condition - and if it helps another charity too, so much the better. A search of my local Oxfam shop yielded Emily Gravett's picture book Wolves, a signed copy of The mountain's blood by Lari Don and Gene Kemp's classic Turbulent term of Tyke Tyler. The latter has a great twist in the tail, but I wonder if it would be as surprising today as when it was written in the 1970s? For teenagers, I got Theresa Breslin's Remembrance, which is about the First World War and therefore very topical in this centenary year, and Solace of the road by the late Siobhan Dowd.

Publishers

Sometimes publishers send me books to review, and sometimes I'm lucky enough to win them in draws by email or social media. I have three to add at the moment, so thanks to Templar for sending me Firebird by Saviour Pirotta and Catherine Hyde, a retelling of the Russian folktale which inspired Stravinsky's ballet, and Yokococo's Hans and Matilda Show about a school talent competition. From O'Brien I received Eva and the hidden diary, one of a series by author Judi Curtin. In this story, Eva and her friend Kate find an old diary and try to put right mistakes that were made long ago.

Book shops

Of course, you can just go into a regular book shop and buy something! I chose these two - one a classic, Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking, and one more modern, Clarice Bean utterly me by Lauren Child. Can you spot the link? Lauren Child illustrated them both in her highly distinctive style. Both books feature enormously engaging heroines.

How can you help?

As I said at the beginning, there are plenty of ideas on the IGBD website, where you'll also find posters, book marks and book plates to go with your gifts. However, should anyone who happens to read this live in Glasgow and just happen to have some spare books suitable for girls of all ages (though I'm particularly keen to help out the Brownies who are around 7-11 years old) - let me know! Maybe you have daughters or nieces who have outgrown some of their books? Leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

Update 12/2/14

I catalogued all the above books at GWL this morning - ready to be borrowed on IGBD!

 

National Libraries Day is coming - 8th February

If you look at the sidebar, you'll see that I've sprouted two new badges. They're for National Libraries Day and International Book Giving Day. Each is important for children's literature and I have plans for both - however, I'll leave IGBD for later and concentrate on NLD for now.

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that One Man and His Beard was collecting photos of people holding up their library cards to illustrate the video for his song We need libraries. Well, it's here! You can see my picture at approximately 3.15 and my Mum and Dad are also there at 1.47. A banner runs underneath the photos listing the reasons we need libraries, many of which involve children's reading. If you love libraries too, please share the video widely.

In Scotland, we're also hoping to collect reasons to love libraries with The Big Question: "What did you do in your library today?" Read more via CILIPS (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland) and take part if you can. And keep using your library!

Natasha Mac a'Bhaird: Missing Ellen

Natasha Mac a'Bhaird: Missing Ellen

Teenagers Maggie and Ellen have been best friends since they were five. Ellen is lively, outgoing and impetuous while Maggie is quieter and more sensible. The story starts with a new school year. Ellen is missing, though we don't yet know why, and Maggie is missing her dreadfully - this dual meaning of "missing" is reflected in the story's two voices. Both are Maggie's - one a narrative from the point where she thinks Ellen's problem started until the time she disappeared, and the other a set of letters to her friend in which she tells her what her life is like now.

It's not difficult to guess where Ellen's story is going as she gets involved with a different crowd and makes choices that Maggie doesn't agree with. She's an attractive character on the surface, but thoughtless and reckless, and I much prefer Maggie who is left bereft at Ellen's disappearance and tortured by "what ifs", wondering if she could have changed the outcome by behaving differently herself. Her family and other school friends don't know how to help her and she has to find her own way through the grief and guilt.

It's hard to say much more without giving away the plot, so I'll leave it at that. I thought the story was very well told and the breakdown, in different ways, of both girls sensitively handled. It's not all gloom though - there's a glimmer of hope for Maggie at the end when she finally realises that she has to let Ellen go, and there's also a hint of romance ahead.

Thanks to O'Brien Press for sending me this book, which I won in a draw. I will now be donating it to Glasgow Women's Library for their younger women's collection.