Jackie Morris: Something about a bear

Jackie Morris: Something about a bear. (Frances Lincoln)

When I worked in a library, we had loads of Jackie Morris's gorgeously illustrated children's books, so I was really pleased to win this one in a Youth Libraries Group draw. "Let me tell you something about a bear" it begins, before matching beautiful watercolours with poetically written text about eight different types of wild bear. But "of all the bears in the wide wild world, the very best bear of all is..." I'll leave you to guess! It finishes up with a double spread of facts, in much smaller text, about each species, and a list of conservation websites. The book could thus appeal to a range of age-groups: from those who just love the pictures, through those who can read the simpler text, to those who are ready to learn more about bears, maybe for a school project.

Jackie obviously loves bears, and so do I. After I won the book, we had a short chat on Twitter about it (find her @JackieMorrisArt). Here's a bear that I saw on holiday this year. It's zoomed a bit, but yes, it was that close, grazing behind our accommodation in Shenandoah National Park.


Jackie also loves cats and I can't remember if I discovered her cat blog first, before her books (We three, ginger cats tales). She has a different blog now (Jackie Morris Artist), and the ginger cats are no longer with her, but it's still worth taking a look, or see the fabulous gallery in the Guardian, Cat walk.

Thanks to YLG and Frances Lincoln Children's Books for sending me this book - there was no obligation from either to write about it. Now I've enjoyed it, I'll be donating it to Glasgow Women's Library, where I'm sure the resident Brownie Pack will love learning about bears.

Book Week Scotland 2014

Well-loved literary characters don their boxing gloves and get ready for the fight of their lives, as Scottish Book Trust launches the full Book Week Scotland 2014 programme (24-30 November). It includes a national vote for the favourite character from a Scottish book. Place your vote (I've already done mine) and find out about all the other exciting events and activities on the SBT website.

The launch looks like a lot of fun! All photographs by Rob McDougall.

 

Scottish Children's Book Awards 2015 - shortlist announced

The nominees. Photo credit: Rob McDougall

The shortlist for the Scottish Children's Book Awards 2015 was announced today.  These are Scotland’s largest book awards, with a total prize fund of £12,000, and celebrate the most popular children’s and young adult books by Scottish authors or illustrators. For a full list of nominees in all three categories (3-7, 8-11 and 12-16) see the Scottish Book Trust website - they are running the awards, with support from Creative Scotland, for the eighth time.

The 8-11 list includes a debut book from one of the youngest published authors in Scotland (Alex McCall), and a children’s book from one of the best known authors in the world (Alexander McCall Smith) - and they have very similar names which means voters (Scotland's children) will have to be very careful with their choice!

Alex McCall. Photo credit: Rob McDougall

Claim to fame - I have actually met Alex McCall, even if only for five minutes. He was with his Mum as she arrived at an event which I'd helped Glasgow Women's Library to organise, and they recognised my name because I'd voted in a Twitter poll on whether the cover of Alex's book, Attack of the Giant Robot Chickens, should have a blue or orange background. Alex is only 20, and currently splits his time between promoting his book and studying Filmmaking and Screenwriting at the University of the West of Scotland in Ayr. He has already won the 2013 Kelpies Prize, and must have his fingers crossed for the double. He says “I'm overjoyed to be shortlisted for this Scottish Children's Book Award. It's fantastic to think that my first published novel could get a response like this.”

Robot Chickens is published by Kelpies, an imprint of Floris Books - it's a good year all round for them, as they have two more books shortlisted. Pyrate's Boy (E.B. Colin) is in the same category as Alex and KelpiesTeen Dark spell by Gill Arbuthnott is nominated for 12-16s.

Congratulations to Alex, Floris Books and everyone else nominated. The winners will be announced on 4th March 2015.

DA Nelson: DarkIsle

DA Nelson DarkIsle (Strident).

My good luck in winning books through social media seems to be holding up! Many thanks to DA Nelson (Dawn) for all three books in her DarkIsle series which I won through her blog.

I've just finished the first book, which was awarded the Scottish Children's Book Award in 2008. I can see why - it's an engaging fantasy which starts in a real world which will be recognisable to many Scottish children. The main character is Morag, a young girl living with cruel foster parents who lock her in the cellar for some imagined misdemeanour. When she first hears voices, she is terrified - until she finds they belong to Bertie and Aldiss, a dodo and a rat! Against their better judgement, these two are persuaded to take Morag along with them in their quest - and what that is becomes clearer as the story progresses.


Their first task is to free Shona, a dragon who has been turned to stone by the evil Devlish - and Shona actually exists! Well, in stone form anyway. She's a sculpture by artist Roy Fitzsimmons and that's her on the left on Irvine Beach (© Copyright paul c and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence). The four friends then set off for the DarkIsle where they must rescue the Eye of Lornish. Do they achieve this? Well, that would be telling, but you'll have great fun finding out as you meet more lovely characters along the way, such as Henry the talking medallion, as well as some frightening and distinctly unpleasant ones, Tanktop the Klapp Demon being a case in point.

You'll also spot a few clues about what might have happened to Morag's parents, but I'm guessing the full answer to that won't be revealed until the second or third book. Those are DarkIsle: Resurrection and DarkIsle: The Final Battle. I'll be reading them next. Once I've finished, they'll be added to the children's collection at Glasgow Women's Library. Dawn actually works near there, so she came into the library to give me the books - you can see a picture of us together on Darkislethebook's Blog. Thanks again, Dawn, for your generosity.

On feet and two wings

Abbas Kazerooni On two feet and wings (Allen & Unwin).

Set during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, On feet and two wings tells the story of an Iranian boy, Abbas, who is soon to be 10 and therefore, unbelievably, eligible for call up to the army. Abbas' parents decide that he and his mother will try to escape via Istanbul to England, but at the last minute his mother is not allowed to board the plane and Abbas travels to Turkey on his own. Remember, as you read on, this is not fiction, this is a memoir. Kazerooni says:

"The book is based on real events that happened to me a long time ago when I was a child. To write it for you I have simplified some events and changed some details."

Abbas arrives in Istanbul, where he doesn't speak the language or understand the system, and has to fend for himself for 12 weeks while he tries to get a visa for the UK. I'm not sure I would like to do that now, never mind as a nine year old. Obviously Abbas has a lot to learn, not least how to judge character and who to trust. In general, the kindness of strangers is greater than that of the few contacts his father has managed to make for him. For example, the man who was to meet him at the airport and help him abandons him almost immediately. Fortunately, he finds a taxi driver with more integrity who helps him to find a cheap hotel where Persian is spoken.

Abbas manages to find his way around the city, change money on the black market (his father has given him a supply of dollars), persuade someone to translate for him at the British Consulate - and also make a living! His best friend is Murat, the hotel owner, whom he talks into giving him work serving drinks and shining shoes. Murat also teaches him backgammon, at which he proves to be a natural, and they make a lot of money taking bets on his performance. Not all is plain sailing though. A less attractive job is delivering packages for the jeweller who changes his money - what is in them is never disclosed, but the job earns him his first beating - and, at heart, Abbas remains a small boy who cries himself to sleep because he misses his mother.

There are traumatic scenes in the book, but it's not unhappy overall. The story zips along, and you really root for the resourceful Abbas who is far more cheerful than many would be in his situation. Also, because we know the adult Abbas is writing the story in real life, we don't need to worry about him surviving. However, as well as being a good story, I think the book would help a lot of children to understand issues of immigration, asylum and persecution. Unaccompanied child refugees still arrive in this country today, so anything that encourages empathy and challenges the dangerous rhetoric preached by such as the Daily Mail and Ukip is to be welcomed.

Thank you to Allen & Unwin for sending me this book, which I won in a draw. I will now be donating it to the University of Strathclyde for its Teaching Practice collection and, I hope, addition to its Refugees booklist.

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