My first book of 2023 and it’s a corker. Like my last read (or ‘listen’, considering it was an audio book 😁), this is a magical, wintery tale, but whereas The Ice Children was based in the present, this is set during the Great Frost of 1683. After losing her twin brother 4 years earlier,…
I really like these Barrington Stoke middle grade (UK Key Stage 2+) novellas: written by an array of superb children’s authors, they have a dyslexia-friendly paper stock and typeface, a length of circa 100 pages and are edited to a reading age of 8 with an interest age of up to 12, so they can…
Regular visitors to the blog will know that fantasy isn’t a genre I naturally gravitate towards; however, I’d heard so many good things about North Child on #bookstagram that I decided to give it a read. Despite her mother’s protestations to the contrary, Rose was born facing North, which according to local lore means that…
Happy New Year! I’ve had to take a break from blogging and social media as life got completely in the way for a while. However, my reading mojo is back with a bang (or is that a bump in the night?) with this fabulously spooky middle grade debut novel by Nick Tomlinson. Young historian Molly…
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t often read fantasy stories because I’m one of those strange people who struggles to suspend belief. However, Kieran Larwood’s Five Realms series has been recommended to me so many times that I decided to give the first in the series a shot, and I have to say that I…
Catherine Doyle’s first middle grade book, the award-winning The Storm Keeper’s Island, was one of last year’s stand out reads for me, and so I couldn’t wait to read the sequel – The Lost Tide Warriors – which came out earlier this month. While I’m always a tad apprehensive about reading a sequel to a…
‘In the deepest dark, you must be the light’ As some of you will know, Cerrie Burnell has been an author of picture books and young fiction for some time and is a real advocate for inclusion. We were thus expecting good things about her first foray into middle grade fiction – The Girl With…
‘Often the journeys we take inside ourselves are more difficult than the stormiest seas’ The Storm Keeper’s Island by Catherine Doyle is the #PrimarySchoolBookClub read for August, and was also the Waterstone’s Children’s Book for July 2018. Some people might be aware of Catherine Doyle through her Young Adult trilogy, Blood for Blood, but this…