Issue No. 169 - March 2008
Cover Story
This issue’s cover (photograph by Kamil Vojnar) is from Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child. Siobhan Dowd is remembered by Julia Eccleshare. Thanks to Random House Children’s Books for their help with this January cover.
Articles In This Issue
For almost 27 years, Books for Keeps has recorded, written about and reviewed virtually every aspect of children’s books. We have interviewed and published articles by and about hundreds of authors, poets, illustrators, editors, publicists, teachers, librarians and academics.
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‘A book at bedtime should be as much part of the daily routine as brushing a child’s teeth’, according to Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, who has called upon parents to spend 10 minutes a day reading to their children as part of a bid to improve literacy levels. But will bedtime stories do the trick? Joanna Oldham explains the research data into the impact of bedtime reading.
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The Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen, describes arguing with politicians and inspiring school visits and ruminates on Ofsted’s report on the teaching of poetry.
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For the first time seven-year-old Hal has read a whole page with no pictures on it – with a little help from a tape! His father, psychodynamic counsellor Roger Mills, describes what happened.
The No Outsiders project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, aims to challenge homophobia and create more inclusive primary school environments. Led by Elizabeth Atkinson and Renée DePalma at the University of Sunderland, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Exeter and the Institute of Education, University of London, the project is exploring ways of challenging homophobic discrimination through positive and non-stereotypical representations of gay, lesbian and bisexual people, as well as people who do not conform to rigid gender stereotypes. Elizabeth Atkinson and Renée DePalma explain.
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Adults have long attempted to encourage the habit of reading with different motivating strategies – including the texts that are offered to children. Here Andrew Lambirth makes the case for introducing humorous poetry from ‘subversive’ poets and with no other motive than delight and amusement.
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John Stannard and Laura Huxford’s The Literacy Game: The story of the National Literacy Strategy is a tale of government ministers, hungry journalists, partisan researchers and opportunistic publishers, not to speak of schools and pupils. Henrietta Dombey assesses a turbulent history and the lessons that can be drawn from it.
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Siobhan Dowd remembered by Julia Eccleshare
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Sarah Garland on a picture book that spellbinds young readers….
MORE »Chosen by members of Bookworms, a book review and creative writing club for home-educated children.
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Sixty-odd years of monkeying about and now there’s a new dress for…
Pippi Longstocking
MORE »Reviews In This Issue
Emily Brown and her old grey rabbit Stanley first featured in That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown.
When Alis, soon to be 15, is told by her parents that she is to marry the 40-year-old Minister of her church, she is horrified.
Size matters is the underlying message of this traditional Swiss story. Ursli lives in a little village in a high Valley of the Engadine Mountains.
This is the third in Arnold’s series of ghostly encounters between this world and the ghostly parallel that hides alongside it, and it’s in this book that the barriers between two worlds start
Set in the late 1700s, this account of a young half-Indian girl and her voyage up the Ganges is clearly written with love both for India and for Anila herself, the spirited heroine of the story.
Archie is just 10 years old when he embarks on the scrapbook sent to him by his Uncle Colin. He is passionate about comics, about his old dog George, his friend Tom and his family.
More adventures of Barnaby Grimes, a ‘tick-tock lad’ making fast deliveries by hand all over Victorian London (‘tick-tock – time is money’) and one of a special band who take direct routes o
Angels, wings and spirits hover throughout this crafted, thoughtful novel; caught between life and death, just like Adrien, who could have a second aneurysm at any moment.
When Marianne leaves England for Skagen in Denmark, she is fulfilling a promise to her dying mother, Esther.
‘That’s what I love about you, Cat Royal, always spoiling to take on all comers, setting the world to rights.
Despite its length, this is a taut, lean, rapid novel. There is something cinematic about it, and some of the health warnings that come with films are appropriate.
On 16 June 1976 and the months that followed, young black South Africans made history through their uprising against apartheid. Blue Sky Freedom opens a year earlier.
Two books on the common, heartbreaking problem of bullying.
This is a quite extraordinary debut novel; it may well come to be considered one of the most remarkable books of 2008.
Illustrations play an important part in this picture book format collection of ten ghost stories for older children.
This is Garland’s second book starring Mum, Eddie, and toddler Lily. Busy Mum has completely forgotten it’s Grandad’s birthday party today!
This large format photographic picture book has the glamour of a coffee table book.
One of a series on ‘Issues in Our World’.
The fourth in an increasingly popular, ‘Fly on the Wall’ series; Greek Hero adds to Roman Fort, Pharaoh’s Egypt and Viking Longship
Midsomer meets Middle Earth in Hootcat Hill, an everyday tale of village folk caught up in strange events when old and new magic meet in the town of Wyrmesbury.
Enter the busy world of the Brainwaves for an anatomical adventure around the human body.
‘You are the Planet – the Planet is you!
Don’t be an Eco-Worrier, be an Eco-Warrior!
Watch Out, Water Wasters!’
Kirsten’s comfortable middle-class world is drifting away from its anchors: her parents quarrel viciously, her best friend has deserted her and her weight is spiralling out of control – she feels
Marketed as a rollicking adventure, this is in fact a much darker story of child exploitation in the Victoria era.
Alvina enjoys the love and attention of her two very different grannies. Granny Rose tells her all about her childhood holidays in Blackpool and does some morris dancing with Alvina.
Tizzie moves from London to the grand house of Roven Mere where her mother is the new cook.
This is another in an admirable series on ‘21st-century Science’.
These six books form part of A & C Black’s ‘White Wolves’ series of guided readers. The first three are intended for Year 3 children (7/8 year old) and are retellings of myths and legends.
There are thousands of new picture books published each year in this country (good, bad and indifferent), but because publishers here tend to be a little insular, we seldom see any of the work of il
Powers is the third volume of Ursula Le Guin’s new series, ‘Annals of the Western Shore’, following the earlier Gifts and Voices.
Stephen Biesty’s well-known dazzling reconstructions are here subsumed into an all-singing, all-dancing DK production.
This is a surreal comic take on the private detective novels of the 30s and 40s. Sensible Hare is retained by the glamorous Mazy Rabbit to trace and return a stolen case of carrots.
These six books form part of A & C Black’s ‘White Wolves’ series of guided readers. The first three are intended for Year 3 children (7/8 year old) and are retellings of myths and legends.
After arranging a meeting at Waterloo station with a girl sharing her name (after a thoroughly modern bit of ‘Googling’), Jessica is suddenly, at the point of greeting, left standing in what she d
There are thousands of new picture books published each year in this country (good, bad and indifferent), but because publishers here tend to be a little insular, we seldom see any of the work of il
How excellent to be offered yet more Stirring Tales of British Vim upon the Seas of Space and Time penned by Mr Philip Reeve and decorated by Mr David Wyatt.
The ‘time slip’ device works well in this picture book about a young boy’s adventure with a group of Stone Age people.
Two children are growing up in London after the Second World War. The boy has a bad stammer; the girl has an abusive stepfather.
Rosen is back on his ursine theme, this time with a very jolly looking bear who hears a noise… A bear (could it be the same bear discovered back in 1989 in his seaside cave in the author’s
Betsey is the West Indies’ answer to Dick King-Smith’s Sophie – a funny, friendly wee girl whirling through the ups and downs of life with her extended family: the trials and tribulations of no
Rather like a Hans Andersen story re-written by A A Milne in his King’s Breakfast mode, this amiable fable never really gets going.
Nobody wants the stripy kitten, born on a farm near Edinburgh so the farmer’s daughter takes him to her office in the city to make a mouser of him.
Children love stories in which terrible things happen to the characters as long as all is resolved at the end, which it is in this book.
One of a series on ‘Discovering Space’ with extensively illustrated descriptions of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and of the space probes sent to explore them.
In this Russian version of the familiar romance, the frog is the beautiful sorceress Vasilissa, grand-daughter of Baba Yaga and daughter of an Enchanter who has transformed her in fear of her growin
These six books form part of A & C Black’s ‘White Wolves’ series of guided readers. The first three are intended for Year 3 children (7/8 year old) and are retellings of myths and legends.
This is a daring piece of humorous writing and it works.
This handsome cinematic novel is a striking object: almost literally so, as it weighs in at 1.2 kg for a volume of about 1,500 cubic centimetres. Its other physical attributes are also impressive.
These six books form part of A & C Black’s ‘White Wolves’ series of guided readers. The first three are intended for Year 3 children (7/8 year old) and are retellings of myths and legends.
Nicholas the littlest pirate is not short, whatever his obnoxious cousin Primrose says but even when he wins a cup at the annual pirate games, Primrose is still not impressed.
The cover of Sally Gardner’s new book shows a revolutionary holding up a presumably aristocratic head after its owner has been guillotined.
This large format, illustrated ‘collectible first edition’ is published for the gift-book market. The story is one of the great classics of literature for children.
This is one of the ancient tales that has been passed down through the ages along with other stories under the heading of the Arabian Nights.
This is a brain-teasing fantasy/horror/adventure epic with a current issues undertone. It will definitely take someone with advanced reading skills and probably a humour by-pass to appreciate it.
These six books form part of A & C Black’s ‘White Wolves’ series of guided readers. The first three are intended for Year 3 children (7/8 year old) and are retellings of myths and legends.
On average most graduates leave university with a debt of some £10,000, so one can only applaud Quercus for publishing a simple guide to managing money for a teenage audience.
David Walser has taken six of the best-known stories from the Arabian Nights and told them in a style which is vivid and vigorous.
This sequel to The Palace of Laughter is equally compelling in its account of the further fantastical adventures of Miles Wednesday and Little, a rather unusual angel.
Jeffers’ third book about the boy and his space travels (following How to Catch a Star and Lost and Found) is perhaps his best.
This fine picture book shows young children much about the lives of a mother panda and her baby through the young one’s first year.
The author is in fact Mark Billingham assisted by the TV performer Peter Cocks and this is the first in a trilogy. It has a sort of made for TV drama feel about it.
When two tatty teddies are abandoned in a box in the park, they decide they must find someone else to love them. To do this, they feel they must become loud and brave in order to be noticed.
Pirates, vampires and an inordinate amount of blood and gore combine with the intention to thrill in this, Number 3 in the series.
The rainforest is one of Earth’s most significant and most interesting habitats and this good value paperback edition of a book originally published in 2004 is welcome.
These six books form part of A & C Black’s ‘White Wolves’ series of guided readers. The first three are intended for Year 3 children (7/8 year old) and are retellings of myths and legends.
It seems that, 25 years ago, the author’s A People’s History of the United States was published, setting previously accepted concepts of that history by the ears and telling it l