Mrs Vennall and the Library Team would like to wish you Season’s Greetings and a happy holiday – with lots of time for reading!
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Monthly Archives: December 2014
Book of the Week – Letters from Father Christmas, by J. R. R. Tolkien
This week’s Book of the Week is suitably Christmassy, and is one of my favourite books, particularly at this time of year. Everyone knows that J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but this book is less well known.
Letters from Father Christmas is a collection of the letters that Tolkien’s sons and daughter received every year for over twenty years – sometimes they arrived in the post, sometimes they appeared mysteriously. They are beautifully illustrated, and full of funny stories from the North Pole… I love the badly spelt Polar Bear comments on some of the letters, particularly when he has been responsible for chaos and is trying to make excuses!
Friday book videos… Hollow Pike by James dawson
Wednesday Book Club
The Wednesday lunchtime book club will be taking part in the Scottish Book Trust’s Winter Read over the holidays. We will all be reading the same book (even Mrs Vennall), and then we will be talking about it in the book club meetings after we come back in January. At last week’s meeting the senior pupils in the group conducted a poll to find our which book everyone wanted to read, and after talking about it, we decided to read My Name Is Mina, by David Almond.
Our box of books arrived yesterday (unfortunately just as book club was finishing), they look really good, and we are all really excited and ready to get reading! Mrs Vennall hopes that we will be blogging about My Name Is Mina on the library blog, and tweeting about it on the twitter feed.
Thank you for our books, Scottish Book Trust!
Rapid Assemblies
There are Rapid Assemblies in the Library all day today, so we will only be open for book exchange before school and at break. The Book Club and Games Club will take place as usual at lunchtime.
Film of the book – The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Remember, the book is much shorter than the films…
Book of the Week – Hollow Pike by James Dawson
Book of the week this week is another chilling thrilling read from James Dawson, Hollow Pike. I didn’t look in a mirror for a week after I read Say Her Name, so I’m going to leave this one for someone else to review!
The blurb says:
She thought she’d be safe in the country, but you can’t escape your own nightmares, and Lis London dreams repeatedly that someone is trying to kill her.
Lis thinks she’s being paranoid – after all who would want to murder her? She doesn’t believe in the local legends of witchcraft. She doesn’t believe that anything bad will really happen to her. You never do, do you?
Not until you’re alone in the woods, after dark – and a twig snaps…
Click on the book cover to go to James Dawson’s site.
Blue Peter Book Award shortlist
The Blue Peter Book Award shortlist has just been announced, by Michael Morpurgo. It’s good to see that our Book of the Week, Goth Girl and the Fete worse than Death by Chris Riddell is on the list. Click on the Blue Peter Logo to go and see the others.
New Books in the Library – The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an angel.
Pain in love is the Roux family birthright. For Ava Lavender, a girl born with the wings of a bird, it is key to her fate.
Ava traces the lives and loves of the Roux women as she tries to understand what has made her who she is and who she will become. On the night of the summer solstice, the skies open up, rain and feathers fill the air and Ava’s fate is revealed.
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is a magical realism novel, but at the same time it is a wonderfully written family story, about three generations of women, about love and about not belonging.
New Books in the Library – Girl Online by Zoe Sugg (aka Zoella)
By popular demand, new in the library today is Zoella’s novel Girl Online…
The blurb on the back says:
Penny has a secret.
Under the alias Girl Online, Penny blogs her hidden feelings about friendship, boys, hercrazy family and the panic attacks that have begun to take over her life. When thingsgo from bad to worse, her family whisks her away to New York, where she meets Noah: a gorgeous, guitar-strumming American. Suddenly Penny is falling in love- and capturing every moment of it on her blog.
But Noah has a secret too. One that threatens to ruin Penny’s cover – and her closest friendship – forever.
We already have a waiting list for Girl Online – if you would like to add your name to it, ask one of the library team, or click on the book cover to go to Zoella’s blog (unfortunately her youtube channel is blocked in school).