Monthly Archives: February 2015

Red House Children’s Book Awards 2015

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Demon DentistSplit secondDavid Walliams and Sophie McKenzie have won the Red House Children’s Book Awards 2015. Demon Dentist came top of the younger readers section, while Split Second won the older readers one. The books in the Red House Award are nominated and voted for by children, so they tend to be popular choices!

The blurb for Split Second:

Charlie’s life is torn apart by a terrorist bomb in a London market. Months later she meets Nat, whose family has been left devastated by the same explosion. But as Charlie gets closer to Nat she starts to wonder if he knows more about the attack than he is letting on…

Life can change in the blink of an eye – whether you’re ready or not.

and for Demon Dentist:

Make your appointment if you dare…Darkness had come to the town. Strange things were happening in the dead of night. Children would put a tooth under their pillow for the tooth fairy, but in the morning they would wake up to find…a dead slug; a live spider; hundreds of earwigs creeping and crawling beneath their pillow. Evil was at work. But who or what was behind it…?

S5 Tree of Knowledge

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S5 are in the library today, doing the Tree of Knowledge Reach for the Power Inside course, which is all about motivation and mindsets and attitudes. According to the Tree of Knowledge website:

THIS INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP AIMS TO HELP PUPILS:

  • Stop talking and start taking positive action
  • Achieve dreams and ambitions
  • Increase focus on positive opportunities
  • Lead themselves to greater success

OVERVIEW

This fun, inspirational workshop is for pupils who have already completed “laugh in the face of exams”. As pupils prepare to leave school and live for the future, can they overcome the one person that is capable of holding them back — themselves?

The Tiger in the Well by Philip Pullman, reviewed by HS

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TigerInTheWellThis is the third book in the Sally Lockhart series and is a little more dramatic than The Shadow in the North. Set a few years later, Sally has a daughter, Harriet, and they are living happily in a new home. But someone is claiming to be Harriet’s father even though he died a few years before and he wants custody of her. So now on the run, Sally vows to make sure to keep Harriet and with the help of the mysterious Dan Goldberg this is one of the toughest battles she’s fought in her life.

New Books in the Library – Valentine Joe, by Rebecca Stevens

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ValentineJoeValentine Joe by Rebecca Stevens is a ghost story, set in World War One and is one of the Branford Boase longlist books – I’m reading my way through them all, and we will eventually put them on display in the library.

He was 15. Old enough to fight. Too young to die.

Rose goes to Ypres in Belgium to visit the graves of those who died in the Great War. There, the name of one boy stays in her mind: fifteen-year-old Valentine Joe. That night, Rose hears marching and when she looks out of her window, she sees a young soldier…

Valentine Joe Strudwick (who is buried at Essex Farm, one of the places our Battlefields Trip visits) was a real person, a boy who signed up at the age of fourteen, and died before his sixteenth birthday. This story is based on the author’s grandfather and the real Valentine.

Book of the Week – The Door That Led To Where

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The door that led to where

In The Door That Led to Where, Sally Gardner (author of Maggot Moon and Tinder) has written a fabulous fast-moving, time-travelling mystery, full of the kind of villains you really don’t want to meet…

The blurb says:

Sixteen-year-old AJ Flynn holds a key in his hand. It has his name and date of birth on it. But it’s a key to a door that leads to where? Or when?

On the other side of the door is a tumbledown house, a city booming with trade, people and a murder mystery that echoes through the centuries. AJ steps through the door and finds himself at the centre of it all. It is London and it is 1830.

Life is tough in 1830 – sickness, murder and crime abound – but is it so different from the London of now that AJ and his friends know? AJ needs to find the answers to the mystery – and decide where he belongs.

I love the book jacket  – it’s very elegant; a red door wrapping a map of London. Have a look – The Door That Led To Where is on the display on the main library desk.

 

New Books in the Library – The Hunted, by Charlie Higson

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New in the library – the sixth and penultimate part of Charlie Higson’s epic zombie series The Enemy, The Hunted. Our copy has the lovely oozy green cover and is signed by the author.

The blurb says:

The sickness struck everyone over fourteen. First it twisted their minds. Next it ravaged their bodies. Now they roam the streets – crazed and hungry.

The others told Ella that the countryside would be safer than the city. They were wrong. Now Ed wants to assemble a crew and find her, though he has no idea who – or what – they’ll meet out there. Or if Ella is even alive…

But the SICKOS are moving as one towards the capital as if being called – and will kill anyone who stands in their way.

We have all the other books in The Enemy series in the library; find them on the junior/teen fiction shelves.

My Name is Mina

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Office windowsLook at the amazing artwork on my office windows! Thank you Maya.

If you look carefully, you can also see:

  • the mess in my office
  • DofE rucksacks hanging on the back wall
  • the stars on the inside of my window, which luckily are the right colour
  • my reflection as I take the photo!

I particularly love the flying birds – they look as though they are flying towards the outside world.

Will Artemis Fowl ever be a film?

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Artemis FowlThe film rights for Artemis Fowl were bought by Disney back in 2001 and in the summer of 2013 they said that there would be a film based on the first two books. Since then I have been watching hopefully… but there has been no more news. So, I thought I’d bring the library copies up to scratch, just in case something happened this year, and we had a rush on them! All eight Artemis Fowl books are great reads, and I love the new paperback covers. Find them on the shelf end display in Junior Fiction.