We are HUGE Dave Pigeon fans in our house and so World Book Day came around with much excitement. Not because the children could go to school in fancy dress (albeit my daughter did indeed go as DP himself!), but because it meant that the fourth book in the Dave Pigeon series – Royal Coo!…
‘Every hour of every day, we’re smart in our own special way.’ I picked this book up recently in an independent book shop in Oakham, Rutland. It was advertised as the Independent Booksellers’ Children’s Book of the Month for February, and on reading it, I can completely understand why. This is such a beautifully-executed, inclusive…
Myths, legends, stories. They are all words for facts that people have forgotten. A stormhound from Odin’s Wild Hunt falling out of the sky and landing in Abergavenny made me smile every time I heard about it. Despite my towering TBR pile, therefore, I picked this up as soon as it was released and it…
Regular readers will recall that I blogged about the brilliant Maverick Early Readers in November last year (here). My son – Hugo – is notoriously picky when it comes to reading: he is completely turned-off by school readers, predominantly due to their relatively lacklustre content and formulaic text, and is only interested in books that…
Regular visitors to the blog will know that we do love a bit of non-fiction in the Merry Bookworm household, and this recently-published retelling of Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species is rather special in our view. Sabina Radeva is both an illustrator and a molecular biologist and has thus combined her 2 loves…
My daughter is a ‘free reader’ at school. However, as she is still quite young, she doesn’t have a long attention span and still loves illustrations, so I am always on the lookout for books that are not too lengthy, and that will encourage reading for pleasure as well as helping to broaden her vocab…
‘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…
I first heard of The Boy at the Back of the Class when it was recommended on Twitter by Lisa Thompson – the fab author of The Light Jar and The Day I was Erased – and as the storyline intrigued me, I decided to buy a copy. For some reason, though, it sat on…
For the last 3 years, I’ve really loved New Year as it has meant a new release from the fab author, Lisa Thompson. She’s the sort of author I would have loved to have read when I was younger, as she focuses on real-life, often gritty, issues. The Day I was Erased is no exception……
At Christmas, it can often be a struggle to encourage those learning to read to keep at it during the school holidays, particularly if they are not fond of school readers. You might find, however, that these books help. The North Police series has been aligned to the book-banded system: the books are marked as…