With all the madness and disruption that Coronavirus has caused, there hasn’t been much time for books these past couple of weeks. I really enjoyed, therefore, sitting down last night to read Jennifer Killick’s latest release. Lance and his Year 6 classmates embark on a school residential to Crater Lake activity centre, which turns into…
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…
I’ve unexpectedly found myself with a spare 5 mins and so I thought that I’d quickly tell you about a new sci-fi mystery novella published earlier this month. The Starlight Watchmaker tells the story of an android, Hugo, who was abandoned at an elite academy, but who luckily managed to establish himself as a watchmaker…
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…
I’ve been a bit slow on the blog lately, predominantly due to it being one of the busiest times of the year on the allotment (my other passion aside from reading). However, today’s rain is a double bonus: I don’t need to water all the veggies I’ve recently planted and, as it’s too wet to…
Released at the beginning of the month, The Secret Starling is the debut Middle Grade (age 8-12) book by Judith Eagle. There’s been lots of excitement about it on Twitter, so I was keen to read it as soon as it was released. Clara lives with her mean uncle in a crumbling, old manor house,…
Fleur Hitchcock is such a versatile writer: contemporary crime, a newly published traditional adventure series (Clifftoppers), and now this historical, grimy drama, which I couldn’t wait to get started on. Athan Wilde finds himself in an impossibly dangerous situation. The man who is helping him build a top secret flying machine is murdered and Athan…
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…
‘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…