A DOG CALLED FLOW by Pippa Goodhart Reviewed by Adèle Geras

My usual disclaimer to start with: Pippa Goodhart is a friend of mine but I promise you I am reviewing her book because I like it   and because, apart from liking it, I think that this kind of book is often overlooked in the press and online in favour of louder, more glamorous books: books which are perceived as sensational in some way: newsworthy,  shocking, edgy.

This short novel was actually Pippa Goodhart's very first book and was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. It's now  been reissued by Troika Books. It's short and there's a lot to be said for books which are designed for  younger children in a way that isn't too daunting or difficult, and this length will attract readers who might be put off by something denser and more complicated.

One of this story's  most important achievements  is that it encompasses many different plot strands and themes in a very elegant way. It's economical, too, and manages to paint a picture not only of a landscape, but also of a community and a particular family in very few words but without leaving anyone feeling short-changed.

 Oliver is having trouble at school. He can't quite manage reading and writing as well as he would like to.  He desperately wants a dog.   He has a problematic relationship with  Craig, a boy in his class. His parents and sister provide a happy family for him to live in, but even there, his Dad seems set against the idea of a puppy.

For  a while, Oliver  has to hide Flow,  but eventually, even Dad is won over by the puppy who is partly blind. Oliver didn't have to pay for Flow, because the farmer knows he won't make a working dog on the Fells.  

I'm not going to tell you more of the plot, but tension and excitement mount as the story progresses and everything is as  sharply organised and worked out as you could wish for. Problems that Goodhart has set up are resolved in a neat and convincing way, and the satisfaction of a happy ending for everyone is very welcome. 

This would  be a perfect book for readers who are just beginning to try whole books on their own and I think every classroom ought to have a copy on their shelves.

Readers also, incidentally, get a good idea of what the Fells look like and learn about the work of the Mountain Rescue teams. It may be a short book but it packs a punch....and there's a nice little surprise at the very end, which I am not revealing!

Illustrated by Anthony Lewis
Pbk: TROIKA BOOKS (price  £5.99)
ISBN: 9781909991163

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MISTER CLEGHORN'S SEAL by JUDITH KERR, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

Last year Judith Kerr, now in her nineties, had a very special new book published.  Mister Cleghorn's Seal is a delight.  Handsomely produced on thick cream paper, with gold lettering on the cover, this book is a classy one, and a fun and a moving and a beautiful one.  It isn't a picture book.  It's a story book.  But every spread has wonderful soft pencil drawings to accompany the text.  The stubby nice people who live in this story world along with the big-eyed seal pup are very appealing, and the whole book has the most comfortable feel of a story one smiles one's way through reading.

The hero of this story isn't a child.  He's a recently retired old bachelor who isn't sure what to do with his time now that he has no work.  But, never mind that, Mr Cleghorn wants exactly what a child would want, and does exactly what a child would want to do.  When faced with an orphaned seal pub that's starving, Mr Cleghorn simply takes that seal pup home with him on the train.  He feeds it with a baby bottle, and waters it on his balcony with a watering can, and puts it into his bath.  

But there's a problem with keeping a seal in a flat where there's a janitor who is keen on the rules, and those rules state that no pets are allowed.  What is Mr C to do?  He considers the nearby zoo, but it isn't good enough.  Then a lady neighbour proves sympathetic ... and I'm sure you can guess how this story manages to end happily after all.  In saving the seal pup, Mr Cleghorn has saved himself.  

A post script from author/illustrator Kerr tells how this story actually puts right a sadder true story that has haunted her over for years.  'More than a hundred years ago' her father, as a young man, had saved a real life seal pup, taking it home to his flat in Berlin, feeding it with a baby bottle and watering it with a watering can on his balcony, and putting it into his bath, but that pup died.  The post script doesn't add that the man himself was then hounded from his home by the Nazis.  There's a lot of restrained emotion in this story, and that, along with the beauty of the pictures and the production, makes it moving and memorable whilst also fun.  This one really is and story and book for any age from about four up to anything you like!  

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The Great Chocoplot by Chris Callaghan. Review by Tamsin Cooke

When I read the blurb for The Great Chocoplot by Chris Callaghan – I thought what a great idea for a children’s book. I raced out to buy it, read it in one sitting, and YES – the story more than lives up to its blurb.

Jelly and her family live in Chompton-on-de-Lyte, where everyone loves a Chocablocka bar or two. So when the end of chocolate is announced, she can't believe it. Determined to investigate, Jelly and her gran follow a trail of clues to a posh chocolate shop and its owner, the pompous Garibaldi Chocolati. Gari's suspiciously smug, despite his failing business and yucky chocolate. Is it really the chocopocalypse, or is there a chocoplot afoot?

Jelly is a fabulous heroine – she’s smart, feisty and intrepid. And each member of her family is quirky and funny with their own role to play. Their witty dialogue made me laugh out loud.

This fun adventure is well paced and very clever. Chris manages to weave in science and history making the story sound so plausible, I actually might start stockpiling chocolate myself.

Jam-packed with jokes, it is aimed at 8+ , but I think it is just as entertaining for adults as it is children. In particular, I adore the witty news bulletins on the 'Chocopocal App', spread throughout the story. Plus there are great black and white illustrations by Lalalimola that really add to the humour and bring the book even more to life.

This is a truly fantastic read. And in my mind, any book that includes the word 'chocolpocalypse' deserves to be read!

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RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE by KATE DI CAMILLO. Review by Penny Dolan

Kate Di Camillo’s “BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE” which won the Newbery Prize in 2000, has long been one of my favourite children's books, so I was very glad to hear about the publication of her newest novel, RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE.

RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE is not a Di Camillo fantasy but a story set in Florida during the summer of 1975. The tale is peopled with a variety of eccentric and alarming characters and yet, despite some dark themes, filled with a slightly dazed optimism. 

The story opens as Raymie Clarke, the central character begins baton-twirling lessons with the alarming Ida Nee:  
“Stop that nonsense immediately,” said Ida Nee.

Even though she was old – fifty at least – her hair was an extremely bright yellow, She wore white boots that came all the way up to her knees.

“I’m not kidding,” said Ida Nee.

Raymie believed her. Ida Nee didn’t seem much like a kidder.

Raymie isn't in love with baton-twirling. She's there because, two days earlier, her father ran off to New York City without leaving any contact address. Raymie wants to enter the Little Miss Central Florida Tire Competition, hoping that when her father sees her photograph in the newspaper, he’ll feel so proud he will call her and come home again. 

She is standing in Ida Nee’s back yard with two unknown girls who both intend to enter the Competition too. The dainty Louisiana Elefante - given to fantasy, bunny-clips in her hair and fainting –  needs the prize money for herself and her Granny while the brooding, knife-wielding, lock-picking Beverley Tapinski merely wants to sabotage the whole event.  Louisiana enthusiastically names the odd trio the “Three Rancheros” and that summer's adventures make the three unlikely girls into firm friends.

Not content with just baton-twirling, Raymie decides to do a Good Deed for her competition interview. She visits the Golden Glen Nursing Home taking A Bright And Shining Path: The Life of Florence Nightingale, a library book - and hence the title of this novel. However, good-deed Raymie finds reading to the elderly is so alarming that she escapes, leaving the library book behind. 

Once Louisiana and Beverley hear about the lost book, they escort Raymie back to Golden Glen and succeed in getting the book back, mostly. From there, Di Camillo develops the story into a strong and heartfelt experience with an inspired ending and a host of eccentric adult characters. Slowly, during their escapades, Raymie understands more about Louisiana and Beverley’s lives as well as her own.

Lightly based on her own childhood, Di Camillo’s RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE deals with longing, friendship, death, determination and bravery in a wonderfully unique and remarkable way – and unlike Di Camillo’s earlier “Winn-Dixie” novel - no dogs are involved in this story. There is, however, a search for Archie the cat, last left in the care of the Very Friendly Animal Centre as well as an incident with a caretaker’s canary and some devious driving by a tiny Granny. A remarkable book with a clear sense of time and place that feels enjoyable, gently humourous and often poignant.

Meanwhile, I will be lending my copy of RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE to a certain twelve-year-old girl when we meet. I wonder what she'll think of it?

nb. I was alerted to RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE’s arrival by a recent review on the Bookwitch blog. Thank you for the recommendation, Bookwitch!

Penny Dolan

RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE,

published by Walker Books (2016) £9.99 hbk.

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THE STORY OF ALISON HUBBLE by Allan Ahlberg and Bruce Ingman. Reviewed by Penny Dolan

Once a teacher always a teacher, I admit, even when enjoying new picture book titles.  

 Some picture books immediately suggest use within an educational context, partly because the story can be interpreted through interesting topic work, often with a classroom “play-corner” alongside. These titles become popular within Early Years, Foundation and Year One classrooms because they fit in with aspects of the curriculum and are not any the worse for that.

(For example, an Early Years classroom I visited recently was working on THE BOG BABY, written by Jeanne Willis and illustrated by Gwen Millard. The internet offered instructions on how to make a Bog Baby collage, a gallery of blue-painted bog-babies created in classrooms and a downloadable record sheet where children can record their bog-baby observations. Well done, Puffin, for spotting that possibility!)

Occasionally, however, a particular book brings the reader the sense of a close family moment or a privately shared armchair story-time. This book is one of those. I imagined Alison Hubble being read by grandparents or parents, each reading-aloud taking place within the bonds of love and quiet fun. The plot feels as if it sprang from a family joke or teasing comment, and then developed into a delightful fantasy. The full title explains the whole dilemma:

This is the story of ALISON HUBBLE

 who went to bed single and woke up double.

The writer of this rhyming story is the much-beloved author Allan Ahlberg whilst the talented Bruce Ingman – possibly the only artist who has brought a poignant conflict between pencils and erasers so vividly to life – forms the illustrating hand in the team.

The plot echoes a familiar complaint, gently sighed from adult to child at the end of a long day: “Whatever would I do if there was another one of you?” and this is exactly what the Hubble parents discover, because Alison herself does what the title says. 

The Hubble's one little girl becomes two Alisons then four and eight and more, doubling on and on and causing much consternation at home, at school and beyond. 

 
The troubles are pursued with gentle humour: when eight Alisons become sixteen:

“Oh no,” said her mum

“What a tragedy!

It’ll take us four hours

To cook her tea.”

“You’re right,” said her dad.

“What rotten luck!

We’ll have to do the shopping

In a three ton-truck.”

As in all cumulative plots, everyone tries to help. The local council does send an enormous tent for the increasing family but the excitement of camping is spoiled when thirty-two little girls now find themselves squashed into just sixteen sleeping bags.

Ingman’s illustrations offer enjoyable tiny "subplots": the harassed teacher, registering the many Alison Hubbles, does not see a boy in the background answering as Alison and the newspaper photograph of a batch of identical Alisons contains one Alison gazing off to the side, like real-life child who won't do the helpful thing for the camera. 

You can have a peek at some of the spreads here. 

Eventually, the many Alison Hubbles need a whole town of their own - but I won’t say which or where - and the end-paper suggests that even further choices might be needed, raising a few more issues that might need discussion. 

However, for now, ALISON HUBBLE (please add the full title yourself!) makes an enjoyably eccentric picture book. Promoted as a tale of Mathematical Mayhem, the book is full of fun, wit and would be lovely to share.  

ALISON HUBBLE will be in bookshops from today, 4^th May, and I'm sure the well-established writer-and-illustrator team means that libraries will stock copies sometime soon. The picture book is recommended for children between 3 - 5years.

Penny Dolan

Ps. I’m just checking the publicity sheet here, as this was a picture book I received for review, and spot that the picture-book publisher is the ever-cunning Puffin! So I’m now wondering if I’ll find Alison Hubble "Times-table" games on screens when I next visit early-years classrooms? Or rows of identically Hubbley-paper-dolls on display? Perhaps you should take my review as an early “Alison Alert”?

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Bone Gap by Laura Ruby: reviewed by Sarah Hammond

Laura Ruby’s teen novel is set in Bone Gap in rural Illinois, a place that everyone knows "had gaps just wide enough for people to slip through, or slip away, leaving only their stories behind."  Brothers Finn and Sean are only too aware of people slipping away: their father died, their mother ran away to Oregon with an orthodontist leaving them to fend for themselves, and the story begins just after Roza, Sean’s beautiful girlfriend, is kidnapped by a mysterious man at a local fair. 

Finn is the only witness to the disappearance of Roza, but his description of the alleged kidnapper as moving "like a cornstalk in the wind" is frustratingly inadequate. The searches reveal nothing. Roza becomes another person who is lost through the gaps, leaving a rift between the two brothers behind her. 

Yet just as we gradually learn that neither Finn’s strange vagueness, nor the odd disappearances in Bone Gap are quite what they seem, neither is the novel itself. Although we follow the vivid, realistic, well-drawn lives of the people of small-town America —  the local eccentrics, the sassy beekeeper, the bullies —  another story begins too. This story reveals Roza, trapped in an increasingly fairy-tale-like world by her strange captor and desperate to find her way home. 

And this magical world begins to spill into Bone Gap. A black racehorse appears at Finn’s house without explanation, taking him on rides through unrecognisable landscapes, over strange cliffs in the middle of cornfields. We begin to notice subtle sprinklings of Greek mythology. Roza’s garden wilts and dies in her absence. When Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, was dragged by Hades to the underworld against her will, didn’t Demeter let the world go barren in her absence? Didn’t Demeter also take the form of a black-winged mare? 

Other questions emerge, too. How important is beauty? Petey, Finn’s new girlfriend, is seen as conventionally ugly yet Finn does not notice. Some of my favourite scenes show the pair falling in love, making up increasingly ridiculous college essays “Describe someone who has had the biggest impact on your life using only adverbs”, “Tell us how you feel about Thursday - is it better or worse than Tuesday?” Roza is kidnapped for her beauty, yet this is not how Finn ultimately recognises her, and Sean’s first drawing of his girlfriend was of her hands. 

And what of abandonment? Who is at fault when someone leaves? Alongside the mysterious story of Roza's abduction, many characters are alone or have missing family members. In learning to heal and move forwards, who rescues whom? 

Bone Gap won the 2016 Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature in the U.S. and was published in the U.K. in April 2016. It is a well-written, thought-provoking novel that encompasses realism and myth, changes in worldview, abandonment and rescue, and, ultimately, questions how we see those we love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laura Ruby writes fiction for adults, teens and children. She is the author of the newly-released YA novel Bone Gap as well as the Edgar-nominated children's mystery Lily's Ghosts, the ALA Quick Pick for teens Good Girls (2006), a collection of interconnected short stories about blended families for adults, I'm not Julia Roberts (2007), and the forthcoming middle-grade trilogy York. She is on the faculty of Hamline University's Masters in Writing for Children Program. She makes her home in the Chicago area. 

You can find her online at:

web: www.lauraruby.com
twitter: @thatlauraruby

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sarah Hammond is a writer for young people. She has published a picture book, Mine!, and a teen novel, The Night Sky in my Head, which was short-listed for four awards in the UK. She is a Brit abroad, now living happily in Chicago, with strong ties to the UK which regularly pull her back across the Pond.

You can find her online at:

web: www.sarahhammond.org

facebook: SarahHammondAuthorPage

twitter: @SarahHammond9

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The Lie Tree, by Frances Hardinge: reviewed by Sue Purkiss

The Lie Tree, by Frances Hardinge, recently made headlines by winning the Costa Book of the Year Prize - the first children's book to have done so since Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials. This is a richly complex Gothic horror story, with language and concepts as challenging as Pullman's. It is the story of Faith, a girl whose father is a vicar but also an archaeologist and natural scientist living at the beginning of the nineteenth century - a time when people (mostly, but not entirely, men) could be all these things at the same time; when the worlds of art and science were much closer than they are now; and when new wonders were constantly being discovered - and old certainties anxiously challenged.

Faith's father is strict and distant, and dismissive of his daughter, even though she is clearly much cleverer than her younger brother, Howard. No-one tells her why the family must suddenly move to the island of Vane, but Faith is a curious girl who refuses to be limited by what is expected of her, and she makes it her business to find out what is going on. 

She soon discovers that her father is fleeing from rumours that he is a fraud; that many of his most famous fossil finds are not genuine. She decides to investigate further - and she finds that at the centre of his obsessions is a mysterious tree which he has hidden in a sea cave. This tree, she eventually discovers, literally feeds on lies - and produces fruit which, when eaten, reveals hidden truths...

Meanwhile, the rumours about her father have reached Vane. Gossip spreads, and the atmosphere becomes as menacing and brooding as the swiftly growing tree. Faith decides she will harness the tree's power to find out the truth - but of course, when we go searching for the truth, we don't always like what we find.

The tree itself - well. Very sinister. There's something about this element of the story that reminds me of The Monkey's Paw, by WW Jacobs, which also features an object with mysterious powers found abroad, whose appropriation by westerners leads to unexpected and terrible consequences - as does Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Perhaps there's something to do with colonialism going on here - the downside of the urge to explore which led to so many adventures and discoveries from the end of the eighteenth century on.

I found this a compulsive, richly textured read, and you have to admire Faith's determination to confound expectations about what, in Victorian times, would have been appropriate for a girl in terms of life chances and behaviour. There are other interesting female characters too; her mother, Myrtle, seems fairly dreadful at first, but I very much warmed to her as she gradually revealed  unexpected depths of deviousness and determination.

For more reviews and other stuff, please see my blog, A fool on a hill.

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