BfK 10 – 14 Middle/Secondary continued


she’s tireless, she’s fearless... she’s eleven! (she nearly stole the show, for me). After a school talent show and some disastrous performances, Kitty gets Matt an audition for The T Factor (demon child of X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent) – if I say any more I’ll spoil the plot, but look out for a quintet of dancing chihuahuas and a rock bank called Toxic Cabbage (love how they got their name).


GUEST REVIEW Matt Millz


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Harry Hill, Faber & Faber, 336pp, 978-0-5713-3854-2, £10.00 hbk


    Hill fans will love this. Matt Mills dreams of being a comedian and of making the big time: he watches his heroes on DVD and hopes one day, that will be me. Trouble is, he’s only twelve and the other half of his comedy double act would rather be in the art room than on stage. So  – he’s got his teeny tiny manager – the appropriately name Kitty Hope with him. Everyone needs a Kitty Hope in their corner: she’s focused,


The Explorer 


Katherine Rundell b/w line illus Hannah Horn, Bloomsbury, 400pp, 978 1 4088 5487 7 £12.99 hbk


Inspired by her own journey to the Amazon, Katherine Rundell’s new novel is an atmospheric and vivid       catapulted into the Amazon jungle after the small aircraft they


are


travelling in crashes into the treetops after their pilot dies. Miraculously they        suspicious of each other and argue about everything. Fred’s fascination for explorers and love of reading books on survival at least helps them learn to fend for themselves. They face constant danger, hunger and night terrors but become braver      work


together as a team. They


become more acutely aware of their surroundings noticing details such as how monkeys cover themselves with ants before taking honey from a bee’s nest and then doing the same  


Kids will love the illustrations by The Beano’s Steve May and parents who take a sneaky peak will like the fact that Matt (Matthew) is actually Harry Hill’s real name and that the girl the boys all fancy is called Magda (Harry Hill’s wife’s real name) – cute. The book is a comic caper and a kind of handbook for would be comedians –there are lots of tips, for example, dealing with hecklers (Harry Hill’s own put down is the best and the  explanations and lots of information about comedy greats to inspire young comedians – the Tommy Cooper jokes were especially well chosen: ‘Last night I slept like a log. 


Special thanks to


Hamill


Christine for


providing this review. Christine is he author of The Best Medicine, also a story of a junior


would-be comedian. It is shortlisted for the Laugh Out Loud Book Award (Lollies) and has a starring role for Harry Hill.)


The novel is sumptuous in its descriptions of the lush and verdant landscape – almost too much at times – but the story conveys a real sense of the vastness and beauty of the Amazon. There is an underlying message that one should have respect for the landscape and that exploration carries a cost and is not always a force for good. The children appear a touch unnatural to begin with but grow and develop into their individual personalities and together form an unshakeable bond of friendship through their shared experiences. Both the explorer and the children have a profound effect on each another.  of love and hope. Embellished with wonderful b/w line illustrations, it’s a very handsome edition indeed. JC


Hetty Feather’s Christmas 


Jacqueline Wilson, Doubleday, 240pp, 978-0-8575-3553-5, £12.99 hbk


At Christmas 1888 Hetty Feather is twelve years old. This book is set in the period after the other books in the Hetty Feather series and after Clover Moon. Christmas day is the one and only day in the year when the Foundling Hospital schedule changes. The foundling children are to be given an orange, a penny, a Christmas lunch and a teaspoon of sugar on their porridge. They also make a Christmas tableau in the chapel. Hetty will see her brother Gideon, cast as the Angel Gabriel. Usually girls and boys are kept apart.


Hetty has discovered that Ida, one of the women working at the hospital, is in fact her birth mother. The rules of the hospital normally forbid such knowledge. Ida has given Hetty a Christmas present, which causes the other girls to become jealous. Hetty reacts badly to bullying and as punishment is excluded from the celebrations. But then one of the governors arrives and informs the matron that she is taking Hetty out.


Hetty meets a family called the Rivers.   Though it is not stated, one of the other children, Beth, has what we would now call an autistic spectrum disorder.


This book takes the reader through some of the conventional Victorian Christmas celebrations, certain of which will be familiar to a modern reader but others unfamiliar. At the end of the book is a section of activities for the reader to  will be entertained this Christmas by an engaging story linked to our traditions today. Nick Sharratt’s characterful black  the start of each chapter add beautifully to the cosy festive mood. RB


back to their families they make a raft and paddle downriver. Stopping when they see a steep cliff in front of them they climb up and stumble upon a ruined city and an inhabitant they did not expect to see. Here the plot speeds up and takes a deeper and more psychological turn.


28 Books for Keeps No.227 November 2017 Sky Dancer 


Gill Lewis, Oxford University Press, 272pp, 978 0 19 274925 3, £6.99, pbk


Gill Lewis’s latest novel brings three very different children together to raise a Hen Harrier chick in secret


and mount a campaign to stop grouse shooting on the local moor. Joe is the son of the grouse shoot’s gamekeeper and we meet him as he goes with his elder brother to scatter their father’s ashes. Their father had died of a heart attack after being imprisoned for shooting a hen harrier. Ella is Joe’s new neighbour, a city girl who is consumed with curiousity about the moor, its creatures, its way of life and its possible future. Minty’s full name is Araminta and she is the daughter of Henry Knight of Hartstone Hall, the owner of the grouse moor. The book develops an argument about the fate of wildlife on game bird estates, the way that such estates exploit and distort the natural environment and the need for rewilding the British landscape. It’s an argument that is passionate, informed, developed in some detail, and supported by an afterword where the author addresses her readers directly. And it is quite a weight for a novel to carry. Most of        person narration. And it is his love of the moor, his emotional recoil from the killing of wildlife despite his familiarity with all the arguments for it, his feeling of isolation and his openness to friendship, his willingness to look at  of the need for change, that grounds the novel and gives it life. Such is the impetus of advocacy in the novel that it does not always avoid the sense of characters representing particular points of view, but, for the most part, it is carried by a drama in which clashes of generation and class are also keenly felt. Lewis is a sympathetic and compelling writer, observant and perceptive, who credits her readers with intelligence, curiousity and a desire to make the world a better place. This is a novel which will move, inform and inspire them. CB


Rising Stars New Young Voices in Poetry


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Otter-Barry Books, 96pp, 978-1-9109-5937-4, £6.99 pbk


A joint project between Otter- Barry Books and arts and literary


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