reviews


plantation at the close of the book, but whose fate ultimately is not in their own hands. There is some clumsiness in the book – the plantation overseers are given ungrammatical speech to highlight their brutality – but generally it is a well constructed, well informed and sensitive attempt to convey the lives of children in crisis so that other children will understand and empathise.


CB Dead Man’s Cove HH


Lauren St John, ill. David Dean, Orion, 202pp, 978 1 4440 0020 7, £9.99 hbk


If there is a children’s equivalent of the airpor t novel or an undemanding read on the beach, then this might be it. The title and the retro cover image self- consciously hark back to the Secret Seven and, more appropriately, Nancy Drew, because this is the first in a series featuring a British girl detective, 11-year-old Laura Marlin. This is the kind of parallel storytelling universe, neither fantasy nor reality, familiar from Blyton. Laura can begin the story in an orphanage run by a matron (Tracy Beaker might never have been written), and criminal masterminds unaccountably choose to unload their cargo into a secret tunnel liable to be flooded by the tide when they might safely use a deser ted beach. The usual ingredients are here; the Cornish seaside setting – St Ives, with recognisable street names and landmarks, barring Dead Man’s Cove itself; a set of characters with something to hide or who are not what they seem; a faithful animal companion, in this case a dog with three legs; and a plot that fits together reasonably well, although it star ts slowly, has some trouble keeping together in the middle and rushes pell- mell for the last few pages. There are some fresh elements. The mysterious new shop keepers in town are Indian, and their son, Tariq, looks destined to be Laura’s companion in subsequent adventures. The skulduggery involving Tariq that Laura uncovers is cer tainly bang up-to-date, if unconvincing in detail. Whether the series might take off is difficult to judge. It stays well within the comfor table conventions of children’s mystery adventure, which are now more than 50 years old. I would think it might need more invention and humour to appeal to a generation of Rowling, Wilson, Higson and Colfer readers.


CB


How Ali Ferguson Saved Houdini


HHH


Elen Caldecott, Bloomsbury, 224pp, 978 1 4088 0574 9, £5.99 pbk


Ali Ferguson has just moved into Lever Tower with his Mum and it feels a bit strange not to be living with his grandparents any more. He also misses his Dad even though he hardly ever hears from him. But then Ali star ts making new friends: Caitlin –and Falcon, the boisterous Alsatian dog she looks after – as well


as Caitlin’s Dad who looks a bit dodgy but soon takes a bit of a shine to Ali’s Mum. And then there’s Gez, Caitlin’s crazy best friend. Before long the three children have a mysterious case of missing persons and animals on their hands: foxes are vanishing, strange owls are hooting, and Falcon’s owner, Miss Osborne has disappeared completely. Are these things related? And is Caitlin’s Dad involved? Ali and friends are on a mission to discover the truth.


How Kirsty Jenkins Stole the Elephant, Elen Caldecott’s well-received debut novel, made the shortlist for several awards, including the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize. Her second, How Ali Ferguson Saved Houdini, came out of her wonderings as to whether it is possible to keep a zoo in a small terraced house. The resulting plot, as you might expect from this premise, is a tad screwball, but makes for an engaging comic caper for younger readers that races fluently along. The characters are convincing and appealing and their dialogue and excited deductions ring satisfyingly true. Caldecott turns a neatly funny phrase too: ‘Ali’s heart was pounding like a toddler with a saucepan lid’. Warm-hear ted, and reassuring both about friendship and family life, this enjoyable book also has the merit of being equally suitable for both boys and girls.


CS


Dewey: The true story of a world famous library cat


HH


Vicki Myron with Bret Witter, Simon & Schuster, 224pp, 978 1 84738 844 5, £8.99 hbk


If, like me, you’d not heard of Dewey, the library cat from Spencer, Iowa, then obviously you should have done, because, as the subtitle of this book tells us, he is ‘world famous’. His fame partly rests on the adult bestseller from which this children’s book is drawn, told to Bret Witter by Dewey’s ‘mom’, retired librarian Vicki Myron. Reading this version, I am at a loss to explain why the original was a bestseller. It’s pleasant enough, full of the kind of anecdotes about darling feline eccentricities that characterise the conversations of cat lovers, taking place in the slightly unusual setting of a library in a small town in Middle America. Yet, at over 200 pages, it’s much too long, even for someone like me who has known three cats intimately, worked in a library for half my life, and has a soft spot for the kind of warm hearted, folksy populism in which a cat might become the means by which its human acquaintances find meaning in life and a community comes together. The problem, I think, is that nearly all the tough issues that faced Vicki and Spencer, which I imagine formed an important part of the adult book (and appear on Dewey’s posthumous website, www.deweyreadmorebooks. com) have been stripped out of the children’s version, including Vicki’s breast cancer, which is alluded to here coyly as being ‘really sick’ and takes up a very short chapter. It is crises


like these that must have provided the necessary weight in the original and whose absence, because the writer does not have courage or skill to share them frankly with children, makes this version bland and uninvolving. I suspect, too, that Vicki Myron herself is a lot more small-town politically astute and media savvy than you might learn from this, with Dewey one of the ways in which she kept the library in the public eye.


CB


Would You Believe... two cyclists invented the aeroplane?! 978 0 19 911969 1


Would You Believe... in Mexico, people picnic at Granny’s grave?! 978 0 19 911985 1


Would You Believe... bed testers get paid to sleep?! 978 0 19 911986 8


Would You Believe... Vatican City is a country?! 978 0 19 911970 7 NON-FICTION


Richard Platt, Oxford, 48pp, £6.99 each pbk


My Uncle’s Dunkirk NON-FICTION


HHHHH


Mick Manning and Brita Granström, Franklin Watts, 32pp, 978 0 7496 9341 1, £10.99 hbk


An evocative and moving account of a young man’s experience of the events of 1940, when nearly half a million British and French soldiers were rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk. Mick Manning recalls childhood seaside holidays staying with his aunt and uncle. The uncle, who served in the Royal Ar tillery during World War II, never speaks of his war time experiences, but it soon becomes clear that he remembers a ver y different kind of beach from the scene depicted, where children are playing and paddling, and holidaymakers queue to board the pleasure steamer. In the pages that follow we see the uncle waiting for rescue in May 1940 alongside hundreds of other soldiers, not paddling but wading waist-deep to meet the boats, chilled to the bone by the seawater. Interspersed with the ar twork are photos of war time mementoes – ‘my uncle’s souvenirs’, which include a soldier’s pay book, telegrams and permits. Captions trace the sequence of events leading up to the rescue by the Little Ships, and a brief outline describes the course of the war after 1940. The contrast between the safe familiarity of a seaside holiday and the tragic events of Operation Dynamo make this a compelling account. A previous volume on World War II by this author/illustrator team, Tail End Charlie, was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award.


SU


A first glimpse at the books in this series gave me a sense of déjà vu: they revisit familiar topics – transpor t, families, work, and towns and cities – and are organised in traditional double spreads. The approach to illustrations – a mix of photographs, paintings and drawings – is hardly innovative either. Is well covered territory simply repackaged here under lively, if sometimes puzzling, titles? In fact the books offer more than this as Richard Platt writes very much with his young readers’ needs in mind. He attends to the ‘big shapes’ as well as the details of the subject of each book. So in the introduction to Would You Believe... bed testers get paid to sleep?! there is a splendid summary of what work was like for the world’s first people, how work and perceptions of it changed through the centuries and why it is important to know about all this today. Then the different sections of the book home in on such topics as work in free and slave societies, work in factories and child labour. The conversational style helps illuminate the issues explored and encourages discussion. And the speculative approach is welcome. In Would You Believe... two cyclists invented the aeroplane?! Platt comments ‘Predicting the future of transport is as risky as jumping a red light’. Then, when imagining what future cities might be like, or should be like, at the end of Would You Believe... Vatican City is a country?! he introduces the interesting idea that town planners could learn something from shanty towns which use few resources. This kind of lateral thinking is likely to inspire young imaginations. Of course, as children reach the later primary years and learn more about the world, difficult issues have to be faced. I found the section on ‘Sons or Daughters’ in Would You Believe... in Mexico, people picnic at granny’s grave?! rather bleak. Looking globally, it is true that if the gender of children could be chosen ‘there would be far more boys than girls’ for all sorts of complicated social and historical reasons. But things are different today, at least in Western societies, as a later section ‘Who’s in Charge’ makes clear. The more challenging issues covered will call for quite a lot of teacher mediation. Perhaps these titles are best used as compact, single topic encyclopaedias to support lessons across the curriculum. MM


Books for Keeps No.184 September 2010 25 HHH


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32