story time books

Having had to dress up and drink with my pinky out at a Fancy Nancy party after a granddaughter (Hullo Victoria) read one of the earlier Fancy Nancy books, I know the power of these stories by Jane O’Connor with illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser. Many preschools have also discovered how well children respond to these with their pretentious but loveable heroine and her splendiferous vocabulary. Unlike some Christmas books which only sell for a few weeks each year, this one will sell year round to Nancy fans, but has an extra resonance over the festive season. With jokes for the adults as well: Nancy thinks bigger is always better when it comes to trees to decorate but “my dad says we must compromise. That means we end up with the tree my mum wants.” With the usual vocabulary extensions like “delectable”, “aroma”, “heirloom”,”magnificent”, “joyous” and of course “spendiferous” it’s great fun. Sometimes there comes a point where a series or a character is pushed too far by author or publisher, but this is still fresh and funny and there’s lots of detail in the illustrations for those who look carefully. If you want a splendiferous Christmas, especially with a little girl, this would be a great present with its sparkly cover.

By Mary Murphy with illustrations by Josh Lee, this is a funny picture book about the bus to the zoo, which is crammed full after the first stop, but keeps on taking more passengers. By the last stop there’s no room for a flea, but luckily there’s only one passenger waiting. Unfortunately it’s an elephant. Children with a sense of fun and absurdity will enjoy this one with its zany catalogue of animals from gulls to tamarins, bats to moths, sloths and gnus, to give a very small selection. Many will have fun trying to name those in the pictures but not mentioned in the text, which is rhymed (mostly). Thank goodness it’s not Noah’s bus with two of each.

‘Tabby McTat was a busker’s cat / With a miaow that was loud and strong. / The two of them sang of this and that, / And people threw coins in the old checked hat, / And this was their favourite song: / “Me, you and the old guitar, / How perfectly, perfectly happy we are. / MEEE-EW and the old guitar, / How PURRRR-fectly happy we are.” ‘

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler,  one of the dream teams of picture books, have done it again, with this story of a busker and his cat. As the extract suggests, the pair are very happy, but circumstances conspire to separate them, and while each looks for the other, their lives carry on, and Tabby McTat now has a family, a wife and three children, including one, Samuel Sprat who looks just like him. When Tabby finds the busker, but feels the pull of his more recent family life, Samuel enthusiastically volunteers to be the new busker’s cat. As always with this pair the illustrations are a wonderful fit with the text, and this will be another extremely popular book. Hardback only this year, at $35. A lovely Christmas present for any child.

This beautiful picture book by Ben Morley, with illustrations by Carl Pearce, tells the story of Joe. When a family moves into the house next door he’s excited at the thought that the boy might come out to play, but his mother tells him he might be tired, because he’s an asylum seeker. Joe hears that as a silence seeker, and takes the boy to the places in his city where he might find silence, but finds them all too noisy. Overnight the boy disappears. Joe goes to look in all the places he showed the silence seeker the day before, but when he returns home his mother tells him they left during the night. Joe hopes he will find his Silence somewhere, and for a few seconds hears the silence he thinks the boy was looking for. Lyrical and lovely.

I loved Sue Lawson’s Finding Darcy, which I reviewed on December 8 last year. This book is also very good, cunningly constructed, beautifully written, with great characterisation. CJ is left with his grandparents (whom he doesn’t know) in a  country area, after spending all his earlier life in the city. This is the aftermath of some event which has left his mother and her partner under stress as well as CJ. Occasional flashbacks, the “Before” part of the story lead up to that event. In his attempts to stay clear of trouble he gets into it, especially after he befriends one of his classmates. As in Finding Darcy, there’s a looming sense of the impact of the past on the present, something the author again handles particularly well, as aspects of that past are slowly revealed. It’s not just CJ’s past either, but his mother’s and grandparents’ as well. Gradually the pieces accumulate until they fit together to give the picture of what has happened to CJ and his mother. Another very good Australian read for secondary age readers.

The Fourth Volume of The Laws of Magic had me reading when I should have been working. All the comments I made about the previous two volumes (enter “Laws of Magic” in the search box to read those reviews) apply again. By now Aubrey, Caroline and George feel like old friends and I still finish the book wanting more. Dr Tremaine is still at large, still diabolically clever, and acquiring more enemies by the day. Aubrey and friends join up with some of them, but as in the previous books, just as the reader thinks the situation is becoming clearer, new twists arise and seldom are situations or people what they seem to be. I recommend this series without hesitation and look forward to more. Great for those who were almost too old for Harry Potter by the time that series finished and are looking for more magic, but more sophisticated characters. My favourite fantasies, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, deal with the human responses to fantastic situations, and this series deals with that better than most. For Aubrey magic is as much a part of his world as books are of mine, and this is beautifully portrayed. If magic,  lots of surprises, wonderful characterisation, clever but warm writing, and some subtle understanding of people caught up in political situations sounds like you, read this series. Wonderful stuff.

This picture book by Joyce Dunbar, illustrated by Jimmy Liao, is an indirect look at fear of darkness, and indirect is often good with children.  Jo-Jo is scared that there might be a monster under the bed, and in this case he’s right. However, it’s a very, very small monster. When the monster gets hungry it tries various foods, but only darkness really does it for him, so he eats darkness, grows bigger and hungrier until there is no darkness left. Then Jo-Jo can’t sleep, his mother can’t hear him crying because she’s under the covers, so the monster holds Jo-Jo, boy and monster drift off to sleep, and the darkness oozes out into the world again until Jo-Jo is holding the monster, tiny again in a dark room. Very comforting look at the positives of darkness.

This is a young adult fantasy by an Irish writer, Celine Kiernan, the first book in a trilogy. I suspect that a lot of people who read this volume will be rather impatient for the next two. Set in an alternative medieval Europe, it has a feisty female protagonist, beautiful writing, and lots of tension, political, narrative and what the Australians, with their fondness for acronyms are calling URST (unresolved sexual tension). The Irish Independent said, “Teen novel that will baroque your world … recommended for both teen and adult readers.” Lots to think about within a story which races along. A great read and I’ll be one of those waiting impatiently for the next two books to find out what happens to Wynter Moorehawke, the fifteen-year-old at the centre of the story who comes home to find her liberal kingdom transformed into a suspicious and vicious place.

This is an amazing, wonderful New Zealand picture book, written by a poet, Paula Green and illustrated by a painter, Michael Hight. The illustrations are full of detail so that each can be looked at for a long time, and the words dance across the pages in what’s either poetic prose or a prosepoem. The blurb on the back calls the language “delicious” and that’s quite a good description. The story, which could be almost superfluous with the illustrations and the lovely language, is also delightful. Aunt Concertina is a junk shop addict who drags her niece along, but then a dusty old kite in one shop insists on going with them and to aunt’s consternation and niece’s delight, flies them around the world to mountains, rivers, volcanoes, ice and waterfalls, Loch Ness and the Amazon. Random rhyme, onomatopoeia and repetition add to the sound effects and the whole is a wonderful book which deserves a wide audience.

This is a stunning young adult novel by Jay Asher, published in the USA in 2007, now available here in paperback. Clay Jensen finds a package with his name on it on his porch. Inside are cassette tapes recorded by his classmate Hannah Baker. She explains that there are thirteen reasons why she killed herself, and that Clay is one of them. He listens to the tapes, walks and rides around the town and learns things he didn’t know about Hannah, other classmates, and himself. It’s wonderfully written novel that had me spellbound and desperate to read to the finish, but it repays careful reading as Hannah’s reasons, seemingly very minor at first, accumulate, and Clay and the reader begin to see how very small things can become significant. And wonderfully, for a book about suicide, it ends on a positive note. Certainly not for the faint-hearted or those who want an easy read, but if you want something to make you think, try this. As Hannah’s reasons pile up, so does the tension, until it’s all but unbearable, but the book is superbly crafted and carries it all well, and in the end it’s a book not about suicide, but about the importance of small gestures, communications and connections. Not just for the young, either. It’s another of those reading experiences which will stay with me for a very long time. Thank you, Jay Asher.