You can find links to past Children’s Hour posts here.

I’d love to hear everybody’s experiences of the books I review too, and feel free to post me a link to your own reviews, I’d love to make this a bit interactive.

The image (if you were wondering) is taken from Shirley’s Hughes’ Alfie and Annie-Rose books which I loved as a child.

Children’s Hour is going to be a little different this week. Last week the toddlers were asked to bring in their favourite books for everyone to look at. These are some of the books we came up with (links lead to amazon):

The Tiger Who Came to Tea: We’ve discussed this one on Children’s Hour before.

Peppa Big and the Big Train: Everyone’s favourite pig, Peppa goes on the train. This was maybe a little long for a ‘first’ book but interesting enough for our toddlers.

Monkey: Let’s face it, the popular thing about tis book is the button that makes Monkey noises…I’m not even sure we got as far as reading the story, if we did it wasn’t memorable.

Dear Zoo: I’m really glad one of the kids brought this in because it’s a great book. A child writes to the zoo because he wants a pet, but they keep sending things that aren’t quite right, with each animal being revealed when a flap is lifted.

The Octonauts: The Octonauts love to explore the sea. I was fully expecting an Octonauts book to turn up as one of our kids adores the show. However he wasn’t the one who brought the book in!

White and Black: My Animals: This is a very simple book. Black and white cartoon pictures of different animals with single words saying which animal is shown.  However it has more that the animals which turn up in these books stereotypically, and the kids loved to name all the animals.

It’s Tuesday again so The Broke and the Bookish are hosting Top Ten Tuesday.

This week it’s top 10 books which deal with tough issues.

1) Handle with Care- Jodi Picoult. In this book a mother is suing her midwife believing that she should have been told that her daughter would be born with brittle bones. It’s difficult because it suggests that if the mother had known she would not have continued with the pregnancy. It also follows her daughter and the issues she has. All of Picoult’s books deal with tough issues but this one hits harder to home because I have a similar (though less severe) condition. Which I talked about in my review

2) Eva- Peter Dickinson I read this as a teenager and it’s still one of my most recommended books. It’s a strange sort of animal rights book. It’s set in the future and a girl who was in a major accident has her brain transplanted into a chimpanzee. She finds herslef in a sort of limbo between the world of the chimps and the human world.

3) Night Waking- Sarah Moss at time of writing this is my current read (although I’ll probably have posted the review before this post goes up). The story focuses on a mother and all her issues with being a mother. She finds a baby’s skeleton in her garden and becomes obsessed with finding out who it was. There are quite a few issues covered, working parents,  child abuse, death, infanticide, anorexia. It’s a tough read emotionally but worth it I think.

4) Reservation Road- John Burnham Schwartz This novel follows a family after their child is killed by a hit and run driver, and follows the driver of the car.

5) Bad Girls- Jacqueline Wilson until I was about 14 I used to read every single one of Jacqueline Wilson’s books, all of which deal with issues faced by children. Bad Girls, which talks about bullying, peer pressure, and friends was one of my favourites. It was the story of Mandy who is bullied by her classmates. One day she meets Tanya and they become friends, but is Tanya more trouble that she’s worth.

6) Deenie- Judy Blume Another author, one read by most teenagers, who deals with teenage issues this time. Deenie is a popular girl then she finds out she has a curved spine and will have to wear a back brace. Basically tragedy to a teenager.

7) Speak- Laurie Halse Anderson is another I read as a teenager. A teenage girl starts high school after an event at a party led her to call the police. She’s basically a social outcast, and she still can’t talk about what happened.

8) Room- Emma Donoghue is the story of a woman who was kipnapped and had her abductor’s child. Hard hitting but fantastically written.

9) Mockingbird- Kathryn Erkskien is the story of an autistic girl who looses her brother. We see her life and her brother’s death thorough her eyes.

10) Middlesex- Jeffrey Eugenides follows Cal as she grows up. Cal knows she is different but doesn’t realise that she is actually neither female or male.

Special mentions go to The Help, The Virgin Suicides, books by Paula Danziger, and Kerb Crawling

Synopsis (from amazon)

You can find links to past Children’s Hour posts here.

I’d love to hear everybody’s experiences of the books I review too, and feel free to post me a link to your own reviews, I’d love to make this a bit interactive.

The image (if you were wondering) is taken from Shirley’s Hughes’ Alfie and Annie-Rose books which I loved as a child.
Five Little Men in a Flying Saucer  is another book  (like Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, and I am the Music Man) which is based on a well known song. The book is very popular in pre-school (3-5 year olds), and the kids enjoy reading it to themselves. What I like about this book though is the pictures, they tell a whole story in themselves. As the little men look at the earth they see all the destruction and neglect that it has gone through and don’t want to visit. It has a sort of environmental message that I like, although I’m not really sure how much the kids understand this.

Buy Five Little Men in a Flying Saucer:

Paperback (£5.39)

Paperback with CD (£7.99)

Big Book (£10.79)

Hardback (£3.99)

Synopsis (from amazon)

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby’s skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women’s vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss’s second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range – showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great emotional depth.

Review

I found this book rather emotionally tough at times. I really liked Anna but because we could see in her head I often found the things she thought, and sometimes even the things she did made me feel uneasy, especially when it came to her children.

In fact it was quite well done because you could understand Anna’s thoughts and approach to things, even though you might not agree, and they were easy things to judge her for.

A lot of the book was about Anna as a mother. At times I did actually find her to be a good mother, but at others she completely lost the plot. Maybe that made it authentic, I really don’t know, I maybe hope not. I suppose all parents get frustrated with their kids sometimes, but Anna didn’t always deal with it well.

There was something about the kids. I think Raph maybe wasn’t meant to be ‘normal’, certainly he seemed ‘too clever’, but I did really like him. Moth was presented at the ‘normal’ kid but I work with two year olds, and he seems rather infantile.

The letters I found rather frustrating. They seemed to break the story, but the way they eventually linked in to the rest of the story made them worth reading.

It’s far from the easiest read, but I did end up abandoning my paperback in favour of finishing Night Waking, and I think that says a lot about how it captured me.

4/5

Buy it:

Kindle (£4.12)

Paperback (£5.51)

You can find links to past Children’s Hour posts here.

I’d love to hear everybody’s experiences of the books I review too, and feel free to post me a link to your own reviews, I’d love to make this a bit interactive.

The image (if you were wondering) is taken from Shirley’s Hughes’ Alfie and Annie-Rose books which I loved as a child.

Bit late for Children’s Hour this week. I’ve been rather busy.

Well Done, Little Bear is one in the Big Bear, Little Bear series by Martin Waddell (who also wrote Owl Babies). In Well Done, Little Bear Little Bear wants to go exploring and does lots of exciting thing, with Big Bear always there to help him. Little Bear’s adventures get more and more risky until he slips into the river, but Big Bear soon saves him and they get across the river together. This is a lovely book to talk about people who look after us. One boy in particular really loves Little Bear and Big Bear, although he’s rather confused as to where Little Bear’s Daddy is. It’s not one we read often because it’s a bit long for the younger toddlers, but it’s getting requested a lot by this particular child, and the other older children enjoy it too.

Buy Well Done, Little Bear:

Hardback (from £1.00)

Paperback (from £1.99)

Disclaimer: This book was provided for me free of charge, by the publisher (via netgalley) in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis (from amazon)
It is 1943 – the height of the Second World War. With the men taken by the army, Berlin has become a city of women. And while her husband fights on the Eastern Front, Sigrid Schroder is, for all intents and purposes, the model soldier’s wife: she goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law. But behind this facade is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman who dreams of her former Jewish lover, who is now lost in the chaos of the war. Sigrid’s tedious existence is turned upside-down when she finds herself hiding a mother and her two young daughters: could they be her lover’s family? Now she must make terrifying choices that could cost her everything.

Review

I read Lisa’s review of this book a month or two ago  which made me immediately search for and request it on netgalley. I’m  big reader of World War fiction and this one sounded a little more unique, plus the review made me think it would be well done.

It was an interesting subject. I think we should really admire Germans who harboured Jews during Hitler’s reign. It would be so easy just to ignore what was going on around you and stay safe (or at least relatively safe).

I quite liked how Sigrid battled with wanting to be a ‘good German’ and not being able to ignore what was going on around her. It showed that she wasn’t some sort of saint, but that this was the way she reacted to the situation. In that sense it makes the idea rather hopeful, that anyone could do something amazing for a fellow human-being, given the right circumstances.

In many ways she was just trying to get through the days, waiting for the war to end. And I can imagine it was that way for a lot of people.

The story was very sad, but also hopeful. I really felt for Sigrid, even if I didn’t always like her. Again it just showed that she was human.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me. - Martin Niemöller

4/5

Buy it:

Kindle (£7.99)

Paperback (£8.96)

Hardback- Large print (£20.44)

Other Reviews:

Lisa @ Lit and Life

Jo @ Fluidity of Time

Did I miss your review? Leave me a link in comments and I will add it here.

Synopsis (from amazon)

You can find links to past Children’s Hour posts here.

I’d love to hear everybody’s experiences of the books I review too, and feel free to post me a link to your own reviews, I’d love to make this a bit interactive.

The image (if you were wondering) is taken from Shirley’s Hughes’ Alfie and Annie-Rose books which I loved as a child.

The Cat and the Mouse  is he third book I received from the author Mike Lockett, and actually had probably been our least read. Not because we don’t like it but because we prefer Hickory Dickory Dock and Monkey and Rabbit Together, plus pre-school keep borrowing it!

The story follows a familiar pattern, and is based on an lesser known Mother Goose rhyme. It reminds me a lot of The Old Woman and her Pig which was just funny to us as kids because it was so absurd.

The Cat and the Mouse follows a similar line. The cat bites the mouse’s tail off and says she will only give it back if the mouse gets her some milk. Only the cow won’t give the mouse any milk unless he gets her some hay, and the story continues. It’s a little more logical than The Old Woman in her Pig, no talking to inanimate objects, but I liked that about the Old Woman and her Pig.

However the children do enjoy this version. Because it’s quite repetitive they can join in easily, and start to know what’s coming next with a few readings. They love to shout “No” at the mouse.

The Cat and the Mouse  is not available in the UK but you can get it shipped from The Book Depository for free:

Hardback (£9.76)

Happy World Book Night everyone!

This year was my first year taking part in World Book Night as a giver. With a mixture of excitement and nerves!

World Book Night (for those who don’t know) is sort of like World Book Day, but for adults. The idea is to get people who wouldn’t normally read to read. Events take part up and down the country and half a million books are given away, some by givers (like me) and some are given directly to hard to reach areas.

I gave away 20 copies of Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair which is a favourite of mine. I picked it because it is easy to read, it’s engaging, it’s funny nd exciting, and it has a little bit of everything. Plus it’s the first in a series which makes it easy to go on from there, as well as being related to Jane Eyre, which is another way to continue your reading.

I was giving away copies to parent and staff at the nursery where I work, which is in a deprived area of Birmingham. It actually went much better than I expected. Not one parent who I offered a book to refused it, and a couple of staff took books too.

I actually found that quite a few of the parent like reading, I don’t tend to know the parents that well and it was interesting to see something new about them. One parent in particular was really interested to the book. He was asking me what it was about and about the rest of the series, he said he would definitely read it, but that it was his wife who should read more. Another told me she was reading The Help at the moment but would read The Eyre Affair next, then pass it on to her Mum who she said was also a reader. One of the grandparents seemed unsure at first but once she found lut there was a crime element, and it was also connected to Jane Eyre she changed her mine- and said she would pass it on to Mum. Quite a few seemed to think they needed to pay for them, or make a donation, maybe adults are just not used to getting free stuff, these seemed to be particularly gracious when they found out it was theirs to keep for free.

Some of the kids actually seemed interested too, which is good in a role model sense. The granddaughter of the grandparent I mentioned before asked why she got a book, and got the reply “because I was a good girl”. Another kid insisted on ‘reading’ the book himself. And another actually picked up a book for his parents, claiming it was about “George’s Day”, probably because it is St. George’s Day today.