Dreaming the Bear by Mimi Thebo, reviewed by Pauline Francis

Darcy is a teenager struggling to recover from pneumonia and has been advised by a doctor to spend two to four hours outside every day. But this is no ordinary outside. Once it would have been the city streets and shopping malls of London that Darcy loves so much (but she reasons that she wouldn’t have caught pneumonia anyway if she’d stayed where she belonged).

This outside is 7,000 feet above sea level, in the winter wilds of Yellowstone National Park, US, full of hibernating bears.  This is where her father has taken a new job and moved his family from England.

 Everybody else fits in well into this new habitat. Only Darcy is weak, helpless and unsettled. Just like the bear she meets when she walks too far one day. Darcy stumbles across its cave, soaked to the skin from a fall, and this bear saves her life by keeping her warm.  Now the narrative switches between Darcy and the bear, who has been wounded and her cubs killed. The line between reality and dream is blurred.

Darcy is drawn again and again to visit the bear.

“The bear raises her arm, and I am the little cold creature that crawls into its warmth. Together we dive down into a dream world.”

The tension of this story is heightened by a severe snow storm, lasting six days, during which Darcy falls in love with Tony, her brother’s friend, who has to take shelter with them.

At first, knowing nothing about bears, I expect Darcy and the bear to help each other to get better, because Darcy feeds the injured bear secretly, making long journeys with food, which I thought would be her recuperation.

‘I felt kind of dead,’ Darcy says. ‘She made me feel more alive.’

Darcy (and me) soon learns her mistake. Tony and her family are furious when they find out what she has been doing. An injured bear in the park dependent on being fed is a danger to everybody. And Darcy is not feeling any better. The ending is both poignant and practical.

This short novel is beautifully written and contains dream-style as well as third person narrative from the bear’s point of view. Although it is instructive for the reader, it does represent the bear as a creature with feelings.

Mimi Thebo has based this story on a real bear in Yellowstone national Park – Bear 134- and her respect and love for this creature is as strong as her respect for the dilemma in which Darcy finds herself. As Darcy’s problems are resolved, she feels the bear’s strength inside her.

“A girl alone. A wounded bear. A bond to last forever.”

Dreaming the Bear is recommended for the 10+ age group.

Pauline Francis www.paulinefrancis.co.uk

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CHLOE'S SECRET PRINCESS CLUB by EMMA BARNES. Review by Penny Dolan

Chloe’s Secret Princess Club may be about three girls who want to become princesses, but at heart, this book is really about the fun of imaginative play and friendship.

With plenty of fantasy books about, one can only be glad to find a story set so clearly within the real world of everyday family situations, and where the young characters have ordinary hopes and childish aspirations.

Also - and a personal response here – I was rather pleased to discover the book was not in a diary format, but presented in fourteen chapters with a few essential lists. The book very much reminded of Beverley Cleary’s Ramona stories, where the focus is all about the central character learning to cope with the smaller bumps of everyday life.

At first, dreamyhead Chloe Higgins keeps her Princess plans to herself. Then, when she sees that the school store-cupboard door is unlocked, she can’t help peeping inside, just in case it is a Portal to Another World and so ends up sticking her bewigged head out of the window, asking for help. Chloe is teased as “Rapunzel” but the incident leads to Chloe and two other girls forming a very Secret Club as they all have a secret wish to become princesses: princesses of the kind and graceful variety, not of the obnoxious, fame-seeking sort. Having had a daughter who loved dressing up, I felt this girlish longing was very well and positively handled within the writing.

After all,it's not an unreasonable wish because Chloe’s mum has definitely told her that “you can be anything you want to be if you believe in it and work hard” - although Mum was talking about Chloe concentrating on Mental Maths at the time!

The author Emma Barnes has created an attractive trio of characters: introducing impulsive, freckle-faced Chloe, shy Aisha, her long-time best friend, and over-achieving Eliza. She demonstrates the complexity of the modern child’s life too. Meeting up after school is not a simple task: during the week, Chloe has after-school swimming and baking, Aisha goes to classes at the mosque, and Eliza has lessons in trumpet, tap-dancing and karate as well as her Friday family supper. The easy culture mix familiar to an urban child of today is a particular strength of Emma Barnes' storytelling.

The three girls do manage to get together for their “Secret Princess Club” after-school meetings and activities in each others houses, where they enjoy creating special rules and secret handshakes as well as writing everything down in their official unicorn notebook, which eventually leads to a serious misunderstanding.

As the chapters progress, the girls try to learn the skills of being princesses, within their available context. Their dance tuition comes via a DVD of ballroom lessons, their beautiful outfits are clothes and scarves from Chloe’s mother’s wardrobe, and their rescuing of lost kittens involves taking a rather elderly cat back up the street to its neighbour. Plans rarely go quite as the girls imagine but although the adults who are around in the background of the story are sometimes upset they are usually kindly, in a busy working way. The Secret Club’s biggest worry is that Chloe’s twin brother, snooping Arthur and his best friend Mikhail will spread their secret back at school.

Although the “Princesses”-  also know as Clorinda, Araminta and Elisabetta - are playing their roles and living their challenges seriously, one senses they know the limits of their game. The book is not about big time riches or fame and most of the dressing-up involved is creative rather than hugely materialistic. The big argument, when it arrives, grows from a visit by Egyptian history experts to the school, and the three girls learning about the “Princess” Cleopatra. Despite the following arguments and anguish (and a lonely bath in asses milk) the three princesses learn more about each others real-life hopes and dreams and the need to be kinder to each other. 

“Most of all we have stuck together and had fun!”

It’s worth noting that the back of this book contains a character-linked personality quiz, a jam tart recipe and suggestions for creating you own clubs, as well as a welcome stress on the fact that a club can be about whatever a child is interested in and not necessarily princesses: a well-made point! I'm wondering if there will be another kind of Chloe Club or a return of the Princesses Club in a further book.

The Secret Princess Club has an appealing real-life charm and offers an amusing and comforting story, whether as a bedtime book for a young reader or shared on the sofa with a grown-up, possibly stirring tales of their own childhood games.

As Chloe’s mother says: “A bit of imagination is a wonderful thing.”

And there is a hamster.

And a frog. 

Penny Dolan.

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Second time around, but worth it! ...by Adèle Geras

This review was posted a while ago on another website to which I contribute, together with Linda Newbery and Celia Rees. It's Writers Review and you can follow it on Twitter @writersreview1 

I felt that this book was so unusual that it deserved to be brought to everyone's attention more than once. It's a picture book for adults, and as such quite a rare beast. I am also putting up this review again because I reckon it's the perfect Christmas present for a FAMILY: the kind of family where generations come together to enjoy sharing a beautiful thing. I also think any classroom would benefit from having a copy on its shelves. There's so much to look at, pore over, enjoy again and again.

It might LOOK expensive at £25.00 but just consider  the other things you might buy at such a sum....and the answer is: not very much at all and nothing I can think of which will give such pleasure nor last as long.  Keats said it best: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. 

Here's the review! And hope it's not too early to wish everyone a very  Merry Christmas and lots of good things in 2017.

Adèle 

I came home one day from a trip to London to find a huge parcel waiting for me. It was this book: THE QUIET MUSIC OF GENTLY FALLING SNOW, written and illustrated by Jackie Morris,  the very well known artist and writer of many wondrous books for children. The volume  measures 37cms by 28cms. It's a   a picture book for adults and I believe it would be good if there were more of these published, because we don't stop appreciating beauty when we leave our childhood behind.  It's published by  Welsh publisher,  Graffeg, and they've done Morris proud. It costs £25 which seems to me to be excellent value. 

The book has an  usual genesis. Since the year 2000, a charity called HELP FOR MUSICIANS UK has commissioned Jackie Morris to create a Christmas card for them. All of the cards are reproduced at the back of the book. This book knits and crafts those cards together into a single volume made up of many stories, weaving their threads (a favourite word of Morris's) into a beautiful tale (or tales)  of loss and love and music. Because of the origin of the cards, the stories are about music; its creation, its destruction; its fragilities and strengths. Morris's love of music comes over in every story and there's a sort of counterpoint that runs through them.  

Morris has added pictures as well as stories. The creatures who inhabit these tales are ones we know she loves from her other books: bears, swans, hares and birds. The ingredients of fairy tales (towers, snow, forests, ships, trees) fill the narrative, skilfully woven into something singular and strange. Reading the book is very much like listening to different songs, different tunes drifting into your consciousness.They're described as lullabies for grown ups and that's very accurate. The narratives are loose and flowing. The characters appear and reappear and disappear and the animals change and become creatures different from the ones we first thought we'd met. The rhythm of the prose sets out to lull the reader and succeeds in doing exactly this. 

The instruments, depicted many times in the wonderful paintings on every page, are fiddles, flutes, lutes and drums. Anyone interested in identifying them can spend many happy hours looking at each double page spread and seeing what can be found in each one. 

The pear tree in the  'partridge in a pear tree' illustration is also the Singing Ringing Tree which goes on to create forests which it takes seven weeks to walk through. That seven is of course another link with the world of the fairy tales.

This book would make a most beautiful Christmas present for any adult who enjoys fairytales, music, and above all, rich and gloriously coloured illustrations which depict people, creatures and places which are buried in our imagination and which, thanks to Morris, we can pretend are real.  She has moved the fantastical from the realm of our dreams and into the light of our real world.

VISIT:  helpmusicians.org.uk 

Hardback published by GRAFFEG

£25

ISBN: 9781910862650

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Three Little Monkeys by Quentin Blake and Emma Chichester Clark, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

This is an absolute joy of a book, created by teacher/student and friends pair, Quentin Blake and Emma Chichester Clark.  Quentin Blake has written the story, and Emma Chichester Clark done the illustrations.  If ever a pair of people understood picture book fun, it is those two, and they have clearly enjoyed themselves enormously in creating this big beautiful book.

Hilda Snibbs has three little monkeys called  Tim, Sam and Lulu, and they are not always very good.

They make wonderfully terrible messes in her home, and she isn't pleased ... but when, one day, she comes home and the house is tidy and the three little monkeys not in evidence, she is distraught.

Until she find them again.

This is, of course, a parent and children sort of relationship played out in a fun and lovely way.  I know very well that if I'd had this book twenty years ago I would have substituted the names Annie, Mary and Susie for those three little monkeys, and my three daughters would have loved 'being' those naughty lovely characters!
Highly, highly recommended.

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Grace-Ella: Spells for Beginners, written by Sharon Marie Jones and illustrated by Adriana Puglisi. Reviewed by Tamsin Cooke

Grace-Ella: Spells for Beginners by Sharon Marie Jones is such a fun, delightful read. It tells the story of Grace-Ella who on the ninth day of the ninth month of her ninth year discovers she is a witch. Her world changes dramatically, suddenly filled with magic, spells and excitement.  Grace-Ella needs to learn how to use her magic and make sure she never breaks The Nine Golden Rules of the Witch Academy. But can she do it?

The wonder of this book lies in its celebration of individuality. Grace-Ella adores her two quirky friends, and doesn’t want to change them at all.  Despite some children at school and her mother’s fear of what other people think, Grace-Ella stays true to herself as well, not feeling like she has to conform.  

Grace-Ella is the kind of girl everyone would like to have as a friend.  She's mischievous, curious and incredibly loyal. She gets into scrapes and causes mayhem but you root for her all the time. The importance of friendship and sticking up for each other really shines through.

All the characters are well thought out – from her bug-loving neighbour to the talking cat, Mr Whiskins. In particular, I found Grace-Ella’s mother hilarious. She made me laugh out loud on numerous occasions with her sense of self-importance and propriety. ‘Ever since her husband had traced her family tree and found out she was descended from a twelfth century prince, she thought herself rather important.’ She thinks nothing of calling the police to get rid of a cat and is outraged when they don't send someone around. 'Here we are, law-abiding people who pay all our taxes and in our hour of need...'

The story is written in such a fun magical way, and I love how the characters and place names are in Welsh.  The illustrations by Adriana Puglisi are beautiful – adding such depth, warmth and laughter to Grace-Ella’s tale.

I imagine children 7+ will adore this book. I can’t wait to read about Grace-Ella’s next adventure.

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The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner, reviewed by Dawn Finch

First the blurb...

Dill's father is in jail for an unspeakable crime. Shunned by the neighbours in their small religious Tennessee town, Dill and his mother try to make ends meet. Dill’s only respite from poverty and prejudice are his two friends: Lydia and Travis. Travis is an oddball, finding sanctuary from his violent father in his obsession with an epic fantasy saga. Lydia is fast-talking and fiercely creative, pinning her hopes on her achingly cool fashion blog. Dill fears his heart will break when she escapes to a better life in New York.

Dill wants to get through his final year of high school in one piece. But there’s a dark secret at the heart of his family, a serpent poisoning his blood, filling him with despair. Dill must confront this legacy of madness and desperation before it tears him apart.


Jeff Zentner is a writer that you may not have yet come across as The Serpent King is his first foray into writing for young adults. Zentner lives in Nashville, Tennessee and his early career placed him firmly in the music industry, but time spent volunteering at music camps for teens steered him in the direction of writing for them. Given his background as a recording artist, I must confess to some sceptisim about this debut novel, but I am happy to admit that I was wrong - those years writing lyrics have given the author the skills he needed to weave some very elegant prose.

Serpent King is a remarkably talented bit of writing. The atmospheric descriptions of the small town where Dill, Travis and Lydia live provide the backdrop for a story that is at times achingly beautiful, and others suffocatingly enclosed. Zentner guides us through an often surreal world of poverty, wealth, isolation, and strange and obsessive religious beliefs. Thanks to Zentner's deft writing style, the town feels incredibly real - we can almost walk the streets for ourselves and step into the lives of the characters.

Description and language never take over though, the real master here is Zentner's instinctive grasp of natural dialogue. He has captured the characters of Dill, Travis and Lydia so well that we walk in their shoes and completely understand who they are. The handling of the relationships between the three central characters is beautifully done and, even when the story takes darker turns, the sentiment never becomes mawkish or glib.

I loved this book, and don't mind admitting that I was very pleased to see that it had made it onto the nomination list for the 2017 Carnegie Medal. Zentner is being hailed by the US press as the "next John Green" and, as with Green's books, you will need a box of tissues for some of the truly heartbreaking moments in Serpent King, but I think that the comparison should end there. I feel that where Zentner rises above many writers of this ilk is in his mastery of dialogue. That time spent volunteering with young people has clearly not been wasted as he really does know how young people speak to each other, and how they relate the complexities of their lives.

The Serpent King feels like a window into the lives of three young people who live in both ordinary, and extraordinary times, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Dawn Finch is a children's writer and librarian and 2016 President of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), and member of the Society of Authors' CWIG committee.
www.dawnfinch.com
@dawnafinch

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