Open main menu

Changes

no edit summary
[[Category:New Reviews|Confident Readers]]
__NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|title=The Iron Man (Faber Classics)
|author=Ted Hughes
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=I'll start with a confession. I read a book recently, and got all the way through and still didn't realise I'd read the whole thing about eighteen months before. I mention it only to say that such a thing is impossible with The Iron Man. With the opening scene, of the behemoth on top of the cliff he is about to fall over, I was there. I was immediately transported to a much younger me, sat in the primary school library or classroom, getting the willies from the vivid description of the Iron Giant's hand helping put the whole robotic monster back together. I don't know of a better way to paraphrase the word 'classic' – but this book stayed with me for over thirty years, and it's just fine to revisit.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571302246</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|title=The Boy on the Porch
|summary=It's the 1760s, and young Benjamin is starting his diaries to record his path from a smart eleven year old to a noted scientist. It would, he thinks, be a very relevant document. And so it proves, in the light of what it eventually yields us. But before then there is his domestic matters to get over – the great-granddad who seems to have run out of words to say in this life, and his horrid mother and her frequently odd menus, and frequent, odder diseases. And the small matter of a harassing old/young man, Farley Cupstart, and his desperate search for something within Benjamin's household – something that looks a bit like a dragonfly, but just a bit more human…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571295584</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|title=Stick Dog Wants a Hot Dog
|author=Tom Watson
|rating=3
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=''Time'' magazine were very perceptive when they put [[:Category:Jeff Kinney|Jeff Kinney]] on their most influential people lists. Many have been the people to take his snappy, over-illustrated young readers format and sense of humour to produce a franchise of witty, short novels about endearingly self-dismissive Average Joes. But with the signs that the whole thing has branched away from endearing Joes to hopefully endearing dogs, the message is getting clearer and clearer – just too many mimics are now on the shelf.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007511493</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|title=Penguin Pandemonium - Christmas Crackers (Awesome Animals)
|author=Jeanne Willis
|rating=3.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=''Penguins do not celebrate Christmas'' we learn from this book, so when Santa's Grotto turns up next door to the Zoo's penguin enclosure one particularly snowy Christmas, all that can occur is jealousy. Some of the many penguins are just too determined to enter into the spirit of, er, receiving things. And you can guess just how well that will go down in the moral universe of a primary school book…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007521944</amazonuk>
}}