==Confident readers==
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Kate Maryon
|title=Glitter
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=You'd think, seeing Liberty Parfitt's life from the outside, that she'd be blissfully happy. She has everything money can buy, she loves life at her expensive boarding school and she has a wonderfully close friend. But she is not content. Her academic grades are not good, and her father clearly prefers her hard-working and successful older brother Sebastian, who is at the same school. He wins all manner of prizes, but the only area in which she shows any talent is music, a subject her father will not allow her to study. Her mother died when she was only nine months old, and Liberty imagines her life would be very different if she had a loving mother to balance her father's criticisms. And then utter disaster: the family loses every penny they own, she is whisked away from school without warning and taken to a dreary little flat where she has to cope not only with her own sadness and sense of loss but also with a father sinking deeper and deeper into depression.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007326289</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kenneth Steven and Jane Ray
|summary=This is a sweet story in which Anne-Marie Conway makes good use of the current obsession with all-singing, all-dancing shows. Her lead character, Phoebe, is painfully shy. She never used to be though, and always loved singing and dancing before, but since she moved up to the big school, and things started to go wrong at home, she has lost her confidence. Against all her inner fears she somehow ends up joining the local drama club, and whilst she tries to find ways to deal with her crippling stage fright she also begins fighting to get her parents back together again.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1409516512</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nick Green
|title=The Cat Kin
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=A group of misfit children find themselves at the local sports centre having arrived to take various different classes but find they're all part of a group being run by the strange Mrs Powell who teaches them about Pashki. Pashki shows them how to 'find their inner cat' as it were (I know - bear with me, it does get better!) and utilise their new skills to move quietly, stealthily and even super-humanly across fences, tree branches, skipping from pole to pole and even from one bus rooftop to another in an exciting chase sequence. Ben and Tiffany both have their own sets of troubles at home, and so Pashki becomes an escape for them both. However, they soon find their new skills get them into more trouble than they could ever have imagined.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905537166</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tony Bradman and Tony Ross
|title=The Orchard Book of Swords, Sorcerers and Superheroes
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Jason and the Argonauts, King Arthur, Aladdin, William Tell, Hercules, Sinbad, St George, Ali Baba, Theseus and Robin Hood. If you love myths and legends as much as [[Top Ten Retellings of Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales|we do]] then those ten heroes will have got your juices flowing, and you'll be desperate to dive in to this collection of adventures. It's fantastic. You'll love it!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408309211</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Betty G Birney
|title=Humphrey's Great-Great-Great Book of Stories
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=There is nothing quite like being proven correct. And this is one of those rare times I have been. From the evidence of the sixth main Humphrey book, [[Holidays According to Humphrey by Betty G Birney|Holidays According to...]], I declared the whole series to be quite brilliant. The books, I decided, were cute without ever being cloying, clever without being too clever-clever, full of morals without ever forcing them on the reader, and packed with entertaining plot and lovely characters. And now the book reviewing gods have decided I read a fantastic collection of the last three novels, to expand my knowledge of the series.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571255949</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Philip Ardagh
|title=Grubtown Tales: Splash, Crash and Loads of Cash
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=If there's one thing that we've learnt from the previous five Grubtown Tales, it's that Jilly Cheeter and Mango Claptrap are never separated. Whatever extraordinary circumstance of life turns up, they'll always work together. So why is Mango, in his shortest of short trousers as usual, sat on top of a floating mayor, in shark-infested seas, and why is Jilly only taking her poorly dog to the vet's? And what sort of help can we expect from a back story involving some liberated lab rats?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571253490</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Rosen
|title=Michael Rosen's Big Book of Bad Things
|rating=4.5
|genre=Children's Rhymes and Verse
|summary=When he was little, Michael Rosen's dad remembered all the bad things he'd done and reminded him of them when appropriate, so Michael imagined he'd written them all down in a Big Book of Bad Things. Here he presents the eponymous poem, as well as many many other tales of childhood, from the horrors of being a second late to school, to making a raft, to going to a café. Some bad, some sad, some quirky, some funny, some touching, some light-hearted, all wonderful.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141324511</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Packham
|title=comin 2 gt u
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Sam Tennant is reasonably happy at school, generally gets on alright with people, and doesn't have much to worry about – until he's murdered in the first chapter of this novel. Oh, not '''really''' murdered – his character in a game he plays online is killed. But then, the two who kill him refer to him by his real name instead of his computer persona, and he realises that virtual life has just become very nasty indeed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848120958</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John E Smelcer
|title=The Edge of Nowhere
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Could you survive in the wilds of Alaska if you were washed overboard from a fishing boat during a storm and somehow, amazingly, managed to make it to dry land? This is the challenge facing Seth and his loyal dog, Tucker. They are out on Seth's father's fishing boat during a terrible storm and neither Seth's dad or his friend realise that the boy and dog have been washed overboard until they reach home and are found to be missing from the boat. A search party is sent out, but Seth is assumed drowned. Luckily, Seth and his dog manage to get to one of the tiny islands that run along the coast of Alaska, and after realising that no one is coming to help them they slowly make their way hundreds of miles over many months. Will they starve to death, or freeze, or be eaten by bears before they manage to make it home?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849391963</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Teresa Flavin
|title=The Blackhope Enigma
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=14-year old Sunni finds it bad enough that when she's trying to do some research on a famous Fausto Corvo painting in Blackhope Tower's Mariner's Chamber, she gets lumbered with her annoying stepbrother to look after. Add to that the presence of her classmate Blaise, a boy who's better at art than she is, and her day is looking depressing – and that's '''before''' Dean mysteriously vanishing when walking around the chamber's labyrinth.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848770340</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joshua Doder
|title=Grk Down Under
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=If you'd ever wondered where speed and agility, and a huge appetite for going where he shouldn't and eating what he oughtn't can get a dog, you only have to turn to this book for evidence. I won't let on how a tiny dog manages to get himself to Australia unaided, but he does - leaving his human owners back in England, and young Tim Malt especially desperate for his return. But the dog called Grk is about to find out how dangerous and nasty Australians can be...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1842709313</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Jarman
|title=The Time-travelling Cat and the Great Victorian Stink
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Consider cats. Normally they like to leave you things like poop, and dead animals, generally in the middle of the kitchen floor. Topher's cat leaves himself a stone statue version of himself when he decides to time travel to some past time of history. I know - odd. I can also introduce you to a very different Topher, one just escaped from the workhouse in Victorian London - if only he could escape the stench of the open sewers in London, and the hunger in his stomach just as easily. Well, I could - but actually they are the same person, just with a completely different mind. When our Topher travels through time as well - on the back of a bird - he finds himself in the person of the second, historical lad. Will that homework project about Victorian history be enough to help him out, and perhaps prevent a nasty crime or two?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849390193</amazonuk>
}}