[[Category:Confident Readers|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Confident Readers]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Andy Mulligan
|title=Dog
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=What life can you find for yourself, when it seems to be marked out at the start that this – the only one you get – begins at such a lowly place? That's the question the dog in ''Dog'' faces, especially when a snide spider tells him he is the runt of the litter, and instead of being bought has been selected by an adult only because he's free. He wasn't even really chosen, and they had thought to get a cat. Oddly enough the mutt gets to be called Spider by Tom, the lad who gets to call him his, but he's fraught with self-doubt. The spider tells him he's only going to cause harm – which he does. But the neighbourhood cat declares that Spider has something of the feline in his mongrel mix, and tempts him across to her way of living. Tom himself, meanwhile, is being nudged into thinking he's beginning at a lowly place – he ignores his absent mother, he has the privilege of a scholarship for him to get beaten up and bullied at school, and he can't see much future for himself, either. Can Spider work out his lot, and match his life with that of Tom, or will outside agencies get in the way?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1782691715</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Amanda Foody
|summary=''I'm thirteen years OLD, not young.'' And it's a good job too, for her grandma and godfather have taken Bea on an extended holiday to Indonesia, where the wild dinosaurs live. Yes, this is a world where they never went extinct, and have been used for riding for leisure or as pack animals ever since mankind domesticated them. But wild and dangerous ones still exist, such as the Raptors of Paradise. Bea's older guardians have another reason to go there, though – they are in search of clues that might lead them to at last discover the fate of Bea's birth parents, who disappeared a decade ago. She's unaware of this being the final grasp at one last clue – and all of them are ignorant of how the real danger and mystique on the island may actually come not from the fabulous beasts, but from other humans…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1786968002</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Frances Hardinge
|title= A Skinful of Shadows
|rating= 5
|genre= Confident Readers
|summary= Once again the vivid and decidedly quirky imagination of Frances Hardinge has produced a story which grips the reader while he or she is reading it, and remains in the memory long after the book has been replaced on the shelf. This time the English Civil War is erupting and we meet Makepeace, whose gift (or curse, depending on your perspective) means she has a space inside her where ghosts can hide. Her first ''guest'' is a large, angry bear which has spent its unhappy life being seriously ill-treated, and much of her energy in the earlier part of the story is given over to stopping it using her body to rampage around smashing everything and everyone in sight.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1509869301</amazonuk>
}}