===[[The Company of Eight by Harriet Whitehorn]]===
[[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Confident Readers|Confident Readers]]
Fourteen-year-old orphan Cass lives in the Magical District, but as she hasn't the slightest ability in that direction she doesn't exactly fit in. She takes after her dad, and she hopes desperately that she'll pass the upcoming auditions for acrobats and join the Circus Boat as it tours to give performances on all the islands of the Longest World. Her guardian Mrs Potts, however, does ''not'' approve: her hope that Cass will demonstrate magical abilities like her mother's (and make Mrs Potts very rich) has been disappointed so she is determined her ward will take on a sedate, genteel job instead: governess, maybe, or draper's model. So poor Cass is reduced to practising her routines in secret, using an old book her father left her. [[The Company of Eight by Harriet Whitehorn|Full Review]]
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Imagine a world without bees. Not just how nice it would be to eat jam sandwiches in the garden without having the little yellow and black torpedoes attacking you - ''really'' imagine it. No bees, no pollination. No pollination, no new plants. No new plants, no food. Simple. So, if those pesky chemicals we use kill off practically every bee in the world, humans will have to take over their work. Children, in fact, because you need small, nimble fingers to work those tiny feathers full of pollen into the flowers and turn them into delicious fruits. [[How to Bee by Bren MacDibble|Full Review]]
[[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Crime|Crime]]
DI Maya Rahman is just back from Bangladesh and she should be on compassionate leave as she went there to bury her brother after he committed suicide. Instead of grieving at home and getting over her jet lag she's pitched straight into a murder investigation as a new member of staff discovers the body of popular headteacher Linda Gibson in her study at Mile End High School. Her hands are bound and beside her strangled body is a card with a Buddhist precept: ''I shall abstain from taking the ungiven.'' It's the second of five precepts and Maya is worried that there's been a murder that hasn't been spotted - and that there will be more deaths. [[Turn a Blind Eye by Vicky Newham|Full Review]]