[[Category:Confident Readers|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Confident Readers]]__NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
{{Frontpage
|author=Judith Eagle
|title=The Stolen Songbird
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Caro's mother, a world-famous whistler, has failed to return home from her recent work trip abroad and is now missing. Her other mother, Ronnie, is having to go up North to take care of her sister who is unwell. So who is going to look after Caro? Sent to stay with Gam, someone Caro has heard her mother despises, she feels frustrated and confused and worried. All her summer holiday plans of building herself some equipment to practise her gymnastics are brought to a halt whilst she is stuck inside this staid old Victorian lady's house, along with an orphan boy, Albie, who is living there too. But she soon finds herself caught up in a mystery, as she discovers a painting of a bird hidden away inside her mum's old suitcase, and all across London a fearsome gang called the Snakes are thieving artworks and terrorising people. Is the painting somehow linked to the gang? And what has happened to Caro's mother? Is she somehow involved in the mystery too?
|isbn=0571363148
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Tania Unsworth
|summary=Vivien knows that mermaids don't exist. But she also knows they have to exist – at least in the public eye. For there would be nothing to Lake Splendour – a far northern English resort – without them. A hundred years and change ago, two teenaged girls allegedly spent months with mermaids, but were forced to return to help out with the Great War effort. They also showed female emancipation, which helped create the town's tourism industry, now faded and falling apart but once a feminist success story. Alice, a girl who stumbles into Vivien's gran's tourist shop one day, knows she certainly wants mermaids to exist – she thinks her family's black sheep died searching for them, or else was just too successful in her hunt. When the shy, doubting Thomasina that is Vivien collides with the exuberant, gung-ho Alice, what on earth – or perhaps in water – will they find?
|isbn=1839941901
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Alison Hughes
|title=Fly
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=This is a very impressive read, as it does a lot of what mainstream teen and tween fiction still struggles with. Its focus is courtesy the first person narration from Fly, a secondary school lad with cerebral palsy, a down-on-her-luck single mom nearing retirement from being a cleaner, a carer while at school, and a bundle of assumptions people lay on him. First they assume that with a broken body comes a broken mind, then they decide he's a maths savant – they even believe they can get away with calling him Fly, which isn't his real name, but everybody just uses it.
|isbn=1525305832
}}
Move on to [[Newest Cookery Reviews]]