'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Greg Grandin
|title=Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=In 1927, the Ford Motor company bought a huge tract of land in Brazil, for the purpose of the company growing its own rubber for use in making its cars. They planted rubber trees and built a factory and houses, and a number of top managers from the company were posted to Fordlandia to run the operation. Huge amounts of money were pumped into Fordlandia, and Ford made great claims for their plans. However, the project was a spectacular failure, and it lasted less than twenty years.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848311478</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Aifric Campbell
|summary=Connie is doing postgraduate research on witchcraft. Although she is initially rather wary of being asked to clear out her grandmother’s old house, the project turns out to lead to lots of exciting possibilities, including romance and perhaps original sources for her studies.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141047550</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Yoko Ogawa
|title=The Housekeeper and the Professor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I never really got on with maths at school. Or sport. So a book that seems to deal with both baseball and mathematics ought to fly to the bottom of my 'to read' pile. However, this slim little Japanese novel slipped into my hands and into my heart as soon as I saw it. The premise is very simple - a young housekeeper is assigned to a job working for an elderly, brain damaged professor of mathematics. He has only eighty minutes of short-term memory, so he doesn't remember her from one day to the next, but his memory pre-1975 remains intact and somehow he continues to function, living through his obsession with numbers. Each morning he greets her at the door asking for her birth date and her telephone number. He finds puzzles and equations in everything, including shoe sizes and baseball, and the housekeeper becomes fascinated as she and her son also begin to see the beauty and the poetry in numbers.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521342</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Glenda Larke
|title=The Last Stormlord (Stormlord Trilogy)
|rating=4
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=The Last Stormlord is a unique story which explores a civilization on the brink of disaster. The world survives through the powers of a Stormmlord who brings water to the parched lands of the Quartern from the distant seas. As the story opens the last Stormlord is weak and dying. Choices are being made about who will receive water, who will not and the Quartern hovers on the brink of returning to a time of Random Rain: water that does not fall where or when it is needed. Without a new Stormlord the land will die.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841498114</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Will Eisner
|title=Life on Another Planet
|rating=2.5
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=There are some people who don't even need their name on their books, for the contents are so obviously and uniquely theirs. Will Eisner is one such person, for the esteem and renown his artwork and pioneering work in the graphic novel form is held under is rightfully his and his alone. I'm quite sure I could recognise a page of his black and white inkwork, and his easily drawn but realistic characters, more easily than any other sequential artist. That trademark signature on the cover, surely the most well-known in 'comic strips' outside Mr Disney's empire, is hardly necessary.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0393328120</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Evany Thomas
|title=The Secret Language of Sleep: A Couple's Guide to the Thirty-nine Positions
|rating=3
|genre=Home and Family
|summary=This volume takes the premise that the positions in which couples sleep together are an insight into their private mind. Therefore, with the help of the line drawings of 39 (apparently all of THE 39) positions, one might see where one is going wrong. It’s a chicken and egg situation where you might learn you’re with the wrong bed partner, and change either them or your nocturnal habits, or in order to change yourself alter things having reflected on the contents here – with the help as they suggest of a ceiling-mounted camcorder.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1932416471</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dyan Sheldon
|title=My Worst Best Friend
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Gracie Mooney and Savanna Zindle are, unlikely as it may seem, best friends. Savanna is popular, beautiful, loud, confident and, well, a little bit stupid. Gracie is short, plain, quiet, and an intelligent lizard-loving environmentalist. Their friendship really shouldn't work, but somehow it does, and they spend hours and hours together, then when they're not together spend hours discussing everything on the phone with each other. You can tell already what's going to happen, can't you? Yes, it's a friendship bust-up just waiting to happen...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1406304204</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mary Hoffman
|title=City of Ships (Stravaganza)
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Isabel is unhappy. Her twin brother is better at everything and she has to make up an imaginary twin to compensate. But when she trips up on a bag of silver tesserae (mosaic tiles) all of that begins to change - she falls asleep holding the tiles and finds herself in Classe, in a parallel world, a country equivalent to Italy, encountered in previous books by Lucien, Georgia, Sky and Matt. She is a Stravagante, a traveller in time and space, and the bag of tesserae are her talisman. Invited into the Stravagante group, she encounters problems with pirates, politics and 'the usual' teenage troubles.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0747592535</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Steve Voake
|title=Hooey Higgins and the Shark
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=A shark has been spotted in Shrimpton-on-Sea's bay. The local chocolate shop has a mahousive egg for sale for £65. Hooey Higgins decides to capture the former so he can charge admission and buy the latter. He's helped out on his adventures by Twig and Will, whilst they all hope they won't fall foul of the big bully Basbo.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1406322342</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kate Maryon
|title=Shine
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=''You and me, Mum, you and me.''
Twelve-year-old Tiff and her mother are a double act. They're so close that they're almost more like sisters than mother and daughter. They both like shiny, girly, things, and Tiff's mum seemingly has an endless supply of new, ever more glamorous baubles for them to share. There's only one problem: how she comes by them. Because Tiff's mum has rather sticky fingers. She shoplifts. She defrauds credit cards. She's very naughty and sometimes it makes Tiff feel rather uncomfortable. She knows deep down that it can't last.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007326270</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anthony McGowan
|title=Einstein's Underpants - And How They Saved The World
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=A delightfully silly school cum sci-fi romp for confident readers, with plenty of pants-based humour, but never at the expense of a rollicking good read.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0440869242</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Xavier Deneux
|title=My Circus
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=An utterly gorgeous board book that everyone will love to pore over, from the very youngest right on up.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408807009</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maureen Roffey
|title=Bedtime (Slip-and-Slide Books)
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=''Bedtime'' is a pull-the-tabs book about - unsurprisingly - bedtime. Page by page reveals child after child rubbing their eyes, changing into their pyjamas, kissing mummy goodnight, and cuddling up with teddy. Each pulled tab changes that picture, much like a before and after shot.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0747599386</amazonuk>
}}
