'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Rebecca Elliott
|title=Zoo Girl
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Zoo girl was not what I expected. I was anticipating your average rhyming story aimed at preschoolers with the usual obsession over zoo animals. What I got was a very deep, moving tale aimed above the usual picture book age that will resonate with people who read it from children to adults.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>074596270X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Dickie
|summary=Renee is a normal school girl living in sunny California. On her sixteenth birthday she is drawn to the woods by her house. There she finds the dead bodies of her parents, surrounded by scattered coins, and shreds of cloth in their mouths. The police say they both died from a heart attack, but Renee isn't convinced — something more sinister must be going on.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1409530248</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ruth Dugdall
|title=The Sacrificial Man
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Synchronicity? Is that what they call it, when unconnected events chime with each other in unavoidable significance? Maybe it is just the human need to see patterns and make connections where there are none, but it's still weird when it happens. In a week that saw a storyline in ''Emmerdale'' echoed in a very personal documentary by Terry Pratchett considering the possibility of choosing the nature and time of his own end, I found myself reading 'The Sacrificial Man'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908248009</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=B R Collins
|title=Gamerunner
|rating=3.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=The Maze is more than just a role-playing game. Rick is one of the many who immerse themselves entirely in the game, and essentially live their life in its virtual reality. He is one of the lucky ones. Thanks to the fact that his guardian, Daed, is the mind behind the Maze and is employed by the powerful and merciless firm Crater, Rick has lived a protected life, one spent inside the thick walls of the multi-storeyed headquarters of Crater. He has never had to go outside and live a life of extreme poverty under the constant threat of gangs or, even worse, the lethal acid rain that is a part of the intensely polluted atmosphere.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408806487</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roy Jacobsen, Don Bartlett (translator) and Don Shaw (translator)
|title=Child Wonder
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=1961 was a year of change, a time, as Jacobsen puts it, ''when men became boys and housewives women''. At the outset Finn and his mother are leading a quiet, rather timorous life in a working class Oslo suburb. Then change overwhelms them, not through world events, but in the form of a mysterious child who is Finn's half sister. Linda is not like other children and Finn's attempt to deal with her impact on his family is the central thread in this quintessential story of growing up.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857050184</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Jarman and Guy Parker-Rees
|title=Ants in Your Pants!
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Leopard is having a birthday party but he has very clear ideas about who should and shouldn't be invited. Specifically, he doesn't want to invite
Aardvark - I really wondered what the poor animal had done to be so maligned. Aardvark isn't really too bothered, but Big Ant is very offended, and he brings all his friends to bite the party guests' bottoms. Who will come to the rescue and save Leopard's party? Why, Aardvark of course. There is a moral here - don't exclude people from your party because they're not cool enough.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408305259</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Richard Scarry
|title=Richard Scarry's Funniest Storybook Ever
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=This new edition of Richard Scarry's Funniest Storybook Ever includes eleven
stories about the inhabitants of Busytown. These "people" are drawn as various animals, and many of them appear in several stories. The local policeman, Sergeant Murphy is a dog wearing a helmet, riding round on a motorbike, and he is kept busy investigating everything from theft to talking bread. He is often assisted by his friends Huckle (a cat) and Lowly (a worm).
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007413556</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chris Higgins
|title=He's After Me
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=
Anna's father has run off with a younger woman, the hated Jude. Her mother is a wreck because of it. Her little sister Livi is going off the rails and running with a bad crowd. All this mayhem is anathema to Anna, who is a reserved, cautious and hardworking girl with an ambition to study literature at university. If this is what unrestrained, rampant emotions result in, then Anna's having none of it. She's never been in love and in many ways she sees this as a blessing.
And then she meets Jem.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>034099701X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Neil Griffiths
|title=Mrs Rainbow
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Mrs Rainbow lives in Rainbow cottage, an amazing brightly coloured country cottage. On the inside every room is a different colour, whilst Mrs Rainbow herself wears colourful outfits and dyes her hair amazing shades from beautiful blonde through to peacock green! One day, however, she receives a visit from the local planning councillors and is told she must paint her house to match the rest of the village...grey!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905434936</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Salman Rushdie
|title=Luka and the Fire of Life
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Back in 1990, Salman Rushdie followed up his controversial 'Satanic Verses' with a book dedicated to his then nine year old son, Zafar, called 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories'. Now, his second son, Milan, finally gets a book of his own, although he had to wait until he was 13 for his father to get around to it. 'Luka and the Fire of Life' is very much a follow up to 'Haroun' and it is certainly helpful, although not necessary, if you have read that book as many of the events in the first book are referred to here.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099555328</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Karen Abbott
|title=A Father For Daisy
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Beatrice Rossall found herself in a difficult position. Her widowed father was an elderly vicar who took in a young unmarried girl who was expecting a baby. Soon after the baby's birth the mother died and Bea's father died not long after, leaving Bea in charge of Daisy who was only a few weeks old and with the prospect that she would have no home within a matter of days. She couldn't get work because of Daisy – with a lot of people believing that she was Daisy's mother – but she wasn't going to let Daisy go to the workhouse. At the end of the nineteenth century this wasn't a good position to be in.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0709092415</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Barbara Sinatra
|title=Lady Blue Eyes: My Life With Frank Sinatra
|rating=4.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Barbara Blakeley, born in 1926, was married firstly to Robert Oliver, an executive, with whom she had a son, and secondly to Zeppo Marx. But it was the already thrice-married and thrice-divorced Francis Albert Sinatra, whom she had idolized as a singer for a long time, with whom she would make her most enduring marriage, and vice versa. They tied the knot in 1976, and stayed together until his death in 1998.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091937248</amazonuk>
}}
