|summary=Freya, who is seven years old, received a very important letter. On the back of the envelope it said ''Buckingham Palace'' and it was from the Queen, inviting her to tea. It looked as though the day was going to be a disaster as Freya curtsied - and managed to knock the Queen over. But the Queen is nothing if not resilient and up she got and off they went to her private quarters where she and Freya made themselves baked beans on toast and mugs of tea ('always dip your tea bag exactly twenty-seven times' is the Queen's advice for a good cuppa) and really it's rather like being in Freya's Gran's flat.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408320053</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tom Becker
|title=The Traitors
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=
What's the saying - sin in haste, repent at leisure? Well Adam is going to be the embodiment of that. One moment where he plants a kiss on his best mate's girl's lips, even though they seem to have split up - at least temporarily - and lo and behold he's snatched by a passing dirigible, and shipped across the universe, to a place outside of time, where the idea is he has three hundred years in prison as penance, after which he will be inserted into the very instance he leaves, remembering only that he should behave a bit more diplomatically in future. Of course, Adam has other ideas...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407109529</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Cathy MacPhail
|title=Secret of the Shadows
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=If there's one thing, more than any other, which strikes you about the Tyler Lawless books, it's how ordinary and everyday the heroine is. She could easily be the girl up the road, or the one who sits next to you in geography: solid, real, utterly normal. And that is Cathy Macphail's skill: she can create characters who are absolutely convincing and lifelike, who live in the same reality as us, liking the same clothes and food and music. And yet, Tyler sees ghosts.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408812681</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Astrid Lindgren and Tony Ross
|title=Pippi Longstocking
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Pippi Longstocking lives the life of every girl's dream. Her mother is dead and her father was blown off his ship. Pippi believes that he's away being the King of the Cannibals (and that she's therefore a Princess of the Cannibals) and in the meantime she lives on her own - well except for a horse, a monkey and a suitcase full of gold - and with NO grown-ups to tell her what to do. Well, a few do try, but Pippi always gives them short shrift and gets on with living her life the way that she wants to live it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0192733060</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicola Davies
|title=Rubbish Town Hero
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=What is most striking about this excellent little book is the utterly matter-of-fact way it is recounted. Violence, near-slavery, starvation and disease are as familiar to the children we meet in this story as television and homework are to its readers. The story is told through the eyes of Chipo, a young boy who can neither read nor write but who willingly took over responsibility for his little sister Gentle when the bombs killed the rest of his family. Gentle has a cleft palate and finds it hard to swallow or speak, but she dreams of a place she calls Happy Split-face Land, where people like her can be healed. She saves up for the trip by washing old plastic bags (she is paid a penny for every hundred), and although Chipo does not believe such a place exists the big brother in him will do nothing to take away her hope. There is no self-pity, no jealousy or resentment evident in either child for the things they do not have, simply a determination to survive and make enough money to stave off hunger and disease. The result is a cracking good story, full of heart-stopping danger and wild escapes, extraordinary encounters and heart-breaking generosity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552563021</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=M G Harris
|title=Apocalypse Moon (The Joshua Files)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Well, I didn't see this coming. After four lurid, neon plastic covers to these books, the fifth and final one is stark black. The hero, Josh Garcia, probably didn't predict this, either - that every step he seems to have gone towards understanding and preventing the end of the world in December 2012, is looking to have been in vain. And even having seen so much throughout the series, even he hasn't seen anything as galling, disappointing and hellish as earth, after the end event, as foreseen so long ago by the Mayans. That black is very appropriate.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407111043</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jo Nesbo
|title=Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder: The End of the World. Maybe.
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=If you put authors you least expect to diversify from more literary to children's works on a scale of one to ten, [[:Category:Jeanette Winterson|Jeanette Winterson]] must be a four, [[:Category:Ian McEwan|Ian McEwan]] a high eight, and [[:Category:Jo Nesbo|Jo Nesbo]], Nordic crime sensation de nos jours at least eleven. But this is now the third in the series of youthful, frivolous adventures, and this time the titular professor, diminutive smart Alec Nilly and Lisa (and their seven-legged spider) have to save the world.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857073893</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Christopher Edge
|title=Twelve Minutes to Midnight
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=The year is 1899. Each night at twelve minutes to midnight, the inmates of Bedlam (London's Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane) rise up from their sleep and begin scribbling strange words and messages everywhere they can... scraps of paper, the walls, scraps from their clothes, even on their own skin. These insane ramblings seem to depict the impossible and hint at the future. Thirteen year old Penelope Tredwell, orphan heiress and writer of best-selling magazine The Penny Dreadful, is intrigued. Hiding behind an actor hired to play the noted author of the Penny Dreadful mysteries, Penny drags him unwillingly into a macabre investigation. As she seeks to discover the meaning of insane ramblings of these unfortunate inmates, and turn them into what would be her best-selling and most famous story ever, Penny finds that she's uncovered a sinister plot controlled by a very real, very evil, very unlikely villain, and she may well be the next victim.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857630504</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Philip Reeve
|title=Goblins
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Poor Skarper. He's such a loser. In the violent and bloodthirsty goblin world where fighting and eating and taking other people's loot are all-time-favourite, number-one activities, he has a terrible handicap. He thinks. In fact, he's pretty clever, for a goblin, to the extent that he uses the goblins' bumwipe heaps for . . . reading. Yup, you heard me. Reading. The foolish hatchling works out that the black squiggles on the mouldering heaps of soft and crinkly stuff left, long ago, by the ancient inhabitants of the tower, are written words, and instead of going out raiding like any sensible goblin, he creeps off to a quiet corner to work out what they mean. Silly, eh?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407115278</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andrew Prentice and Jonathan Weil
|title=Black Arts
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=London, 1592. Jack successfully completes a test with a local crime family and becomes a "nipper" or cutpurse thief. But Jack's first victim accidentally brings him into contact with a London even more dangerous than the one he already knows - one where magic is real and the fight between good and evil can have fatal consequences. Jack returns home to find his mother murdered by Nicholas Webb, a charismatic Puritan preacher currently whipping up the London crowds against demons and witches.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0385615132</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Saviour Pirotta and Cecilia Johansson
|title=Grimm's Fairy Tales: Rumplestiltskin
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Rumpelstiltskin is one of the better known of the tales from the Brothers Grimm and a perennial favourite. The poor miller shows off in front of the king about the abilities of his beautiful daughter - she can apparently spin straw into gold. The king insists that the girl be sent to the palace and when she arrives tells her to get a load of straw spun into gold - or suffer the (fatal) consequences. The girl is saved by the appearance of a dwarf who works his magic in return for the girl's necklace; on the second night it's her ring she gives up and on the third it's the promise of her first-born child.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>140830841X</amazonuk>
}}
