'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Camilla de la Bedoyere, Clive Gifford, John Farndon, Steve Parker, Stewart Ross and Philip Steele
|title=Discover the Extreme World
|rating=4
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary=In my day it would have been called 'an encyclopaedia'. It would have had a lot more text, been rather dull – and remained largely unread by those who received it as a worthy present. For 'Discover the Extreme World' you need to start at the opposite end of the scale. It's about visual impact. A fact is linked to a picture and the more striking the better – and only then is it explained. The text is as simple as possible – clear, unambiguous wording which drives the point home as quickly as possible. The layout encourages you to move the book so that you see the pictures better and can read the words. It's fun and (say it quietly) it's educational.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184810474X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=A Portsmouth
|summary=We sweep back in time to a young Henrietta. Living the spoilt and pampered life of a pretty, little princess whom everyone (even her dog) loves and adores. She spends delightfully carefree days singing and dancing and playing with her little dog. But the subject of marriage is on the horizon. She's fourteen after all. Time to put away those childish things. Who has her family decided will be her future husband? The young princess has no say in the matter but hopes he will be just a little handsome and be gentle with her. It's not only a marriage of two individuals (that's almost inconsequential) it's a marriage of two nations - with strategy and long-term thinking in mind. In short, the French Royal Family want to do everything to appease other countries and hopefully keep war at bay.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848091672</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Maberry
|title=Dust & Decay
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=''Dust & Decay'' picks up the action six months after ''Rot & Ruin's'' climactic battle with Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. Benny and his friends have spent the time honing their self-defence and zombie-killing skills through some very intense training by Tom. And now, the time is finally right. They're about to head back out into the Ruin in search of the jet plane they saw in the sky after the battle at Gameland. There might, just might, be a real civilisation surviving somewhere on the continent.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857070975</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jeyn Roberts
|title=D4rk Inside
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=''4. Earthquakes shudder across the world.''<br>
''3. SOMETHING is released.''<br>
''2. Trust no one - not even yourself.''<br>
''1. The killing game has begun...''
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230756182</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lesley Howarth
|title=Maphead
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=MapHead and his father Ran are of the Subtle World. Ran can travel through time, make things disappear and erase human memories. MapHead can flash the map of any place across his face and bald scalp. MapHead is a halfling and now he is almost 12, Ran has brought him to meet his human mother. As they need to pass for humans, they've taken new names - Boothe and Powers, from a random movie - practised their English, and enrolled MapHead at the same school as his half-brother.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846471206</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Rob Keeley
|title=The Alien in the Garage and Other Stories
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Would aliens like custard creams? Can fake tan hide a big lie? Are TV remotes sinister objects? Do secrets make you popular?
Rob Keeley explores all these questions and more in a super collection of slightly spooky, blackly comic short stories. They're beautifully observed and you can see that Rob knows children well. He has the emotional landscape exactly right and is equally accurate when describing - and sometimes gently mocking - peer relationships.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848765797</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=D R Thorpe
|title=Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=The great-grandson of a crofter, and son-in-law of a Duke, Harold Macmillan was born in London in 1894. Despite the well-to-do aristocratic background, his years as a young adult were marked by bad experiences in the trenches which left him with lifelong war wounds, and his early service as a Conservative Member of Parliament by the plight of the unemployed in his first constituency of Stockton. He had much in common with another future Prime Minister, Winston Churchill; both had American mothers, and both were mavericks who were elected as Conservatives but refused to toe the party line too steadfastly.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844135411</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Juliet Archer
|title=Persuade Me
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=A decade before we meet Anna Elliott she had fallen in love with Rick Wentworth when they were both working in France. Her father, Sir Walter Elliott of Kellynch and Minty, a family friend persuaded her to give up the relationship and take up her place at Oxford. She now lectures about Russian literature, but it still unmarried and largely at the bidding of her father and her two elder sisters. Rick Wentworth, meanwhile, has been in Australia, but he's now returned to the UK on a tour to promote his best-selling book. It's an academic work about sea life, but the picture of a half-naked Rick on the cover and the title ''Sex in the Sea'' means that Rick – and his book- are in demand.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906931216</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Susan Hill
|title=The Shadows in the Street
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=This is the fifth novel in Susan Hill's series about the detective Simon Serrailler. Although you could probably follow the story without knowing the previous books I think it does help to have some background on who all the characters are. I really love the way Hill weaves her story around some wonderful character studies. Simon is actually hardly in this novel, and the focus instead is on the 'extras', with a lot of details being put into characters who will only be around for this particular novel but who live and breathe through it wonderfully well.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099499282</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Susan Cooper, Joseph Delaney, Berlie Doherty, Jamila Gavin, Matt Haig, Robin Jarvis, Derek Landy, Sam Llewellyn, Mal Peet, Philip Reeve and Eleanor Updale
|title=Haunted
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=I've always enjoyed a good ghost story – whether at a sleepover when I was a teenager, or even now reading horror stories in bed in the middle of the night. As soon as I saw this book I knew I wanted to read it, and it did not disappoint; a group of excellent authors from all genres have come together and the result is a collection of brilliant stories not to be missed by any ghost hunters out there.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849393214</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Robert Ross
|title=Marty Feldman: The Biography of a Comedy Legend
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Some years ago, I was given a Penguin edition of Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', with what looked like an uniquely fearsome face on the front cover. A year or two later, I saw a photograph of Marty Feldman and was convinced he must have inspired it if not actually been the model.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857683780</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anna Sheehan
|title=A Long, Long Sleep
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=This is a book set in the future, with hover-cars and eye-scans and travel to other planets. But make no mistake – that's not what this book is about. Sixteen-year-old Rose has been asleep for far longer than she intended; in the meantime the world has almost come to an end in a terrible plague, and her stasis tube has been abandoned in a basement. If Brendan had not come exploring, she might never have been found at all. But how is that possible? How could the daughter and heiress of the most powerful couple in the galaxy have been forgotten? This book is about her awakening, and the slow, painful unfurling of the real facts of her early life.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0575104724</amazonuk>
}}
