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100books

Ape House by Sara Gruen #100books

10th August 2011 by Jax Blunt 1 Comment

I was thrilled when this arrived in the post yesterday from Two Roads Books. I read Water for Elephants as part of Cara’s book group and absolutely loved it, so couldn’t wait to get my hands on Ape House. It’s published in paperback on 1st September this year, so it’s available for pre-order from Amazon if you can’t wait either.

is a fabulous book. It’s complex, informative, educational, fascinating, enthralling, uplifting and an all round good read. There isn’t one part of it that disappoints – no cardboard characters or throwaway plot lines, everything pulls together to make a beautifully completed whole.

Sara Gruen put two years of research into writing this book, and it doesn’t actually show. What I mean by that is that the accuracy of the facts behind the plot is seamless with the fiction that wraps it all together, no awkward edges destroy the way the story flows. There’s no mawkish sentimentality even though many of the main characters are bonobos – you get the feeling that Ms Gruen respects the Great Apes as much as she does her human protagonists.

Is that an odd way to describe a relationship between an author and her characters? Respect? I hope you know what I mean. We’ve all read books that jar at some point, where a character is forced into a plot point that just doesn’t really work for them, doesn’t play well with how they’ve been drawn, but they are forced to it to pull the story together. No danger of that here – the characters all have their own flaws, no perfect ppl in this book or the world, but even the less pleasant are internally consistent.

I don’t really like to do detailed synopsis in my reviews, as I never want to spoil a story for anyone. I just hope that I describe enough of the writing and the book to whet an appetite, and that that’s what I’m doing here. I will tell you to set outside a day when you pick this book up – you really won’t want to put it down. And when you’ve finished it, you’ll be a little disappointed that you’ve reached the end.

Finally getting to the end of our 100 books. Book 87 to be accurate.

[Read more…] about Ape House by Sara Gruen #100books

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Filed Under: 100 book challenge, It's where it is, review Tagged With: 100books, Ape House, Sara Gruen, Two Roads Books

Star Struck by Jane Lovering #100books

6th August 2011 by Jax Blunt 4 Comments

I really wasn’t up to much today, so I was thrilled to find an envelope from ChocLituk in my post this morning. It contained

and chocolate, so was a very good start to the day.

I haven’t read any Jane Lovering before, though I understand there are several about. This one is due out in September, and if you like good chick lit, I’d have said you’ll enjoy it. Strong characterisation, plot line to keep you guessing (but not ridiculous or over contrived as it does unfold) and lots of nicely oglable characters for internal visualisation. Ms Lovering appears to follow my interests in men, going for good descriptions of eyes, accents and rear ends, which I do recall being the triumvirate of requirements back in the days of frequenting university bars on the pull.

(Oh so very long ago….) Anyway. This book centres around a woman who has lost a lot in a recent car accident. (If that kind of central theme of loss or car crashes will be a problem for you, I’d advise you skip this one.) She ends up visiting a Sci Fi conventions in the states with a friend who thinks it will help snap her out of things, though all is not what it seems. Sci Fi conventions are things that intrigue me – I do like my science fiction, though I’ve never gone so far as to attend one. Good plot for a book though, and one that I could identify with in some parts.

How it all unfolds is not something I’m going to go into, but it romps along enticingly enough that I kept picking it up and managed to finish it in one day. (Not quite one sitting, but little details like no food in the house and having to go shopping got in the way.) And I’ll be looking out for other books from this author. Really enjoyed it, thanks ChocLituk!

I shall be entering this in the Chick Lit plus challenge, and of course it’s another of my 100 books. Book 86 to be accurate.

[Read more…] about Star Struck by Jane Lovering #100books

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Filed Under: 100 book challenge, review Tagged With: 100books, ChickLitPlus, Jane Lovering, review

Alexander's Athenian Adventure – review and giveaway

6th April 2011 by Jax Blunt

Alongside the history day, I also want to squeeze in a quick review of a book I was sent that fitted in with today’s theme. Alexander’s Athenian Adventure, as you might imagine is set mainly in historic Athens. There’s a wealth of historic information about the society of the time, set it a quick moving adventure about political intrigue, though aimed at children probably around 10. Big didn’t find it a desperately satisfying read, though I did wonder if that was in part as there are no girls allowed to do anything much in the main body of the book (as was the case in Ancient Greek). I’ve sent off a copy with a friend’s son, so hopefully he’ll report back as to what he thinks soon 🙂

Along with the copy we were sent for review, I’ve *three* copies to give away. Entry by comment below, and you can get an extra entry for sharing the post by twitter or fb or blog. (Please leave an extra comment for each of those things you do, I really can’t track them otherwise!)

UK only, runs til 13th April at midnight, and I’ll use a random number generator to pick the winners. If you don’t respond to me within a week, I’ll pick someone else!

This is book 75 of my hundred book challenge. [Read more…] about Alexander's Athenian Adventure – review and giveaway

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Filed Under: 100 book challenge, giveaway Tagged With: 100BookChallenge, 100books, Alexander's Athenian Adventure, Michael Siegel

FridayReadAlouds – Author Feature: Rebecca Elliott

4th March 2011 by Jax Blunt 1 Comment

A couple of things have come together recently to inspire this post, which I hope is going to be the first in a series. First of all, as part of my 100 books challenge, I was sent Cub’s First Winter by Rebecca Elliott, from Top That! Publishing. As a result, I found one BecElliott on twitter and got chatting.

Also on twitter, there’s a meme called FridayReads hosted by TheBookMaven. I got to thinking, wouldn’t it be cool to do a FridayReadAlouds – picture books, chapter books, books to share with families, books that need to be savoured.

So here you are, just squeaking in on a Friday, the inaugural FridayReadAlouds post, and I’m starting with an author feature on Rebecca Elliott. Rebecca has three picture books out atm, and more in the pipeline, and her books are absolutely luscious, the pictures just welcome you in and envelope you.

The stories are simple, but the use of language eloquent – I particularly like the narrative in Just Because, narrated by a little boy, about his very special big sister and her special chair. It’s a sensitively told story about a little girl with special needs and is a wonderful introduction for children who might not have come across this type of situation before.

Milo’s Pet Egg is beautiful too, though the story is not an unfamiliar one. I enjoyed the illustrations a lot, and I’m guessing Smallest did, as I had to read it three times in a row the first time I picked it up, and several times since too.

And so to the interview – as I had quite a few questions, I’m going to just give you a couple here, and finish the rest off next week. If you’ve any questions you’d liked to put to Rebecca, please stick them in the comments box.

Jax: How did you get into illustrating/ writing – was it a lifetime dream – did you want to do this as a little girl?

Rebecca: A recently unearthed school project entitled “All About Me’ which I created at the tender age of 6 has in it the not unpretentious line “When I grow up I want to be a writer and a artist”. I remember endlessly boring my long-suffering family with stories I had written about rabbits wearing flat caps and aliens flying around in suitcases. This ambition never truly died, although it did take some knocks along the way, and now, many years later, I find I have to pinch myself because it seems this long running daydream of mine is finally coming true.

It was by a rather scrappy route that I find myself here though – I’ve met many illustrators who, fresh out of their Illustration degree were picked up by a publisher at their final degree exhibition and go on immediately to big things in the picture book world. Not me though, my degree was in Philosophy. Why? Why not. And indeed it’s that kind of insightful clever reasoning that got me through the degree. Anyhoo, at University I also took some ‘wild’ courses in digital design, which in turn got me into designing the university magazine, which in turn got me into using Photoshop and Illustrator, which in turn got me into digital artwork. Soon enough I found that childhood ambition rising in me again and I spent hours and hours trawling the internet for advice on putting together a children’s book illustration portfolio.

I graduated and started working in an excruciatingly dull office job which served to fuel my ambition to break out of the bland and into the world of children’s illustration. So I continued to work on my digital illustration style and sent off various book ideas and samples to publishers. When I look back at these embarrassingly inept samples now it’s so very very painful – not to mention inexplicable that I considered them publishable. The publishers I sent them to, of course, shared my current opinion that they were, at best, laughable excuses of incompetent daubings and I have a file full of rejection letters to prove it. But I didn’t give up and slowly my samples got a little better and eventually some work for a couple of mass-market publishers came trickling in.

Luckily I’m married to an extremely supportive husband and a year after graduating I gave up the dull office job and went full-time freelance. I meandered along for some time with my mass-market work but it was without doubt my partnership with the then fledgeling Bright Agency a couple of years later that finally gave my career the push it so desperately needed. With their help I worked and worked on my style and eventually gave up the digital illustration in favour of getting down and dirty with some real paints.I’ve been illustrating books now for around 9 years but my true ambition of writing the books as well as illustrating them only became a reality last year when three of my books were published in August – Just Because, Cub’s First Winter and Milo’s Pet Egg. I have two more coming out in May/June this year and more in the pipe line. I am one extremely fortunate lady.

Jax: Were you good at art at school?

Rebecca:I’ve always loved art – as did my two siblings although it’s a little inexplicable because neither of my parents were at all arty. And because I drew all the time, in school and out, I guess I was pretty good at it. My artwork at GCSE level was quite strange though, when my parents walked in to the final exhibition show the teacher sidled up to them and said, ‘Just look for the weird pictures’ – and sure enough amongst the gentle paintings of flowers and sparrows were my disturbing offerings involving tree-like hands growing out the ground holding bulging eyeballs. I clearly have issues.

It’s amazing how many people I meet now who tell me they used to love art at school but haven’t done it in years – and I never understand why. Don’t let the kids have all the fun – if you loved art at school chances are you still would now so go pick up a paintbrush, do that potato print, make something out of a toilet roll. Go on, you know you want to.

***

And it’s me again. That’s fabulous advice to end with for this week, whether you loved art at school or outside of it 🙂 I’m going to leave the interview here for now, but please, I’d love to know what you think of Rebecca’s work, and of this series, and most of all, I’d love to know what you’re reading aloud to your children. Please let me know – comments box, via twitter, or on your own blogs, and drop me a link.

small print – affiliate links in this post are assigned to the 100 book challenge fundraising account. And if I can track down where we’re up to, I’ll add these two books to the list! ETA These are books 72 and 73 🙂

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Filed Under: 100 book challenge, It's where it is Tagged With: 100 book challenge, 100books, Cub's First Winter, FridayReadAlouds, Just Because, Milo's Pet Egg, Rebecca Elliott, top that publishing

Books of the weekend #100books

14th February 2011 by Jax Blunt 2 Comments

Another combined review of the picture books we focussed on this weekend. I try to think back to when Big and Small were this kind of age, and I doubt very much I read this number of books to them then. I think Small listened to longer stories that we were reading to Big, I think with Big we just didn’t quite do as much reading. Granted we weren’t at home with her anywhere near as much – by this age she was spending 4 full days in nursery. I know that they did a lot of reading at nursery as well though, so I daresay she was getting some books read to her then.

Anyway, I’m getting off the topic. This weekend we worked our way through some more library books, including:

I rather like this one. I approved of it having a pronunciation guide at the beginning – Ngai (the god of Everything and Everywhere) is pronounced N-guy apparently. This reminds me in style of the Ted Hughes stories like How the Whale Became – this is a story of how the hippo, a land animal who had been told to eat grass by his god, came to live in the water and behave the way he does today. The pictures are incredibly evocative of a hot african landscape, and quite inspirational – we’ve started doing more artwork at home, and I’m quite looking forward to having a go at doing things in this style. I’ll be having a look to see if there are any more in this series at the libary, and I think they’ve make a fabulous addition to story shelves at a nursery making sure it had multi cultural influences to hand.

Next we have

This book rather annoyed me. The pictures are lovely – particularly the cover and first few pages, but the story just doesn’t work for me. You start out with the single parent/ only child frog family and then suddenly there are frog babies. Lots of frog babies. A whole host of baby brothers and sisters for Little Frog. Now I know that this is a lovely story about getting used to having a baby sibling (or more) but what annoys me is the idea that Little Frog was an only child first time around, but there are loads in the next batch. What happened to the rest of the tadpoles first time around?

If you can set aside that kind of query, you should enjoy this. The artwork is lovely, the pictures full of colour and energy and movement. And the moral is the kind of thing that you want first children to be getting to grips with. But you’d better not read it to a child who spots the kind of dissonance that I do 😉

This story I liked a lot. What are those poems called where the shape and layout of the words or letters matters? I can’t remember. This book is kind of like them though. The font size and style changes as you go through a sentence, and it helps you read it aloud in an interesting way. I also rather like the fact that the Night Pirates are girl pirates, but they still let a boy, Tom, join in. Good to see the stereotypes being challenged a little from time to time, and you’ll need to read the story for yourself to see what happens to the grown up pirates.

Our final book of the weekend (or at least of the pile that I’ve managed to locate to write about!) says proudly on the cover As seen on TV. We haven’t seen it on tv. Smallest doesn’t watch TV – the children don’t, particularly, during the day, and as of yet she’s shown no real interest in it. I think if she were to start watching the flickering images I would be reasonably happy for her to be watching stories like this though. Mum and Ebb and Flo (and Bird) get stranded on an island on their way home to their houseboat, and could there just be a sea monster, Morgawr, somewhere about?

I hope I would be as quietly resourceful as the mum in this book. But I doubt very much that I could quietly whip up a shelter from a tarpaulin and two oars, sort out reed beds and create fire. So perhaps I’d better go on living in a house, and stay well away from houseboats! It’s a calm and unsensational treatment of an adventure that seems only just slightly out of the ordinary for this little family, and once again, the artwork is lovely and not completely beyond reach. Think I’ll pop it on the pile of things for us to look at as we paint, too.

So those are books 65, 66, 67 and 68.I’m given to understand that the children have a batch of reviews to do over the next couple of days too, so keep your eyes peeled for more updates. [Read more…] about Books of the weekend #100books

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Filed Under: 100 book challenge Tagged With: 100BookChallenge, 100books, Adrienne Kennaway, Algy Craig Hall, Deborah Allwright, Jane Simmons, Mwenye Hadithi, Peter Harris

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