I didn’t start home educating as an act of rebellion, but it seems increasingly the government views this entirely legal activity that way. Instead, it was to give my children space to be themselves without external judgement /artificial standards /ridiculous amounts of unnecessary testing. I thought we’d probably only home educate through primary years, then […]
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
November 6, 2017 By 3 Comments
I don’t know what I was expecting from Little Fires Everywhere, but what I got was a compulsively readable book, filled with fascinating characters on a slow but inexorable dance towards the disastrous start of the book in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated, and couldn’t wait to see unfold. Buy at Amazon Everyone in […]
Tinsy Winsy Weeny Tots review
September 24, 2017 By Leave a Comment
Wildflower Bay by Rachael Lucas – review and giveaway
August 9, 2016 By 33 Comments
Let’s talk about the A word.
March 23, 2016 By 10 Comments
Maurice (Christopher Eccleston), Alison (Morven Christie) and Joe Hughes (Max Vento) in The A Word. Photograph: Rory Mulvey/BBC/Fifty Fathoms So. BBC one showed a new drama, The A word, last night about a family discovering their son has autism. It’s very well acted – unsurprisingly given it includes Christopher Eccleston on fine, if somewhat grumpy […]
One by Sarah Crossan
August 7, 2015 By Leave a Comment
Just finished One by @SarahCrossan and now want to read everything else she's ever written. But not shopping lists. Cos that would be weird. — Jax Blunt (@liveotherwise) July 3, 2015 I read One in one sitting I think. It’s that kind of book. It wraps around you and carries you along, though it’s not […]
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
July 2, 2015 By 4 Comments
buy at Amazon Only in wartime could a stalwart lass from Manchester rub shoulders with a Scottish aristocrat, one a pilot, the other a special operations executive. When a vital mission goes wrong, and one of the friends has to bail out of a faulty plane over France, she is captured by the Gestapo and […]
Saturday 30th May 2015
May 30, 2015 By 2 Comments
{watching} Bandits (amazon link). We had dinner before film, and the little ones went to bed, so we could watch something a bit more adventurous. Bruce Willis is usually a good sign that an action movie will at least be fun, although it turned out that this wasn’t really an action movie. The humour went […]
Angelina Ballerina – breaking the fourth wall in picture books
April 13, 2015 By 7 Comments
The Angelina Ballerina books form a series of stories about the heroine, Angelina (a mouse) and her friends and family (also, unsurprisingly, mice). Although ballet is an important interest, it’s not a feature of every story and in fact is barely mentioned in Angelina’s Birthday by Katharine Holabird (Author) and Helen Craig (Illustrator) (affiliate link). […]
