Over to you! Can't wait to hear all your suggestions!
Sue Purkiss
Thursday, 31 August 2017
Books, books, books...
With the summer holidays drawing to a close, and a new school year about to start, it seems a good time to share recommendations for books. So I invite anyone - ABBA posters, readers, librarians, teachers - to tell us in the comments about a children's book you've read and enjoyed recently: can be for any age, and doesn't necessarily have to be a new one. Writers - you can recommend your own, or someone else's: up to you!
I'll kick off, with Saviour Pirotta's The Mark of the Cyclops. The first of a series, it's an adventure story set in Ancient Greece, about two boys who turn detective to help out a slave girl who's been accused of a crime she didn't commit. It's a cracking story - but it's also full of detail about life in Ancient Greece - without really noticing it, you find out so much about what they wore, what they ate, their customs, social structures and so on.
Over to you! Can't wait to hear all your suggestions!
Sue Purkiss
Over to you! Can't wait to hear all your suggestions!
Sue Purkiss
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9 comments:
This school year builds up to the centenary of the end of World War One in November 2018. There are many great books for young people on the subject beyond Michael Morpurgo's - though his are excellent, of course. THE SHELL HOUSE by Linda Newberry is one of my absolute favourites; also, for the most able & mature readers Pat Barker's adult REGENERATION trilogy is extraordinary. Four Carnegie medal winners contributed to WAR GIRLS (as did I, to my eternal delight) while David Almond, Tracy Chevalier and Adele Geras are among the host of fantastic writers who contributed to THE GREAT WAR collection. Sally Nicholls, another WAR GIRL contributor, will launch her suffragette novel THINGS A BRIGHT GIRL CAN DO next month, while I touch on the dreadful Spanish influenza epidemic in THE GOOSE ROAD (Walker, 2018). I think these titles could offer teachers a wider range of perspectives on WW1 to balance traditional "maleness" of war stories.
Geraldine McCaughrean's Where the World Ends. Did I enjoy it? NO! Could I have put it down? Not a chance! Such powerful writing - such a heart-breaking story.
Joan Lennon's 'Walking Mountain.' Strange, funny, exciting, sad - popping with ideas.
Some older books - written in the 1970s: Joan Lingard's five books about Kevin and Sadie - a Catholic and a Protestant living in Belfast who fall in love, elope and go into exile in England because their love is unacceptable back home. I came across the second book first, then immediately sought out the first one, and finally bought a bind-up of the last three. Wonderful stories with believable characters, settings and atmosphere.
Last Leaves Falling by Sarah Benwell and the brilliant Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys are two of my favourites this year.
Great favourite was Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate Di Camillo.
Thanks, everyone. I remember teaching Joan Lingard's Across The Barricades back in the day - very powerful. And I very much enjoyed one of Ruta Sepetys' earlier books, so will look out for her new one.
Morris Gleitzman's Once series, about a Jewish boy, Felix, who is on the run from the Nazis, then fights with the partisans and eventually makes his way to Australia. They're beautiful books with characters you can care about, deeply, and my students love them, despite never having met anyone Jewish(except me!). I'm reading the latest in the series, Maybe, in which Felix comes to Australia by an Air Force plane, which crashes, parachutes down and has several adventures... I just love Felix! The third book in the series is seen from the viewpoint of his granddaughter in the present day, when he has become a famous and well loved doctor. Then it went back to the war years.
Thanks, Sue. I read the first one, but haven't caught up on the others yet.
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