On My Bookshelf: Wizards of Once, Twice Magic by Cressida Cowell Hodder Children’s Books 2018 It’s the winter school holidays and I’ve been doing lots of reading. Lots. In some of the books I’ve only gone as far as Sydney, in others I’ve crossed the world and travelled in time. Some have been magical! In some books I’ve found new friends, and in others I’ve been lost in strange and distant lands. Having just got lost in the Wildwoods (in a British Isles so old, it didn’t know

Impossible Music by Sean Williams Allen & Unwin 2019 And the word for today is: entirely. it is not every day a complete stranger just hands you a book. It’s not every day that the book they hand you has a copy of a letter from the author inside. This is what happened to me at the CBCA National Conference 2019. I will add that the lovely person handing out books also handed them to other people, and that she wasn’t the only one handing out books. This particular book, however

Lenny’s Book of Everything Karen Foxlee Allen & Unwin 2018 I’ll be frank about this book. So many people had told me it was brilliant that I wasn’t sure whether I was suffering from FOMO or doing that weird ‘not-reading-it-because-everybody-else-has’ thing. Now, picture me, standing in the bookshop at the CBCA National Conference in Canberra, surrounded by nothing but amazing children’s books, on a self-imposed book diet (to appease the hunger gods, since I’ve dropped to part

Published by Angus & Robertson an imprint of Harper Collins Children’s Books 2018 I waited in excited anticipation (read impatience) for this book to be available after meeting the lovely author, Sheryl Gwyther, at a writing retreat last year (and online sometime previously), and know the detailed research that went into creating this nail-biting adventure set in the time of the Great Depression. I finally managed to get a copy (the last in the store by the time I got to my f

Too many people had said how amazing this book was and I couldn’t ignore it any longer. Besides, I love the cover. The colours are magnificent and the raven is just gorgeous. I am a sucker for a gorgeous raven, er, cover. And I am always a sucker for a good story about wizards and magic and adventurous girls and boys taking on the odds. The Wizards of Once is a good story about wizards and magic and an adventurous girl and boy, who, incidentally, are not supposed to like each

I have bookshelves crammed with books. I’m sure you would never have guessed. This particular book was lent to me by a lovely librarian friend. I read it. Now I own it. I went right out and bought my own copy because it is a fabulous adventure with a gorgeous main character, all packaged up in a totally beautiful book, from the delightful cover, to the endpapers, the print, the texture and... mmm... smell of the paper, and the magical illustrations by Kelly Canby. There was n