Siobhan Dowd

    The London Eye Mystery is a lovely little hardback about a cousin about to move to America going missing on the London Eye.  We began to read it together whilst in Japan. But the children couldn't hold back. The story was gripping, the characters, a strange mixture of totally realistic and larger than life.
    The saddest thing about discovering this writer who has just come out with another book, Bog Child, is that she has not lived to see it published. She died in 2007 of breast cancer. Along with Dina Rabinovitch , she was young, talented and brimming with imagination and life. These women are models to we who are alive and hopefully healthy. We should all be looking at the positive things in our lives and not moaning about the less than satisfactory.
There is a great line in the mediocre film, Knocked Up. The father is talking about kids and bubbles. He said he wished there was one thing, anything in his life he could get excited about the way his kids got excited about bubbles.
Happy 2008, be happy.