JuniorBookWorm.com

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.

Jewish Book Week 23rd February-2nd March

Jewish Book Week is on the calendar again. This is just a little early reminder for what's in store. The massive sell out names like Francesca Simon , Anthony Horowitz and Michael Rosen are not on the list this year. But Jacqueline Wilson's A Brief History of Children's Diaries, is bound to book up quickly. The print version of the Jewish Book Schedule seems to have beaten the on-line version. But I am sure that any day now the website will be available for use. I, on behalf of my children, am up for talk listed as The Joe Craig Show. Shamefully, I have not heard of him but the Jewish Book Week booklet tells me he is up there with Horowitz and Higson (young James Bond) as the "best spy kids authors...for his Jimmy Coates series). Now that I have found a link to his website, I realize that I must go to see him live. He looks too young to have written a series of anything but poems. He is very handsome in a very Jewish way!

The Southbank Centre is also have a literary week of events in February, Imagine 08. Michael Rosen, Eion Culfer and Jeremy Strong, among others, will be there.