Review: Animals on Country

Animals on Country combines education and fun as Uncle Kuu takes us for a walk to learn about Australian animals.

If you look carefully, you can see fresh tracks on the ground where different animals have been roaming around.

Review: 11 Ruby Road 1950

The third book in the fantastic Our Australian Girl series, 11 Ruby Road 1950, throws open the doors of history on the post-war years. 

Light is shed on the lives of the people living on Ruby Road; lives well-lived with love and kindness shared, entwined with one another, regardless of their differences.

Mum Betty has not been herself since the birth of baby Maria. 

Gran arranges for her to spend some time in the country to recuperate from what she tells everybody, is a bout of influenza.

Twelve-year-old Patsy is sent for her summer holidays to Ruby Road where Uncle Alex and Aunt Mary own a Milk Bar. 

She hopes to keep busy to prevent becoming bored, while filling her sketchbook which is her constant companion, with whatever she sees. 

Meet The Illustrator: Dani G

Name: Dani G

Describe your illustration style in ten words or less:
Quirky, fun, bold colours, colourful, Australiana, stark, different, organic.

What items are an essential part of your creative space?
My desktop computer with the Adobe Creative Suite, Ipad and Apple pencil. Walls printed with photographs of my inspiration.

Do you have a favourite artistic medium
Although I work digitally, I do love traditional media such as printmaking using lino tiles and ink. I also love working with paper and oil pastels and getting messy with a mixed media approach.

Review: The Enchantment of Golden Eagle

A whimsical tale of love and family, The Enchantment of  Golden Eagle is one of those books that flies into your heart and builds a nest there.

It will spark questions and deep thinking in young and old — the kind of picture book I truly adore!

In this Margaret Wild and Stephen Michael King gem, Ella and her brother Leif find a baby eagle. They care for the eagle as he grows older and stronger. 

Review: OceanForged - The Wicked Ship

It is a Dark Age for the Realm of Aquinta. Before the Prime Council, in the Age of Glory, the Champions ruled. The Radiant Palace belonged to those heroes who wore OceanForged armour - a set of magical artifices shaped with extreme heat and cooled by the salt water of their sea.

The Prime Council takes over the Radiant Palace.  New laws suppressing the citizens are enforced till they are unable to survive. The burrows become their home. 

Poverty prevails.

Warnings are not circulated before the cyclone hits. The burrows flood. All those caught within, drown, including eight-year-old Cori’s parents. 

Life is preparing Cori for a great adventure when she discovers information about the artificers that created OceanForged Armour. 

Junior Review: Shmoof

Shmoof is shmoofy. Shmoof is VERY shmoofy. Shmoof might even be the SHMOOFIEST dog there ever was.

The story of Shmoof is a follow up to the well-known book Floof. 

Shmoof is just about to meet Floof and is ready to be friends with Floof. Floof is ready to never be friends with Shmoof.

But then comes the … vacuum cleaner!

Guest Post: Dr. Stephanie Gutnik on What Readers (of All Ages) Can Learn From Children's Books

The story goes that from the time I could carry a book, I would arrange a stack next to my mom or dad and read for hours. I enjoyed everything from the glimmering illustrations in The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister to the silly and soothing sounds of rhythm and rhymes by Robert Munsch.

My parents’ consistent efforts of reading to me led to a pastime of reading on my own. The return on their investment was never having to hear 'I’m bored' from their oldest child, whose nose was always in a book.

Review: One Koala One Hundred Trees

I could not love this book more if I tried. And it’s not just because koalas happen to be very, very cute.

Dad and I find an injured koala on our property …

Dad says keeping koalas safe will be a big job.

I need a plan and help from some friends …’

There is so much to digest and reflect upon in this book – for everyone, not just picture book aged readers.

12 Curly Questions with children's author Jess Horn

1. Tell us something hardly anyone knows about you.

I’m terrible at picking favourites and answering questions without context. Actually, that’s probably something people do know about me, but I felt the need to add it here to preface my answers to the remaining 11 questions. In more obscure news, I once created an incredibly long insult using my extensive Ghostbusters vocabulary to ward off bullies. Did it work? No. But it thoroughly baffled them
for a bit, which I consider a mild success. I can still recite it to this day, so if you ever end up in my bad books … consider yourself warned.

Review: Dragon Forged: Sword of the Champion

It is a century since the passing of the last Champion. The Day of Legend is drawing near when a new hero will arise, and Goddess Draela’s Champion will restore Draeland to the locals, after years of captivity by the Fiendlord.

Orin is courageous and modest. With his friends Beatrix and Pascal, he goes in search of a missing villager. They are well equipped for any attack by the goblins who have recently overrun the village, due to their their mentor Bruno, who has been training them for the Village Guard.

But life has other plans for them all.

When Orin and friends lead an attack on the fiends sent to destroy Draeland, a power is released in Orin. 

Review: Tiny Dancer

In the notes that accompany this book, author Patrick Guest mentions the ‘undying love only a mother can give,’ and I strongly, humbly beg to differ.

For it is this father’s undying love that has borne magic, mystery and wonder in abundance with the birth of picture book, Tiny Dancer.

‘Tiny Dancer is about making each moment count and living life to the full.’

A tortoise may live for over one hundred years. An olive tree, up to five thousand. But a mayfly lives for just one day.

Meet The Illustrator: Michèle Dodd

Name: Michèle Dodd

Describe your illustration style in ten words or less:
Semi realistic, quirky, colourful and totally original

What items are an essential part of your creative space?
A beautiful view, Lyra pencils, watercolours, scalpel, Lyra .25 lead pencil, a make-up brush to remove dust, paintbrushes and a Staedtler rubber.

Do you have a favourite artistic medium?
Pencil and watercolour.

Name three artists whose work inspires you.
Van Gogh, Maurice Sendak and Julie Vivas

Which artistic period would you most like to visit and why?
Would have to be when The Heidelberg School artists were in full swing creating amazing Australian landscapes at their artist camps in the Heidelberg area - late 1880’s to early 1890’s.

Review: Luna's World Bk #2 - Friendship Fail

Friendship Fail is the second title in the excellent series, Luna’s World. 

Luna is a wonderful, relatable character.  

She is smart, loves books, writing and the diary she is encouraged to keep, helps to centre her when her mind is whirring. 

It has been five weeks since Luna’s last entry. So much has happened during that time.

Luna and her Mum have become dog walkers. 

Their persistence and lots of advertising found them customers.

Review: Childish

There’s a lot of childishness in this book. Also copious amounts of humour and heart which are the welcome hallmarks of Morris Gleitzman narratives. 

Like many of Gleitzman’s tales, Childish is a collision of inane and razor-sharp intellect, resulting in an invitation to think deeper and go further.

Arkie and Dot are phenomenal kid heroes. Arkie is from the bush. Dot is city minded and part of her family’s dumpling dynasty located within the city burbs. 

With things going sour in the bush, Arkie is jettisoned to live with Nan in the city until his parents can sell the family farm and join him.

Armed with typical Aussie bush stoicism, Arkie’s straightforward integrity matches Dot’s can-do, uncompromising disposition and grit beautifully. This is a merry match despite its infancy and one that is a delight to follow as the friends try their best shake local council and the utility companies into action.

Review: The Bin Monster

With a warm welcome in the bold and bright end pages, this book could easily have been be inspired by happenings on any street in any suburb. 

The narrator is an unnamed young girl who loves where she lives. 

All the neighbours are her friends, and she plays a meaningful part in each of their surrounding lives, and they in hers.

But their neighbourhood’s almost perfect life, is being shattered by a monster.

Guest Post: Heather Preusser on Using Cartoons As Mentor Texts

How did my predilection for highlighters and praying to 'the salty snack gods' lead to selling my debut chapter book series? 

In 2018, I participated in Marcie Colleen’s Crafting the Chapter Book Class through The Writing Barn. Four years later, Erinn Pascal at Andrews McMeel acquired HEDGEHOG WHODUNIT, my chapter book series about a sleepy hedgehog and tireless rat solving animal antics in City Zoo.

As part of Marcie’s class, she encouraged us to think like cartoonists. (Finally, watching television counted as productivity!) 

Because I was drafting a story set in the zoo, I dove into re-watching one of my all-time favorite cartoons, The Penguins of Madagascar, a spin-off of the Madagascar movies that aired on TV between 2008-2014.