L.H. Johnson's Blog, page 32

The New Abbey Girls

The New Abbey Girls by Elsie J. Oxenham My rating: 3 of 5 stars I have such a love-hate relationship with Elsie Oxenham. When I’m thinking about culling some books, hers are always the first that I look at and yet they’re still here. They’ve been in a bag a few times, and I’ve taken […]

To Kill A Mockingbird by Haper Lee, adapted and illustrated by Fred Fordham

To Kill a Mockingbird: A Graphic Novel by Fred Fordham My rating: 5 of 5 stars It’s kind of terrifying to adapt something because you’re not just adapting the thing in question. You’re trying to adapt the aura of it; some books have this indefinable something about them that you can’t ever pin down in […]

El Deafo by Cece Bell

El Deafo by Cece Bell My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sometimes, due to library reservation queues and the like, it takes me a long time to get to a book. And that’s a good thing, because it tells me that it’s being talked about, that it’s being passed from hand to hand fever-quick and […]

No Ballet Shoes In Syria by Catherine Bruton

No Ballet Shoes in Syria by Catherine Bruton My rating: 5 of 5 stars Aya is eleven, Syrian, and seeking asylum in Britain. Her mum, her, and her baby brother, escaped from the war in Syria – but her father got separated from them on the way. Her whole family is suffering from the experience […]

A Girl’s Stronghold by E.F. Pollard

A Girl’s Stronghold by E.F Pollard My rating: 4 of 5 stars Delightfully nutty in the way that only turn of the century children’s literature can be, this starts as something quite typical and then escalates to quite the heights. Were I the sort of scholar to throw around labels in a willy-nilly sort of […]

“Us” An Old-Fashioned Story by Mrs Molesworth

Us by Mrs. Molesworth My rating: 4 of 5 stars First published in 1885, ‘Us’ is a fairly typical piece of children’s literature for this age. The good are good, the bad are bad, and the upper classes are full of moral upstanding-ness and the lower classes (particularly gypsies) are the worst. They are prejudices […]

A trio of board book reviews

I have a trio of board books to bring to your attention today! When I’m sent something to review, it doesn’t always get to the point of being reviewed. Sometimes we don’t click, sometimes there’s very little I can say about it, or sometimes it’s so out of my remit that I wouldn’t know where […]

I Was Born For This by Alice Oseman

I Was Born for This by Alice Oseman My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’ve been meaning to read Alice Oseman’s work for a long while. It’s always a good sign when her books fly in and out of the library, quicker than swifts in summer, because that means they’re being read. Fiercely, voraciously, passionately. […]

So You Think You’ve Got It Bad? A Kid’s Life in Ancient Greece by Chae Strathie, illus. Marisa Morea

So You Think You’ve Got It Bad? A Kid’s Life in Ancient Greece by Chae Strathie My rating: 4 of 5 stars This was fun. ‘So You Think You’ve Got It Bad? A Kid’s Life In Ancient Greece’ isn’t the pithiest of titles (and indeed, a structure paralleled by others in the series such as […]

Revisiting The Bunker Diary; or, the state of Children’s and Young Adult literature today

I’ve recently been revisiting The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks. Much of the prompt for this comes from a class I’ll be teaching in a couple of weeks about writing young adult fiction, though I admit a part of me was interested to see how it felt reading this complex, challenging book from a fresh […]