Nosy Crow's Blog, page 27

Take a look inside Adam-2 – the gripping new sci-fi novel from Alastair Chisholm

In August we’re very excited to be publishing Adam-2, by Alastair Chisholm – a hugely gripping, fast-paced and unputdownable sci-fi adventure. And today we’re sharing an early preview of the book – you can read the first few chapters below!

The robot Adam-2 has been locked in the basement of a lost building for over two hundred years – until one day he is discovered by two children, and emerges into a world ruined by a civil war between humans and advanced intelligence.

Hunted by both sides, Adam discovers that he holds the key to the war, and the power to end it – to destroy one side and save the other. But which side is right?

Surrounded by enemies who want to use him, and allies who mistrust him, Adam must decide who – and what – he really is.

From the highly-acclaimed author of Orion Lost, Adam-2 is a brilliantly imagined science-fiction thriller, perfect for fans of Eoin Colfer, Anthony Horowitz, and Philip Reeve.

Read the first few chapters below:

Adam-2 will be published this August – you can pre-order a copy from Waterstones here or Amazon here.

If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all of our latest book news, including exclusive previews, giveaway and more, you can sign up to our newsletter here.

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On writing queer middle grade

To mark Pride Month, we’re delighted to share this piece by Louie Stowell, author of the Dragon in the Library trilogy and Otherland, on writing queer middle grade.

I’ve been having a lot of chats since the start of Pride Month about what it means to write middle grade about queer characters – specifically, lesbian/gay/bi/pan characters. The upshot: a lot of queerness in middle grade is found in the adults, whether it’s two dads or an adult non-parent character.

For example, In Otherland, the Fairy Queen is pansexual, as is her former Favourite, Mab. (That is, she’s pan from a human perspective; fairies don’t use romantic labels of any kind. The only labels they care about are honorifics like Your Most Glorious and Superb Highness, Bringer of Light.) When I was drafting Otherland I assumed the word “Favourite” clearly meant “gay lover in the night time” but then I realised 8 year olds probably haven’t read all the books and definitely shouldn’t have seen the films that would give them that concept. So, with the great patience of my editor – and audio narrator – I added a gloss explaining it meant boyfriend or girlfriend.

It’s all very incidental as this isn’t Gloriana and Mab’s story really, though it was important to me to make sure it didn’t get buried in subtext. But this story belongs to Myra and Rohan.

When it comes to the child characters in Otherland, there’s no obvious love stuff. They’re eleven and they’re both a bit clueless in their own way. The way Myra is dazzled by Gloriana is 100% a crush for me, but Myra wouldn’t know it as such, and it’s up to the reader how they view it. In my head, it’s Sarah looking at Jareth in Labyrinth. But since authorial intent is meaningless, and I don’t write kissing books (yet), I’m very relaxed about how queer you read it on the page.

But, let’s just say, I tend to assume all characters I write are queer until proven otherwise. And that my experience was very much that queer kids are drawn to each other without realising it. So I suppose I assume Myra and Rohan are both queer. But at the same time, that’s not their known experience, so they’re also not. Schrödinger’s gays.

There’s definitely middle grade out there explicitly about crushes, but I’m intrigued by people writing queer identity about children who don’t know yet. I didn’t know until I was about thirteen or so, for instance. It’s easy to look back and read into things but my experience at the time was firmly not knowing, or even thinking much, about love stuff, beyond “yuck, kissing”. Some children know things earlier than others. And I’m sure people growing up now have more opportunities to know, given that they aren’t under the deadening blanket of Section 28. But I imagine there will always be kids who don’t know until they’re older, because they’re busy being covered in mud and hitting each other with toy swords.

I wouldn’t say I write queer representation in any conscious way. It’s more just a matter of what comes out of my brain that may or may not reflect my lived experience. The only way you get good queer rep in the end is with a spread of many authors across the entire queer spectrum. No one writer ever represents everyone. But every queer child deserves a story just for them. I hope Otherland is that for some out there. Or, for them when they’re thirteen and they look back and go, waaaaaaaait.

If you’d like to read more queer MG, here are some brilliant ones:

The Strangeworlds books by LD Lapinski
The Accidental Diary of B.U.G. by Jen Carney
Me, My Dad and the End of the Rainbow by Benjamin Dean
Princess Princess by K O’Neill
The Murder Most Unladylike series by Robin Stevens
Susie Day’s Pea books and Secrets books
Lumberjanes by Noelle Stevenson (hard to categorise age wise but I reckon MG/YA borderlands)

Thank you, Louie! If you’ve not yet discovered Otherland, you can read the opening chapters of the book below:

Buy the book.

And you can also listen to a preview of the audiobook edition here:

Buy the audiobook.

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Three Nosy Crow books shortlisted for the 2021 Junior Design Awards

The shortlist for the 2021 Junior Design Awards has been announced – and we are thrilled to see Make Tracks: Farm and Peekaboo Sun have been shortlisted in the Best Baby Book 0-2 years category, and What Are Little Girls Made of? has been shortlisted in the Best Designed/Illustrated Book for Children category!

The Junior Design Awards are run by parenting magazine Junior and celebrate “the very best and most beautiful products on the planet” – so we are honoured to have been shortlisted again this year.

Make Tracks: Farm, illustrated by Johnny Dyrannder, is a brilliant chunky board book for toddlers who love things that go. Learn about five different farm vehicles, with simple first words, clear diagrams and fun, easy-to-use counters that little ones with love moving around the page.

Buy the book.

From the creators of the bestselling Felt Flaps series, Ingela P Arrhenius and Camilla Reid, Peekaboo Sun is a wonderful summery addition to this stylish, interactive book series. With ten peekaboo sliders, fun rhyming text and a surprise mirror at the end, this beautiful book is perfect for babies and toddlers this summer.

Buy the book.

Rediscover your favourite nursery rhymes in What Are Little Girls Made of? – a beautifully illustrated collection of reworked rhymes with a feminist twist, proving that girls can be heroes of any story too. With brilliantly funny rhymes by award-winning Jeanne Willis and charming artwork by Isabelle Follath, this is the perfect gift – and a wonderful book for children and adults alike to read aloud, or enjoy alone.

Buy the book.

Judging for the Junior Design Awards will begin in late June. You can read more about the awards and see the full shortlist, here.

Congratulations, Johnny, Camilla, Ingela, Jeanne and Isabelle – and best of luck!

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Take a look inside The Wide, Wide Sea

Next month we’re absolutely delighted to be publishing The Wide, Wide Sea, written by author and wild-swimmer Anna Wilson and illustrated by Waterstones Children’s Book Prize winner Jenny Løvlie – an inspiring and moving picture book about protecting wildlife from plastic pollution.

And today we’re very pleased to be sharing an early preview of this beautiful book!

When a young child forges a special connection with a seal on a trip to the seaside, their imagination takes them on an unforgettable journey. Through their eyes, we have a chance to explore everything the amazing beach and wide, wide sea has to offer . . . until suddenly a violent storm blows in. The next morning the beach is ugly . . . and covered in litter. Whose fault is it? And who can fix it? Together, the child, their grandmother, and the rest of the community clean the beach, and the child makes a promise to the seal that things will change for the better.

Beautifully illustrated, and with a moving message of conservation at its heart, The Wide, Wide Sea will inspire and delight children who love wildlife.

Take a look inside:

You can pre-order a copy of The Wide, Wide Sea from Waterstones here, Bookshop.org here, or Amazon here. And if you’d like to stay up-to-date with all of our latest books news, including awards, exclusive previews, giveaways and more, you can sign up to our newsletter here.

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Dick Robinson – a personal view

On Saturday, my former boss, Dick Robinson, died, unexpectedly. He had run Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, educational publishing, school book club and school book fair company, for five decades, and I worked for him when I ran Scholastic in the UK. During his tenure – he inherited the running of the business from its first CEO and chairman, his father Maurice (“Robbie”) – the business grew and diversified, with sales of $1.5 billion dollars even in a pandemic year that made elements of its business challenging or impossible. There’s no-one else who has ever been more powerful, and wielded that power more benevolently, in the world of children’s books.

Dick was many things. He was a visionary, combining strong business sense and prudence with an unfailing commitment to the idea of children’s literacy, particularly that kind of joyful literacy achieved through children’s reading for pleasure. Making reading accessible to children was his life’s work, and he was particularly engaged with making books accessible to children whose access was challenged by opportunity, geography or money, whether through giving books to schools running the book clubs and fairs, through publishing extraordinary books that shape children’s imaginations like Harry Potter, Captain Underpants and The Hunger Games, or through innovative digital literacy catch-up programmes. If there is, within the children’s book business, a spectrum between those of us who are most interested in literature and those of us who are most interested in literacy, I’d say that Dick was firmly on the literacy side of that spectrum: he was not a snob about reading, minding much less about what children were reading than that they were reading. He believed that literacy and reading can and does change lives. Dick was open-minded and fiercely intelligent: conversation with him was dazzling because he knew so much about so much, and he was always willing to consider new ideas, new projects, new ways of doing things. Dick was international in his outlook: after his studies as a young man in the UK, and his engagement with Scholastic’s work throughout the world, he was knowledgeable and interested about different places and different cultures: I think it would be fair to say that not every American CEO, given the power and scale of that country, shares a similarly broad perspective. Dick was quiet and thoughtful: though he could be an inspiring speaker, particularly to an audience of teachers (he loved teachers!), he was perhaps most engaged and engaging in smaller groups and in conversation with individuals. I remember many of the things he said to me: about business, about schools and libraries, about books and about people. He was a shrewd judge of people, and I know that he had an unerring sense of my own weaknesses as well as strengths. And, to me, he was unfailingly kind and encouraging, and extraordinarily generous in his recognition of what Nosy Crow has achieved.

Fourteen years ago, I was at a dinner held in honour of his seventieth birthday, and as a joke, I quickly wrote a rhyme for him that everyone could join in with. Here are a couple of verses: doggerel, perhaps, but also a joke of the most serious and heartfelt kind:

“Integrity and grit combined
With vision and incisive mind.
Determined, honest, wise and kind:
Dick Robinson!

So which boss stands out from the crowd?
Who of Scholastic makes us proud?
Who is it? Let us shout it loud!
DICK ROBINSON!”

I worked with him for five formative, challenging, exciting years. He made me laugh. He made me cry. He made me furious. He made me work hard. He made me be honest with him. He made me believe in him and in his vision. I feel privileged to have worked with him and to have shared time with him since. He is a loss to me, certainly, but he is an immeasurable loss to the world of children’s books.

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Take a look inside 100 First Words: City!

This month we’re thrilled to have published 100 First Words: City – a super-stylish lift-the-flap book and a brilliant tool for building vocabulary! This is the second book in the series, following the award-winning 100 First Words.

All toddlers will adore searching for the colourful characters behind the shaped flaps, then naming the animals, objects and people you might find in a city. Arranged by theme, with stunning artwork from homeware designer Edward Underwood, this beautiful book is a celebration of city life in all its vibrancy and diversity.

And today you can take a peek inside the book and see the big flaps in action!

100 First Words: City is out now – you can order a copy from Waterstones here, Bookshop.org here, or Amazon here. And if you’re interested in the first book in the series, you can purchase a copy here.

If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all of our latest news, including giveaways, early previews and award news, you can sign up for our books newsletter here.

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Happy Pride month from Nosy Crow

If you look at the Nosy Crow logo at the top and bottom of our webpage, on our social media accounts, and, if we write to you, on our email signatures, you’ll spot that the dark grey of the crow’s body has been transformed into the colours of the progress pride flag: black, brown, pale pink, pale blue, white, red, orange, yellow, green, darker blue and purple. This is because June is pride month.

Several of our Nosy Crow colleagues are part of the LGBTQ+ community, and several of our authors and illustrators are too. Creating a rainbow crow is a small way of showing our recognition of and support for them all, for the printers, distributors, publishers outside the UK, retail workers, librarians, teachers and children’s carers who buy and who help us make and distribute our books and who are part of the LGBTQ+ community, and for the LGBTQ+ community in general.

We are a children’s publisher, and not many of our books directly address the joys and challenges of an LGBTQ+ identity, but we are proud to publish some books that include explicitly LGBTQ+ characters.

Earlier this year, we published Making a Baby: An Inclusive Guide to How Every Family Begins by Rachel Greener, illustrated by Clare Owen. Described in one of the five-star reviews on Amazon as “just incredibly perfect in every way!”, we made sure, among other things, that the book distinguishes between sex and gender, included same sex couples, and dealt with surrogacy. Last month, we published Otherland by Louie Stowell, author of the Dragon in the Library trilogy, in which we find a mention that our protagonists’ fairy godmother Mab is locked in conflict with Queen Gloriana, in part because Gloriana is her ex (and Louie will be writing for our blog later this week on the importance of LGBTQ+ representation in children’s fiction). And in August, we publish Adam-2 by Alastair Chisholm, whose first novel, Orion Lost, is currently shortlisted for the 2021 Waterstone’s Book Prize. In Adam-2, one of the central characters is Linden, who is non-binary, with preferred pronouns ze and hir.

 

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Watch the official trailer for Somewhere

This month we’re delighted to have published Somewhere, written by award-winning Jeanne Willis and illustrated by Anastasia Suvorova – a heartwarming picture book about the power of imagination and the importance of home.

And today we’re sharing the official trailer for the book!

At the bottom of Oscar’s garden is a magical place called Nowhere, where extraordinary things can happen. Oscar can fly an incredible kite, build an enchanted castle and even set sail in a pirate ship! He can do just what he likes, and there are no grown-ups asking questions.

But when Nowhere begins to feel a little lonely, will Oscar find himself wishing for Somewhere that feels more like home?

With gorgeous artwork and ingenious die-cuts throughout, this is a magical picture book – perfect for reading with little ones at bedtime.

Take a look inside the book:

Somewhere is in bookshops, and available online, now – you can order a copy from Waterstones here, Bookshop.org here, or Amazon here.

If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all of our book news, including early previews, award news, giveaways and more, you can sign up here.

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Five Nosy Crow books to read for Empathy Day 2021

Next Thursday, on June 10, we’re celebrating Empathy Day: founded in 2017, Empathy Day focuses on using books as a tool to build empathy, encouraging everyone to read, share books, and put empathy into action.

To support Empathy Day, EmpathyLab has created two Read for Empathy guides featuring empathy-boosting books for children aged 4-16. We’re thrilled that this year The Suitcase, by Chris Naylor Ballesteros, and Talking to the Moon, by S.E. Durrant, have been included in the collection!

The Suitcase is a simple yet powerful picture book about a strange animal that arrives with a suitcase. Written in response to the refugee crisis, with themes of kindness, understand and friendship, this is a brilliant empathy-building book.

Buy the book.

Talking to the Moon is a moving story of memory and family, told through the eyes of a grandchild losing a beloved grandparent to dementia. Beautifully told, this is ultimately a hopeful book.

Buy the book.

Last year, No Ballet Shoes In Syria, by Catherine Bruton, was featured in the Read for Empathy collection, and in 2019, Ella on the Outside by Cath Howe and Running on Empty by S.E. Durrant were also included.

Buy the book.

Buy the book.

You can find out more about Empathy Day and view the guides, here. Don’t forget to join us next week to celebrate and share the importance of empathy!

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Take a look inside How to Be a Vet and Other Animal Jobs

In July we’re very excited to be publishing How to Be a Vet and Other Animal Jobs – a fascinating new book about how to work with animals, for children aged 6+, written by vet and CBeebies presenter Dr Jess French, and illustrated in full-colour by Sol Linero.

And today we’re sharing an early preview!

Do you have what it takes to become a vet, a horse trainer or to work at a nature reserve? Find out all about the incredible animal jobs you could do, from training to become an animal behaviourist or a wildlife rehabilitator to working at a zoo or even becoming a bug wrangler!

How to Be a Vet and Other Animal Jobs is the third book in this series about fascinating jobs, following How to Be a Footballer and Other Sports Jobs, and How to Be an Astronaut and Other Space Jobs.

Take a look inside:

How to Be a Vet and Other Animal Jobs is out in July – you can pre-order a copy from Waterstones here or Amazon here.

Sign up to our books newsletter here to stay up-to-date with all of our latest news, including early previews, giveaways, discounts and more.

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