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Discovering bravery by Emma Brade 14 y.o award winner

"As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters." Seneca

"Imagination is...the power that enables us to sympathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

Commencement address Harvard 2008: "...I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp."

So far have loved How to help your Grandda by Judi Curtain (all told in letters) and imagery in The Snow Globe by Marita Conlon-McKenna. The Eoin Colfer story A Wibter's Take: The Lookout was interesting if not a little confronting for the reader audience.

Loved Judi Curtain's How to help your Grandda story told in letters.

"There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber," she explained. "There's a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere - it doesn't all get used up at once." Door

Left to right: coats, dresses, jackets, pants, skirts, blouses.

At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet in imagined.

I open the first page in the first book, I break the first alone, I shove my nose into it to have a good sniff and off I go. When I've finished reading the last word of the last sentence of the last book, I'll turn over the last page & decide for myself whether the life before me is really the one I would still want to have read.

I am a book-man & a man-book. My Great Wall protects me. And I read so as to take it to pieces, slowly & calmly. I shall pick books randomly & without premeditation, so reading will arise of its own free will, & I know it will be in the right order.

Writers you thought had vanished make a comeback, & some you thought set up for eternity disappear.

but then it's for the media, the booksellers, the academy, & secondary & primary schools to decide. They don't agree with each other, they keep changing their views, & so literature never stops changing its boundaries & shape.

Literature isn't something ore-existing that you insert into a text, it's a complex construction that's built only with hindsight, that's all. Writers contribute to it...the publisher and the imprint certainly add their mark

Grace Blakely is living with her grandfather because there's no place else for get to go. Her Dad's army unit is being deployed to the Middle East, and her Mum is dead. Her grandfather lives on embassy row where jumping from a wall with land you in a whole other country and possibly a whole lot of trouble.

Sometimes...when I'm feeling sad, I like to be around all these books. They're very good at making you forget your troubles.

Ella Milana has discovered a fault in a published copy of Crime & Punishment.