Hubble Bubble and the Super-Spooky Fright Night Tracey Corderoy (text) & Joe Berger (illustrations) (Nosy Crow) With its gorgeous Hallween-y cover, this latest book from the Hubble Bubble young fiction series ( a spin-off of the bestselling picture book series) puts you in the right mood straight away. Pandora is having a Halloween party with her …
Marnie Edwards (text) & Leigh Hodgkinson (illustrations)(Nosy Crow) Princess Sapphire and Emerald the Witch, who live in Mixtopia, a land where everything is a little bit topsy–turvy. In this first adventure, the two friends are invited to a wedding party in Fairyland. After deciding upon their gladrags, the girls are on their way, it looks …
Brothers Grimm (text) & Sybille Schenker (illustrations)translated from German by Martin West(Minedition) If the Hansel and Gretel Week has allowed me to indulge in my love for fairy tale retellings, it has also allowed me to discover a brand new and unbelievably talented illustrator and her astonishing book: Sybille Schenker’s Hansel and Gretel is first and …
Anthony Browne(Walker Books) If the other versions of Hansel and Gretel I have presented so far very much had a sense of place, this adaptation by previous Children’s Laureate Anthony Browne conveys a very strong sense of time. First published in 1981, this book depicts rather bleak elements of society at the time: the unemployment, the poverty, possibly …
Michael Morpurgo (text) & Emma Chichester Clark (illustrations)(Walker Books) This beautiful version of Hansel and Gretel is retold by former Children’s Laureate and award-winning author Michael Morpurgo and he has certainly put his stamp on this traditional tale. Here, he weaves a story based on courage, hope, survival undying love, and battling envy and cruelty. He brings a refreshing twist to the tale, …
Ian Beck(The Bodley Head) Charity Delafield has been cocooned inside her father’s mansion house for as long as she can remember. She has been told her mother died in childbirth, and her father, in the name of some unknown condition she is supposed to suffer from, has prevented her from mixing with anybody else but …
Tracey Corduroy (text) & Joe Berger (illustrations)(Nosy Crow) What if your granny was a little bit “out there”? What if people stared at her in the street when you are out shopping with her? What if your friends found her really cool, while you just found her just a little bit embarrassing? And what if …
Abie Longstaff (text) & Lauren Beard (illustrations)(Random House Children’s Books) Meet Kitty Lacey, hairdresser extraordinaire with an array of famous clients: from Little Red to Thumbelina, and from the Beast to Father Christmas, they all come to visit when their hair needs a trim. But when she is called to a rather threatening-looking tower, she …
Helen Nicoll (text) & Jan Pieńkowski (illustrations)(Puffin)What better way to kick off a Halloween feature than to talk one of the greatest witches of a the picture book world: Meg! Mog and Owl are hungry and Meg decides she will conjure a spell to make them spaghetti. But in typical Meg-fashion things don’t go quite …
Jaclyn Dolamore(Bloomsbury Children’s Books) Nimira left her native Tiansher after her mother, a dancer in the Royal Court, died and travelled to make her fortune as a dancer herself. But at the beginning of the book, we find her performing as a music-hall dancer, a “trouser girl”, forced to dance for drunken audiences in a …
