Thirteen-year-old orphan Tomek runs a grocery store where, one day, a stranger girl comes into his shop asking for various items. She tells him she is looking for a magic river whose waters are eternal. Tomek develops a yearning to travel, and to bring some of the eternal water back for a beloved elderly man in his village.
Hop has night terrors, filled with big, scary, hungry-eyed wolves. She knows they only live in her dreams but they still seem very real. Her mummy has some good advice, but will Hop be brave enough to take it?
They had me at the title, if I’m honest. Who could resist the idea of Wolves in helicopters?
Boldly declaring itself ‘The Only Book You Will Need to Become an Expert Beekeeper’ from the outset, this witty and engaging guide to beekeeping for bears has instant appeal. As any worthwhile guide should, it begins with Bear, our aspiring beekeeper, wielding this essential manual to find those crucial bees.
From penne to spaghetti, Rigatoni loves every kind of pasta. His owners, Ruth and Tina, make sure to serve him pasta at least once every day, and if by chance they ever forget, Rigatoni has a special pasta miaow to remind them. He likes to be stroked and tickled; he has his favourite spot on the couch to relax and a special dish to eat his pasta out of. All in all, Rigatoni has a pretty great life.
Authors Melissa Cummings-Quarry and Natalie A. Carter know that growing up as a girl is often difficult, but growing up as a Black girl can be much more challenging. Grown, their carefully curated and lovingly crafted guide, is an educational and fun book aimed at teaching young Black girls (and other girls of colour) how to navigate the different challenges they may face.
In an increasingly complicated, fast-changing world, this book is an essential piece of kit for every bookshelf, and don’t let the ‘celebrity endorsement’ put you off! Angelina Jolie’s foreword underpins the seriousness of the subject matter, while coming across as practical, sincere, very positive, and really sets the tone for what’s to come over the ensuing pages. It explores why having formalised, ratified human rights codes are necessary, what’s protected under them, why young people (and adults!) should make sure they are followed, and why continued action to right wrongs is needed.
A young boy is off to Grandma’s birthday party. Soon, he asks the inevitable question, ‘Are we there, yet?’ Judging from his parents’ faces, this isn’t the first time he’s asked. Simple car journeys can take forever. Watching out the window and playing with toys can only occupy a child for so long, and the boy soon becomes bored. Then, his imagination takes over and he goes on a road trip of a different kind. He sees knights jousting, dinosaurs on the loose, pirates and Ancient Egyptians. It becomes a trip through the past and the future, with excitement and adventure round every bend.
Oliver and his family are heading to the zoo and because it is his birthday, Oliver gets a gigantic rainbow lollipop just before they go in. While his parents and little brother are enjoying the visit and the animals, Oliver is daydreaming about the delicious taste of his treat – after all, he thinks, the lollipop is the most dazzling thing in the whole zoo until … it is suddenly gone, before he could even take a lick.
The world is waiting just for you, ready for you to explore and find your place, in this mesmerising collaboration from Ruth Doyle and Ashling Lindsay. Dreams for Our Daughters calls on girls to become the leaders of the future, to aspire to anything they want and to find their place in a world that is waiting for them. With the empowerment of girls at its heart, it could so easily have fallen into the trap of being a book that you think you ‘should’ read rather than want to, but it is something else entirely.
Curley is a little girl who has been dogged by a bad mood for hours, since her mother passed an ice cream shop without buying her a cone. When Curley finds a stick, she pokes her brother with it, cheers up, and the bad mood transfers to her mum. Thus the bad mood, in the shape of a cloud, is passed from person to person in a manner reminiscent of DC Thomson’s 1970s cartoon strip A-Choo: The Story of a Sneeze Looking for Somewhere to Happen.
