Pan MacMillan

The Monsters of Rookhaven won the 2021 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Honour Award for Fiction. The Shadows of Rookhaven is a well-crafted sequel that explores themes of family, belonging, loss, and difference. We first meet Billy in the human world where, as a misbegotten, he is an outcast. He lives with the Catchpoles, who are not human, and he has taken Meg, another outcast, under his wing. When this unlikely family unit is captured, and Meg’s safety is threatened, Billy agrees to their captors’ demands so that he can save her.

The Lotterys More or Less is Donoghue’s second book about the four-parent, seven-kid modern family, also known as the Lotterys. Donoghue returns to visit nine-year-old Sumac and her eclectic mix of ‘sibs’, parents, rescued pets and grumpy old Grumps, who has settled in nicely.

Mirabelle lives with her unusual family in Rookhaven. She and her family are, to put it simply, monsters. They live in a mansion, hidden away (thanks to a protection spell) from the outside world of humans. However, the nearby village and the Rookhaven monsters maintain a generations old truce: the townsfolk will keep the monsters’ existence a secret, if the monsters promise to never enter the town or hurt one of the humans. However, one night, out-of-towners and runaway siblings, Jem and Tom, accidentally find their way into Rookhaven territory…

In this wonderful collection of poetry, chosen and illustrated by Chris Riddell, the line drawings wrap around the poems, almost as if they were drawn personally into your copy in pencil after the words were printed, with their intertwined nature ensuring the illustrations and the words are consumed as a unit.