Sometimes visiting your grandparents where nothing ever happens, and everything is always the same can be a tad dull. When a young child goes to stay with their grandparents, they discover a suitcase in the attic full of pictures of mysterious people having all kinds of wonderful adventures. Who could these interesting people be? Grandma and Grandpa are so ordinary and terribly uninteresting, and our protagonist knows absolutely everything there is to know about them. Or do they?
This tender story is told by Will Pinker, a young teen who wants to inform you that living near the ‘haves’ does not make life any easier for the ‘have-nots’. In fact, playing video games at his best friend Cameron’s house, with its underfloor heating and its cupboards full of food, only serves to make Will feel worse about the rundown two- bedroom flat he shares with his dad nearby.
This story follows the Morrow twins on a time-bending adventure full of twists and turns. When Merry and Spike move to Fox House temporarily with their mother, they soon realise that all is not as it seems. The owner, Lady Belmont, is a hermit, and a whole section of the house has been damaged by a mysterious fire. The twins find a friend in local boy Ben Gumbley, and they quickly learn about a missing woman, a baby left on the doorstep and the creepy Alastair, who is set to eventually inherit Fox House.
Ellery is a cynic in a society that worships deities adjacent to the ancient Greek Olympians. Forced to leave home due to an endless winter which has destroyed their family’s rural livelihood, Ellery has had enough of superstition and fairytales. That is, until they meet Knox, who introduces Ellery to a world of magic and adventure.
This quirky graphic novel, the third in the Kitty Quest series, will entice the reluctant reader in your life, with the many zany elements dreamed up by Phil Corbett’s wild imagination and illustrations that seem to fizz from the pages. Fans of Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man series will enjoy the asinine, ludicrous humour unashamedly delivered from page one.
Scorch, Grub and Fang are a gang of devious dragons who love nothing more than stomping through the woods being bad. They meet a host of different characters and take delight in interfering in their fun to cause mischief. However, things don’t go according to plan when their badness doesn’t cause the upset they had hoped for. Our story starts to take a turn as they slowly realise that maybe, they’re bad at being bad …
Living up to a parent’s expectations is tricky for any kid, but living up to a parent who is the best at their job is almost impossible, when you are different. Zed’s Dad is the best of the Demon Hunters and Zed always thought he wanted to follow in his footsteps. But when a new demon falls from the sky, Zed begins to uncover secrets that change his entire world and what he thought he knew or wanted.
Trust no one is the rule to remember when reading this fast-paced adventure story. Rosalyn Quest wants to have mundane teenage experiences, like attending a gymnastics summer camp, and making friends. However, coming from a famous family of thieves, being normal is next to impossible. After her mother, a fellow famous thief, is kidnapped, Rosalyn is forced to do whatever it takes to get her back safely. Rosalyn enters into the Thieves' Gambit - a high stakes competition for young criminals - where the winner is granted one wish.
Readers of this book will find familiar faces from their own bedtime classics, reinvented, and reimagined by a young girl searching for her own story among the vast shelves of a library. The heroine of this story could be any young reader, discovering the joys of literally falling into the pages of a book and being whirled away on adventures by their own active imaginations, but she is also a girl with brown skin and thick, black hair that would make Rapunzel envious.
Darnton’s picture book is told from the perspective of a big sister anxiously awaiting the birth of her new sibling. Her excitement is infectious and at each stage of the pregnancy, she imagines all the fun she can have with her baby brother. However, she’s unsure how she feels about having an avocado for a brother, or an onion! This delightful picture book playfully explores the long wait for the much-anticipated birth of a sibling—with an unexpected twist.
