BOLD GIRLS

Dani is enjoying her summer holiday, spent on an island with her best friend Ella. They play all day long, build huts, dance in the sea, and swim five, six, seven times a day. They watch the moose swimming through the water and the sea eagles circling over the island. Sometimes Dani is a bit homesick for her hamsters, or her cat, or her dad who phones every evening. But mostly it seems that little can shadow Dani’s carefree summer world. But then her father arrives on the island accompanied by his new girlfriend, and Dani feels her happiness begin to slip away.

This is a charming and fun tale about a young traveller girl named Ossiri whose family are ‘Tattini Folki’ or rag-and-bone people. Ossiri’s family recycle unwanted old goods, mending old clothes, fixing broken furniture, selling scrap iron. They live in caravans and are happy. Ossiri loves music, but the family can neither afford to buy her an instrument nor to lose her if she had to travel the country as a musician.

Lucinda Belinda Melinda McCool is a terrible creation, a horrible girl, a hateful person in a long line of disgusting characters in children’s literature. I love her.

Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross have made a wonderful book in the tradition of Roald Dahl and other irreverent wordsmiths.

Lucinda Belinda Melinda is image-obsessed. She is perfectly groomed and utterly cool. She also has an opinion on the way her friends look: ‘She’d point at their faults very loudly in class/And insist they correct them in front of the glass.’

Magrit lives in a tiny, abandoned graveyard, lost, forgotten and overgrown amongst the tall buildings and busy outside world that surround it. But she is not alone. She has her friend and advisor, Master Puppet that she built from old bones and bits of graveyard stuff. Magrit and Master Puppet are sitting atop their crumbling chapel one night, when a passing stork drops a baby into the cemetery. While Master Puppet begs her to dispose of the terrible thing, Magrit takes no heed, deciding to call him Bugrat and raise him herself.

Nora is bored. Her grandma encourages her to play in the garden ‘with the tiger and dragonflies as big as birds and plants that can gobble you up’. Nora is not convinced or even interested. Suddenly a dragonfly whizzes across the garden and captures Nora’s imagination. She delves deeper and deeper into Grandma’s wild and beautiful garden to discover the unexpected.

Petunia Paris is a very lucky and very wealthy little girl. Each birthday, her parties are splendid, lavish affairs where she can ask for whatever she wants in the whole world, and it arrives! But on her sixth birthday, it seems she already has everything; a swimming pool, a bicycle with a chauffeur, her own library and all the dresses she could ever want. So she says the first thing that pops into her head. Petunia wants a parrot.

‘Change brings growth’, so foretold Sydney Goodrow’s fortune cookie but that’s the last thing Sydney wants. Her mother is only four feet tall, and according to Sydney, that’s the perfect height. It was as tall as her dad had been when he was alive too, but now he’s gone, and Sydney continues to grow. She doesn’t want to be as tall as her sister Jade, so she regularly practices her shrinking exercises.

Is scéal fisiciúil fuinniúil é Méabh Banríon na Troda. Feictear amhmhothúcháin gháifeacha agus tá an scéal agus gníomhartha na gcarachtar spreagtha uathasan. D’fhéadfadh go bhfuil cuma sheanfhaiseanta ar an scéal féin sa lá inniu ann agus téamaí ann a d’aireodh teibí don léitheoir óg – pósadh, breith pháistí, an rachmas tomhaiste ag eallach – ach nach iontach an deis é don mhúinteoir nó don tuismitheoir comhrá a spreagadh ar an seansaol, ar ról na mban fadó, agus ar an mbrúidiúlacht a bhí mar pháirt den saol sin.