Family Friday: We love The Wombles!

This review is a real family effort, produced with help from my littlest girl, who turned 8 yesterday.

Title: The Wombles
Author: Elisabeth Beresford
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: Nov 2010
Genre: Children's

Find it at Amazon UK

The blurb says:
The Wombles is the first ever Wombles book and introduces the stern but kindly Great Uncle Bulgaria; Orinoco, who is particularly fond of his food and a subsequent forty winks; general handyman extraordinaire Tobermory, who can turn almost anything that the Wombles retrieve from Wimbledon Common into something useful; Madame Cholet, who cooks the most delicious and natural foods to keep the Wombles happy and contented; and last but not least, Bungo, one of the youngest and cheekiest Wombles of all, who has much to learn and is due to venture out on to the Common on his own for the very first time . . .

Our verdict: A great read for 6+, (with an up-to-date eco-message).

I bought this for the Kindle because the youngest wanted to read on the Kindle and most of my books weren't suitable for her. She's adopted an Orinoco toy salvaged from my parents' house, so I thought she might like to read about him. I was right! Having enjoyed the book together, I thought it would be a good idea to let her review this one for her, with a few prompts:

The Wombles was written quite a long time ago now. Do you think it's still interesting to read today?

Yes, because it's not too complicated and it doesn't mention old words much.

The book isn't really one big story, but several episodes over a period a time. What do you like about the stories?

The book is mainly about Bungo growing up, but there are different stories that happen. There are very funny bits and very exciting parts. Some of the funny bits are when the Wombles don't understand human stuff properly, like they call things funny names or don't really know what things are for. The descriptions are very good and I found it easy to imagine the situation and the place. The illustrations also help.

Who do you think would enjoy The Wombles?

Children who like fantasy and adventure stories about made-up creatures. It isn't really written for one specific gender; I think boys and girls will like it.

Do you have a favourite Womble?

I like them all quite a lot but I do like Great Uncle Bulgaria best because he is responsible and sensible. 

So, there you have it. She greatly enjoyed The Wombles and is after the next in the series now, The Wandering Wombles. I also found that Bloomsbury have a Wombles website and much fun was had with the activity pack!

Words on Wednesday: NaNoWriMo

Well, I've done it - signed up for this year's NaNoWriMo. You can find me as BethKemp (unsurprisingly!). I'm still not certain whether this is the best or worst idea I've had this year, but we'll see.

For those who don't know (where HAVE you been?), NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month and the aim is to produce 50k words in 30 days. It should more properly be International Novel Writing Month now, since it is a worldwide venture, but that wouldn't be so easy to pronounce. Since it is essentially a quantity over quality exercise (arguably, like all first drafts), it's important to not get bogged down in minutiae and to just keep throwing words down on the page.

I've never done it before, but I did follow Hestia's and Ania's NaNo adventures with interest last year. I'm hoping it will help me to stop pushing my writing to the back of my life, something that's happened a fair bit lately. Although most of that has been due to new term - er 'stuff' at work, it's still a habit I don't want to embed.

I'm currently working on a major rewrite of a story for 5-8s and that will be finished in October, so the NaNo project will give that some drawer time. I also have an end of October deadline for a non-fic project, so the timing's working nicely for me.

I'll be returning to a YA story that I outlined, decided was dull and shelved for the 5-8 piece before coming up with a twist that freshens it nicely (I think!). Beyond jotting the twist as a 'what if' at the top of my outline, I haven't touched it since early summer. I reckon I'll have time to double check and tweak the outline and do the most important research before NaNo starts. Details can come later (see, I have already embraced the NaNo spirit!).

Are there any other NaNo-ers out there?

In My Mailbox 3

In My Mailbox is a weekly meme (but you can do them less often, as I am) which is run by The Story Siren. I've let this one accumulate over a month, as my summer book buying frenzy has slowed down.

My exciting win this month is Catwalk Queen (Million Dollar Mates) by Cathy Hopkins, which I won from the fabulous Girls Heart Books blog.  My resident very-nearly-thirteen-year-old (eek!) was the proud recipient. If you like books for girls from about age 8, this blog is fantastic, with contributions from loads of authors.


I also received two great books for review this month:

Linda Sargent sent me her lovely novel Paper Wings, which I found to be a brilliant nostalgic read (even though I can't be nostalgic for the post-war period since I wasn't there, but I'm sure you know what I mean!). My review for this one went up last week. 

Also for review, this time through the wonderful Transworld Book Group, I have John Boyne's Crippen, which I'm currently reading and finding dangerously absorbing on the train.  Watch out for the review soon, but so far so great.


And finally, just two purchases this month:

Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus is attracting all kinds of attention in the blogosphere at the moment and it is just a gorgeous book to behold.  For more images, visit this post on My Favourite Books but take care - it's this post that made me pre-order it. Don't say I didn't warn you!

My final choice for this month is Nicole Peeler's Tempest's Legacy, which I had pre-ordered for my Kindle and had the pleasure of seeing simply appear on release day.  Having loved the previous two Jane True books, I had to have this one.

Magical Monday: The Everyday Magic of Autumn

The leaves around here are looking gorgeous. Driving down the main road closest to my house, the foliage on either side is phenomenal just now: rich reds, russety browns, golden yellows as well as the last vestiges of green.

Now we're firmly in the dark half of the year (the equinox was last week) it's all longer and longer nights until the tipping point of the Winter Solstice. For some, this is a reason to lament, and of course in less developed times, it was a genuine reason to fear, but for us in our heated homes with water literally on tap, that old primal fear is just residual and we can (mostly) enjoy the changing seasons for their beauty. I really like Autumn for its crunchy leaves and crisp mornings. I'm not a fan of hot weather, or of snow and ice, so Spring and Autumn are my favourite times of year.

That is until the first 'leaves on the track' announcement which makes me late for home or traps me at the station when I want to get home... :) Is that a UK-only thing? International readers - please let me know if that's a familiar thing to you too!

Do you have a favourite season?

Thrilling Thursday: Review of Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick

A spellbinding tale of love and death. What could be more thrilling?

Title: Midwinterblood

Author: Marcus Sedgwick

Publisher: Indigo

Publishing: 6th October

Find it at Amazon UK

The blurb says:
Have you ever had the feeling that you've lived another life? Been somewhere that has felt totally familiar, even though you've never been there before, or felt that you know someone well, even though you are meeting them for the first time? It happens.

In 2073 on the remote and secretive island of Blessed, where rumour has it that no one ages and no children are born, a visiting journalist, Eric Seven, and a young local woman known as Merle are ritually slain. Their deaths echo a moment ten centuries before, when, in the dark of the moon, a king was slain, tragically torn from his queen. Their souls search to be reunited, and as mother and son, artist and child, forbidden lovers, victims of a vampire they come close to finding what they've lost. In a novel comprising seven parts, each influenced by a moon - the flower moon, the harvest moon, the hunter's moon, the blood moon - this is the story of Eric and Merle whose souls have been searching for each other since their untimely parting. 

Beautifully imagined, intricately and cleverly structured, this is a heart-wrenching and breathtaking love story with the hallmark Sedgwick gothic touches of atmosphere, blood-spilling and sacrifice.


My verdict: beautiful, haunting and unlike anything else I've read. Highly recommended for those who enjoy a well-crafted story. Don't let the teens keep it to themselves!
This book gripped me instantly. I read it over three days of a very busy working week, which says a lot on its own. I'm not going to leave it there though *grin*. The novel has superb writing and makes intelligent use of folklore/myth, so it was always going to be a winner for me. I still managed to be surprised by just how fantastic it was though. I read recently somewhere that Marcus Sedgwick spends a long time planning (I think I read months), and this book is testament to that degree of careful thought.

The novel as a whole is like an orchestral suite, with different movements all sharing a key theme and a set of motifs which flow through the whole, adding cohesion and providing (I'm sure) satisfying recognition on re-reading. As always, Sedgwick's prose is relatively sparse yet beautifully lyrical. He doesn't waste words, nor does he need to use complex vocabulary to weave a clever story.

A particularly effective aspect of the opening story was the Wicker Man-style creepy vibe. This helps build the sense of inevitability which propels us through all the stories back to the beginning of it all. The trailer conveys this dark and spooky tone brilliantly.



Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely and it's a real contender for the best book I've read this year. I think it's worth saying that, for all the 'doomed lovers' stuff implied in the blurb, it's not a 'romance' title. Also, as an Indigo publication, it's being targeted at the Young Adult market, but I think there's life in it as a literary chiller for adults too.

My grateful thanks go to Orion for providing me with a proof copy of this wonderful book for review.
This is my nineteenth review for the British Books Challenge. 

Words on Wednesday: Review of Paper Wings by Linda Sargent

A beautifully written tale of childhood innocence for this week's Words on Wednesday.

Title: Paper Wings
Author: Linda Sargent
Publisher: Omnes
Published: Feb 2010

Find it at Amazon UK

The blurb says:
A Kentish woodland; hot, endless days of summer; a strange and touching friendship...

Ruby and Peter think of the woods as their own: a place for adventure, for plans and projects, for secrets. But when Ruby is hurt in an accident, they find that a stranger is hiding there: Gabriel, a man haunted by wartime guilt and by the loss of ideals. Soon an alliance is formed - but others are watching, and the children unwittingly provoke long-held resentments, bringing themselves and Gabriel into danger.

Atmospheric and beautifully-realised, Paper Wings is a grown-up story about childhood, bringing innocence and experience into dramatic conflict.

My verdict: A novel which is quietly crafted with plenty of intrigue.
A lot of the power in this gentle book lies in the unsaid, the merely-hinted-at, and that (for me) is what makes this an adult read. It's not inappropriate for children in any way, but it is likely to go over their heads. This largely results from the child's-eye-view adopted for the bulk of the novel.

The narration is in the third person, but hugs a specific character's viewpoint at any one time. The shifts in narrative perspective are clear and flagged by scene titles such as 'in the woods' to avoid confusion. This allows Sargent to 'zoom in close' and really immerse us in the characters' experience, which sometimes allows us to read the situation differently from the child characters, or at least to understand a little more about some events and actions.

The story itself is gentle and nostalgic (another reason the book is more likely to appeal to adults), with lots of detail to transport us to its environment. The language is not by any means impenetrably old-fashioned or contrived, but it does avoid contemporary usage and contributes to the overall sense of a story which is very rooted in its time and place. The hops growers based setting was not familiar to me, so I enjoyed the vividness of Sargent's descriptions and the use of different senses to take me there. There is inherent mystery to the plot, with the shadowy and haunted figure of Gabriel hiding in the woods, and there are unexpected twists and turns.

Overall, I found this a charming read which, while exciting, has a gentleness which befits its post-war countryside setting. I've chosen to post this as a 'words on Wednesday' piece as I feel the book is representative of a high degree of craft, especially in terms of narration and understatement. Readers like to have some work to do to get inside a story, and this book is a great example of avoiding the impulse to over-explain.

Thanks go to the author for kindly providing a copy for review. As Linda Sargent is a British author, this is my seventeenth review for the British Books Challenge hosted by the lovely Bookette.

Tuesday Tidings: Why we'll stick to toys from now on

These days are gone ...

We had a bit of a scary time on Sunday (but all's well now) when our lovely little Jessie hurt her throat playing with a stick. She had run to fetch it and made the most hideous high-pitched noise. We ran to her, thinking she'd fallen and hurt her leg or something, and it took us a while to figure out what was wrong. It seems the stick had gone down her throat and bruised the back of it, making it difficult and painful to swallow. There was no blood, so we were confident she hadn't cut herself, and we could see the stick on the ground, so we were able to check it was all there and not splintered in her mouth.

She was clearly a poorly girl, slinking home and then not moving around once we were home. Her gorgeous beard was all slimy with drool and we couldn't get her to drink, so we had to call the vet and see if we could take her in (I should mention again that this was Sunday). They felt they should see her, and gave her an antibiotic just in case of splinters and potential infection, and a painkiller/anti-inflammatory, with instructions to bring her back the next morning. If she wasn't better then, they'd anaesthetise her and explore her throat for cuts and/or splinters. Luckily, she was much improved on Monday morning and was her happy usual self by last night.

Don't worry, she can still play!

Whilst seeing what we should do for her, I naturally googled for advice on dogs hurt by playing with sticks and found some very scary stories. We have had a lucky escape and a fairly light warning. Jessie seemed very unwell and unhappy indeed, but it must just have been bruising for her to recover so quickly. We won't let her play with sticks again, and will make sure we always have a toy with us. She did pick up a stick within 100 yards of entering the park today, but thankfully she's pretty obedient and knows "leave" and "drop". Jessie has lived with us for just over a year now and she's about two years old (we got her from the Dogs Trust). We ought to have many more years with her yet.

Please, if your dog likes sticks too, I would urge you to think about alternatives. We would never have thought something like this could happen, but it's absolutely not worth it when there are other ways of playing the same game. The vet was all-too accustomed to dealing with 'stick damage', as they called it.

It's Award Season, apparently

This blog's been given not one but two awards this week:

the Liebster ('beloved') Award 

and the Versatile Blogger Award.

The Liebster Award, intended to show bloggy love to blogs with fewer than 200 followers, has come from the lovely Claire Hennessy who is a very funny British writer living in California. Her blog is well worth checking out for writerly fun. I particularly enjoyed her entry for the recent 200-word writing challenge.

The Versatile Blogger Award was sent my way from the Lifebeyond blog, which belongs to M C Rogerson and features lots of lovely booky stuff. It was here I first saw the trailer for Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which jumped onto my wishlist immediately!


Liebster Award - the rules:
1. Show your appreciation to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.
2. Reveal your five picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Post the award on your blog.
4. Bask in the camaraderie of the most supportive peo­ple on the internet.
5. And best of all have bloggity fun and spread the love.

The Versatile Blogger Award - the rules:
1.) Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them in your post.
2.) Share 7 things about yourself.
3.) Pass this Award along to 15 recently discovered blogs and let them know about it.


My Seven Things:

1. I am allergic to dogs but we still have one. I had realised that I can become immune to animals I live with, so we planned to get her at the start of the summer holidays last year to allow me to (hopefully) be ok by the time I had to return to work.
2. I hate it when people ask who my favourite writer is. How am I supposed to choose?
3. I very rarely wear makeup, and am not into shoes or handbags. I was a tomboy as a kid, too. :)
4. I used to sing in folky pubs as a teenager.
5. I am fascinated by symbols and archetypes and have a small collection of tarot decks.
6. I can't drive and have never had a lesson. I don't believe it's something I could do and don't understand why the world assumes everyone drives.
7. I also can't ride a pushbike.

My selected blogs:
I have chosen four excellent blogs to recommend. With lots of networking going on due to the campaign, some people whom I would have wanted to include had already received one or both of these awards. I also think that a few recommendations are perhaps more helpful and likely to get followed up than a great long list.

I think I've managed to whittle down my list only to those who haven't. So, if I've made a mistake or you don't want to be included, please accept my apologies!

A Wanderer in Paris is Michele Helene's lovely blog, discussing her writing life and sharing memories in photographic form. I've been following Michele's blog almost as long as I've been blogging, and she always has something interesting to say.

Ramblings of a Rusty Writer is Rebecca Emin's writerly blog, on which she is currently celebrating the publication of her debut novel. I came across her blog through Rachael Harries' Writers' Campaign, and we are both in group 1: picture books, early readers, MG and YA. Expect to see a review of her novel on this blog in the next couple of months.

Helen Writes belongs to Helen Anderson. She is one of the bloggers I've met through the Writers' Platform-Building Challenge, so I've only been following her for about a month, but I'm really glad I found her blog with its well-thought out and always interesting posts about writing.

Stacy S Jensen's blog is focused on writing, sharing her personal experiences twice a week. I particularly enjoy her "Thankful Thursdays" feature, where she shares a helpful writing resource. Hers is another blog I've been fortunate enough to discover through the Writers' Campaign. 

Family Friday: top tips for walking with kids

We've taken our kids walking for several years now. The youngest was probably three when we started regularly walking as a family (she'll be eight in a fortnight). We're not enormous distance hikers - five miles is a long walk to us, and we probably more regularly do around three.

One of these has been helpful but you absolutely can enjoy family walks without one! (She's only been with us for a year, and is out first family dog.)

So, here are my top things that encourage kids to enjoy the great outdoors:

1. Checklists of things to spot. This has easily been the most helpful single thing to get the kids involved. We have a book of family walks which helpfully includes checklists tailored to each route, but we also make out own for other walks. It's important for the list to be a mixture of easily-spottable things (depends on the route and sometimes the time of year, of course, but cows, acorns, swans are good standbys for us), specific features of particular walks (a windmill, a standing stone) and sometimes number-based challenges (how many herons can you see etc). 
2. Snacks - ideally hidden ready to be produced at a 'flagging' moment. As well as the obvious boiled sweets, dried fruit is good. Water is, of course, essential.
3. Stiles, brooks and livestock (ideally separated from you by a fence!). I could never have predicted the amount that stiles increase the fun of a walk by :) and paddling in or crossing a brook is also a joy. Spotting livestock is popular as well, but some kids are made nervous by walking through a cow or sheep field.

Do you have any to add?

Thrilling Thursday: Gimme Shelter...

... is what everyone should be saying today, as Harlan Coben's fabulous new YA series starts with Shelter. I read this in the summer and loved it (here's my review).

Have a look at the trailer!



If you like witty crime novels with quirky non-stock characters, Shelter is a great read.